Showing posts with label HBO. Show all posts
Showing posts with label HBO. Show all posts
Monday, March 30, 2015
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
HBO Show, 'Newsroom,' nailed the Tea Party last night
The American Taliban...watch for yourself. It's kind of beautiful...
Another arrow in the dead center of the target was when he said, "tea partiers love America but hate Americans." SO true!
Another arrow in the dead center of the target was when he said, "tea partiers love America but hate Americans." SO true!
- Ideological purity
- Compromise as weakness
- A fundamentalist belief in scriptural literalism
- Denying science
- Unmoved by facts
- Undeterred by new information
- A hostile fear of progress
- A demonization of education
- A need to control women’s bodies
- Severe xenophobia
- Tribal mentality
- Intolerance of dissent
- A pathological hatred of the U.S. government
“They can call themselves the Tea Party. They can call themselves conservatives and they can even call themselves Republicans, though Republicans certainly shouldn’t. But we should call them what they are. The American Taliban.”
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Too Big to Jail
Tuesday, May 24, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
It was a well-acted docudrama focused on the BIG men and some women in the banks and in government who tried to put Humpty Dumpty back together again up on that wall to prevent a total economic collapse when panic dried up credit and financial institutions faced failure.
Based on the work of a New York Times reporter, it offered a skillfully-made but conventional narrative which, like most TV shows, showcase events but miss their deeper context and background.
We heard all the explanations, save one.
There was greed, ambition, ego and money lust. There were personal rivalries and ideological battles, parochial agendas and narrow self-interest. There was panic on THE Street and in the halls of mighty institutions. In many ways, the program recycled and made an official narrative compelling viewing. In the end, everyone was to blame so no one was to blame.
But... what was missing was any notion of intentionality and premeditation, almost no mention of systemic fraud and CRIME, that one word that sums up what really happened for those millions of Americans who have lost jobs and homes. We never saw victims or felt their pain and bewilderment. We were never shown how a shadow banking system emerged or how the finance industry worked with their counterparts in finance and insurance to transfer wealth from the poor and middle class to the superrich.
When I was but a precocious lad, my elementary school encouraged students to take out a savings account at the nearby Dime Bank in the Bronx. We were each given a bankbook and taught to put in $.50 a week to show us how to build wealth by being thrifty. It was with a sense of pride that I watched my balance grow.
It may have been peanuts in the scheme of things, but to me, at the time, it was the way to plan for the future.
At the same time, in those year I watched TV shows glamorize the bank robbing antics of a man named Willie Sutton who also staged jail breaks wearing masks and costumes. When he was asked why he robbed banks, he responded famously, “That’s where the money is.”
And it still is, except in our era, it is the banks that are robbing us.
That’s because what’s now called the “financial Services sector” has gone from about 30 percent of our economy to over 60 percent. Through a process called financialization, they have transformed how all business is done.
Making money from money soon began to surpass making money from making things. What we were never warned about was the danger of getting too deeply in debt, or how the economy was shifting from production to consumption.
Private equity, credit swaps, derivative deals and collateralized debt obligations soon drove the economy. Markets became captives of high performance trading by powerful computers.
When Wall Street became the defacto capital of the country, the bankers accrued more power than the politicians who they bought up with impunity. Their lobbying power deregulated the economy and decriminalized their activities. They killed many of the reforms enacted during the New Deal designed to protect the public. They built a shadow (and shadowy) banking system beyond the reach of the law.
And now, here we are, in 2011, five years after the meltdown of 2007, four years after the crash of 2008 and the passage of the TARP bailout that pumped money into their treasuries at taxpayer expense. Since then, there has been a steady parade of scandals and the disclosures that have come out since. Every week, more banks close and or consolidate and run into problems with regulators.
Take “my” old bank in the Bronx. It has been through as many changes as I have been. A website on bank histories runs it down:
On the day I wrote this commentary, the New York Times reported:
The banks that are increasingly despised and blamed for their role in engineering the financial disaster, are now trying to play nice to change their negative image.
Explains the Times:
Just last month, Huffington Post reported:
More shocking has been the largely passive response by our government and prosecutors. At last, the Attorney General of New York is said to be investigating but none of the big bankers have yet gone to jail or suffered for the scams and frauds they committed. Most of the State officials who vowed to after the banks in the absence of aggressive federal actions have backed down.
So what can “we the people” do? We can do nothing and watch more of what’s left of our wealth vanish, or we can join others in demanding a “jailout,” not a bailout.
