Tag Archives: Media

American Idolatry: White-Washing Hank Greenberg

Posted on by

In 2005, Fortune Magazine ran this piece by Devin Leonard. I just came across it in my mail, where it was lying forgotten at the bottom of the inbox.

So. There was at least one mainstream journalist hip to the revered boss of AIG. I take back my general denunciation of the media on this point. Apparently, what was missing was the larger picture…

Well, that’s what bloggers are for. We supply the big picture. We connect the dots…

Here’s a part of the piece:

“Not long after starting a prestigious new job as general counsel at American International Group, 48-year-old E. Michael Joye received an alarming piece of news. AIG, an employee confided, had for years been improperly booking premiums it received for workers’ compensation insurance. If true, it meant that the insurance company was cheating state governments out of tens of millions of dollars used to pay benefits to injured workers.

Joye, a former Navy lieutenant who had left a blue-chip law-firm partnership to join AIG, investigated the matter personally. He soon heard even more shocking news: that AIG chief Maurice R. “Hank” Greenberg knew about the practice–and had done nothing to stop it. Greenberg was one of the all-time great American CEOs. Could it really be true?…..

…According to Joye’s notes, one employee even described a meeting about the matter at which Greenberg had asked, “Are we legal?” When an employee responded, “If we were legal, we wouldn’t be in business,” Greenberg “began laughing, and that was the end of it.”

Nonetheless, Joye reported what he had learned in meetings with Greenberg and Thomas Tizzio, then AIG’s president. Then he wrote them a memo that couldn’t have been blunter. AIG’s behavior was “permeated with illegality,” he wrote; these “intentional violations” could produce criminal fraud and racketeering charges and “expose AIG to fines and penalties in the hundreds of millions of dollars,” as well as civil suits producing “astronomical damages awards.” AIG, Joye wrote, needed to end the illegal practices immediately, fire all those involved, report the violations, and make restitution.

After finishing the memo, Joye met with Tizzio. What was Greenberg going to do? Nothing, Tizzio told him, according to Joye’s later account. Greenberg had decided that correcting the problem would be too expensive. (Tizzio declined to comment.) Appalled at the news, Joye tendered his letter of resignation on the spot, packed up his office, and left the building. He had been at AIG for eight months……..

Hank Greenberg, however, did move quickly to deal with the thorny problem of a former general counsel who might publicly accuse him of condoning fraud. Two weeks after Joye quit, Greenberg sent a short note to Jules Kroll, founder of the well-known corporate-intelligence firm, forwarding background material about Joye. ……

Joye’s abrupt parting with AIG was not a case of skittishness brought about by the current spate of investigations into insurance industry accounting. No, Joye left AIG in January 1992, and for 13 years he remained silent about what he had discovered there. …….

But Joye never forgot his glimpse of the way AIG’s CEO did business. Even after retiring to his home near Princeton, N.J., he kept his AIG files. And so, this past spring, after New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer began an investigation into Greenberg’s long-buried secrets, Joye came forward to offer one of them up.”

My Comment

Notice how the universal (and well-merited) emphasis on the wrong-doing of Goldman Sachs, the company, or on AIG, the company, takes the focus off Greenberg. See, for example, this piece by Matt Taibbi, which does just that.

But worrying about AIG, or GS, as companies, at this point – while useful and necessary – is in some ways beside the point. The problem is not any company or organization itself but a network made up of people who use companies like GS or AIG or Citi. They’re the culprits of the financial crisis.

This network communicates outside the formal communication channels usual to business and government. You’re going to get relatively little looking for an email record or phone record — as a smoking gun. Or rather, even if you did find it, it would be secondary.

Take Blankfein’s presence (Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs) at the bail-out pow-wow hosted by Tim Geithner.  Outing this gives you a tea-pot dome type scandal, but then what? The scandal can quickly be resolved by disposing of the offender. But that  does next to nothing to disrupt the network. The rest of the insiders can always get another member to pick up the slack.

That means that in this game there are bag-holders... and there are players.

Vikram Pandit is, from that perspective, a bag-holder. Franklin Raines is a bag-holder. Bernie Madoff may have been turned into a bag-holder, but he was also a player.

