Yvette Kantrow, executive editor of The Deal, riffs Tuesday on Time columnist Joe Klein and New Yorker columnist Malcolm Gladwell for blaming many of the country’s ills on private equity.
“How so, Klein never explains. But he praises George W. Bush’s hiring of Paul O’Neill as his Treasury secretary because O’Neill ‘came from the world of manufacturing.’ (He was Alcoa‘s CEO.) Geithner’s sin is that he never made anything or worked for a company that has. The message: Making is good; dealmaking, bad.
“It’s not surprising that during a recession the media would romanticize manufacturing, with its imagery of ordinary people earning a livable wage as they produce something useful at the local plant. But the notion that Wall Street somehow has a monopoly on ‘disastrous chicanery’ is laughable, as big corporate scandals from a few years ago — Tyco, Adelphia, Enron, WorldCom — make clear. The media’s memory, however, is short. Indeed, the same sort of reverence for manufacturing CEOs in which Klein indulges runs through a takedown of Rattner by yet another big-cheese columnist, The New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell.”
Read more here.
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