Saddam And Goldman Sachs: Who Is The Student, And Who Is The Master?

When Matt Taibbi was writing a recent article about Goldman Sachs over the past seventy years, he asked them some basic factual questions. Here's how they responded:

Your questions are couched in such a way that presupposes the conclusions and suggests the people you spoke with have an agenda or do not fully understand the issues.

In 2004, the FBI made Saddam Hussein watch a documentary about the brutal repression of the post-Gulf War Iraqi rebellion against him. Then they asked him some basic factual questions about it. Here's how he responded: (pdfs)

Hussein opined that a documentary such as this...is not a neutral film produced by neutral individuals...

Hussein said it was "beneath him" to comment about this documentary. Hussein characterized the film as not being objective and that it was made as further justification for "what was being done against Iraq"...

Hussein stated that an accused individual should be able to defend himself...He affirmed that he would not comment on such propaganda films.

The funniest part is, you could legitimately argue that Goldman Sachs has killed more people than Saddam.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Madoff, the Convenient Villain

By: Bernard Chazelle

The scam artist formerly known as Bernie Madoff, who now goes by the name of "Hitler-to-the-Googleth-Power," got an earful yesterday:

"Extraordinarily evil";
"A beast";
"A monster";
"A low life";
"I only hope that he lives long enough that his jail cell becomes his coffin."
"Do the right thing: Jump!"

Geez, you'd think they were talking about Dick Cheney or someone with the blood of thousands of children on their hands.

Judge Chin sentenced the 71-year old man to 150 years in jail. That means he'll be free in the year 2159, at which point the descendents of his victims will be legally allowed to piss on his grave until (I quote) "Jupiter and Saturn collide in a giant ball of fire." I don't mean to belittle the hurt of the small investors who've been ruined by our new Hitler. Many did not deserve that.

But then many did. Many of them knew it was a pyramid scheme but trusted Madoff to protect them by finding another bunch of suckers to tile the ground floor of the pyramid (the only place where you get hurt). But, honestly, Judge Chin, how can a man who ruined John Malkovitch be really bad?

Don't get me wrong: I am not asking my old pal Pope Benedict to expedite Madoff's elevation to sainthood. (If the world needs a new Saint Bernard, I am here to serve.) But Wall Street is full of villains who've caused worse harm than Madoff. Some of them even work for our beloved president. So where did Madoff go wrong? Simple. He forgot to bribe Schumer to change the laws and make whatever the hell it is that he was doing legal. Bob Rubin and Larry Summers understand that well. That's why the media calls them "geniuses" and Madoff "Hitler to the Googleth Power."

Also, dunno about you, but I don't much like the idea of an old man dying in a prison cell.

— Bernard Chazelle

Get This Man A Column In The Washington Post

Richard Cohen on going to high school with Bernie Madoff:

Others in my class did not say goodbye to Bernie until it was too late. Through Ruth, they invested with him -- modest amounts, a share of profits from a humble summer resort, the savings of a schoolteacher...

Now their money, their life's savings, is all gone. Oddly enough, they are still better off than some of Bernie's richest investors. My friend Ted has his New York City teacher's pension, while the very rich, who put all their retirement funds with Bernie, have been utterly wiped out. I feel sorry for them. I identify with them. They were not, as is sometimes written, greedy. The stock market was a mystery. It seemed to defy logic. They let Bernie deal with it. I would have done the same.

It's crucial that Washington Post columnists be credulous idiots who know that understanding financial basics is beyond their mental capability, and hence they should trust whoever has lots of money. Thank god Katherine Graham found someone who fits the profile so perfectly. Otherwise readers of the Post might learn something about how the world works, and that must be prevented at all costs.

Previously in Richard Cohen's flickering consciousness:

You will never need to know algebra. I have never once used it and never once even rued that I could not use it. You will never need to know -- never mind want to know -- how many boys it will take to mow a lawn if one of them quits halfway and two more show up later -- or something like that. Most of math can now be done by a computer or a calculator.

—Jonathan Schwarz

I Am Part Of The Problem

Spanish sociologist Pablo Ouziel writes at Consortium News:

Serious events and acts are taking place everyday which merit serious social debate, yet because of the fact that our societies are deeply fragmented, broken and clashing between each other, we are unable to grant ourselves the necessary pause, required for conciliation and unity.

