So Glad We Gave Them $12 Billion

JP Morgan was apparently not just too big to fail, it appears they were too big to warn American regulators about crook Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme. But authorities in the UK were much luckier:

The UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) was warned about Bernard Madoff in October 2008, two months before the fraudster confessed that his investment empire was a sham, according to a lawsuit unsealed in New York.

The allegation was made in a suit filed against JP Morgan, one of Madoff's banks, on behalf of the fraudster's victims.

According to the suit, filed by the court-appointed trustee Irving Picard, executives at JP Morgan allegedly told Soca that they were concerned about "investment performance achieved by its [Madoff's business] funds which is so consistently and significantly ahead of its peers, year-on-year, even in the prevailing market conditions, as to appear too good to be true – meaning that it probably is".

Wow, that’s nice. Meanwhile, over at the New York Times, their reporting on the same lawsuit looks a little different:

Senior executives at JPMorgan Chase expressed serious doubts about the legitimacy of Bernard L. Madoff’s investment business more than 18 months before his Ponzi scheme collapsed but continued to do business with him, according to internal bank documents made public in a lawsuit on Thursday.

On June 15, 2007, an evidently high-level risk management officer for Chase’s investment bank sent a lunchtime e-mail to colleagues to report that another bank executive “just told me that there is a well-known cloud over the head of Madoff and that his returns are speculated to be part of a Ponzi scheme.”

I find this interesting. Both stories are extremely damaging, but the New York Times makes no mention of SOCA and the tip British authorities received. Curious.

I’m also curious why JP Morgan executives warned British law enforcement about Madoff, yet said nothing to American regulators or law enforcement. Remember: the lid was blown off Madoff’s scheme when his sons came forward -- it was Madoff’s children who turned him in to the FBI. Yet all this time JP Morgan knew about the fraud, and some bank employees even privately warned their own clients. Even worse, bank executives tipped off the British authorities. But Americans were kept in the dark. Thousands of clients lost close to $65 billion -- many of them philanthropic funds. That's money which would have gone into our communities. JP Morgan said nothing.

Why?

According to The Guardian:

The suit is damning of JP Morgan's alleged role in the scandal. It claims that Soca was informed by JP Morgan "only in an effort to protect its own investments" and the bank did nothing further to stop the fraud even though it had informed the authorities.

And these are the assholes we give $12 billion to? Hey, fuck you, you anti-American, taxpayer-fleecing, selfish dicks. Too big to fail, my ass.

I wonder if there is some difference between the two country’s regulatory laws which made Britain the recipient of this information and America not. I guess it's not polite to ask such things.

New York Times Fail

The New York Times regrets the errors:

Correction: October 17, 2010

An article last Sunday about Pamela Geller, a blogger who attacks Islam, misidentified the location of a beach from which she video-blogged about her visit to Israel during the Israel-Hezbollah war in 2006. She was in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., at the time of her reports, not at a beach in Israel. The article also overstated the number of monthly unique visitors to Ms. Geller’s Web site, Atlas Shrugs. The site attracts 194,000 such visitors, according to Quantcast statistics — not one million. (The Nielsen Company estimated 184,000 in September.) And because of an editing error, the article misspelled the surname of the lead singer of the Who whom Ms. Geller was likened to for being the “front man” in the attack on Islam. He is Roger Daltrey, not Daltry.

Jesus.

(Via Sadly No.)

The New York Times Regrets The Error

That pesky liberal media strikes again:

A front-page article and headline on May 21 reported findings from an unreleased Pentagon report about prisoners who have been transferred abroad from the American detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The article said that the Pentagon had found about one in seven of former Guantánamo prisoners had "returned to terrorism or other militant activity," or as the headline put it, had "rejoined jihad."

Those phrases accepted a premise of the report that all the former prisoners had been engaged in terrorism before their detention. Because that premise remains unproved, the day the article appeared in the newspaper, editors changed the headline and the first paragraph on the Times Web site to refer to prisoners the report said had engaged in terrorism or militant activity since their release.

The article and headline also conflated two categories of former prisoners. In the Pentagon report, 27 former Guantánamo prisoners were described as having been confirmed as engaging in terrorism, with another 47 suspected of doing so without substantiation. The article should have distinguished between the two categories, to say that about one in 20 of former Guantánamo prisoners described in the Pentagon report were now said to be engaging in terrorism. (The larger share — about one in seven —applies to the total number described in the report as confirmed or suspected of engaging in terrorism.)

Glad we got that straightened out.

So, one out of every 20 terrorists detained at Gitmo "rejoins jihad” after their release. Or, for another way of putting it, 19 0f 20 do not.

Big difference how you put it but either way, it’s a helluva lot better than 1 out of 7.

End Of An Error

[UPDATE]:

Goodbye New York Times, hello Washington Post.

Your liberal media: still not liberal.
--------
William Kristol is gone from the New York Times.

