Greed killed Jackson as much as any drug
August 26, 2009 by Max Rottenstein
I'm thinking about the economy and Michael Jackson, please don't leave there is a connection.
The President has started to mention that we might just be seeing the beginning of the end of this recession. Those comments gave me a fairly long moment of pause followed by intense thought of how this particular recession got started.
The only answer I can come up with is greed. Mortgage lenders took on bad debts, investment banks and other backing institutions packaged and resold these mortgages, both good and bad, into the financial world to enable the whole cycle renewed itself until the music stopped.
Greed to write new mortgages meant that many lenders would no longer require their debtors to have such basic things like a job or a down payment or even a cosigner...things you would think would all be non-excusable prerequisites.
Michael Jackson and greed have definitely made their way back into the news.
The latest chapter in this epic is focusing on Jackson's use and abuse of prescription pharmaceuticals. More specifically, authorities are putting the magnifying glass on the people who helped him get the drugs the may very well have prematurely ended his life that fateful Thursday afternoon. The name that has become all too familiar is Jackson's personal physician at the time, Dr. Conrad Murray.
Dr. Murray was to be payed $150,000 a month for the responsibility of attending to the King of Pop's medical well being. We know Murray was only on the job for two months as Jackson began his rigorous preparation for fifty concerts in London. Reading through the search warrant affidavit recently released executed on the doctor's office and storage unit in Houston, we can assume that Murray did cross that line of medical professionalism by attending to Jackson's medical needs while at the same time catering to his pharmaceutical wants.
Jackson's battle with insomnia led him to become entangled with a bevy of hard hitting sedatives such as Ativan, Versed, and the anesthetic that everyone now knows, Diprivan. Jackson too was familiar with Diprivan, or propofol as it's generically known. He called it his "milk" referring to its white translucent color.
Jackson might not have had solid medical knowledge of what was going into his body but he knew that if whatever he took didn't put him to sleep, the "milk" would always do the trick. Dr. Conrad Murray didn't seduce Michael Jackson into this chemical tango and two months was hardly enough time for Murray to be spotlit as solely responsible for this tragedy.
Michael Jackson started writing the elements of the end of his life, whether he knew it or not, a long time ago. He didn't seem to be a normal person and he didn't seem to want to be. It now seems clear that Jackson had a clear problem with prescription medications that can potentially be traced back more than twenty years to a mishap during a filming of a Pepsi commercial. The saga of how Jackson went from pills to injections to an anesthetic rarely used outside of a hospital operating room with full cardiorespiratory monitoring started long before Murray came into the picture.
Jackson had needs, but his wants seemed to rule his life. By any account, Jackson did not like anyone to refuse him.
Despite having some of the best legal and financial advisers in the sphere of professional entertainment, Jackson was regularly spending $20-30 million a year more than he was earning, and this was going on for many many years. To keep up this consumptive lifestyle, Jackson had to take out gigantic loans leveraged against his physical and intellectual properties. The "This Is It" tour that Jackson was preparing for, the tour that concert promoters AEGLive were paying Murray to watch over and maintain Jackson's well being for, was primarily going to pay off a good size chunk of those gigantic bills.
So Jackson's promoter's wanted to keep Jackson alive and happy and earning. Jackson himself not only wanted to continue his lavish lifestyle but was also hungry to regain something of the stature he had in the 1980s. Murray was motivated by money as well. He was buried under a heaping mountain of bills himself: student loans, credit cards and civil judgements. Needless to say, there was a lot of money riding maintaining the King of Pop at status qua and on June 25th we tragically saw where the wages of that maintenance led.
Greed is a very sharp double-edged sword. It blurs that line between what we tell ourselves is right and wrong, what we will and will not do. In the case of our economy, greed led to a widespread distortion of the basic rules that would normally stop a hazardous situation from leading to the utter catastrophe we find ourselves in now. In Michael Jackson's case, greed is most definitely the lowest common denominator. Jackson and Dr. Conrad Murray, both buried in debt, both relying on more liquid paymasters to deliver them from their financial peril.
According to Murray, the morning Jackson died, he pleaded for an extra dose of propofol to get to sleep. It appears that that extra bit was enough to kill him. Despite being Jackson's physician for only two months of the last twenty-five years Dr. Murray is now being targeted by the LAPD as one of the ones responsible for that death. Greed most likely kept Dr. Murray from treating Michael Jackson for pharmaceutical addiction instead of insomnia.
One question that I have is what part greed played in the 90 minutes between the time Jackson allegedly stopped breathing and the time paramedics were called to the Holmby Hills home where Jackson was staying.
I hope that greed will not write the final chapter of this story. Dr. Murray was not the only responsible party, not by a long shot and should not be the only one called to account. A greed to successfully conclude this saga on one person might just lead to that. There were others who introduced Michael Jackson to his "milk" and they are just as responsible for his death as Dr. Murray.
