Where are tough reporters to expose as traitors the financial players who have systematically and perhaps deliberately damaged their country’s economy for profit

Noomi Rapace in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Music Box Films

A new movie, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, takes us headlong into the world of 20-something hackers with a grudge.

The heroine Salander is 90 pounds of she-devil rage at man and the machine.

Sex, anger, Goth and tattoos with one ring in her nose make Salander a new movie heroine on the genre of La Femme Nikita without the guns. 

Her boy-friend is a journalist being sued for slander when he exposed right wing industrialists. The movie comes from the popular Stieg Larsson novel  of the same title. The journalist is scathing in his denunciation of a lazy mainstream press who write up press releases from corporations as though they were Oracles from Delphi.

Frank Rich, in the NY Times, uses the book The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and movie to indict the mainstream media in an act of self-flagellation for a NY Times writer.

“A bank director who blows millions on foolhardy speculations should not keep his job,” writes Larsson in one typical passage. “A managing director who plays shell company games should do time.” Larsson is no less lacerating about influential journalists who treat “mediocre financial whelps like rock stars” and who docilely “regurgitate the statements issued by C.E.O.’s and stock-market speculators.” He pleads for some “tough reporter” to “identify and expose as traitors” the financial players who have “systematically and perhaps deliberately” damaged their country’s economy “to satisfy the profit interests of their clients.”

“If anything, the animus driving “Dragon Tattoo” seems more timely every day. The more we learn about the shell games practiced by our own C.E.O.’s during the pre-crash bubble, the more we share Larsson’s outrage that none of them are doing time. For instance, we now know, as we didn’t in September 2008, that Lehman’s collapse wasn’t exactly an unexpected, unpredictable calamity to those in its executive suites. The 2,200-page bank examiner’s autopsy released 10 days ago concluded that Lehman, in league with its auditor Ernst & Young, used “materially misleading” accounting gimmicks to mask its losses, duping investors and the ever-credulous Securities and Exchange Commission alike.”

What’s remarkable is that Larsson wrote all this in a book completed years before the meltdown of 2008 — and was referring only to Sweden. And yet the overlap with our recent history is profound — so much so that surely both his prescience and the universal resonance of his villains account for some of his novel’s marathon ride through the zeitgeist, its ability to touch the nerves of so many readers in America and throughout the West.

Far from being held liable for the chicanery and recklessness that would destroy their company and threaten their country’s economy, these executives benefited big time. In a study late last year, three Harvard Law School researchers examined public documents to assess whether one “standard narrative” of the crash was true — that “the meltdown of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers largely wiped out the wealth of their top executives.” It turned out to be a fairy tale. “In contrast to what has been thus far largely assumed, the executives were richly rewarded for, not financially devastated by, their leadership of their banks during this decade,” the Harvard Law team wrote. The top five executives at both Lehman and Bear collectively took home $2.4 billion in bonuses and equity sales — that’s nearly a quarter-billion dollars each — between 2000 and their 2008 demise. NY Times

In the US, the financial media are the same pack of entertainment reporters portrayed in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. The press genuflect for business leaders, lapping up every tidbit and rumor that feeds financial news reported as a version of Entertainment Tonight..