Robbing banks, the new-fashioned way

Posted on August 4, 2010 by oddmanout215

St. Louis bandits were slick, but not as slick as the Wall St. gang

Monday’s big story in the Midwest: “Masked gunmen steal huge stash of cash in predawn heist at St. Louis ATM servicing business.”

So who’s bolder, the four armed robbers, or the honchos at Goldman Sachs and American International Group Inc. who effectively used the banking system to steal billions from taxpayers? Let’s compare the heists.

Johnny Depp as John Dillinger

The four gunmen, dressed head to toe in black, arrived at the ATM servicing center before dawn. They overpowered a guard as he reported for work, and then another. They apparently knew in advance that “it took two workers to separately punch in access codes to open the vault.” They got away with about $11 million and are still on the loose.

Lloyd Blankfein and his cronies at Goldman Sachs didn’t wear masks or carry guns. Neither did Robert Liddy and his crew at AIG, which was the country’s biggest insurance company. They gambled billions on the housing bubble, using mortgage-linked investments called collateralized debt obligations and insurance instruments called credit-default swaps, because they knew they had friends in government who’d help them steal back their billions if the gambles didn’t pay off.

The housing bubble burst, the banks failed and government bailed out AIG to the tune of $182.3 billion in taxpayer money. AIG used much of the bailout money to pay off obligations to Goldman and other banks that had been incurred through complicated insurance arrangements.

The St. Louis crooks obviously had insider knowledge regarding the ATM center. They deserve the John Dillinger Prize – I just invented it – for being ballsy throwbacks in an age of cell phones and surveillance cameras. They have a good work ethic, and one might even say they got their money the old-fashioned way. As John Houseman used to say in an old TV commercial, “They earned it.”

The Wall Street crooks had insider knowledge far beyond that of conventional robbers. They took no physical risks and escaped with a bundle of loot that makes the St. Louis robbers’ take look like small change. AIG and Goldman are even stronger than they were before the worldwide economic collapse – a collapse they helped trigger with their reckless investment and insurance policies.

The Wall Street gang wouldn’t dream of robbing banks the old-fashioned way, even if they had the guts. They’re smarter than that. They knew their power would remain undiminished even if their mortgages racket collapsed because their friends are named Paulson and Geithner. They knew, as conservative apostate David Stockman recently wrote, that their monster companies are “wards of the state, extracting billions from the economy with a lot of pointless speculation in stocks, bonds, commodities and derivatives.”

The St. Louis crooks will get killed or go to jail. Blankfein and his colleagues will remain rich and free unless the federal government is radically reformed. As the Duke said several times in The Searchers, “That’ll be the day.”

Posted in economic collapse, Goldman Sachs, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

We’re mad as hell, Friedman!

Posted on August 1, 2010 by oddmanout215

Our enemies are not our friends. The world is not flat.

Thomas Friedman is a widely read pundit and an optimistic chap. Wrong most of the time, but optimistic, and very thorough in explaining the madness of U.S. foreign policy.

He doesn’t endorse this policy but he doesn’t condemn it either, even though he concedes, for example, that some of the money the U.S. gives Pakistan “is killing our own soldiers.”

Friedman was a cheerleader for Dubya’s war on Iraq but these days he downplays that fiasco and focuses on arguing for globalization, the myth that our future prosperity depends on the grand-scale economic interdependence of nations. It is the be-all and end-all of his ideology.

Peter Finch as Howard Beale

I couldn’t help but think of Friedman during a recent viewing of Network, the 1976 movie in which Howard Beale, the Mad Prophet of the Airwaves, is reprimanded by Arthur Jensen, the owner of the TV network that broadcasts Beale’s show. Beale had been telling his fans that they are being lied to by the mainstream media, that they are confusing these lies with what’s going on in the real world. Jensen shouts at Beale:

“You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast… multi-national dominion of dollars. … It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!”

Maybe Network was one of the inspirations for The World Is Flat, Friedman bestselling ode to globalization, written before the economic collapse exposed the rotten core of the world financial system and the naivete of those who see something benign in this system.

THE WORLD IS ROUND, Tom. We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take you anymore. ATONE!

Posted in globalization, mainstream media, New York Times op-ed, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Out of work, out of sight, out of mind

Posted on July 29, 2010 by oddmanout215

In the  1930s, the jobless were big news. Now they’re invisible.

Media coverage of the unemployment problem pretty much ended on July 22, when President Obama signed a bill extending coverage to 2.5 million Americans whose benefits had been blocked by the rock-solid Republican troglodytes in the Senate.

However, the legislation didn’t help the 99ers – those whose joblessness has persisted beyond 99 weeks, the maximum number of weeks for which a recipient can receive emergency benefits. This means that the 99ers, millions of them, along with millions of other Americans who are seeking work, are effectively left out in the cold, or the scorching heat, when it comes to being able to pay the bills.

I guess this is one of the things that distinguishes a Great Depression from a run-of-the-mill small-d depression. In the 1930s, the fact that millions of people were thrown out of work for years on end was considered a national disgrace and was priority No. 1 on the Roosevelt administration’s list of problems to correct.

But now, when long-term unemployment is a more serious problem than at any time since the the ’30s, the news media is arguably blasé about the issue. And the Obama administration, despite its success in pushing an expensive economic stimulus package through Congress, has come up with no – as in zero – large-scale public works projects to get the jobless back on their feet.

Yes, a much larger percentage of the population was thrown out of work by the Great Depression than by the depression – technically, a recession – that began in December 2007. And the social safety net in today’s America is bigger and more secure than in the 1930s, when there were no emergency benefits programs for the jobless, who were very visible because they had to take to the streets to sell apples, or beg, in order to survive.

Maybe that’s what it will take to change things — millions of apple peddlers and tens of thousands of muggers. Or else an organized movement committed to getting federal legislators off their asses and working to change the benefits apparatus and the employment picture.

Michael Thornton, who writes the Rochester Unemployment Examiner in New York, posed good questions about congressional slackers in a recent post:

Why was it so easy for Congress to abandon up to four million benefits exhaustees, but they can’t abandon an unwinnable Afghan War where they just assigned another $91 billion dollars? Why was it easy for Congress to pass a $700 billion bank bailout (or $23 trillion bank backstop) that benefited corrupt banks and allowed for record Wall Street bonuses, but they can’t find $20 billion to support four million long-term unemployed US citizens who lost their job due to Wall Street malfeasance?

I guess we’ll have to wait until these legislative slackers return from their long summer vacations before we can ask these questions and regain the attention of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, those in the Philadelphia area who’ve exhausted or will soon exhaust unemployment benefits, and those who want to help exhaustees, should contact the Philadelphia Unemployment Project.

Follow-up to July 18 post: We’re still waiting to see that story about the 99ers that New York Times reporter Michael Luo said was in the works.

Posted in Congress, mainstream media, Obama, Philadelphia, Politics, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

The mystery of the vanishing oil spill

Posted on July 28, 2010 by oddmanout215

The Times seems stumped. Maybe the Hardy Boys should be on the case.

I clicked on the New York Times link this morning and there it was — “On the Surface, Gulf Oil Spill Is Vanishing Fast; Concerns Stay” — the big story that was going to alert readers to the fact that some chemical dispersants used to break up oil slicks on the Gulf of Mexico are highly toxic and ultimately might do more harm than good.

But the reporters made only a passing glance at this concern, in the story’s eighth paragraph, and focused instead on how rapidly the visible evidence of the British Petroleum oil disaster is dissipating. Their story didn’t explicitly declare the recent clean-up effort a success. It mentioned “scientific uncertainties associated with the spill.” But the reporters, or their editor, glossed over the possible environmental impact of the dispersants. Arguably, their story was as misleading as one of those public relations dispatches from BP back in the spring.

Maybe the reporters were stumped because of all the bad information BP has spread around. They might at least have mentioned Corexit, the extremely toxic chemical used in the oil dispersal effort, and they could have consulted insiders who are more than just vaguely skeptical about the safety of humans and other creatures exposed to in some way to the almost two million gallons of Corexit that has been poured into the Gulf.

Maybe reporters at The Times are working on the big story this very minute, but I got the impression from today’s dispatch that the Hardy Boys, Frank and Joe, might do a better job just by doing the detective work some of us remember from books we read back in grade school. I can see the Hardy Boys out there on the gulf:

Frank steered the motorboat in a wide arc and said he wanted to take another look at the site where the mile-long oil slick had been sprayed with Corexit and then vanished.
“Why?” Joe asked in surprise.
“Because this is the same thing that oil cleanup guy told us happened to that three-mile slick the other day after it was sprayed with Corexit,” Frank replied.
“Yes, I remember him,” Joe said. “The one who can’t breathe anymore.”
Excitedly, the brothers speculated on the possible connection between the two sprayings. Then the brothers each put on the respirators they had brought with them and began to look for clues…

Follow-up: A little late and not prominent enough, but the online Times has posted an update about legislative efforts to make the EPA set minimum toxicity standards for dispersants.

Follow-up to July 14 post: President Obama never did get around to making a statement on the possible need for respirators by all workers in the vicinity of the cleanup.

Posted in BP, Gulf, New York Times, Obama | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Hey, Dem girls — time to wake up

Posted on July 27, 2010 by oddmanout215

David Lynch fans may remember the scene in Mulholland Drive where The Cowboy says “Time to wake up” to the Naomi Watts character, whose real life turns out to be a nightmare.

Democrats will wake up in a nightmare, too, if they don’t soon get their act together. It will be Election Day and they’ll find themselves in the minority in the House and with a slimmer majority in the Senate, a turn of events that would ensure even harder times for the poor and so-called middle classes.

As the Washington Post reported Sunday, Republicans in Congress are now convinced they can win big in November by blaming Dems for current high unemployment rates and other grim economic news, even though they are working in unison to block all Dem efforts to create jobs and provide financial help for the unemployed.

The latter tactic didn’t become part of the GOP strategy until this summer, when Republicans fought like Rotweilers to deny a benefits extension to those who are out of work. Until then, only kooks such as Sen. Jim Bunning (R.-KY) claimed that jobs benefits were a significant factor in the ever-growing deficit.

It’s a given that Republicans are stingy and mean-spirited, but if the November elections go badly for the Dems it will largely be because they fell into a typically timid defensive posture as Republicans became progressively bolder in trying to paint Dems as somehow responsible for the economic downturn that happened while Dubya was in office.

Mainstream media will be a factor, of course, because of its tired old “he said/she said” approach to reporting political news. For instance, in stories last week about the benefits extension bill, mainstream reporters repeatedly failed to challenge Republicans who said they opposed the bill because Dems wouldn’t agree to offset its $34 billion cost with spending cuts or unspent stimulus funds. Reporters who were doing their jobs would have pointed out that the benefits extension foes were some of the same people who voted for more than $1 trillion in tax cuts for the rich, a move they still defend.

But Dems could make the news machine work for them if they hammered every day at the liars who created the budget deficit and now use it as an excuse to heap hardships on the poor. They face a tough road, mostly because President Obama didn’t have the gumption or good sense to emulate FDR and come out swinging against the Party of No as soon as he took office.

The message being heard most often these days is that of congressional right-wingers, a cast that includes characters so grotesque — Bunning, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R.-KY), Rep. John Boehner (R.-OH), et al. — that even David Lynch at his weirdest couldn’t have invented them.

Let’s hope the foggy-headed Dems we elected in 2008 will figure out how to fight these freaks. If they don’t, 2011 will be an even worse economic nightmare than 2010.

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Politico reels in another red herring

Posted on July 25, 2010 by oddmanout215

The issue is right-wing lies, not ‘media recklessness’

Once upon a time, the news was dictated to us by a handful of corporations that professed to be non-partisan in their methods and goals.