And Hank Greenberg is a player, for sure.

Just my speculation, this Friday afternoon, as winter starts closing up shop in the Southern Cone. It was warm enough today to walk around without a coat. A couple of weeks more and spring will be here…


Do-Gooding Dimwit?

Posted on by

Meddling and ignorant idealism is never a power for good, as this recent turn of events in Burma illustrates:

It is a remarkable irony that an unknown American, who presumably wanted to champion Suu Kyi’s democratic cause, was the catalyst for her latest troubles. But so go the unintended consequences of political inexperience. “Burma’s pro-democracy movement has long been an attraction for fantasists, fanatics and adventure tourists,” writes Aung Zaw, editor of the respected online news magazine the Irrawaddy, sho covers Burma from neighboring Thailand. “Did John William Yettaw consider the consequences [of his swim]? Did he think for a minute that he would do more harm than good? Probably not.”

One of Suu Kyi’s lawyers branded Yettaw a “wretched American.” Inside the country, it can be easy to spot the foreign idealists masquerading as, say, tourists or teachers, who have made it their mission to change Burma…… As Aung Zaw noted in the Irrawaddy, two British activists who were convicted for staging separate political protests in Burma in 1999 were both released early after serving only a fraction of their jail sentences. Good news for them. But Burmese can hardly expect the same treatment. If Suu Kyi is convicted — and Burmese courts have a frighteningly high conviction rate — few expect the Lady to taste freedom anytime soon. “

More here at Time.

My Comment

Idealists? I wonder. A large number of these do-gooders aren’t idealists so much as vain, self-important no talents, who gain a passing glory by linking themselves to ‘mass movements’ or ‘popular leaders’. In their own countries, they’re nobodies. But in a third-world country, their US citizenship, racial membership in the ‘ruling class,’ and the relative strength of their currency, gives them a status that their own accomplishments cannot. It goes to their head. Pretty soon, they fancy themselves saviors. They interfere, stir up trouble, and then conveniently leave, letting the ‘natives’ take the rap for their arrogant intervention…

On the other hand, there’s something remarkably “stagey” about the whole incident. And when I note that Gordon Brown – he who sold off Britain’s gold at the bottom of gold prices and has now presided over the bankruptcy of its banking system — seems to be throwing righteous and media-genic fits over the Burmese junta’s response, I have to wonder.

I think about Bill Clinton’s miraculous intervention on behalf of the two journalists in North Korea….and in a world of simulation and media myth-making, I have to file this under “What really did happen?”

Liberals Love to Hate Sarah Palin

Posted on by

Update: This piece is now up as a full-length article at Lew Rockwell.. Reader responses will be below in the Comments, as usual…

In an August 3 piece in Salon magazine, even the usually well-modulated voice of Professor Juan Cole, shot up a few octaves. He compared Sarah Palin to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, and came out in Ahmadinejad’s favor. Now, according to some people, Ahmadinejad stands guilty of anti-Semitism. I don’t know if that’s true or not. But that’s what the establishment media seems to think. So, if the same media thinks Palin is worse than Ahmadinejad, then what it’s saying is that to liberals, being a conservative small-town mother is more dangerous than being anti-Semitic.

Palin and the Iranian president are both dangerous populists, writes Cole. They blame their failures not on their own loose lips (Palin’s stutterings on the Katy Couric show and Ahmadinejad’s alleged anti-Semitism), but on media conspiracies against them.

Of course, there’s no real reason why both things couldn’t be true. Palin could have her short-comings, and she could still be the victim of a hatchet-job by the media. But measured logic is not the style of the Sarah-phobics:

Here’s Cole again on the Irani-Alaskan Axis-of-Medieval:

“Both politicians ‘encourage a political style of exhibitionism, disregard for the facts as understood by the mainstream media, and exaltation of the values of people who feel themselves marginalized by the political system….’

Dear me. Tut-tut. Political exhibitionism, eh? And that wouldn’t be something ever committed by Barack Obama now, would it – he with the near-halo on many a magazine cover, who dubbed himself a voice for people marginalized by the system – or so I recall – in his celebrated Getty- er- pre-election speech on race?

