My Catholic upbringing drummed into me the Jesuit difference between acts of commission and those of omission. Law school repeated the same principles.
Commission is doing an act that causes harm. Omission is failure to perform an act. Especially one that would be expected by a normal sane person in the ordinary course of events.
This column is concerned with omission. The culprit the United States mainstream media. The big guys. Television, newspapers and magazines. Those owned and controlled by major corporate conglomerates which include in their make up banks. The story to be told involves the apparent failure of the media to report news that might be unfavorable to their corporate owners.
The days of news people owning television, newspapers and other media outlets are long gone.
Examine for example the ownership of the major television companies in the United States. NBC used to be owned by General Electric, then General Electric and Comcast, and now Comcast alone. ABC is owned by the Walt Disney Companies. CBS used to be owned by Westinghouse. It is now owned by National Amusements and Viacom. CNN is owned by Time Warner and Turner Broadcasting. Fox is owned by 21st Century Corp. and Rupert Murdoch's Fox entertainment Group.
The story to be told involves Iceland. It is a tale not heard by most Americans to this day. Only a handful were aware. I did not know.
Iceland had banking problems of its own in 2008. The banks had inflated the value of Iceland's banks internationally. They screwed around with the numbers to make the banks look better than they actually were. Things caught up. The bubble burst. Most of the banks were heading for bankruptcy.
Does the too big to fail argument sound familiar? The government of Iceland wanted to bail the banks out. With taxpayer dollars, of course. The people of Iceland said no, emphatically no, and never.
A revolution occurred. It started on the same day in 2008 when Obama was being sworn in. The people took to the streets. The rebellion was called the "Pots and Pans Rebellion." The people were banging pots and pans together as they marched.
The Icelandic people were so vocal and adamant in their position of no bailout for the banks that three months later the entire government of Iceland resigned. The President and all of Parliament. The government had been taken down.
Did you hear any of this? See it reported on TV? Read it in the newspapers? Most Americans did not. At the same time, all of the rest of the world knew and were openly discussing it. It was front page news in all European newspapers. Foreign television was rampant with the details.CNN's European group reported everything as it happened. Not America's CNN. Silence.
Credit should be given where credit is due. The New York Times provided a small handful of piecemeal stories. Not front page stuff. The Times danced around the details. It reported that the fall of the government was caused by mayhem beyond Iceland's borders.
Note again that the U.S. media failed to report the street protests, the Pots and Pan revolution, and the resignation of the entire government.
A new government was elected. No time was wasted in correcting the situation. Iceland's feeling was that what had occurred should never happen again. Corporate greed could not be permitted to rear its ugly head ever again.
Recall the U.S. position that banks were too big to prosecute. Not in Iceland. They arrested and prosecuted bank officials and politicians alike. And sent them to jail. Just last week one of the bank fraud cases came to a conclusion. Four executives of the Kaupthing Bank were sentenced to jail. Without probation. One was the Chairman of the Board. Involved financial fraud. They had loaned an individual money to buy just over 5 per cent interest in the bank. A no no.
The Icelandic people believed their Constitution was ineffective. It no longer worked for the people. They wanted a new one. They put together a large number of citizens to rewrite the Constitution. People, not politicians. It took four years, but is now the law of the land. The primary thrust was to prohibit corporate fraud. They spelled it out in the Constitution. It was clear to them that corporate greed was destroying the country and had to be stopped.
While all this was going on in Iceland, where was the U.S. media? No word was heard from them. A cover up in form and substance. Why? It is thought by some including this writer that corporate ownership of the media some how influenced the news people from reporting what was happening in Iceland. The news was not in the best interests of the corporate conglomerates. Most of whom included banks in their ranks.
This silence was going on at same time the United States was experiencing its own bank problems. The U.S. bank mortgage frauds started coming to light in 2007. Imagine had the U.S. government been of the opinion as the people of Iceland that the banks were not too big to fail nor too hard to prosecute. The U.S. people had they known of Iceland's happenings might very well have acted as Iceland did. Protest, react to a government that was not responsive to the will of the people, jail the bankers and politicians who supported them, and rewrite a new Constitution that would not be so favorably interpreted by the courts in favor of corporations. I am confident that under such, corporations would not have been deemed persons as the U.S.Supreme Court did a few years ago where political contributions were involved.
The American people share in the blame. We stood around like puppets and believed what our leaders, including the President, were telling us. We did not question. We did not act. There is a lesson to be learned here.
What galls me is the banks continue to screw around to the detriment of the American public. They do what they want, when they want. I have always subscribed to the position that if just one major bank CEO was tried, convicted, and sent to jail, the rest would back off. However, our government has told us first the banks were too big to fail and then too big to prosecute.
What can I say? The impropriety is obvious. The media turned its back on the people's right to know. The difficult thing to accept is that they got away with it.
Everyone is defecating on the 99 per cent.
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