You may have read last week's reports from London (one example, Julia Werdigier's piece for the New York Times is here) of bankers like Barclay's John Varley defending the purity of their motives ("Profit is not satanic," was my favorite among the quotes from his speech at the church of St. Martin in the Field. Meanwhile, over at St. Paul's Cathedral, you have Brian Griffiths, an advisor to Goldman Sachs, saying, "We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all.").
If you thought you heard an unrefined "Oh, yeah?" from me, you were right.
Compare the bankers' comments to these from Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury: "There hasn't been a feeling of closure about what happened last year. There hasn't been what I would, as a Christian, call repentance. We haven't heard people saying 'well actually, no, we got it wrong and the whole fundamental principle on which we worked was unreal, empty'."
He added, "I feel that .... what I call the 'lack of closure' [is] coming home to roost. It's a failure to name what was wrong. To name that, what I called last year 'idolatry', that projecting of reality and substance onto things that don't have them."(click here for the complete article from the Times of London)
In today's Salon, Andrew Leonard pointed out an excellent (but long) article by John Arlidge in yesterday's Times of London, in which Goldman Sachs chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein claims to be doing, yes, "God's work."
My "Oh, yeah?" just got louder and more cranky.
Blankfein is aware that "people are pissed off, mad, and bent out of shape" at what bankers have wrought.
He just thinks that we're wrong to be so angry: "If the financial system goes down, our business is going down and, trust me, yours and everyone else's is going down, too."
Doesn't that sound like a threat? Doesn't it sound as though he's saying, 'Let me do whatever I want, unless you want me to wreck it all.'
Yeah, that's what I thought, too.
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment