NPR probes bank’s gift to NYPD (I kid you, NPR)

Posted on October 2, 2011 by oddmanout215

This just in from a National Public Radio investigation sparked by a post on JP Morgan Chase’s website:

JPMorgan Chase recently donated an unprecedented $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation. The gift was the largest in the history of the foundation and will enable the New York City Police Department to strengthen security in the Big Apple. The money will pay for 1,000 new patrol car laptops, as well as security monitoring software in the NYPD’s main data center.

New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly sent CEO and Chairman Jamie Dimon a note expressing “profound gratitude” for the company’s donation.

NPR’s report on the bank’s unprecedented gift featured extensive excerpts from a Naked Capitalism post:

… And what sort of benefits might JPM get? It is unlikely that there would be anything as crass as an explicit quid pro quo. But it certainly is useful to be confident that the police are on your side, say if an executive or worse an entire desk is caught in a sex or drugs scandal. Recall that Charles Ferguson in Inside Job alleged that the use of hookers is pervasive on Wall Street (duh) and is invoiced to the banks.

Or the police might be extra protective of your interests. Today, OccupyWallStreet decided to march across the Brooklyn Bridge (a proud New York tradition) to Chase Manhattan Plaza in Brooklyn… Over 700 of the marchers were arrested, and the media has a rather amusing “he said, she said” account, with OccupyWallStreet claiming entrapment and the cops batting their baby blues and trying to look innocent.

I kid you, NPR! By now everyone knows you’re a bunch of whipped dogs, too scared of right-wing politicians to even report the JP Morgan-Chase gift, let alone mention publications that are looking into it.

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, mainstream media, Wall Street, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

NYT’s Ginia B. admits Occupy is for real

Posted on October 2, 2011 by oddmanout215

In her article today, Ginia Bellafante didn’t call Occupy Wall Street “pantomime progressivism” — an improvement — but it seems she still doesn’t quite get what’s going on in Lower Manhattan.

Bellafante’s lede refers to Occupy as “ideologically vague and strategically baffling.” It’s as if she were trying to justify her previous superficial coverage by blaming protesters for not handing her a hardbound manifesto and a diagram of all direct actions they are planning.

Bellafante isn’t giving up on her notion that the event, in its early days, wasn’t worthy of coverage. The main point of her new article — headline: “Every action produces overreaction” — is that Occupy Wall Street is growing and spreading to other cities only because the cops did such a clumsy job of containing it.

And she can’t contain her Maureen Dowd-style snark for long. At one point, she mentions Michael Moore being interviewed in the park on Wednesday and adds:

In the preceding 48 hours, the endorsement of the left’s ruling class had been secured: encouraging words from Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein had been sent to the group; visits were paid by Susan Sarandon and Cornel West.

The left’s ruling class! As if most of the protesters in Lower Manhattan are major fans of Chomsky, or have even read him. As if the millions of people who are jobless and/or homeless are left-wingers waiting for Naomi Klein to tell them what to do. As if Bellafante doesn’t know that the “ruling class” in this country works in the Wall Street office towers and has nothing to do with the left.

Note to Ginia’s editors: Where the f*ck are you guys/gals when B. files her copy?

Progress, maybe: An article about the arrest of 700 protesters yesterday on Brooklyn Bridge actually made it into NYT’s print edition today, albeit on Page 18. But it made me wonder how many other stories involving that many arrests in NYC would not have made The Times‘ front page.

Posted in economic collapse, globalization, Great Recession, mainstream media, New York Times, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Recession, my ass. Deal with the ‘D’ word.

Posted on October 1, 2011 by oddmanout215

Come on, Robert Reich, you’re almost there. You mentioned there was zero jobs growth in August. You noted that the number of Americans looking for work “has grown by over seven million” since 2007, but that 300,000 fewer Americans actually have jobs now than in ’07. You put in a word for the march for jobs in DC to be led by Al Sharpton, who still voices vigorous support for Barack Obama, even though the latter has done nothing to create jobs since taking office.

