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Cairo In America

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We have seen quite a bit of hand-wringing by those in the mainstream news media about the repression against protests in Cairo during the past few weeks.  What we don’t see on television are the oppressive tactics used against protesters and journalists here in the United States.  Never mind the fact that the Obama administration refuses to prosecute any of the crimes which led to the financial crisis.  Simply protesting against the refusal of Attorney General Eric Hold-harmless to do his job can result in arrests and beatings administered by police.  At The eXiled blog,Yasha Levine discussed the targeting of journalists by police, hell-bent on squelching coverage of the Occupy movement:

Remember how in November, Bloomberg and the NYPD got a lot of heat from the city’s media establishment for the arrest rampage they unleashed on journalists covering the eviction raid on Liberty Plaza?  Cops arrested more than two dozen accredited journalists from major news outlets, including the New York Post, NPR, AFP and The Associated Press.  Hell, cops even clubbed a couple of reporters for the baggertarian rag The Daily Caller.  As a result, New York’s police commissioner made a big show of issuing an order that instructed police officers not to interfere with journalists covering OWS.

But clearly that was just for show.

Because this month the NYPD has gone out of its way to harass and arrest journalists covering OWS, especially targeting live streamers and indie journalists who can’t be counted on for propaganda support like the mainstream folks.  According to Free Press’ Josh Stearns, who has been maintaining a list of journalists arrested while covering the Occupy Movement across the country, at least five journalists and seven live streamers were arrested by the NYPD in the first half of December.

*   *   *

The NYPD continued harassing indie journalists five days later during the D17 protests.  Some were bashed with batons, others were threatened with having their official press passes revoked. By the end of the day, at least two journalists were arrested, including photojournalist Zach Roberts and Jennifer Dworkin, an independent filmmaker who had worked for PBS.

It will be interesting to see whether a new piece of technology, called the “Occucopter” will enable those reporters to obtain valuable images of abusive police tactics – without getting their own skulls crushed in the process.  The Guardian provided this report:

This week in New York, Occupy Wall Street protesters have a new toy to help them expose potentially dubious actions of the New York police department.  In response to constant police surveillance, police violence and thousands of arrests, Occupy Wall Street protesters and legal observers have been turning their cameras back on the police.  But police have sometimes made filming difficult through physical obstruction and “frozen zones”.  This occurred most notably during the eviction of protesters from Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, where police prevented even credentialed journalists from entering.

Now the protesters are fighting back with their own surveillance drone.  Tim Pool, an Occupy Wall Street protester, has acquired a Parrot AR drone he amusingly calls the “occucopter”.  It is a lightweight four-rotor helicopter that you can buy cheaply on Amazon and control with your iPhone.  It has an onboard camera so that you can view everything on your phone that it points at.  Pool has modified the software to stream live video to the internet so that we can watch the action as it unfolds.  You can see video clips of his first experiments here.  He told us that the reason he is doing this “comes back to giving ordinary people the same tools that these multimillion-dollar news corporations have.  It provides a clever loophole around certain restrictions such as when the police block press from taking shots of an incident.”

The American public is no longer content to sit back and do nothing while the Obama administration sits back and does nothing to prosecute those criminals whose fraudulent conduct devastated the American economy.  In my last posting, I discussed the intensifying wave of criticism directed against the President by his former supporters as well as those disgusted by Obama’s subservience to his benefactors on Wall Street.  Since that time, Scot Paltrow wrote a great piece for Reuters, concerning the Justice Department’s failure to intervene against improper foreclosure procedures.  Paltrow’s widely-acclaimed essay inspired several commentators to express their disgust about government permissiveness toward such egregious conduct.  At The Big Picture, Barry Ritholtz shared his reaction to the Reuters article:

The fraud is rampant, self-evident, easy to prosecute.  The only reason it hasn’t been done so far is that this nation is led by corrupt cowards and suffers from a ruinous two-party system.

We were once a great nation that set a shining example for the rest of the world as to what the Rule of Law meant.  That is no more, as we have become a corrupt plutocracy.  Why our prosecutors cower in front of the almighty banking industry is beyond my limited ability to comprehend.

Without any sort of legal denouement, we should expect an angry electorate and an unhappy nation.

Is there any hope for America or will we continue on our course of devolution toward becoming a banana republic?  At his Pragmatic Capitalism blog, Cullen Roche brought a glimmer of hope to some of us when he published Saxo Bank’s list of 10 outrageous predictions for 2012.  I was particularly encouraged by the third item on the list:

3. A yet unannounced candidate takes the White House

In 1992, Texas billionaire Ross Perot managed to take advantage of a recessionary economy and popular disgust with US politics and reap 18.9 per cent of the popular vote.  Three years of Obama has brought too little change and only additional widespread disillusionment with the entire US political system, and conditions for a third party candidate have never been riper.  Someone with a strong programme for real change throws his or her hat in the ring early in 2012 and snatches the presidency in November in one of the most pivotal elections in US history, taking 38 per cent of the popular vote.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed.


