Djelloul Marbrook

The publication of Saraceno and responses to it have prompted me to think a great deal about the nature of crime. I spent most of my life thinking I knew what crime is. Now I wonder. I hear, we all hear, a lot from the pulpit and the rostrum about abortion, stem cell research, right to life, family values, the war on drugs, but what do we hear about greed? You know, one of the seven deadly sins, the legal crime that’s destroying our hard-won middle class, destroying families by forcing them to stretch themselves too thin just to survive, depriving sick people of medicine, causing the immigration problem.
What do we hear from the fulminators and their patsies about that? And for that matter, what do we hear from the press about greed? It’s the pariah story. Sure, we hear about obscene CEO salaries and Wall Street swindles, but we don’t hear that greed is an ever-growing plague that has already ravaged us, we don’t hear about anybody scurrying to do something about it, the way we expect leaders to protect us from avian flu or porous borders or Osama bin Ladin and his cowardly ilk. Why is that, I wonder? Could it be that our ever-centralizing and ever-diminishing media are owned by the bottom-liners who’d fire their grandfathers to make a quarterly report look good and who’d cook their books if they had to? Not only do the demagogues and talking heads not want to blow hard about greed, the media aren’t interested in it either. Is there a cure? Maybe. Maybe citizen journalists in the blogosphere will run this issue up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes.
When I was a reporter I used to marvel at the elephant in the room whenever we reported labor-management disputes. Nobody ever raised the issue of what is a moral, ethical profit margin. The reason they never raised it is, I think, because we have all acquiesced to it being as much as a pirate can steal. Did we expend our blood and national treasure fighting communism only to see an unbridled, piratical global capitalism gobble upour dreams for a better life? Is that what the war on communism was about? Making the CEO of Exxon filthy rich while most of us can’t afford to pay for gas? And where are all the preachers and their political allies on this one? Anybody hear them?
Well, that’s my thought for this rainy day. Don’t know if I feel any better, but maybe that’s because I paid $3.14 for gas this morning.
—DM