The thing is, this clown never should have been hired to begin with. His columns were riddled with embarrassing errors, even in his very first piece.

Look, it’s fine to offer a conservative opinion in your op-ed pages but what is up with hiring political operatives for this task? Folks like Kristol have drunk so much Kool-Aid, they are deeply in the tank for the GOP, rendering their “opinion” nothing more than RNC talking points. That’s not reality-based opinion, that’s media spin:

Such willful blurring of the line between journalists and political partisans has consequences. One is the shock—even outrage—that results when a journalist has the temerity to behave like one. Recall the uproar when CNN’s Brown challenged Tucker Bounds, McCain’s spokesman, to provide an example of a decision Sarah Palin had made in her role as commander in chief of the Alaska National Guard. The McCain camp had held up this experience as evidence of her readiness for the vice presidency, and when Brown asked Bounds to back up that claim, he either could not or would not—and Brown wouldn’t let it go. Bounds cried foul, suggesting she was somehow out of line. Hmmm. Tenacity and an adversarial tone. That does seem suspicious. In the days following that exchange, there was far too much serious discussion of Bounds’s ridiculous charge.

The Brown-Bounds dustup was an early salvo in the McCain campaign’s full-throated deployment of the well-worn media-bashing strategy—a strategy that benefits when everyone (from Nick Kristof to Bill Kristol to the anonymous blogger on the partisan site Daily Kos who spread a rumor that Palin’s newborn son actually belonged to Palin’s seventeen-year-old daughter Bristol) is mashed together under the banner of The Media. Serious news outlets do themselves—and the rest of us—no favors by encouraging this distorted understanding of what they do and why.

I’m no fan of Nick Kristof but as the CJR pointed out in December, Kristol,

writing once a week since January, has had five published corrections for errors of fact in his column; the former, [Kristof] writing twice a week in that same period, has had no published corrections but did take the extraordinary step of using an entire column to apologize to Steven J. Hatfill, the scientist who was named (and recently exonerated) by the government as the leading suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks; in 2002, Kristof had written columns urging closer scrutiny of the then-anonymous “person of interest” who turned out to be Hatfill.

Let’s hope the New York Times learned a valuable lesson from its failed Kristol experiment and quit blurring the lines between political operatives and journalists.

Media Bashing For A New Century

Bless their hearts. The “media elites” can’t catch a break--not from the Republican Party, and not from liberals.

The so-called “liberal media” (and I can’t even type those words with a straight face) got quite a drubbing at the Republican National Convention last week -- so much, in fact, that it sparked this hilarious video featuring the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank as the face of the “Eastern media elite.” If you haven’t seen it, check it out. It’s hilarious.

In yesterday’s New York Times Mark Leibovich addressed the GOP’s media bashing, correctly pointing out that it’s SOP for Republican candidates to blame “the liberal media.” This is true, and it’s not just politicians who like to portray themselves as a poor, oppressed minority unfairly battered by a biased press. I hear that line from conservatives all the time. They just haven’t owned up to the fact that truth has a well-known liberal bias.

But it works, for some bizarre reason. They circled the wagons and cried foul when the New York Times uncovered John McCain’s relationship with a Washington lobbyist, then cried foul when the Times didn’t cover the stalkerazzi lying in wait to nail a trysting John Edwards, who wasn't even a candidate any longer. Hello?

It’s okay for Ron Fournier, who is directing the political coverage of the Associated Press this election, to have been in consideration for a job on the McCain campaign. It’s not okay for Keith Olbermann to make his views known. In fact, Olbermann has been bumped from the anchor chair on election night, to appease the WATBs on the right:

The McCain campaign has filed letters of complaint to the news division about its coverage and openly tied MSNBC to it. Tension between the network and the campaign hit an apex the day Mr. McCain announced Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. MSNBC had reported Friday morning that Ms. Palin’s plane was enroute to the announcement and she was likely the pick. But McCain campaign officials warned the network off, with one official going so far as to say that all of the candidates on the short list were on their way — which MSNBC then reported.

“The fact that it was reported in real time was very embarrassing,” said a senior MSNBC official. “We were told, ‘No, it’s not Sarah Palin and you don’t know who it is.’ ”

Whaaah!!!! Reporters doing their jobs instead of taking talking points and press releases from the campaigns! Must stop! Must stop now!


Tell it to Fox News, assholes.

Unfortunately, there are some legitimate issues with our media elites, which those in the media themselves don’t seem to recognize. It’s what folks like Digby and Atrios refer to as “The Village,” the insulated bubble in which those who hold power and the media that is supposed to be covering them exist. We saw it when John McCain hosted the media at a chummy barbecue--and was rewarded with such glowing verbiage as “grillmaster” and “all-American dad.” We were horrified when the AP’s Ron Fournier and Liz Sidoti greeted John McCain with that box of donuts at a luncheon. Barack Obama was likened to a terrorist. No donuts for you, black man!