 

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Revenge Of The Blondes

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My vintage iPhone sputtered, stammered and finally stalled out as I tried to access an article about derivatives trading after clicking on the link.  The process got as far as the appearance of the URL, which indicated that the source was The New York Times.  I assumed that the piece had been written by Gretchen Morgenson and that I could read it once I sat down at my regular computer.  Within moments, I was at The Big Picture website, where I found another link to the same article.  This time it worked and I found that the piece had been written by Louise Story.  “Wrong blonde”, I thought to myself.  It was at that point when I realized how much the world had changed from the days when “dumb blonde” jokes had been so popular.  In fact, a vast amount of the skullduggery that caused and resulted from the financial crisis has been exposed and explained by women with blonde hair.  After a handful of unscrupulous Wall Street bankers brought the world’s financial system to the brink of collapse, an even smaller number of blonde, female sleuths set about unwinding this complex web of deceit for “the Average Joe” to understand.  Here are a few of them:

Yves Smith

All right  .  .  .   It’s an old picture from her days at Goldman Sachs.  Cue-up Duran Duran.  (It’s almost as old as the photo of Ben Bernanke in my fake Chandon ad, based on their  “Life needs bubbles” theme.)  On most days, the first blog I access is Naked Capitalism.  Its publisher and most frequent contributor is Yves Smith (a/k/a Susan Webber).  At the Seeking Alpha website, a review of her recent book, ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism, began this way:

ECONNED is the most deeply researched and empirically validated account of the financial meltdown of 2008-2009 and how its unaddressed causes predict similar crises to come.  As a long-time Wall Street veteran, Yves Smith, through her influential blog “Naked Capitalism” lucidly explains to her over 2500,000 unique visitors each month exactly what games market players use and how their “innovations” evolved over the years to take the rest of us to the cleaners.  Smith is that unusual combination of scholar, expert, participant and teacher, who writes with a clarifying sense of moral outrage and disgust at the decline of ethics on Wall Street and financial markets.

Smith’s daily list of Links at Naked Capitalism, covers a broad range of newsworthy subjects both within and beyond the financial realm.  I usually find myself reading all of the articles linked on that page.

Gretchen Morgenson

Gretchen Morgenson is my favorite reporter for The New York Times.  She has proven herself to be Treasury Secretary Turbo Tim Geithner’s worst nightmare.  Ms. Morgenson has caused Geithner so much agony, I would not be surprised to hear that he named his recent kidney stone after her.  With Jo Becker, Ms. Morgenson wrote the most revealing essay on Geithner back in April of 2009.  Once you’ve read it, you will have a better understanding of why Geithner gave away so many billions to the banksters as president of the New York Fed by way of Maiden Lane III.  Morgenson subsequently wrote her own article on Maiden Lane III here.

Ms. Morgenson has many detractors.  Most prominent among them was the late Tanta (a/k/a Doris Dungey) of the Calculated Risk blog, who wrote the recurring “Morgenson Watch” for that site.  Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism (see above) accurately summed up the bulk of the criticism directed against Gretchen Morgenson:

Gretchen Morgenson is often a target of heated criticism on the blogosphere, which I have argued more than once is overdone.  While her articles on executive compensation and securities litigation are consistently well reported, she has an appetite for the wilder side of finance, and often looks a bit out of her depth.  Typically, she simply runs afoul of finance pedants, who jump on misapplication of industry jargon or minor errors when those (admittedly disconcerting) errors fail to derail the thrust of the argument.

A noted example of this was Morgenson’s article of March 6 2010, in which she explained that Greece was hiding its financial obligations with “credit default swaps” rather than currency swaps.  The bloggers who vigilantly watch for her to make such a mistake wouldn’t let go of that one for quite a while.  Nevertheless, I like her work.  Nobody is perfect.

Louise Story

As I mentioned at the outset of this piece, Louise Story wrote the recent article for The New York Times, concerning anticompetitive practices in the credit derivatives clearing, trading and information services industries.  Discussing that subject in a manner that can make it understandable to the “average reader” (someone with a high school education) is no easy task.  Beyond that, Ms. Story was able to explain the frustrations of regulators, who had hoped that some degree of transparency could be introduced to the derivatives market as a result of the recently enacted, “Dodd-Frank” financial reform bill.  It’s an important article, which has drawn a good deal of well-deserved attention.

Last year, Ms. Story co-authored a New York Times article with Gretchen Morgenson, concerning collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) entitled, “Banks Bundled Bad Debt, Bet Against It and Won”.  As I pointed out at the time:  Pay close attention to the explanation of how Tim Geithner retained a “special counselor” whose previous responsibilities included oversight of the parent company of an investment firm named Tricadia, Inc.  Tricadia has the dubious honor of having helped cause the financial crisis by creating CDOs and then betting against them.

These three women, as well as a number of their non-blonde counterparts (including:  Nomi Prins, Janet Tavakoli and Naomi Klein) have exposed a vast amount of the odious activities that caused the financial crisis.  They have helped inform and educate the public on what the “good old boys” network of bankers, regulators and lobbyists have been doing to this country.  The paradigm shift that took us beyond the sexist stereotype of the  “dumb blonde” has brought our society to the point where women – often blonde ones – have intervened to alert the rest of us to the hazards caused by what Paul Farrell of MarketWatch described as “Wall Street’s macho ego trip”.

If you should come across someone who still tells “dumb blonde” jokes – ask that person if he (or she) has read ECONned.


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