Because of this, we are easy to control as a mass of isolated individuals, which is held together by norms and regulations, bureaucracies, military and police, and concepts such as the nation state, the church and the corporation.

If we are to stay in this model of society, I fear we will live in perpetual war until we destroy ourselves by not paying attention to the fact that something is drastically wrong.

I've long believed this. I also could barely pay attention long enough to write this blug post.

(via)

—Jonathan Schwarz

Michael Jackson Died For Our Sins

By: Mike Gerber

When I heard that pop singer Michael Jackson had died, I could not help but remember what a staple he was in the late-night monologues. What would all the hacks, myself included, do now? Crypto-queer GOPers and philandering family-values types can only get you so far. Perhaps Roseanne Barr could be coaxed out of retirement and given the Ambassadorship to Iran. Perhaps Oprah could be slipped some chemical that turned her into a combination of James Brown, Wilhelm Reich, and Minnie Pearl. Even then, they'd be no Michael Jackson. Everything Jackson did was a set-up; everything he was, a punchline.

For his entire adult life, Jackson was ridiculed in public by the best in the business. Think about that for a second. He knew what everybody thought of him--he must've known. At what point did all that weirdness change, from something inside of him, to something caused by all of us? Only he could know, if he ever did, and now he's dead.

Some portion of this ridicule was earned: the compulsive plastic surgery, the persistent whiff of child molestation, the bizarre marriage to Elvis' daughter--these were, if not earth-shattering events, deviations from the norm reasonably worthy of a satirist's attention. But I think anyone not getting paid on a 13-week contract has to admit that at a certain point it became a peculiar kind of public torture. Most of the time that Michael Jackson made the monologue, he hadn't done anything genuinely newsworthy. Yet there he was, the butt of another joke about gayness, or pedophilia, or plastic surgery, or germophobia...I could go on, but there's no point. There never was.

One of the biggest changes in American pop culture has been the demise of humor based on stereotypes (or at least its widespread concealment). This is a good thing, but as the humor of stereotype has waned, other things have had to step in. The things that have filled the void are

a) celebrity humor; and for those intellectuals among us
b) absurdism about "inhuman autopilots"--zombies, pirates, robots, ninjas, etc.

Add in reflexive taboo-busting--sex and drug jokes--and you have described 99% of what passes for comedy in these United States. Most political humor is celebrity humor with a veneer of importance; it comes from no political viewpoint, only comments on behavior. Most of the NPR/New Yorker brand is absurdist autopilot humor, with enough celebrity to satisfy their timeliness fetish.

All that is another post, so I'll leave it and finish this one. Unlike say, Cary Grant, Michael Jackson had the ill fortune to be a celebrity when nightly scrutiny of a pop singer's personal habits became what passed for incisive commentary. Precisely when American power needed all the restraining that satire could throw at it, satire became obsessed with celebrities. Coincidence? Surely not. Part of this was the entertainment industry's self-aggrandizing belief that nobody in the audience knows about anything but entertainment--which, after fifty years, has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But even more powerful was simple risk-aversion. Any Jackson joke was risk-free. Since he was both celebrity and inhuman autopilot, the material flooded forth; and in that flood was protection, safety in numbers. That's why it all felt strangely impersonal, as if this "Michael Jackson" we were all laughing at didn't exist as a person. To the extent that anybody I knew spared a thought for the guy, the human being, they decided he deserved it for being so weird. Such is the compassion of the herd.

But so what? you might say. Life's rough, and Jackson didn't have to be rich and famous. He didn't have to get nose jobs and sleep in a hyperbaric chamber. Well, here's what: It's inconceivable to me that all this concentrated ridicule did not drip down, poison-like, to the man himself, and make a difficult life even more difficult. And it would be one thing if the enjoyment generated as a result of this pain was in any way instructive, constructive, or substantial. It wasn't. It was just meanness. Occasionally Jackson deserved our scorn, but most of the time he didn't, and it says a lot about the culture in which we live that Michael Jackson--a pop singer--was the target of so much vitriol. Anybody who runs for President, much less does what it takes to win, is just as weird as Michael Jackson was. They simply hide it better. Here was a guy so terrorized by his father that he'd vomit at the sight of him; a guy whose talent robbed him of his own childhood; a guy who spent the rest of his life mutilating himself and possibly mistreating others in an utterly doomed attempt to release from his pain. Apportion the blame however you like, but what the hell is funny about that? The moment you stop to think about it--for one second--it no longer becomes fodder for humor. So when we laugh at a Michael Jackson joke, we should know: that's not laughter, that's keeping yourself dead inside.

