This clip includes MSNBC's Morning Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, along with Financial Times' U.S. Managing Editor Krista Freeland, and The Big Idea's Donny Deutsch (AKA "the maverick CEO who built a multi-billion dollar advertising and media business").
There are so many things to be amazed at in this clip it's not even funny. Well, it's pretty funny when Moaning Joe says, "I know I've cut back on my spending." You can tell he is oblivious to how out of whack his income is with the average American.
And how about when Donny Deutsch is explaining how the American psyche is "damaged permanently" and Joe interrupts - reaffirming his elitist outlook with "I would say they've healed themselves." Oh my goodness; with so many average Americans (median annual income $50K) struggling to keep their homes and their family feed, what kind of self-absorbed jerk would say something like that.
Remember, the premise of the conversation was supposed to be the obvious idea that America may be in the mist of a second great depression. And whether it's true or not, you can tell these people don't believe it would have any effect on their lives.
In that context, Ms. Freeland's declaration - that "the most acute part" of the financial crisis is over because we have past the "scary period" when it was possible that the too-big-to-fail banks would actually fail - is pretty funny too. It clearly does not occur to her that Neil Barofsky (Special Inspector General for Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program) telling U.S. taxpayers that they may be on the hook for as much as $23.7 trillion to bail out financial companies is the truly scary part of the whole thing.
Instead, Ms. Freeland seems encouraged by the ability of J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs to leverage the hundreds of billions of freshly printed taxpayer dollars they received last year, into a "significant stabilization in the financial sector." And then, she further proclaims to have visual evidence of growth in the economy, pointing only to the short-term effects of federal stimulus spending and the replenishing of previously postponed inventories.
It's all so terrifyingly amazing.
But try to ignore all that foolishness and focus on the point raised by Donny Deutsch: "When you have people in Vietnam working for five cents a day, there's no way we can manufacture hard goods in this country." This is the real issue for working men and women in this country - and by the way the entire group immediately started talking over him, it appears to be a point that is not to be discussed on television.
But instead of discussing that real and devastating fact, Krista Freeland jumps in with the ridiculous idea that Germany - with less than a third of our population, earning about half our average wage - is some sort of example for America's future.
Finally, they all seem to settle on the mythical savior of "green jobs."
What a sad, sad joke the media has become.
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