As for “facts as understood by the mainstream media,” since when are facts determined by how journalists understand them? Isn’t that just what some guy called Donald Rumsfeld said not so long ago and got these very same journalists lathered up at his solipsism?

I’m no fan of Sarah Palin.

Anyone who has five children at home and hankers for high office has her priorities confused. If a real feminist was needed on McCain’s team, Todd was the Palin they should have picked. And no, the photogenic governor doesn’t have the experience needed to take on DC. No more than our genial President himself.

But by trashing Sarah Palin in such a rancid, racial, and bigoted way, the media did itself no good, and turned her into an instant symbol of the double-standards practiced by this country’s political elites toward outsiders.

Whatever you think of the moose-hunting mayor, she isn’t an insider, and it was insiders who dragged America through the mud over the last two decades.That makes her – one way or other – a voice for ordinary people, one of us. The persistent trashing of Sarah Palin is a trashing of ordinary Americans.

Pots & Kettles Update: White House Accuses Drudge, Bloggers of Spin…

Posted on by

From an AP report this morning:

WASHINGTON – The White House is turning to the Internet to hit back at a Web posting that claims to show President Barack Obama explaining how his health care reform plans eventually would eliminate private insurance.

The three-minute White House video features Linda Douglass, a former network television correspondent and now White House Office of Health Reform communications director, sitting in front of a computer screen showing the Drudge Report Web site. That site carries a series of video clips from another blogger who strings together selected Obama statements on health care to make it appear he wants to eliminate the private health insurance business.

In the video Douglass says the site is “taking sentences and phrases out of context, and they’re cobbling them together to leave a very false impression.“

My Comment

And of course, the government and its minions would never take anything “out of context,” or “leave
a false impression..”

Oh nooooooo.

Drudge must have hit pretty close to get this level of presidential attention…

As for your jaded blogger at this humble site, I am as wary of the word “private” as I am of the word
“public.” Private is just the other face of public, most times. Gates, Buffet, Trump, Welch – they’ve all proved that their companies aren’t “private” enterprise – they all profit from insider ties, knowledge, subsidies, and pay-offs.

The “private-public” divide, like the “left-right” divide, is an elaborate bit of window-dressing intended to camouflage a much more real divide: “honest-dishonest.”

Update: I notice that Barack Obama has now joined Michelle Obama on Vanity Fair’s “best-dressed list.” Look, I agree Mrs O. has a distinctive and interesting fashion voice, but her husband?

Now the president is a runway model too?

Could this have something to do with creating positive spin in the wake of the recently resuscitated “birther” controversy?

“Birther” is the disparaging term applied to anyone who questions whether President Obama was born within the US, or believes he was born in Kenya, or apparently even brings up the subject – as the recent attacks on conservative broadcaster Lou Dobbs suggest. To clarify, I have no idea what positions Lou Dobbs takes or doesn’t take. And to further clarify, my personal opinion is that naturalized citizens should be as free to become president as natives. Of course, that isn’t the position of the constitution, but that’s another issue.

Surely, questioning the president on a constitutional point would seem to be the essence of what free speech protects. Instead, the establishment puts a derogatory label on it that makes it off-limits and a kind of racist “hate” or “fringe” speech, like the speech of holocaust revisionists (‘denialists’), 9-11 theorists (‘truthers’), critics of Israel or Zionism (‘anti-semites’), and critics of the US (‘anti-Americans’)

[how come if you criticize China, you’re not an anti-sinite?]

Please. Talk about feeding a fire…

Fire is a useful tool but a dangerous god. Feed it with too much fuel, and it burns in every direction. It consumes everything in its path.

He who glows in the fire of public adulation today burns in it tomorrow.

England Unrepentant for Role in Torture

Posted on by

Lynndie England is unrepentant for what she did, says this piece:

“We move on to another hideous image, in which the same group of prisoners – one of whom Graner had punched full in the face – were lined up and ordered to masturbate.

How long had this sick charade continued? ‘You are going to find this ridiculous,’ says England, half suppressing a snigger. ‘One guy did 45 minutes! Freddie [Graner’s fellow prison guard, Ivan Frederick] just wanted to see if they would do it – and all seven of them lined up doing this.

‘Well, six stopped after a few minutes, but the seventh carried on.’