But you’re not writing we’re in an unqualified depression because, technically, the economy isn’t depressed so long as the multinational corporations and other large businesses are making huge profits. You write:

America’s ongoing jobs depression – which is what it deserves to be called – is the worst economic calamity to hit this nation since the Great Depression. It’s also terrible news for President Obama, whose chances for re-election now depend almost entirely on the Republican party putting up someone so vacuous and extremist that the nation rallies to Obama regardless.

The problem is on the demand side. Consumers (whose spending is 70% of the economy) can’t boost the American economy on their own. They’re still too burdened by debt, especially on homes that are worth less than their mortgages. In addition, their jobs are disappearing, their pay is dropping, their medical bills are soaring.

You’re the economist, Bob, so what’s the difference between the “jobs depression” and the Great Depression to most Americans? Is the misery index any lower now than in the 1930s? If my parents were alive, I think they’d say no, except that this depression is less visible, because there are food stamps rather than breadlines.

The banksters and the corporations were bailed out, and now they’re hoarding money and refusing to create jobs, except in other countries.

Remove the word “jobs,” Bob, and just call it what it is — a full-blown disaster-course depression.

Footnote: Reich hit a home run in a follow-up column on the same subject:

… When Republicans recently charged the President with promoting “class warfare,” he answered it was “just math.” But it’s more than math. It’s a matter of morality. Republicans have posed the deepest moral question of any society: whether we’re all in it together. Their answer is we’re not. President Obama should proclaim, loudly and clearly, we are.

Posted in economic collapse, globalization, Goldman Sachs, Great Depression, Great Recession, Obama, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

‘You’re way wrong… I read Erica Jong’

Posted on September 30, 2011 by oddmanout215

Whither the zipless fuck?

I’ll back up… One thing you can count on these days is the bizarre ubiquity of Facebook, which is always “on” and always ready to introduce you to new friends — or, more accurately, to friends of friends of friends. But I was still surprised when I logged on yesterday and saw this message to me from FB:

Erica Jong
Five mutual friends
Add friend

My chance to befriend Erica! To ask her whether she’d invented or merely filched the phrase “zipless fuck,” meaning a sexual encounter between strangers who have no real-life mutual friends and no intention of meeting again and, in many cases, no time to even take off their clothes. At most, a one-night stand, but from the feminist perspective spelled out in Jong’s novel Fear of Flying (1973).

It’s all so ancient now. By 1987, Hollywood was cranking out cautionary tales about sexual promiscuity, including Fatal Attraction, with Glenn Close as a bunny-boiling avenger who stalks Michael Douglas after he ziplessly fucks her — that’s what he thinks — then goes back to wifey.

I’m sure zipless fucks are as popular as ever, per capita, albeit with much more frequent use of condoms. It’s just that academics and the well-to-do and the entertainment industry long ago stopped equating them with political statements. In a recent op-ed headlined “Is Sex Passe?”, Jong wrote:

Generalizing about cultural trends is tricky, but everywhere there are signs that sex has lost its frisson of freedom… Just as the watchword of my generation was freedom, that of my daughter’s generation seems to be control. Is this just the predictable swing of the pendulum or a new passion for order in an ever more chaotic world? A little of both.

Maybe, except that Jong is only referring to the relatively small, privileged world in which she lives. The rest of us live on another planet. I think that’s one of the things Bob Dylan was getting at, in his cryptically amusing way, in “Highlands,” from Time Out of Mind (1997):

Then she says, “You don’t read women authors, do you?”
Least that’s what I think I hear her say
“Well,” I say, “how would you know and what would it matter anyway?”

“Well,” she says, “you just don’t seem like you do!”
I said, “You’re way wrong”
She says, “Which ones have you read then?” I say, “I read Erica Jong!”

OK, maybe Erica and I wouldn’t make such good friends, even in Facebook’s phony world.