A well-known international banker was just arrested for a high profile alleged sex crime but not one of possibly thousands have been prosecuted for well documented financial crimes.
Where are the political leaders and activist groups willing to “fight the power” and demand accountability and transparency on Wall Street?
Why are so many us banking on a financial recovery to bring back jobs and a modicum of justice created by the very people and institutions responsible for the crisis?
And why didn’t I learn about these dangers when I first discovered the wonderful world of banking? Isn’t that what schools are for?
This week the financial crisis finally went prime time in the form of a big budget HBO docudrama called “Too Big To Fail.”
It was a well-acted docudrama focused on the BIG men and some women in the banks and in government who tried to put Humpty Dumpty back together again up on that wall to prevent a total economic collapse when panic dried up credit and financial institutions faced failure.
Based on the work of a New York Times reporter, it offered a skillfully-made but conventional narrative which, like most TV shows, showcase events but miss their deeper context and background.
We heard all the explanations, save one.
There was greed, ambition, ego and money lust. There were personal rivalries and ideological battles, parochial agendas and narrow self-interest. There was panic on THE Street and in the halls of mighty institutions. In many ways, the program recycled and made an official narrative compelling viewing. In the end, everyone was to blame so no one was to blame.
But... what was missing was any notion of intentionality and premeditation, almost no mention of systemic fraud and CRIME, that one word that sums up what really happened for those millions of Americans who have lost jobs and homes. We never saw victims or felt their pain and bewilderment. We were never shown how a shadow banking system emerged or how the finance industry worked with their counterparts in finance and insurance to transfer wealth from the poor and middle class to the superrich.
When I was but a precocious lad, my elementary school encouraged students to take out a savings account at the nearby Dime Bank in the Bronx. We were each given a bankbook and taught to put in $.50 a week to show us how to build wealth by being thrifty. It was with a sense of pride that I watched my balance grow.
It may have been peanuts in the scheme of things, but to me, at the time, it was the way to plan for the future.
At the same time, in those year I watched TV shows glamorize the bank robbing antics of a man named Willie Sutton who also staged jail breaks wearing masks and costumes. When he was asked why he robbed banks, he responded famously, “That’s where the money is.”
And it still is, except in our era, it is the banks that are robbing us.
That’s because what’s now called the “financial Services sector” has gone from about 30 percent of our economy to over 60 percent. Through a process called financialization, they have transformed how all business is done.
Making money from money soon began to surpass making money from making things. What we were never warned about was the danger of getting too deeply in debt, or how the economy was shifting from production to consumption.
Private equity, credit swaps, derivative deals and collateralized debt obligations soon drove the economy. Markets became captives of high performance trading by powerful computers.
When Wall Street became the defacto capital of the country, the bankers accrued more power than the politicians who they bought up with impunity. Their lobbying power deregulated the economy and decriminalized their activities. They killed many of the reforms enacted during the New Deal designed to protect the public. They built a shadow (and shadowy) banking system beyond the reach of the law.
And now, here we are, in 2011, five years after the meltdown of 2007, four years after the crash of 2008 and the passage of the TARP bailout that pumped money into their treasuries at taxpayer expense. Since then, there has been a steady parade of scandals and the disclosures that have come out since. Every week, more banks close and or consolidate and run into problems with regulators.
Take “my” old bank in the Bronx. It has been through as many changes as I have been. A website on bank histories runs it down:
And then, of course, some years later, Washington Mutual itself, went bust and was bought up for a song by JP Morgan Chase. Here are some of the latest headlines about the bank now known as WAMU:Dime Savings Bank of New York, The
04/12/1859 NYS Chartered Dime Savings Bank of Brooklyn
09/10/1930 Acquire By Merger Navy Savings Bank
06/30/1970 Name Change To Dime Savings Bank of New York, The
09/30/1979 Acquire By Merger Mechanics Exchange Savings Bank
07/01/1980 Acquire By Merger First Federal S & L Assoc. of Port Washington
08/01/1981 Acquire By Merger Union Savings Bank of New York
06/23/1983 Convert Federal Dime Savings Bank of NY, FSB
01/07/2002 Purchased By Washington Mutual Inc.