Hearing this account for the first time, even Roy T. Hardy, her lawyer, who had thought himself beyond shock after representing England for five years, is clearly taken aback…..

‘Sorry? For what I did?’ she interjects, incredulous. ‘All I did was stand in the pictures. Saying sorry is admitting I was guilty and I’m not. I was just doing my duty’

……it is impossible to empathise with her, for she is such an unsympathetic character……”

More of the same at Drudge on England’s interview with the German news magazine, Stern.

My Comment

I read this report with interest for two reasons.

1. It substantiates, as many other reports have done since then, my early (July 2004) insight that there were pictures of women being abused that were being deliberately held back and that the key to understanding Abu Ghraib was that it was a deliberate policy.

2. It also vindicates the argument of an essay I contributed to “One of the Guys” (Seal, 2006), a piece called “The Military Made Me Do It,” that England got the benefit of double-standards that treated the women torturers as somehow victims themselves.

I was sympathetic to England, as far as she – and others low down in the pecking order – were made scapegoats for the military and government elites who actually developed the policy. I was also sympathetic about the class bias shown toward them (shown in  phrases like “trailer trash” that are used in this report as well).

But I thought England could still have behaved better than she did. I compared her to Joseph Darby, the whistle-blower, who did his duty despite all the dangers of being seen as a “snitch” by his colleagues. Both were about the same age. I thought England benefited from a double-standard exonerating the young women torturers.

I suggested in the essay that England’s sex was really as much an advantage as it was a disadvantage in the prison where she was a guard (female-deprived).

Another point of vindication: many journalists treat the story of Abu Ghraib as primarily a story about America. I find this somewhat narcissistic. The story is about the victims. To my mind, putting England and her colleagues at the center of Abu Ghraib adds a second injury to the victims.  And, as this report illustrates, the perps are rarely worthy of it, even as psychological case studies. Most evil is done by depressingly ordinary people.

A final point. I recall that some journalists made the culturally obtuse decision to interview the raped women, completely forgetting the consequences to the victims of such media exposure. Sure enough, some of the interviewed women ended up dead.

I have to wonder at journalists with so little imagination and compunction for the subjects of their stories…

‘Subjects’ are also subjects in the other sense – they have their own voices.

All this adds to my belief that the mediacrats can be as big a problem as the kleptocrats.

Media theorist Debord and the Society of the Spectacle

Posted on by

Guy Debord and the Society of the Spectacle

(Lila: Apologies. Looking through my archives, I came across this broken link and just fixed it. The source is Douglas Kellner, “Media Spectacle”).

The concept of the “society of the the spectacle” developed by French theorist Guy Debord and his comrades in the Situationist International has had major impact on a variety of contemporary theories of society and culture.[1] For Debord, spectacle “unifies and explains a great diversity of apparent phenomena” (Debord 1967: #10). Debord’s conception, first developed in the 1960s, continues to circulate through the Internet and other academic and subcultural sites today. It describes a media and consumer society, organized around the production and consumption of images, commodities, and staged events.

Building on this concept, I argue that media spectacles are those phenomena of media culture which embody contemporary society’s basic values, serve to enculturate individuals into its way of life, and dramatize its controversies and struggles, as well as its modes of conflict resolution. They include media extravaganzas, sports events, political happenings, and those attention-grabbing occurrences that we call news — a phenomena that itself has been subjected to the logic of spectacle and tabloidization in the era of the media sensationalism, political scandal and contestation, seemingly unending cultural war, and the new phenomenon of Terror War. Thus, while Debord presents a rather generalized and abstract notion of spectacle, I engage specific examples of media spectacle and how they are produced, constructed, circulated, and function in the present era.

As we enter a new millennium, the media are becoming more technologically dazzling and are playing an ever-escalating role in everyday life. Under the influence of a multimedia image culture, seductive spectacles fascinate the denizens of the media and consumer society and involve them in the semiotics of a new world of entertainment, information, and consumption, which deeply influence thought and action. In Debord’s words: “When the real world changes into simple images, simple images become real beings and effective motivations of a hypnotic behavior. The spectacle as a tendency to make one see the world by means of various specialized mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly), naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs (#18). According to Debord, sight, “the most abstract, the most mystified sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present day society” (bid).

