UPDATING THE UPDATE ON FINANCIAL REFORM; MEDIACHANNEL ANNOUNCEMENT

June 27th, 2010 - by: danny

JUNE 27: TO MEDIA CHANNEL READERS
FROM YOUR NEWS DISSECTOR

In a few days at the end of June, we will lose the capacity to send out these newsletters through our friends at Democracy in Action who have worked with us for years as the not for profit distribution arm for Mediachannel blogs and newsletters. We can no longer afford their great services.

If we are to survive at all, we have to conserve our resources even further. That means, if you want to read my commentaries and other Mediachannel news, you will have to come to us at Mediachannel.org. That takes a little more time than just having content plop in your inbox, but we hope it will be worth it.

Today, I offer an update of the analysis of the financial reform bill that I have been covering with religious intensity. As readers also know I have also been urging that you support my film PLUNDER THE CRIME OF OUR TIME on the financial crisis as a crime story(Plunderthecrimeofourtime.com) by ordering it from our website or downloading it from iTunes or Video On Demand Channels. Its also on Netflix, Amazon etc, We are encouraging folks who do care about this issue to set up home and community screenings as an educational tool in the fight for economic justice.

My own life is going through some changes too in the aftermath of the closing of Globalvision’s office. As it happens, I have a big Birthday on June 27 and hope it will be a turning point.

Thanks for those of you who sent such kind greetings.

Comments are welcome to dissector@mediachannel.org

Danny Schechter

JUNE 29: UPDATE ON THE UPDATE, DO THE DEMS HAVE THE VOTES TO PASS FINANCIAL REFORM?

I promised myself and advised readers that I won’t be writing every day but I have to make an exception, in summary form, when it comes to the financial reform issues that I have been focusing on even as most progressives do not.

Reform activists find alot in the Dodd-Frank bill to like although most are disappointed over its failure to tighten the reins on big banks, derivatives and the shadow banking system. The finance industry knew what its was doing as it swarmed on Capital Hill with a lobbying force 25 times bigger than the Congress itself. Last Friday morning, after a 20 hour marathon, it seemed liked the Dems with a small sprinkle of Repugs pulled it off. But now, just a few days later, it is unclear if the bill has the votes to pass. Senators in Maine and Massachusetts didn’t like the last minute addition of a provision to tax the banks for the monies they received from TARP. And then Robert Byrd up and died at age 92. If the Party of No holds firm and votes no, this massive 2000 page bill, constructed over months in a process characterized compromise, collusion and corruption, can go DOWN leaving us with no new regulations governing the party of Money, and leaving us more open to prophecies of Paul Krugman and Andrew Ross Sorkin in the Times, namely a new crash and depression. The G8 was ineffectual, as usual, last weekend, in tackling structural economic problems and real reforms while the coverage focused on the street protests, not the sleaze in the suites. Bad News is expected in this week’s jobs report and with the cutbacks to come as Europe embraces new austerity measures.

Meanwhile, the FBI is riding high in the aftermath of its busting of 11 alleged Russian Spies. That story got more ink than its earlier arrest of TWELVE HUNDRED AMERICAN MORTGAGE FRAUDSTERS, the largest such crackdown in history. Meanwhile, the Roberts Court has ruled that laws governing the prosecutions of financial criminals are flawed in the cases of a former CFO at Enron and the odious hypocrite Conrad Black, the right-wing publisher who loved to give lectures on political morality.

To Be Continued.

WHAT NOW, AFTER FINANCIAL “REFORM?” WILL WE BE SPARED ANOTHER CRASH, WILL WALL STREET BANKSTERS GO TO JAIL?

By Danny Schechter
Author of The Crime Of Our Time

The Sturm und Drang is over. The Bank lobbyists went home to collect their bonuses as the House and Senate agreed on a 2000 page financial “reform” quickly praised by the White House and superficially covered in the press.

The key underreported fact highlighted by Naked Capitalism: “On a flat trading day, financial firms shares rose 2.7% after the deal was announced.” Compare that to the market volatility and dire forecasts on Wall Street that followed the call for new financial regulations and you can see who won.

The industry has already figured out how to get around the new law even before it is passed, as expected. They are preparing for the next fight – to influence the new rules and regulations and tailor them to their liking. What will the Democrats still have to give up for needed votes, much less substantive change? Stay tuned.