Footnote: I’d link to a full recording of “Highlands” but all I could find was a teaser. (Dylan is old-school — he likes to get paid for his work.)

e

Posted in arts, fiction, humor, mainstream media, movies, Politics, The New Depression, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

My dinner with Barack

Posted on September 29, 2011 by oddmanout215


I received another dispatch from Barack Obama a few days ago, and this time the subject line made me blush: David, can we meet for dinner?

The room whirled and I thought for a moment I might need my jacquard brocade fainting couch. But then I recollected myself and marveled at the boldness of the solicitation. What if I succumbed to temptation and ended up in an assignation with the commander-in-chief? What were my chances for long-term happiness?

I am taciturn, white and barely able to voice coherent sentences. Barack is profoundly personable, biracial and possessed of the oratorical powers of a Pericles. Could he still manage the vicissitudes of life in the spotlight if I were in the picture? How would OK! Magazine respond to such an improbable pairing? Would Mom ever forgive me?

It occurred to me this might be a cruel jest on Barack’s part. Or he’d confused me with another David he’d met in a previous visit to the Philadelphia area. Rereading the e-mail, I focused on these sentences:

If this sounds a bit familiar to you, it’s because we’ve done this before. In fact, my hope is that I’ll be able to keep doing these dinners throughout the campaign.

No, he knew who I was. I’d sensed strong feelings during our previous encounter, when Barack appealed for support of his plan to put Americans back to work, a quaint idea that occurred to him at the very moment he launched his re-election campaign. The pretext this time was to ask for a five-dollar donation:

I hope you’ll take a minute to help build this campaign. When you do, you’ll have a chance to join me for dinner… Maybe I’ll get to thank you in person.

This was clearly an electronic billet-doux.

In the end I had to turn down Barack’s offer. Life is complicated enough without political intrigue. Barack is no longer keeping company with Rahm Emanuel — that loathsome little man! — or with the unseemly Lawrence Summers, but his confidantes still include the likes of Timothy Geithner and William Daley. And then there was the prospect of having to deal with Michelle.

And why would I become involved with a man for whom I don’t even intend to vote?

Posted in economic collapse, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, humor, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

A bankster prerequisite: Scamming 101

Posted on September 28, 2011 by oddmanout215

Matt Taibbi explains what triggered Wall Street protests

Actually, this long quotation from a February interview of Taibbi explains why it’s accurate to think of crooked investment bankers — banksters — as scam artists as well as degenerate gamblers of other people’s money:

… These banks were taking… subprime mortgages, and they would have these billion-dollar pools of mortgages where, in some cases, 70 or 80 percent of the loans were to people who had no identification or no jobs or who had put no money down into the mortgage. And then they were taking these loans and applying this phony baloney, hocus pocus math, these derivative instruments, and turning them into AAA-rated investments. And they were marketing, again, these securities to, say, state pension funds as AAA-rated investments, which means credit risk almost zero. So they took the stuff that they knew was very, very risky and very, very likely to default, and they were going to the state of Wisconsin, the state of Ohio, the state of New York, and saying, “Hey, this is almost as safe as — or in fact, it is as safe as United States Treasury bonds. You should buy this, and you’ll earn a little bit more than you’ll earn if you buy T-bills.” The reality was, they were just taking absolutely worthless stuff and sticking it with these people and then fleeing the scene.

While reading Taibbi’s words, I remembered years ago interviewing a police detective whose specialty was tracking down scam artists, usually guys who worked street scams involving gullible people making ATM withdrawals. The stakes are much higher on Wall Street, and the banksters in the sharp suits are just as sleazy as street scammers. So why aren’t they in jail?

Footnote: The protests are “about” bankster fraud resulting in the destruction of vast amounts of middle-class assets, but are also in reaction to the fact that banksters and corporate chiefs more or less own most of the major officeholders in both political parties and thus make a joke of government by and for the people.