Experience and everyday life are thus shaped and mediated by the spectacles of media culture and the consumer society. For Debord, the spectacle is a tool of pacification and depoliticization; it is a “permanent opium war” (#44) which stupefies social subjects and distracts them from the most urgent task of real life — recovering the full range of their human powers through creative practice. Debord’s concept of the spectacle is integrally connected to the concept of separation and passivity, for in submissively consuming spectacles, one is estranged from actively producing one’s life. Capitalist society separates workers from the products of their labor, art from life, and consumption from human needs and self-directing activity, as individuals inertly observe the spectacles of social life from within the privacy of their homes (#25 and #26). The Situationist project, by contrast, involved an overcoming of all forms of separation, in which individuals would directly produce their own life and modes of self-activity and collective practice.

The correlative to the spectacle for Debord is thus the spectator, the reactive viewer and consumer of a social system predicated on submission, conformity, and the cultivation of marketable difference. The concept of the spectacle therefore involves a distinction between passivity and activity and consumption and production, condemning lifeless consumption of spectacle as an alienation from human potentiality for creativity and imagination. The spectacular society spreads its wares mainly through the cultural mechanisms of leisure and consumption, services and entertainment, ruled by the dictates of advertising and a commercialized media culture. This structural shift to a society of the spectacle involves a commodification of previously non-colonized sectors of social life and the extension of bureaucratic control to the realms of leisure, desire, and everyday life. Parallel to the Frankfurt School conception of a “totally administered” or “one-dimensional” society (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972; Marcuse 1964), Debord states that “The spectacle is the moment when the consumption has attained the total occupation of social life” (#42). Here exploitation is raised to a psychological level; basic physical privation is augmented by “enriched privation” of pseudo-needs; alienation is generalized, made comfortable, and alienated consumption becomes “a duty supplementary to alienated production” (#42).

Spectacle Economy

Since Debord’s theorization of the society of the spectacle in the 1960s and 1970s, spectacle culture has expanded in every area of life. In the culture of the spectacle, commercial enterprises have to be entertaining to prosper and as Michael J. Wolf (1999) argues, in an “entertainment economy,” business and fun fuse, so that the E-factor is becoming major aspect of business.[2] Via the “entertainmentization” of the economy, television, film, theme parks, video games, casinos, and so forth become major sectors of the national economy. In the U.S., the entertainment industry is now a $480 billion industry, and consumers spend more on having fun than on clothes or health care (Wolf 1999: 4).[3]In a competitive business world, the “fun factor” can give one business the edge over another. Hence, corporations seek to be more entertaining in their commercials, their business environment, their commercial spaces, and their web sites. Budweiser ads, for instance, feature talking frogs who tell us nothing about the beer, but who catch the viewers’ attention, while Taco Bell deploys a talking dog, and Pepsi uses Star Wars characters. Buying, shopping, and diningoutare coded as an “experience,” as businesses adopt a theme-park style. Places like the Hard Rock Cafe and the House of Blues are not renowned for their food, after all; people go there for the ambience, to buy clothing, and to view music and media memorabilia. It is no longer good enough just to have a web site, ithasto be an interactive spectacle, featuring not only products to buy, but music and videos to download, games to play, prizes to win, travel information, and “links to other cool sites.”To succeed in theultracompetitive global marketplace, corporations need to circulate their image and brand name so business and advertising combine in the promotion of corporations as media spectacles. Endless promotion circulates the McDonald’s Golden Arches, Nike’s Swoosh, or the logos of Apple, Intel, or Microsoft. In the brand wars between commodities, corporations need to make their logos or “trademarks” a familiar signpost in contemporary culture. Corporations place their logos on their products, in ads, in the spaces of everyday life, and in the midst of media spectacles like important sports events, TV shows, movie product placement, and wherever they can catch consumer eyeballs, to impress their brand name on a potential buyer. Consequently, advertising, marketing, public relations and promotion are an essential part of commodity spectacle in the global marketplace.Celebrity too is manufactured and managed in the world of media spectacle. Celebrities are the icons of media culture, the gods and goddesses of everyday life. To become a celebrity requires recognition as a star player in the field of media spectacle, be it sports, entertainment, or politics. Celebrities have their handlers and image managers to make sure that their celebrities continue to be seen and positively perceived by publics. Just as with corporate brand names, celebrities become brands to sell their Madonna, Michael Jordan, Tom Cruise, or Jennifer Lopez product and image. In a media culture, however, celebrities are always prey to scandal and thus must have at their disposal an entire public relations apparatus to manage their spectacle fortunes, to make sure their clients not only maintain high visibility but keep projecting a positive image. Of course, within limits, “bad” and transgressions can also sell and so media spectacle always contains celebrity dramas that attract public attention and can even define an entire period, as when the O.J. Simpson murder trials and Bill Clinton sex scandals dominated the media in the mid and late 1990s.