Is it political bias or personal bias? The Washington press corpse, as we call it, is all about access and cocktail parties. It’s really hard to objectively cover a subject whom you’re playing golf with tomorrow.

Here's what I mean: Buried in Leibovich’s story, where he defends the press against charges of liberal bias, is this tidbit:

At the last Republican National Convention, in New York City, Mr. McCain hosted 50-or-so media A-listers to a 68th-birthday party for himself at La Goulue on Madison Avenue. The guest list included network anchors, network news executives, Sunday talk show hosts and a lot of other media types who all qualify as Kind of a Big Deal. Mr. McCain proposed a hearty and gracious toast to his guests that night, raising his glass to “my base.”

This kind of chummy cliquishness is what bothers me. It’s not liberal-vs-conservative, it’s insider-vs-outsider. The anchors and Washington powerful put on a good show for the 6 o’clock news, then everyone goes out for cocktails afterwards. Meanwhile, Amy Goodman and two Democracy Now! staffers are arrested at the Republican National Convention for covering protestors. That’s some free speech for ya.

I wrote about this a long time ago in a post called Real Deep Memory Hole. I dug up an old Rolling Stone column from 1972 which criticized the media’s deference toward candidate Richard Nixon while burying stories about George McGovern. Replace the word “newspaper” with “mainstream media” and you have a pretty accurate portrait of where we are today:

Newspapers, as A.J. Liebling explained in The Press, are neither public servants nor custodians of the Holy Grail.

They are private enterprises in a capitalist economy whose primary function is to make money. Just like a department store or a gas station.

They are not in the business of truth and honesty and the public good unless the owner of the paper sees that as a way to making money.

The other thing to understand about newspapers is that they are owned by rich people and rich people are, by and large, Republicans.

So when your friendly neighborhood newspaper dumps on McGovern, runs his campaign news inside the paper and spreads the latest bullshit about Nixon’s runaway lead in the polls all over page one, remember that Republicans own the newspapers. As Liebling once noted, Democrats only work there.

Thirty-five years later, what has changed? As I wrote then, it’s gotten worse:

Because rich Republican families no longer own the newspapers. Rich Republican corporations do--corporations which make their money from things like (in the case of GE, which owns 80% of NBC Universal), defense contracts.

Will the internet change things? Will talk radio? Probably not. Corporations have infiltrated every level of political process. Corporations exist solely to make money. And the media that could protect us from this creeping tyranny of the corporation is so deeply entrenched in that world, they don't even see the problem. They think it's liberal-vs-conservative; it's not, and don't let them fool you into thinking that. Look deeper.

Follow the money.

I Get E-mail

The following is from New York Times reporter Andrew Kramer, in response to a letter I wrote him referencing his article about Iraq oil deals:

Thank you for your note. I appreciate your concerns that U.S. energy policy shaped the decision to go to war. And today Iraq's great resources are surely a factor in deciding the outcome. One idea that might get lost in the debate, however, is the obligation we have to the Iraqi people to prevent wider chaos and more suffering. Being right about the faulty decision to enter Iraq doesn't mean the American Left can be wrong about what should be done now. Along with claiming to be in the right, the left should take a very hard look at the consequences of early withdrawal. And frankly, anger at the misleading steps of the soon-to-be past administration should not cloud the judgment. Following through on the project of building a democracy in Iraq is perhaps the best possible outcome we could hope for. If we do that, the Iraqis can always come back later and vote down the oil contracts that were concluded now, between unequal partners.

Thank you for your interest,

Andrew

Apparently Mr. Kramer still thinks there’s a pony under all that manure we’ve been shoveling in Iraq. Maybe he’s worried if American troops leave Iraq the country will dissolve into sectarian violence, Sunni against Shia, blowing each other up.

Oh, wait.

Never mind.

Look, I used to buy into that whole “Pottery Barn” nonsense, that we had an “obligation” to fix the mess we created. But then I realized: we are the problem! We are the shard inside a festering wound, and the only way for healing to begin is to remove the foreign object.

There is no “building democracy” with a gun pointed in your face, Mr. Kramer. There will be no peace as long as we are occupying that country. The Iraqi government will always be viewed as illegitimate, and our motives will always be questioned. America needs to step away from Iraq now, because no good has or will come from our presence there. I don’t care how many schools we paint, it doesn’t make up for the nearly 100,000 civilians killed since the invasion.

No, Mr. Kramer; you and the rest of the media elites peddling this false “we have an obligation to bring democracy” line are dead wrong. Future generations of Americans will be paying for this $3 trillion war. And what do we have to show for it? Nothing--except maybe some oil contracts for ExxonMobil. I’m sure the Chinese will enjoy using up all that oil Exxon is planning to sell them.

Bring the U.S. troops home now.