`Bailout’ of Bain Capital Through FDIC Write-Down Replicates Story of The 2008 Wall Street Financial Crisis and Outrages That Doomed The U.S. Economy

Remember how the 2008 financial crisis on Wall Street precipitated the national and world-wide economic collapse?  Remember how, the economy collapsed so badly it still hasn’t recovered, falling into the “Great Recession.” It’s the biggest economic downturn this country has experienced since the Great Depression.  If it hadn’t been for the rescue of a massive stimulus package (albeit in many respects awkwardly handled and designed) things could even have been worse than the Great Depression.

And remember those Wall Street abuses that led to the financial crisis?: The abusive risk-taking by Wall Street insiders content to exit companies and dubious transactions, fortunes in pocket, knowing that if risks materialized they, their cash in hand, would still be sitting pretty in contradistinction to those left holding the bag?

Remember how the Wall Street community coerced a rescue, paid for by the rest of us, that somehow wound up focusing far too much financial benefit on the same Wall Street players who put us in harm’s way?  How the threat was that if such rescue was not forthcoming assets and liquidity of rest of the financial system would be catastrophically imperiled?  Remember how when the rescue was implemented the benefits doled out didn’t flow through to the rest of the economy exactly as hoped (but unfortunately impossible to  contractually provide for)?  (An interesting 99-minute docudrama summing up the dilemma of those early structuring days as seen through the eyes of a fictionalized Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson and author and financial columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin is HBO’s “Too Big To Fail”.)
    
Remember the outrages when the rescued Wall Street operators insisted (despite the havoc they’d wreaked) on their continued entitlement to huge bonuses and excessive management fees?

Remember how, following the Street's resurrection from the meltdown, the Wall Streeters went on their merry way to continue in various stratagems for accumulating wealth without necessarily considering that the welfare of the rest of us still hadn’t yet recovered?

If you remember all this then you are going to find a new article appearing in Rolling Stone Magazine extremely resonant.  It's about a “bailout” package Mitt Romney negotiated to financially rescue a failing Bain & Company by using some sharp legal tricks and lobbying of federal officials to force an FDIC write-down of $30 million Bain & Company debt to a recoupment by the FDIC of just $14 million, a substantial loss.  The tale is fascinating in how it replicates in multiple miniature motifs the basic story of the larger 2008 financial crisis.  You can savor its details here: The Federal Bailout That Saved Mitt Romney: Government documents prove the candidate's mythology is just that, by Tim Dickinson, August 29, 2012.

Before sending you on to this recommended read I thought I would preliminarily peruse the fact checking universe.- The Rolling Stone Magazine story, which reporter Tim Dickinson, based on documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, stands up well to fact checking.

One of the first things I found relating to it was on the Obama campaign web site: FACT CHECK: Bain & Co. Was Saved By A Bailout, August 30, 2012

The Obama campaign web site doesn’t fact check the Rolling Stone article.  Instead it uses the Rolling Stone article to fact check the Romney claim/myth that Romney, currently a doctrinaire rejectionist of federal help or assistance, built the value of his Bain wealth on his own and without help.  The Obama site uses the Rolling Stone article to call Romney out, viewing the federal agency’s write-down of Bain’s debt pursued by Mr. Romney was a form of federal help.  In an important respect the Rolling Stone article reports (this is not mentioned on the Obama site), that the FDIC help may have been delivered by virtue of inherited familial political connections and what the article notes as “crony capitalism” maneuvering:

A month before he closed the 1991 loan agreement, Romney promoted a former FDIC bank examiner to become a senior executive at Bain. He also had pull at the top: FDIC chairman Bill Seidman, who had served as finance chair for Romney's father when he ran for president in 1968.

(Romney’s getting “business” benefits from his father’s political coattails is reminiscent of George W. Bush’s garnering of fantastically huge profits from insider stock trading when the Securities and Exchange Commission was controlled by his father, then President George Bush.)

I suggest that you first read Mr. Dickinson’s Rolling Stone article for a coherent and contextual understanding of what happened, but below are the few faults that other fact checking stories find concerning Mr. Dickinson’s account of the facts (or the facts of the story as circulated by others prior to Mr. Dickinson's obtaining of the Freedom of Information Act FDIC documents):

    •    “Bailout,” by dictionary definition, means “rescue from financial distress” which is accurate but a better technical term could have been used.  The Washington Post suggests it would be better to technically describe the multi-million relief from debt negotiated by Romney for Bain as “a loan restructuring.”

