Golden boys lose their shine
Attacks on the so-called «golden boys» are meaningful when they come from US President Barack Obama or the British prime minister, who have both been announcing investments in public benefit projects. Of course, there are reservations – are the golden boys the only ones to blame? Who encouraged and tolerated them? What system are they the products of? These are the questions that civil societies need to raise and answer. Is the problem a systemic one? Some have called it artificial and moral. If that is the only way the casino capitalism of greed can develop, by means of toxic products, by trading in bad debts and pyramid schemes, how then are the golden boys, until only recently the darlings of the system, to behave? Like prudent pastors or monks? After all, their job was greed itself. At any rate, a hypocritical witch hunt in the Balkan manner is the way it is put into practice in Greece, which demonizes those who only yesterday were glamorized, goes beyond the ridiculous and verges on the vulgar. It is a violent insult to people’s intelligence. The salaries of CEOs at public corporations and listed companies are now being vilified as outrageous by those very people who until only recently were braying in favor of a deregulated market and against state intervention, who were advertising every sale of public property at what were usually paltry prices, and urging the appointment of business managers to public office, even government. This is hypocritical and false. It is being done to avoid dealing with the fundamentally political dimension of the crisis, to keep society in a state of ignorance and fear. As for the vocal critics of these executives – many of them are earning far more than those they are criticizing, some of it even under the table.