Then along came revelations that non-partisanship – also called objectivity, neutrality, fair and balanced reporting – was at best a dodgy concept that news outlets invoked to disguise the extent to which they screened out information that ran counter to the corporations that controlled them.

Media complicity in big lies told by the government about the Vietnam War and other disasters soured the public on the notion of objective reporting, but it’s not quite dead, as every reader of Politico knows.

This week, Politico editors John Harris and Jim VandeHei of Politico, in a weird example of special pleading, wrote that their publication was “both an enabler (in the eyes of some critics) of the deterioration of political discourse, and a target of it (as we try to defend our values as neutral journalists amid constant criticism from activists who think we fail at neutrality or are disdainful of the goal in the first place).”

Their mini-essay was in response to the buzz about Shirley Sherrod, the black official at the Department of Agriculture who was portrayed as a racist last week by right-wing smear specialist Andrew Breitbart and Fox News. John and Jim complained of “media recklessness.” They bemoaned the “new media environment… in which facts hardly matter except as they can be used as weapon or shield in a nonstop ideological war.” They seemed to pine for the days when the news corporations “set the agenda and tone for much coverage. This was a more insular and elitist arrangement, but also more restrained.”

Restrained? What about accurate? It’s no accident that John and Jim offered no evaluation of the Sherrod story. Instead, they noted that Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.) deplored Fox’s unwarranted attack on Sherrod. Then they turned to Cesar Conda, a right-wing spin doctor, who complained that the lesson of the Sherrod story is that Republicans are being persecuted by leftist organizations.

Which is it, John and Jim? The talking heads at Fox knowingly misrepresented Sherrod as a racist. In light of this and many other instances of on-air lying, was it accurate of Obey to call Fox an “ideological hatchet machine?” Or was Conda accurate in implying that Fox’s smear of Sherrod amounts to a “slightly politically incorrect” comment?

To answer those questions would be to admit that reporters, if they’re doing their jobs, draw conclusions based on the available facts. If they don’t, they’re merely making noise.

If John and Jim are content to operate a noise machine, that’s their right. But I wish they wouldn’t call what they do reporting.

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Memo to Obama: Show some fight

Posted on July 22, 2010 by oddmanout215

Be an aggressor, or a counterpuncher. Anything but a stiff.

It seems the administration’s spokespersons, from Robert Gibbs all the way down, are motivated more by fear of Glenn Beck than by a desire to push the Democratic agenda.

You might think they’d be fighting for the interests of constituents against the slanderers who, more than ever, call the shots at right-wing media outlets. And yet, time and again, Barack Obama and his lieutenants have let themselves be bullied into unnecessary legislative compromises because they’ve ignored, or only tepidly challenged, Republicans who lie about the administration’s policy goals and personnel.

The most recent Obama fiasco involves Shirley Sherrod, the Department of Agriculture official and black woman who was accused of racism by right-wingers in connection with a video speech she made that was posted on a right-wing website. According to Sherrod, the undersecretary of the department, upon hearing of the posting on Tuesday, told her to resign after first voicing fear that the video was “going to be on Glenn Beck tonight.”

Amazing. Obama’s people dumped Sherrod because they were afraid that a borderline basket case on Fox News would accuse them of treating white farmers in a racist manner. If they’d made a few phone calls or seen the video materials, they quickly could have confirmed that she was a hard worker for poor farmers, black and white, and anything but a racist.

As everyone now knows, the smoking gun turned out to be a snippet from the original video served up by Andrew Breitbart, a right-wing hack and point man for Republican smear campaigns. The difference between Breitbart and Beck is like that between a maggot and a fly.  The Breitbarts of the world carry lies that are in the larval stage. The Becks — and the Sean Hannitys, Bill O’Reillys, and so on — help these lies take wing and buzz around long enough to spread contagion.

What’s maddening is that Obama and company don’t seem to be getting any better at countering these creatures. They don’t seem to understand that their enemies — our enemies — lie blatantly and repeatedly because they know Dems will challenge them halfheartedly and the mainstream media won’t challenge them at all.