01/07/2002 Name Change To Washington Mutual Bank
WaMu agrees on post-bankruptcy control -- report - Reuters
WaMu, Shareholders, Biggest Creditors Said to Settle ... - Bloomberg
WaMu shareholders are offered $25M-plus to drop claims
And to whom does the Times turn for expertise on the subject, but a key former operative at Washington Mutual who was with the bank in the go-go era of shoveling out subprime mortgages? Now, he gives advice on risk management:“The nation’s biggest banks and mortgage lenders have steadily amassed real estate empires, acquiring a glut of foreclosed homes that threatens to deepen the housing slump and create a further drag on the economic recovery.
All told, they own more than 872,000 homes as a result of the groundswell in foreclosures, almost twice as many as when the financial crisis began in 2007, according to RealtyTrac.”
What were people’s homes are now “inventory” to be stockpiled even though it has a negative cumulative effect on economic recovery of the housing market.“These shops are under siege; it’s just a tsunami of stuff coming in,” said Taj Bindra, who oversaw Washington Mutual’s servicing unit from 2004 to 2006 and now advises financial institutions on risk management. “Lenders have a strong incentive to clear out inventory in a controlled and timely manner, but if you had problems on the front end of the foreclosure process, it should be no surprise you are having problems on the back end.”
The banks that are increasingly despised and blamed for their role in engineering the financial disaster, are now trying to play nice to change their negative image.
Explains the Times:
So, they are still foreclosing, but with a smile. Is it a ‘lot different than it used to be’?“Conscious of their image, many lenders have recently started telling real estate agents to be more lenient to renters who happen to live in a foreclosed home and give them extra time to move out before changing the locks.
“Wells Fargo has sent me back knocking on doors two or three times, offering to give renters money if they cooperate with us,” said Claude A. Worrell, a longtime real estate agent from Minneapolis who specializes in selling bank-owned property. “It’s a lot different than it used to be.”
Just last month, Huffington Post reported:
The truth is that most of the bigger banks have emerged from the financial crisis stronger than ever, with executives cashing in with higher salaries and bigger bonuses. That old saying about criminals who “laughed all the way to the bank” has to be revised because in this case they never left the bank.“Top executives at Washington Mutual actively boosted sales of high-risk, toxic mortgages in the two years prior to the bank's collapse in 2008, according to emails published in a wide-ranging Senate report that contradicts previous public testimony about the meltdown.
The voluminous, 639-page report on the financial crisis from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations singles out Washington Mutual for its decision to champion its subprime lending business, even as executives privately acknowledged that a housing bubble was about to burst.”
More shocking has been the largely passive response by our government and prosecutors. At last, the Attorney General of New York is said to be investigating but none of the big bankers have yet gone to jail or suffered for the scams and frauds they committed. Most of the State officials who vowed to after the banks in the absence of aggressive federal actions have backed down.
So what can “we the people” do? We can do nothing and watch more of what’s left of our wealth vanish, or we can join others in demanding a “jailout,” not a bailout.
A well-known international banker was just arrested for a high profile alleged sex crime but not one of possibly thousands have been prosecuted for well documented financial crimes.
Where are the political leaders and activist groups willing to “fight the power” and demand accountability and transparency on Wall Street?
Why are so many us banking on a financial recovery to bring back jobs and a modicum of justice created by the very people and institutions responsible for the crisis?
And why didn’t I learn about these dangers when I first discovered the wonderful world of banking? Isn’t that what schools are for?
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Reagan - The Documentary
(It's an Iframe embed code, so I can't resize to fit in my blog's 480 pixel width. You can toggle in full screen mode or here is the direct link so you can resize to whatever you'd like. I just noticed that the video doesn't even show on Google Buzz, so you Buzzers will have to click the link for sure. I thought Iframes, fixed the embed problem on Buzz. Guess not.)
I've never been a fan of Reagan, if that isn't obvious. And recently, several economists have made compelling arguments that our financial troubles today can be traced directly back to Reagan's initial tax cuts for the wealthy (he raised taxes on us poor folks 6 times). The redistribution of wealth in the US began again under Reagan which would culminate today into the greatest disparity between rich and poor this country has seen since the first decade of the 1900s. That is Reagan's most lasting legacy.
The fact he traded arms for hostages to fund covert operations in Central America seems par for the political course these days, and I wasn't surprised when old footage of the Mujahideen leadership meeting with Reagan in the White House, and there's Osama bin Laden, who was one of the Mujahideen leaders and a US ally while the Mujahideen fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s. And there's also that infamous photo of Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein in 1983, shaking hands on the deal in which the US sold Iraq the weapons they used on the Kurds. So none of that covert, secret stuff surprises me. I just assume that all presidents have similar dirty little secrets, and yes, they all lie about them.