Posted in casinos, economic collapse, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, mainstream media, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Times columnist snickers at Wall St. protesters

Posted on September 27, 2011 by oddmanout215

To my knowledge, only one story regarding the ongoing Wall Street protests appeared last week in The New York Times, and it was the sort of snarky, condescending dispatch you might expect from a Republican legislative staffer, not from a reporter for a daily. Here’s Ginia Bellafante’s lead paragraph:

By late morning on Wednesday, Occupy Wall Street, a noble but fractured and airy movement of rightly frustrated young people, had a default ambassador in a half-naked woman who called herself Zuni Tikka. A blonde with a marked likeness to Joni Mitchell and a seemingly even stronger wish to burrow through the space-time continuum and hunker down in 1968, Ms. Tikka had taken off all but her cotton underwear and was dancing on the north side of Zuccotti Park, facing Liberty Street, just west of Broadway. Tourists stopped to take pictures; cops smiled, and the insidiously favorable tax treatment of private equity and hedge-fund managers was looking as though it would endure.

Bellafante’s account is sketchy, to put it mildly. Throughout the Sept. 23 piece, she describes the crowds in the park and in the marches as smaller than the participants reported and dwindling by the day. She quotes a few random goofballs instead of the many knowledgeable people on the scene who could have articulated the protesters’ grievances. She assures us that those involved in this first real sign of a backlash against the Wall Street crooks who crashed the economy are practitioners of “pantomime progressivism.”

Shades of Tom Wolfe, but without the wit or the sense of history. I couldn’t help wondering if Bellafante has ever been hungry or homeless, or even slept outdoors. If she was ever arrested and locked in a shitty smelling cell, or shot with Mace or pepper spray, or clubbed over the head, thrown to the ground and held in place by a cop pressing his boot to her face.

You know, the sorts of things that happened to those silly protesters after Bellafante went back to her desk in the comfortable Times building.

Maybe Bellafante should be reassigned to the fashion section, where she might do less harm. Not likely. I’ll bet she was high-fived by her way-cool colleagues for writing such a fashionably snide article.

Footnote: The above post corrects an earlier version that referred to Bellafante as a reporter. It turns out she’s a columnist, which means the Times ran no “hard news” stories last week about the protests.

FYI: Bellafante seems a good example of what Will Bunch referred to when he suggested mainstream reporters would rather file a negative story than seem “unsavvy” — i.e., in sympathy with causes or groups of people who are deemed uncool or out of fashion.

Posted in economic collapse, globalization, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, mainstream media, New York Times, Politics, unemployment, Wall Street, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Liberal decries DN’s report on police violence… Huh?

Posted on September 26, 2011 by oddmanout215

Here’s how Nathan Schneider of Democracy Now! responded when police violence — and the documenting of it by amateur videographers — finally forced some mainstream publications to stop pretending Occupy Wall Street isn’t happening:

In an article that recounts as many gory details as will fit, the [New York] Daily News devotes only two short paragraphs to what the protest is actually about and what protesters have been doing all this time: “attempting to draw attention to what they believe is a dysfunctional economic system that unfairly benefits corporations and the mega-rich.” True, but too little. The real story for the Daily News, it seems, is not this unusual kind of protest, or the political situation which it opposes, but the chance to have the word “busted” on the cover next to the cleavage of a woman crying out in pain.

The DN’s front-page story wasn’t good enough for Schneider because it didn’t offer a detailed explanation of what has sparked the protests. WTF! What did Schneider expect from a tabloid, or from any other mainstream media outlets on the scene? Police violence was the story on Saturday, so that’s what was reported.

The MSM has had plenty of time — years, in fact — to report the unfairness and, in many cases, the possible criminality of those who work “the system,” especially the Wall Street banksters. They chose not to report these things, except in vague terms that masked the direct link between the banksters’ conduct and the ongoing economic meltdown.

Schneider should be celebrating a victory, but he seems wistfully disappointed. In regard to the MSM, he’s like Prince Andrei in War and Peace, lamenting the madness of war.