And so it was that Gibbs and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack offered meek apologies to Sherrod but had nothing to say about the goons who fabricated and spread the racism story. Instead, Gibbs on Wednesday lamely suggested that some people had acted “without a full set of facts.” Beck’s almost immediate response to Gibbs’s remarks was “Bobbie, don’t try to spread the blame. I didn’t fire her. You did. Nobody here at Fox News fired her. You did. Yeah. Without the facts.”

The bottom line is that right-wingers were able to control the message. What should have been a story about Republicans inventing scandals became a story about how inept and cowardly Obama’s people are at countering Republicans who invent scandals.

Obama didn’t speak up for Sherrod until after the whole country knew she’d been slimed by a hack. He seems to have a deathly fear of being accused of “reverse racism,” an absurd concept, and to naively believe that the mainstream media is committed to helping the public distinguish between facts and lies.  His failure to respond in a passionate and coherent way to Republican lies regarding the stimulus package, health care reform, the gulf oil spill, jobless benefits and other issues large and small has cost us dearly. We all lose every time he fails to fight back.

Posted in Obama, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Brooks appalled by Gibson, but not by Bush

Posted on July 20, 2010 by oddmanout215

In the Weekly Standard, back in 2003, David Brooks bemoaned the fact that “Many Democrats feel that George Bush is just running loose, transforming the national landscape and ruining the nation, and there is nothing they can do to stop him.” In a 2007 New York Times op-ed quoted in AlterNet, Brooks lauded Bush for being confident “in the rightness of his Big Idea” and in the vague notion “that history is moving in the direction of democracy…”

Brooks, the Earnest Weasel of conservative commentators, was different from many Bush apologists in that he pretended his hero was making policy in the interest of “suburban moderates,” not the extreme right wing that Bush proudly represented. Curiously, despite the existence of much on-the-record evidence, Brooks never reminded readers that the leader of the free world was a former drunk and coke sniffer, barely literate, a man who owed everything he had to the money and power of his family.

And yet Brooks was appalled – appalled, I tell you – by recent published gossip about Mel Gibson, the aging actor and director who split with his wife of many years and allegedly slugged his girlfriend (ex-girlfriend now). Assuming the Olympian tone of a prig in a Jane Austen novel, Brooks wrote, “Let us enter, you and I, into the moral universe of the modern narcissist.” He listed Gibson’s vices and misdeeds and some dubious statistics on the percentage of Americans who are narcissists.

There are two points to be salvaged from Brooks’s pretentious dispatch. The first is that narcissism isn’t a crime. Yes, Gibson is a substance abuser, a boorish bitter Catholic, a Holocaust denier and a lot of other things, but no one can accuse him of cynically putting into place policies that led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths in Asia or the collapse of the American economy. Those are the deeds that sum up Bush’s character and legacy.

Also, one should keep in mind that Brooks’ social criticism is always at the service of his sneaky right-wing agenda. Gibson isn’t just a flawed human, he’s proof that “ …We’ve entered an era where self-branding is on the ascent and the culture of self-effacement is on the decline.”

Arguably, Brooks is pining for an America in which “self-effacing” proles do the bidding of their rich and powerful masters, no questions asked. I wish the Earnest Weasel would state his views more plainly, or that the Times’ op-ed page editor would replace him with a right-winger who has more balls and integrity.

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The myth of a safety net for the unemployed

Posted on July 18, 2010 by oddmanout215

Why is the media so blase about the plight of the long-term unemployed?

This question came to mind after I read today’s New York Times story by Michael Luo about an unemployed woman named Terri Sadler who had, according to Luo, “used up 79 weeks of benefits but was expecting an additional 20 weeks under the extended federal program.”

In a subsequent e-mail to Luo, I wrote that he should have stated “that more than a million unemployed people already have exhausted their benefits (99 weeks is the limit) and will receive no further aid. Even if an extension is passed, those in Ms. Sadler’s position will quickly hit the 99-week wall and be back to zero income.” I added, “The real story here is that there are no jobs and no relief in sight for Americans who ‘max out’ at 99 weeks. Who among our legislative representatives is working to help these people? Why didn’t YOU ask this question?”

