She tries to touch a similar nerve in her new book, “Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption are Undermining America’’ (Crown). Who’s to blame for the “lunatic excesses’’ of the ’90s that left portfolios in ruins? She says “the awful truth is that the corporate tricksters have pillaged the U.S. economy’’ and paid “legal bribes’’ to make politicians look the other way.
Well, yes. Huffington spends much ink touring the hall of shame of fallen CEOs and their $6,000 shower curtains (in one of her quizzes, you can link a CEO to “slime mold’’). But she rarely goes beyond greedy CEOs and pliable politicians to explain the excesses that undermined America, as her title suggests. She invites readers to e-mail her the lesson of the corporate crisis in 100 words or fewer. Let’s try 50: everyone from daytraders to CEOs looked for shortcuts to wealth. People overlooked fantasy math and lavish executive giveaways because a rising market was all that mattered (and the market was in turn cited as proof that high CEO pay worked!). We now know two plus two can only equal four.
Granted, a pig in a suit makes for a nifty book jacket. But you have to dig deeper than that to touch the ’90s nerve.