But Reagan being such an iconic figure for the Republicans--I know for a fact there are members of the GOP who hold Reagan in higher esteem than any of our founding fathers, AND Jesus Christ as well. And many of those Tea Baggers who love Reagan--working class people who are suffering through this *sssshhh* depression (with a small "d"), can't grasp that Reagan policies are what led to the loss of their jobs, their pensions, and their tax dollars being funneled to the rich.
Saint Ronnie Raygun is also responsible for amassing such a huge mountaion of debt which we've never been able to pay off, and which has increased with every president since, most notably our current and previous presidents. President Ronald Reagan is more myth and real. Ronald Reagan was a flawed executive--as they all are--ultimately no better or worse than the others who held his job. I believe he had only the best intentions behind his bad decisions to knowingly break the law in the Iran-Contra Operation, he even admits (kind of) his error in judgment--even says some of his advisors were adamant he not pursue an illegal course.
This documentary presents a nice historical perspective on Ronald Reagan's political journey from president of the Screen Actor's Guild; to his initial affiliation as a liberal Democrat and fan of Roosevelt's New Deal; to being questioned in McCarthy's Pink scare in the Communist witchhunt in Hollywood in the 1950s--which though publicly, he did not name names, privately, he had become an FBI informant, giving the FBI a whole bunch of names. Then through the communist controversy, he embraced conservatism, became governor of California, and lost 3 campaigns for GOP presidential nominee before finally getting his party's support in 1980.
This film presents many points of view toward Reagan, from the Saint Ronnie views held by Grover Norquist and his bunch, to the candid views of some of his staff who disagreed with him on policy decisions, reporters who broke the Iran-Contra scandal story, political commentators, and his two sons, Michael and Ron. And here's the kicker: Reagan's views back then were closer to Obama's and Clinton's than to either of the Bushes. Reagan would be a moderate Democrat if his career had begun more recently and he was active in politics with the same views he had then. Ronald Reagan, blue dog Democrat, and not Saint Ronnie of the GOP. Would he have been as memorable as a Democrat? Probably not. He was big government, and even though he blasted big govt with his rhetoric, the size of the federal govt increased under Reagan and both Bushes. Goldwater spun in his grave like a plane propeller.
Reagan is a very fair account of Ronald Reagan's life, it seems by all accounts. It's not a character assassination, and you could argue that some of Reagan's worst moments sort of get glossed over without much depth (like his FBI informant role, the Iran hostage release after his inauguration, etc). While no one says anything horrible about the man, damning evidence is presented that should have knocked Reagan off anyone's high pedestal. He broke the law, and it was an impeachable offense. But he made the rich in this country so much richer, and for that, he is America's favorite president, even by many poor people who are clueless how connected his policies are to their poverty.
I enjoyed the film, and enjoyed the new perspective shown on those days. I was in 6th grade when Reagan was elected and a sophomore in college when his term ended, and during his two terms, I had become politically aware, and opposed his administration quite demonstratively. My mom worked the Republican Convention in Dallas in 1984 as a volunteer, and I was outside in the "Rock Against Reagan" demonstration where punk bands set up their equipment as close to Reunion Arena as we could get. See, there were no Free Speech Zones back then.--jef
Friday, March 19, 2010
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Bill Maher: But I'm not Wrong
Tonight my wife and I watched Bill Maher's new HBO special, But I'm not Wrong.
We watch Maher's Real Time series on HBO, I also watched his previous show, Politically Incorrect.
I've enjoyed his last 3 or 4 stand up specials--I have an appreciation for his heathen wit, and he did not disappoint tonight, either. And Religulous was...outstanding.
His new special was funny, with some very poignant comments and thought provoking moments. And even though he loves himself some Israel and President Obama, he allowed himself to criticize the president a little.
In fact, toward the end, he echoes my sentiment about the Republicans and Democrats both being equally deep in the pockets of corporations.
He's equally cynical with regard to Sarah Palin and religion.
It was funny. If I believe in anything at all, it's that laughing your ass off is very healing for your mind, body and spirit, because after laughing your ass, there's a sort of euphoric buzz not all that dissimilar to a post orgasm buzz.
Or so say I.
If you like cynical, political stand up commentary with lots of "fucks", "cocks" and "shits,"by all means check it out. It's also very current regarding events.
jef
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