I went and saw Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps Sunday night, wanted to see how Hollywood would frame what’s happened to us, and was looking for the scene which places blame. It’s there.
It’s when the protagonist says to the love interest, that what’s happened will happen again, "...because people like you and me wanna be lied to, like children, we like to hear bedtime stories...." I don’t know if I have the line exactly, but that’s the sense of it. A character in a film said it, so it must be true. It can't be true that we don't like to be lied to, but just are? The movie blames the vicitm.
But another aspect of the film I went to zero in on was where the US Congress is mentioned. It’s mentioned twice. First, during negotiations in the boardroom of the New York Federal Reserve, where it’s characterized as a group of people who can be cowed into doing whatever private interests want by spin and lies. The next time it’s mentioned later in the film, it’s depicted as some ferocious watch dog that’s going to demand answers, or there’ll be hell to pay.
Another aspect about scenes taking place in the New York Fed boardroom between financial titans and government officials is that all the heads at the table seem to have no real knowledge of why what’s happened, has.
It’s the toxic assets right? It’s greed right? Well of course they’re movie characters, so they can only say what the writer’s have them say, but in real life we all know why what happened, happened. The Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Act in the late 1990s, a President signed off on it, and the Supreme Court ignored it.
Glass-Steagall Act: http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Yet even real life citizens, journalists, and reporters act as if they’re characters in a movie--that they can only say what’s on the script at the direction given. For instance, Tom Ashbrook, on the NPR radio program On Point Monday morning, had a New York Times business reporter, and a film reviewer, and some callers. Even he and everyone on the show never mentioned why "Too Big Too Fail" happened, never mentioned that it was all because laws which were designed to prevent harm, and which were enacted, were then repealed.
On Point’s host, Tom Ashbrook, is an award-winning journalist brought to public radio by the attacks of September 11, 2001, when he was enlisted by NPR and WBUR-Boston for special coverage, after a distinguished career in newspaper reporting and editing.
Tom’s career in journalism spans twenty years as a foreign correspondent, newspaper editor, and author. He spent ten years in Asia — based in India, Hong Kong, and Japan — starting at the South China Morning Post, then as a correspondent for The Boston Globe. He began his reporting career covering the refugee exodus from Vietnam and the post-Mao opening of China, and has covered turmoil and shifting cultural and economic trends in the United States and around the world, from Somalia and Rwanda to Russia and the Balkans. At the Globe, where he served as deputy managing editor until 1996, he directed coverage of the first Gulf War and the end of the Cold War.
Tom received the Livingston Prize for National Reporting, and was a 1996 fellow at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation before taking a four-year plunge into Internet entrepreneurship, chronicled in his book The Leap: A Memoir of Love and Madness in the Internet Gold Rush.
Raised on an Illinois farm, Tom studied American history at Yale and Gandhi’s independence movement at Andhra University, India. Before taking up journalism he worked as a surveyor and dynamiter in Alaska’s oil fields, a teaching fellow with the Yale-China Association, a Hong Kong television personality, and a producer of international editions of Chinese kung fu films.
How is it a guy with a resume like this can broadcast on this subject and not only not mention Glass-Steagall and the reason we enact laws (to prevent harm) but almost squeal like a kid at how insane it all seems? He mentions how Gordon Geko, while in prison asked: Has the world gone insane? If Geko was a real person he tell us the reason what happened, has happened, is because financial interests worked to get Glass-Steagall repealed back in the late 1990s.
Today Ashbrook had on Noam Chomsky talking about the Tea Party, and the despair in the country, and no signs of hope, and nothing to save us from the situation (it's been awhile since I've exchanged e-mail with Mr. Chomsky about the convention clause of Article V, but after today's segment, maybe it's time to remind him what we discussed some time back).
Another line in the movie is the old adage about how the definition of insanity, is to keep doing the same thing, and failing, hoping for a different result. It was here on Daily Kos that in 2004 this blog was touted in the media as having a marked effect on that election and the sweeping in of a Democratic Congress under one of, if not the most vile presidential administrations in America history (it did advocate torture, afterall). The new speaker of the house said that Congress would drain the swamp. Since that time of course, the Supreme Court has ruled that corporate interests can now spend unlimited amounts on political speech. So I guess the question is, is there going to be a point where Daily Kos realizes the "electing better Democrats" and hoping for new results is a kind of insanity? I mean it's not like there's a law in place preventing Markos from reorienting basis of his blog in light of recent events, right?
Another line in the film that I noticed is where the protagonist tells his love that by publishing the secret history of the bad guy, that it’s her chance to go from reporting the stories to becoming part of the story (that it would be her blog Frozen Truth which brings down some corruption). If you'd like to become part of the story, sign up for ConventionUSA.org http://www.conventionusa.org
The site is going through its 2.0 phase, so hopefully it will get to looking a bit better, with a better pitch on the splash page. In essence if you sign up to be a delegate for $10 a month, it doesn't mean you need to get involved in the nuts and bolts of debate, it just means you support the Constitution for the the price of a cheeseburger and fries per month. And if it goes viral, and say this time next year we have a million Americans signed on to ConventionUSA, that would be ten million dollars a month, and we could beat corporate interests at their own game.
In the end, we can multi-task right? We can work to elect better delegates and support the Constitution?