    •    Bain & Company (a financial “consulting firm”) is not Bain Capital (a private equity firm), the company for whom Romney directly worked. Indeed, that’s quite true: As Mr. Dickenson describes, Bain Capital was spun off by Bain and Company.  It was in connection with the spinning off of Bain Capital as a separate company that Bain & Company generated the insupportable amount of debt that gave rise to the FDIC loss.  Dickenson observes: “Had Bain & Company collapsed, insiders say, it would have dealt a grave setback to Bain Capital, where Romney went on to build a personal fortune valued at as much as $250 million.”  Romney worked at Bain Capital to save Bain and Company for a $4 million fee that was paid to Bain Capital.

    •    The public did not pay for the FDIC’s write-down of the Bain debt with taxpayer dollars (therefore the FDIC’s reduction of Bain’s debt wasn’t truly a federal bailout).  Dickenson’s article includes a clear acknowledgment about how the federal agency lobbied by Romney (the “Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation”) functions with respect to losses it incurs:

        . . . while taxpayers did not finance the bailout, the debt forgiven by the government was booked as a loss to the FDIC – and then recouped through higher insurance premiums from banks. And banks, of course, are notorious for finding ways to pass their costs along to customers, usually in the form of higher fees. Thanks to the nature of the market, in other words, the bailout negotiated by Romney ultimately wound up being paid by the American people.

That leaves only the question of whether inclusion of “The Federal Bailout” in the title of his article is misleading.  Indeed, Vice President Biden incorrectly cited the Rolling Stone article for the premise that taxpayer dollars paid for Bain’s “rescue from financial distress.”  You will note that I have been more careful with the title of this National Notice article.
  
    •    The principals at Bain reduced the amount of their originally planned extraction of money from Bain & Company.  Notwithstanding that Bain principals apparently saw benefit in doing so the Washington Post seems to commiserate with those principals because at one point only half of the funds they had generated by creating the unsupportable Bain & Company debt, half of what they planned to remove, was taken out by them.  The principals took half the money while the FDIC wrote down the unsupportable debt by half: Is that really the Post’s argument that the deal was a tenable one?  Notwithstanding, reading Dickenson's account of events, which was written after the Post ventured its assessment of the deal’s arithmetic, the Bain principals ultimately did take out much more of what was originally planned, eventually extracting it in the form of bonuses engineered by overly clever legal documents that Mr. Romney, a lawyer, very likely had something to do with.

(For “Fact Checking” articles from the Washington Post and New York Magazine see: Did Mitt Romney Get Bailed Out at Bain? By Kevin Roose, 8/30/12, Biden’s incorrect claim that a Bain ‘bailout’ cost American taxpayers, by Glenn Kessler, 09/04/2012, Did Mitt Romney get a ‘bailout’ for Bain & Company? by Glenn Kessler, 07/25/2012.)

I think the mostly quibbling disputations above obscure the overall big picture which is how much Dickensen’s tale of this chapter of Romney’s exploits so amazingly echos what we ought to remember about all the things that propelled us into Wall Street’s 2008 crisis.

The Bain rescue occurred before the 2008 financial crisis, taking place in the early 90's.  Bain, while benefitting from the deal with the FDIC to “rescue from financial distress,” remained in business.  And Bain Capital, as we know, is in business to make money.  Accusations have been leveled that when it serves its profit-motives Bain is never reluctant to put other business out of existence even when it means the destruction of jobs.  The facts behind those accusations can be sorted out by others, not me, at this time, but however sordid the accusations are I am not sure that they are as bad as when Mr. Romney in his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention pathetically wanted to prove that the opposite was true, to prove that Bain Capital created jobs, and was able to do so presumably without government assistance.  (This brings us back to fact checking.)

In his speech Mr. Romney said of Bain and himself using the “we” pronoun:

At a time when nobody thought we'd ever see a new steel mill built in America, we took a chance and built one in a corn field in Indiana. Today, Steel Dynamics is one of the largest steel producers in the United States.

But as ABC News (and other press organizations reported) while Bain Capital:

    . . .  invested $18.2 million in the project, just as plans for the mill were being finalized in June 1994. That figure was more than doubled by state and county subsidies, adding up to more than $37 million.

(See: Fact Check: Mitt Romney's Speech at RNC, by Gregory J. Krieg, Aug. 31, 2012.)

The Obama campaign’s fact check puts the total amount of government assistance Steel Dynamics received at a significantly greater amount: “Three Times More” than from Bain, “$60 million” and makes the point that the company’s growth and build-up of its work force “came years after Romney and Bain had anything to do with it.”   (See: FACT CHECK: Steel Dynamics Got Three Times More Money From The Government Than Romney’s Firm, August 30, 2012.)