To accept that there is a limit to how much we can make fun of a celebrity, is to accept that certain behavior is more important than other behavior, and proportionality is a dangerous thought in our politicized times--if you want to get another 13-week contract. Yes everybody knew about Michael Jackson, and his existence as shorthand predisposed him to be joked about; but every second of airtime that he was being ridiculed, other much more worthy targets were escaping without critique. It's not a stretch to suggest that this, too, has created our troubled world.

If satire has a salutary effect (which is debatable), its benefits come in proportion to the importance of the target: what sort of danger is being curtailed or avoided by the force of ridicule. In blasting away at Michael Jackson, American comedy did more than merely shoot a perfectly motionless fish in a tiny glass barrel; it ignored some authentic sea monsters cruising the coast. And for that, everybody in the satirical end of comedy needs to take a long, hard, look--not at the spectacle of Michael Jackson, but at ourselves.

Which was maybe why we were so content to look at him in the first place.

—Mike of Angle

Smells Like Pulitzer Spirit

By: Bernard Chazelle

The Times has an informative piece on Honduras.

From the byline alone, you know this is going to be good: Elizabeth Malkin, in Mexico City, with reporting by Simon Romero from Caracas. Which makes perfect sense since, as we all know, Mexico City and Caracas are the two major cities in Honduras. (Too bad they had no reporter in Bangkok. I hope the Pulitzer committee doesn't notice.)

The Honduran president, Manuel Zelaya, was ousted by the army on Sunday after pressing ahead with plans for a referendum ...

A referendum? OK, but for what?

... a referendum that opponents said could lay the groundwork for his eventual re-election

Ok, so we ask his opponents what the referendum is about. How about asking a more neutral observer? Like?

Mr. Zelaya pressed ahead with plans for a nonbinding referendum that opponents said would open the way for him to rewrite the constitution to run for re-election despite a one-term limit.

Yes, I think we got that point. Opponents of the referendum really don't like that referendum. But what's the referendum about? I'll go out on a limb and, on the basis of what our crack reporters have told us, I'll take a wild guess: "Can I, el Caudillo Zelaya, run for president again and again and again? Yes or no?"

Let's check with Dr Wikipedia to see how well I'm doing:

Incumbent President Manuel Zelaya wanted to hold a non-binding referendum on whether to convene congress to modify the constitution.

Hmm... me very confused.

It's non-binding, meaning that it has no enforcement power.

It's not a referendum to change the constitution.

It's a referendum to convene a constitutional assembly to modify the constitution.

Further investigation shows that right now a president is only allowed a single term of 4 years, which of course works great for the opponents of reform. (Note: term limits are not necessarily a bad idea, but which country in the world has a single 4-year term limit?)

After the armed forces commander, Romeo Vazquez, said that the military would not participate in the referendum, Mr. Zelaya fired him. But the Supreme Court declared the firing illegal.

Nice! If Obama wants to fire Paetreus, he'd better be nice to Scalia. But I really enjoyed this line: "the military would not participate in the referendum." I am sure Jon could write an entire SNL skit just out of that one line.

The Times goes on to quote our own president:

“I call on all political and social actors in Honduras to respect democratic norms, the rule of law and the tenets of the Inter-American Democratic charter,” Mr. Obama said in a statement. “Any existing tensions and disputes must be resolved peacefully through dialogue free from any outside interference.”

Nice little jab at Chavez while failing to condemn the coup. "Let's all be good boys and girls..." Neat. Barack-Hillary will play their good-cop/bad-cop routine, which proves to me that the Honduran military got the go-ahead from the CIA. Or, rather, let me clarify this statement. There's no way this would have happened if the US had said no. And if anyone doubts there's bad blood between Honduras and the US, one has to go back only 9 months for Honduras' decision to delay the accreditation of the US ambassador in solidarity with Bolivia.

To quote our hero Augusto Pinochet, "Sometimes democracy must be bathed in blood." Now that we've had our "democracy" moment, is the bloodbath next?

Perhaps our NYT correspondent in Tahiti can tell us.

— Bernard Chazelle