Moral Blindness

I really enjoy Dean Baker's blog. He has a few themes and he keeps repeating them even though the mainstream media ignores him. One theme is that the US Social Security system if well funded for the next 40 years, but right wing ideologues keep hammering the idea that it somehow can't be afforded.

Here is another of his bugaboos: Some big media seem to have a crusade to lower workers' wages, e.g. the Washington Post editorializing in supposedly "news" pieces about the need to reduce auto workers' wages. Baker points out the oddity that this same paper seems blind to the fact that the bailed out financial institutions have workers at the top -- called "CEOs" -- who are pigs at the trough feasting on public monies but nobody seem concerned about reducing their "wages":

More Bank Bailouts: Who Gets the Money?

The Washington Post made reducing the pay of autoworkers by $4.00 an hour a central theme of its coverage (both news and editorial) of the auto industry bailout. For this reason it is especially noteworthy that its discussion of new plans for bailing out banks has no mention whatsoever of executive compensation at the banks.

In good years, the highest paid bank executives could make more money in an hour than a UAW autoworker earns in a year. For this reason, readers may find restrictions on the compensation of bank executives to be an important part of what could be another trillion dollar bailout package for Wall Street. The omission of any discussion of executive compensation is quite striking.