Notwithstanding Romney's bewildering failure in his convention night reach to say he knows how to create jobs, I think the real story is how much Romney's kind of Wall Street mentality is what got us into the job-destroying Great Recession in the first place.  That's worth remembering even if the Republican campaign would prefer that the public doesn't.  For an eye-opening that will also be a lot like a walk down memory lane, I suggest you read the Rolling Stone article . . .  and it's one worth passing around.

Mitt Romney Won’t Release His Tax Returns Because He Took His Wife’s Horseback Riding As a Medical Deduction? Why Romney’s Taxes Matter

Is the reason that Mitt Romney won’t release his tax returns because he took his wife’s dressage horseback riding as a medical deduction? . . .

. . . That would make sense because it would give “RomneyCare” a whole new meaning in a presidential campaign when everyone is supposed to be paying a lot of attention to the design of the national system we should have in place to pay for the public’s health care.

This is not to belittle the fact that Ann Romney has real health problems. .   she has multiple sclerosis, a serious disease. .   nor should anybody want to demean the significance of anyone else’s significant health issues.  But when so many people in the population faced with considerable health problems struggle to pay for even the minimum treatment they need there are basic questions to ask if and when Ms. Romney has relatively lavish options to attend to her personal health that are way beyond what is available to others, especially when the Romney/Ryan vision for a change to a capped-out voucherized Medicare involves everyone scrimping and saving and cutting back financially (except the insurance companies Romney/Ryan want to take over the program!).

Did the Romneys actually tax deduct Ann Romney dressage horseback riding?  Ms. Romney has “discussed the therapeutic benefits of horseback riding” and in June news reports had her doing so at the “Marion Therapeutic Riding Association in Ocala, Fla.”  (See: June 6, 2012, On horseback, Ann Romney talks about health struggle, by Chris Leyden.)  But the Romneys have released just one of their tax returns and are refusing to release any others so we don’t know and can only guess.  (The Romneys are not releasing more tax returns even after the vice-presidential vetting process was disclosed to have involved the required release to the Romney campaign of “several years” of tax returns.- Only two of Paul Ryan’s tax returns are being released to the public.  The less wealthy Ryan family paid  20% their adjusted gross income in 2011 and 15.9% in 2010.)

The political comedy troop “Capitol Steps” does a routine with a meaningful punch line where their faux Mitt Romney in their parody asks presidential debate audience members to submit their guess about why he is not releasing his tax returns so he can pick among the guesses for what he thinks might sound like the best explanation.  Consider this National Notice’s submission to that suggestion box collection of guesses!

In the only year for which the Romneys have released a tax return, it is shown that they did deduct $77,000 for one of their dressage horses.  So who knows what happened respecting dressage horse deductions in other years and whether some of them are medical?
 
Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has written a number of times about the importance of seeing Romneys tax returns to obtain critically important information.  In January he wrote about how Romney was doing the “Dance of the Seven Veils” maneuvering around the fact that he wasn’t going to release tax returns that would apparently raise issues that are deeper and more more awkward than the fact that Romney, a vastly wealthy man, is telling us that he pays only 13% of his income in taxes:

    . .  the larger question isn’t what Mitt Romney’s tax returns have to say about Mitt Romney; it’s what they have to say about U.S. tax policy. Is there a good reason why the rich should bear a startlingly light tax burden?  

(See: Taxes at the Top, by Paul Krugman, January 19, 2012.)

Krugman pointed out how knowing what Romney’s tax returns would disclose is central to the issues of the campaign:

Elections are, after all, in part about the perceived character of the candidates — and what a man does with his money is surely a major clue to his character.

and:

To the extent that Mr. Romney has a coherent policy agenda, it involves cutting tax rates on the very rich — which are already, as I said, down by about half since his father’s time. Surely a man advocating such policies has a special obligation to level with voters about the extent to which he would personally benefit from the policies he advocates.

(See: Mitt’s Gray Areas, by Paul Krugman, July 8, 2012 783.)

On the question of character, Krugman points out that when Romney’s father, George, ran for president 44 years ago he released twelve years worth of tax returns.  Those returns disclosed that because taxes on the rich were much higher in the `50s and `60s Romney paid much more in taxes (37%) than the 13% his son is now paying and that, as the senior Romney put it, he “seldom took advantage of loopholes to escape his tax obligations.”   What’s more, the senior Romney earned his money contributing value to the economy by running the American Motors automobile company making compact cars.