Team Obama Turns Up Heat on NY Journalist

Posted on by

Michelle Malkin, writing in The Pittsburgh Tribune Online:

“As I’ve reported before, the Obama campaign’s “Vote for Change” registration drive, run simultaneously with ACORN/Project Vote, was an all-out scramble to scrape up every last unregistered voter sympathetic to Obama’s big-government vision.

In an e-mail message to whistle-blower MonCrief last summer, New York Times reporter Stephanie Strom told the truth: “The real story to all this is how these myriad entities allow them to shuffle money around so much that no one really knows what’s getting spent on what.” By Oct. 6, 2008, Strom had thrown in the towel in the wake of blistering phone conversations with the Obama campaign. She wrote:

“I’m calling a halt to my efforts. I just had two unpleasant calls with the Obama campaign, wherein the spokesman was screaming and yelling and cursing me, calling me a right-wing nut and a conspiracy theorist and everything else. I’d still like to get that file from you when you have a chance to send it. One of these days, the truth is going to come out.”

It’s only just begun.”

My Comment

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t consider Michelle Malkin anything but a very partisan source. I find her incredibly abrasive and limited. But this story really needs attention, not so much for the revelations about ACORN and the Obama campaign (what else would you expect?), but for the insight into how the government handles the “free” press when it gets out of line.

Judged by the Elitest of Elites

Posted on by

I knew the Supreme Court of the US was weighted heavily in favor of the elite products of high-powered law schools, high-powered federal work experience, and high-powered theories.

But this chart of the make-up of the Supreme Court in recent years at the New York Times (May 2, 2009) was still something of a stunner to me.

One hundred percent of SC justices are former federal judges.

How many now are state judges? Nil.

How many now are private lawyers? Nil.

How many now are elected officials? Nil.

How many now are government lawyers? Nil.

How many now are law professors? Nil.

As Adam Liptak, the SC correspondent at The Times, justifiably complains,

“None of the justices have held elective office. All but one attended law school at Harvard or Yale. And the only three justices in American history who never worked in private practice are on the current court..”

But then Liptak holds up as a model, David Souter, a former attorney-general of the State of New Hampshire.

This, as trial lawyer Norm Pattis points out, is like depending on a sprinter to win a marathon.

“When is the last time a lawyer who made his living from fees earned
representing ordinary working people sat on the Supreme Court?”

But the question could be asked of many more government insitutions.

When was the last time the SEC was staffed with officials from small banks and  thrifts?

When was the last time a mayor from a small-town made it to the White House?

We talk about localism a lot. But in practice we’re heavily prejudiced against it.

A small-town resume, we presume, is fit only for small-towns.

There are a lot of reasons for this but I’ll focus on a couple that strike me at once (and I’ve blogged on them recently):

(1) It used to be that education fitted you to exercise judgment. These days we avoid judgment altogether, confusing it with judgmentalism.

In the absence of the ability to judge (and any common standard to judge by), we become victims of public relations and marketing. When no one can agree on substance, image becomes everything.

Brands rule. Harvard and Yale are the best known national brands, so we outfit our justices in them.

(2) Increasing specialization means that fewer people feel capable of pronouncing judgment about something, even if they felt it was permissble to. They look instead to experts to make their choices for them. The media, which has a disproportionate effect on nearly every choice made,  tends to focus on experts who come from the same educational and socio-economic background. The circle of the elite thus tends to get smaller and clubbier with every year.