President Obama packed his latest ‘triumph” in his bags when he winged North to a bragging session at the G20 meeting in Canada where many countries wanted far tougher measures given the depressed state of the global economy. The Financial Times was underwhelmed by this legislative ‘breakthrough,” as were the nearly one million Americans being cut off from their benefits. Many analysts pointed to loopholes galore in a measure the President labeled the toughest crackdown on Wall Street “since the great depression.” Wall Street smiled.

Somehow on cue, Dick Cheney checked back into the hospital, and in Iceland, the scene of the first post-meltdown economic collapse, a comedian from “The Best Party” was elected to head the largest city.”

There is something very comic about all this, but that hasn’t stop big media from using the occasion to trumpet the President’s assertion of his “command authority,” duh, and give him another illusionary achievement to boast about. Financial analyst Yves Smith was dismissive,

“So what does the bill accomplish? It inconveniences banks around the margin while failing to reduce the odds of a recurrence of a major financial crisis.

The only two measures I see as genuine accomplishments, the Audit the Fed provisions, and the creation of a consumer financial product bureau, do not address systemic risks. And the consumer protection authority was substantially watered down.”

Now what? Already “Dodd-Frank,” as the bill is known is being compared to Glass-Steagall even though it us not reorganizing the banking system or guarding us against giant banks being considered too big to fail, Republicans, including Scott Brown from Massachusetts, the Dems ‘great white hope in this charade, now threatens to vote against the bill because it assesses fees to pay for costs they incur in the event of their own collapse.

Smith again: “Dodd-Frank effectively anoints the existing banking elite. The bill makes it likely that they will be the future giants of banking as well. Legislators touted changes that would restrict proprietary trading by banks and force them to spin off their swaps desks into separately capitalized operations. But banks get to keep the biggest part of their derivatives business, which is dominated by interest-rate and foreign exchange swaps.

Does this great betrayal sound familiar? Perhaps its just part of a deeper pattern that is not just a commentary on Obama but our whole political culture: Dems dependent on Wall Street for donations, and a media that invariably touts the interests of the status quo.

Meanwhile what’s left of the American left is in retreat in Detroit at the Social Forum debating a plethora of important issues but unable, it seems, to agree on a joint program for economic survival. They are more upset with the hideous Israeli embargo on Gaza than our own corporate elites embargo on jobs and justice for American workers. As a result many have become sadly irrelevant in this fight with the exception of some brave members of Congress, and groups like A New Way Forward and Citizens for Financial Reform who stuck to their guns.

President Obams now hopes to tax the firms who received bailouts. But he yet to call for a full criminal investigation of those behind the crimes of Wall Street.

As far as prosecuting wrong doers in high places, the pro-corporate Supreme Court this week more than signaled a rejection of statues passed in the wake of the Enron scandal to jail financial criminals. The FBI did carry out the biggest bust in history of mortgage fraudsters this month, but has not touched the Wall Street firms that knowingly securitized and sold fraudulent mortgages and profited from them. (These Wall St billionaires can now retreat to their mansions in East Hampton, where, perhaps not so coincidentally, the Town Government is embroiled in its own financial crime scandal.) Meanwhile 14 million families face foreclosure.

Will prosecutors ever get it together to act?

Does this relate to the financial reform battle? You bet. As reporter Charles Gasperino asked on the Daily Beast: “Why should anyone expect some paper-pushers in Washington to prevent something as complicated as the next great financial meltdown when they couldn’t stop Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme?

What to do? I feel like I am fighting a loosing battle even trying to distribute my film PLUNDER THE CRIME OF OUR TIME (plunderthecrimeofourtime.com), and companion book that argues the case for the financial crisis as a crime story. I would like to think that screenings and discussions nationwide could help stoke a movement to keep this fight for a jailout and economic justice going, at least until the next crash.

Anyone out there want to get involved in helping? Clearly, the compromisers in a compromised Congress have gone as far as they will, or perhaps can, go. It’s our challenge to intensify the heat, or step aside and let hypocritical Teabaggers dominate the discourse.

News Dissector Danny Schechter directed the DVD Plunder The Crime of Our Time and In Debt We Trust try to educate and energize a movement for economic justice tapping into the massive anger that’s out there. Comments and suggestions to Dissector@mediachannel.org

The News Dissector