As with this recession as with the Jackson tragedy, the only true measure of good in it is what we can learn from it. And if we don't learn from it, it will just happen somewhere else all over again.
The President has started to mention that we might just be seeing the beginning of the end of this recession. Those comments gave me a fairly long moment of pause followed by intense thought of how this particular recession got started.
The only answer I can come up with is greed. Mortgage lenders took on bad debts, investment banks and other backing institutions packaged and resold these mortgages, both good and bad, into the financial world to enable the whole cycle renewed itself until the music stopped.
Greed to write new mortgages meant that many lenders would no longer require their debtors to have such basic things like a job or a down payment or even a cosigner...things you would think would all be non-excusable prerequisites.
Michael Jackson and greed have definitely made their way back into the news.
The latest chapter in this epic is focusing on Jackson's use and abuse of prescription pharmaceuticals. More specifically, authorities are putting the magnifying glass on the people who helped him get the drugs the may very well have prematurely ended his life that fateful Thursday afternoon. The name that has become all too familiar is Jackson's personal physician at the time, Dr. Conrad Murray.
Dr. Murray was to be payed $150,000 a month for the responsibility of attending to the King of Pop's medical well being. We know Murray was only on the job for two months as Jackson began his rigorous preparation for fifty concerts in London. Reading through the search warrant affidavit recently released executed on the doctor's office and storage unit in Houston, we can assume that Murray did cross that line of medical professionalism by attending to Jackson's medical needs while at the same time catering to his pharmaceutical wants.
Jackson's battle with insomnia led him to become entangled with a bevy of hard hitting sedatives such as Ativan, Versed, and the anesthetic that everyone now knows, Diprivan. Jackson too was familiar with Diprivan, or propofol as it's generically known. He called it his "milk" referring to its white translucent color.
Jackson might not have had solid medical knowledge of what was going into his body but he knew that if whatever he took didn't put him to sleep, the "milk" would always do the trick. Dr. Conrad Murray didn't seduce Michael Jackson into this chemical tango and two months was hardly enough time for Murray to be spotlit as solely responsible for this tragedy.
Michael Jackson started writing the elements of the end of his life, whether he knew it or not, a long time ago. He didn't seem to be a normal person and he didn't seem to want to be. It now seems clear that Jackson had a clear problem with prescription medications that can potentially be traced back more than twenty years to a mishap during a filming of a Pepsi commercial. The saga of how Jackson went from pills to injections to an anesthetic rarely used outside of a hospital operating room with full cardiorespiratory monitoring started long before Murray came into the picture.
Jackson had needs, but his wants seemed to rule his life. By any account, Jackson did not like anyone to refuse him.
Despite having some of the best legal and financial advisers in the sphere of professional entertainment, Jackson was regularly spending $20-30 million a year more than he was earning, and this was going on for many many years. To keep up this consumptive lifestyle, Jackson had to take out gigantic loans leveraged against his physical and intellectual properties. The "This Is It" tour that Jackson was preparing for, the tour that concert promoters AEGLive were paying Murray to watch over and maintain Jackson's well being for, was primarily going to pay off a good size chunk of those gigantic bills.
So Jackson's promoter's wanted to keep Jackson alive and happy and earning. Jackson himself not only wanted to continue his lavish lifestyle but was also hungry to regain something of the stature he had in the 1980s. Murray was motivated by money as well. He was buried under a heaping mountain of bills himself: student loans, credit cards and civil judgements. Needless to say, there was a lot of money riding maintaining the King of Pop at status qua and on June 25th we tragically saw where the wages of that maintenance led.
Greed is a very sharp double-edged sword. It blurs that line between what we tell ourselves is right and wrong, what we will and will not do. In the case of our economy, greed led to a widespread distortion of the basic rules that would normally stop a hazardous situation from leading to the utter catastrophe we find ourselves in now. In Michael Jackson's case, greed is most definitely the lowest common denominator. Jackson and Dr. Conrad Murray, both buried in debt, both relying on more liquid paymasters to deliver them from their financial peril.
According to Murray, the morning Jackson died, he pleaded for an extra dose of propofol to get to sleep. It appears that that extra bit was enough to kill him. Despite being Jackson's physician for only two months of the last twenty-five years Dr. Murray is now being targeted by the LAPD as one of the ones responsible for that death. Greed most likely kept Dr. Murray from treating Michael Jackson for pharmaceutical addiction instead of insomnia.
One question that I have is what part greed played in the 90 minutes between the time Jackson allegedly stopped breathing and the time paramedics were called to the Holmby Hills home where Jackson was staying.
I hope that greed will not write the final chapter of this story. Dr. Murray was not the only responsible party, not by a long shot and should not be the only one called to account. A greed to successfully conclude this saga on one person might just lead to that. There were others who introduced Michael Jackson to his "milk" and they are just as responsible for his death as Dr. Murray.
As with this recession as with the Jackson tragedy, the only true measure of good in it is what we can learn from it. And if we don't learn from it, it will just happen somewhere else all over again.