Above all, Schneider’s tone is reasonable, like that of the faux Democrat Barack Obama:

We in the press need to think more highly of our readers, as well as of our own ability to report on stories that don’t depend simply on the shock value of violence, or on cheap-shot ridicule, or on stifling formulas. For many Americans, nonviolent direct actions like this occupation are the best hope for having a political voice, and they deserve to be taken seriously as such.

Sometimes liberals make me sick.

Posted in economic collapse, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

Meet Blankfein’s buddy, Officer Badass

Posted on September 25, 2011 by oddmanout215

A young man is pushed and wrestled to the ground by a cop, then handcuffed. His crime? Not immediately retreating as the cop swaggered toward him on the sidewalk. The victim appears to say something to the cop right before the assault. Maybe “Why are you harassing peaceful protesters?” Or just “Why?”

Whatever he said, his actions clearly weren’t posing a threat to the cop.

The video shows, for anyone who cares to see it, how quickly cops in America can fly out of control in situations that involve large or small groups exercising their rights of free speech and assembly. The cop in this video isn’t behaving like a law officer but rather like a thuggish corner boy in the Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood where I grew up. (He’s also behaving like the cops in that neighborhood, but that’s another story.)

Videos that show similar misbehavior by cops at Occupy Wall Street are posted on Huffington Post, and many other videos are likely to appear online if police violence continues.

This is how journalism often happens these days. Increasingly, journalism does not happen through America’s corporate-controlled mainstream media, which have all but ignored the Wall Street protests for the eight days they’ve been in progress. I’m sure Lloyd Blankfein and the other banksters are grateful.

Footnote: If the protests were in Cairo rather than on Wall Street, The New York Times would have put them on its front page.

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, mainstream media, New York Times, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Facebook’s budding tyrant (like, comment, share)

Posted on September 24, 2011 by oddmanout215

I was scrambling eggs the other day and in the background on the radio was Mark Zuckerberg, gushing about the wonderful changes taking place on Facebook, and why it’s such a good thing that Facebook is taking over the social-networking world and making every bit of information about everyone available to everyone else, all the time, everywhere.

Not long before this, I’d read a Q&A on the new round of Facebook changes and encountered gems such as this:

Q: What is the scrolling, Twitter-like list of my Facebook friends’ activities doing on the right side of the new layout?

A: Facebook calls this the “ticker” — not to be confused with, but similar to, Twitter. The idea is to show a live feed of everything going on with your Facebook friends and pages you follow as it is happening. There will be information here that doesn’t appear on your regular news feed, such as songs your friends are listening to on the music service Spotify, news stories they are reading or, eventually, even movies or TV shows they watched on Netflix.

I’d thought Are you kidding me? but the horror didn’t really kick in until I heard Zuckerberg in full visionary mode. It hit me that this super-achieving dweeb really is out to take over the world and rearrange it to fit his vaguely totalitarian views on information, communications and community.

He’s 26 years old, but only someone with the mind of an old Stalinist would be so dead-set on “making the world open and connected” — the phrase written on the inside of Zuckerberg’s hoodie — as if there is anything inherently good about unlimited openness and connectivity.

It might not even strike Zuckerberg as ironic that he’s the gatekeeper of this brave new world; that he and his cronies are aiming to control who’s connected to what, by grabbing everything else on the Internet and serving it up to users as they see fit.

From the New Yorker:

The more our online lives take place on Facebook, the more we depend on the choices of the people who run the company—what they think about privacy, how they think we should be able to organize our friends, what they tell advertisers (and governments) about what we do and what we buy.

We shouldn’t take for granted that Zuckerberg’s invention will remain benign. In fact, anyone who doesn’t see Facebook as a potential monster probably thinks he or she really has 780 “friends.”

Footnote: I use Facebook (a few of my friends really are friends) but in a minimal way, and the time I spend using it decreases with each new creepy revelation about the people who control it.

Posted in mainstream media, Politics, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments