Banks Are Lending--to Their Own

The credit crunch is squeezing American businesses and consumers, except for the directors, top executives and other insiders who have loans from their own banks totaling $41 billion.

We learn this from the Charlotte Observer, which reports: "At Charlotte-based Bank of America, those loans more than doubled last year, to $624.2 million--the biggest dollar jump in the country. The largest of them likely went to three directors or their companies. The surge came during the third quarter as credit markets froze, the government prepared to infuse banks with billions in tax dollars and the board approved the purchase of troubled Merrill Lynch.

"Bank of America ranked fourth on the list of biggest insider lenders. At the top was JPMorgan of New York, which held $1.48 billion in insider loans, mostly by directors or their companies."

This hyperactive insider lending raises all kinds of questions about the true condition of the institutions that are now about to receive another huge bailout by the Administration's plan to get toxic assets off their books.

But it also raises a question about journalism as well. Why does a story of this significance come from a Charlotte reporter, Stella M. Hopkins, part of the McClatchy chain, rather than from the journalistic centers of the financial and political universe in New York and Washington?

The McClatchy papers are in small to medium-sized but fast-growing communities, and they often break stories that the metropolitan behemoths overlook. Old-fashioned journalism seems to be alive and well on Main Street.

Iraq Death Watch Numbers Game

After the Civil War, Gen. Robert E. Lee turned down all offers to write his memoirs, saying that to do so would “be trading on the blood of my men.” That delicacy of feeling is long gone.

Now Washington bureaucrats are not at all squeamish about using soldiers’ blood for political profit. Case in point is the claim that American combat deaths have gone down since the Surge started and, as the McClatchy Newspapers reported, “Military officials and observers are wondering whether the lower U.S. casualties are a sign of success...”

A recent post questioning this “sign of success” has drawn a rebuttal of what McClatchy calls “vitriolic criticism...from liberal web sites.”

This “vitriolic” retired journalist has long been an admirer of the reporting by McClatchy, formerly Knight Ridder, particularly in the selling of the Iraq war by the Bush Administration, and the criticism of the numbers story was clearly aimed at the Pentagon source rather than the messenger.

Readers can judge for themselves, but there is a new kind of callous ingenuity in stressing certain kinds of deaths over others, particularly when one source of the numbers--an August helicopter crash that killed 14 U.S. troops--is officially an accident but an Air Force spokesman “could not rule out a strike by a surface to air missile.”

But it’s saddening to be arguing about how our young people are dying rather than why.