Luo sent this prompt reply: “The plight of 99ers has definitely been on my mind. In fact, that’s the story I had intended to write at the outset. I found Terri on a Facebook group for 99ers. I quickly learned, of course, she wasn’t really a 99er. But her situation was still compelling in light of the Senate impasse. I asked my editor what I should do. He said we should do a quick hit on her and come back to the 99ers. The problem, of course, is the story would sound very similar. I told him that. He said we’d have to sort it out, which we will. These things are complicated, what goes into figuring out when a story is undertaken or not… The point is, we’re aware of the issue and mean to get to it. I just ask for some forbearance.”

Luo seems to be one of the good guys — a reporter who seems to want to communicate the urgency of the unemployment problem. Unfortunately, a lot of other people at major news organizations aren’t nearly as conscientious.

My hunch is that indifference to the plight of the 99ers  — out of work, out of money and, often, out on the streets — by cynics in Congress is being underreported because the gatekeepers of mainstream news are afraid that right-wingers will accuse them of bias.

Right-wingers pretend to believe that further aid to the jobless will prevent Congress from balancing the budget. They pretend the federal budget deficit that developed over the past decade wasn’t caused by massive tax cuts for the rich and the funding of two foreign wars. They pretend that shining a light on corrupt legislators — those who act in the interest of corporations seeking tax breaks rather than private citizens seeking jobless benefits — amounts to biased reporting.

One of the biggest domestic stories since the Great Depression has been placed on the back burner by the media. Pretty odd, no?

Posted in mainstream media, New York Times | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Geno’s is proof you are what you eat

Posted on July 15, 2010 by oddmanout215

I witnessed anti-immigrant anger yesterday at Geno’s, a South Philly sandwich shop that, even on a good day, looks like a lunch spot for loonies. The outdoor tables under sheet metal awnings, fluorescent light on orange tiles, angry white men in ball caps, the smell of processed meat, the local wing nut broadcasting his radio show from the sidewalk – all this seemed a recipe for the sort of bigotry-fueled urban violence depicted decades ago by Robert Stone in his novel A Hall of Mirrors.

At issue was the strict immigration law recently passed in Arizona. On one side of the street were protesters alarmed by the antics of Geno’s owner Joey Vento, the rally’s organizer, who likes to rant about illegals. On the other side, at Geno’s, were Vento’s supporters, angry patriots who eat the fat-drenched swill he traffics in. In the middle were hunched and grizzled plainclothes cops whose every gesture seemed to say, “I can’t wait to retire next year…”

Vento and his fellow yahoos want the illegals sent back across the Rio Grande. “We have laws in this country,” the cheesesteak tycoon told a newspaper reporter. “That’s what makes us different from any other country.”

Actually, what made our country different was that immigrants weren’t hamstrung by draconian laws when they got off the boat. They were relatively free to build new lives for themselves. They worked hard and maybe caught a few breaks and often found themselves prospering. The children or grandchildren of these immigrants – even obnoxious self-promoters like Joey Vento – sometimes prospered in a big way.

And yet these children of immigrants, these Cheez Whiz worshippers who drove their gas guzzlers from the suburbs to the city on a moronic whim, don’t feel prosperous. They won’t acknowledge, or are too dumb to realize, that their anti-immigrant political heroes are the same people who authorized huge tax cuts for the rich and two ongoing foreign wars – the main reasons why the U.S. budget surplus became a deficit over the past decade. They know the economy is on the skids and blame its decline on Democrats in government and poor dark people.

Yesterday, Vento said fellow South Philly business owners who hire illegal immigrants should go to prison, where they will “see Big Bubba looking at them” – his term for black inmates – and decide to mend their ways. What is it about some people that makes them instantly conflate fear and loathing with Hispanics and blacks?

I think it’s their diet.

Posted in immigration, Philadelphia | Tagged , , | 1 Comment