Exactly what the Romney son, Mitt, has been doing to build up his wealth certainly ought to be explained, and it's not just the question of why he parks his money in the Cayman Islands: We know far too little but according to Mitt Romney’s disclosure documents he has between $20.7 million and $101.6 million earning him tax-free income in his IRA.  Whether, the actual amount is closer to $20.7 million or $101.6 million (wouldn’t you like to know with a lot more specificity?) those multi-millions amount to a virtually impossible accomplishment because the Internal Revenue Code limits what can be contributed to an IRA to amounts that are relatively small by comparison ($2,000 and annual 401(k) retirement contributions at $30,000) and Romney had only about 15 years working at Bain Capital LLC. to make such annual contributions.  By rights, if you do the calculations, it ought not to have built up to even $1 million, let alone being so many multiples greater.  (See: The Secret Behind Romney’s Magical IRA, by William D. Cohan Jul 15, 2012 and Massive Romney IRA Still Sparks Unanswered Questions, by D.M. Levine, 07/17/2012.)

The reason that annual contributions to IRAs are limited by the federal tax code to somewhat moderate amounts is that IRAs are intended as a mechanism to provide a secure retirement for the general populace, not to be an instrument of abuse whereby those who are vastly wealthily can park their wealth to avoid paying taxes.  Mitt Romney must have found a way to circumvent the law’s intentions.

Since Romney isn’t releasing his secrets, what he did to build up what may be the single biggest IRA account in the country can only be guessed at.  It probably involved a degree of artificiality that, were the IRS guarding the chicken coop, the IRS probably ought not to have permitted.  If you read the above linked-to reporting, what is suspected is that Romney utilized his inside knowledge of the structuring of Bain transactions (where companies on Bain’s operating table were sliced and diced into all sorts of different  financial slivers, instruments and interest the average reader probably wouldn’t have patience to try to understand) in order to transfer what were relatively sure bets on truly huge financial pay-offs while valuing them for purposes of his IRA contribution as proportionately infinitesimal.

With Mitt Romney having by whatever trick or device tallied up a personal IRA that is at least in the tens of millions and with the Romneys taking tax deductions on the order of  $77,000 for dressage horses every year it's rather a challenge to believe Ann Romney's recent assurance in her speech at the Republican Convention that she and her husband understand and appreciate the economic challenges she describes as besetting the average American family:

    . . . that price at the pump you just can't believe, the grocery bills that just get bigger; all those things that used to be free, like school sports, are now one more bill to pay. It's all the little things that pile up to become big things. And the big things — the good jobs, the chance at college, that home you want to buy, just get harder. Everything has become harder.

This was part of Ms. Romney’s effort to encourage women (and she tried to be complete in naming all the variations: “moms of this nation — single, married, widowed — . . . mothers. . . wives. . .grandmothers. . big sisters . . . little sisters . .  daughters”) to view Romney as a potentially good provider if he is elected president.  One gathers that Ms. Romney’s point is that, if elected president, the man she “met at a dance many years ago” will spend less time looking for tax loopholes and tax deductions available only to the supremely wealthy and will spend more time considering the situation of the average Joes of the 99%.

Really? One indication on that score is the way the the Romneys interrupted their campaign (reportedly against campaign adviser advice) to rush off to attend the London Olympics (shoehorning in two ill-fated stops in Israel and Poland for cover) where Ms. Romney's horse was competing.  There Mr. Romney (who admittedly has Olympics in his resume) had to bend over backward to pretend that he didn't know anything about the "horse ballet" exploits (as dressage is sometimes called) of his wife's horse Rafalca and managed to undiplomatically offend his British hosts.

I don’t usually refer to the work of the ubiquitous Republican apologist David Brooks who, among other things, writes a regular opinion column for the New York Times: He is usually far too predictable about arguing that whatever position the Republicans have taken about things it is not necessarily entirely unreasonable when looked at a certain way.  He does that pretty much no matter how outrageous the Republicans get, rarely venturing any, even quiet, tut-tutting.  Something got into Mr. Brooks the week of the Republican Convention and he apparently couldn’t resist giving in to his sense of humor (I don’t think I’d previously picked up on the fact he had one) to write about the hilarity of the Republican chore at the convention of portraying the silver-spoon Romney biography as heroically relevant to the common man/woman/voter (a sampling to get you started before you click on to read the entire piece):       

Mitt Romney was born on March 12, 1947, in Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Virginia and several other swing states. He emerged, hair first, believing in America . . . . He was given the name Mitt, after the Roman god of mutual funds. . .

    * * * *

 . . . . He uttered his first words (“I like to fire people”) at age 14 months. . .  purchased his first nursery school at 24 months. The school, highly leveraged, went under, but Romney made 24 million Jujubes on the deal.

(See: The Real Romney, by David Brooks, August 27, 2012.)

Never did I think that I would find Brooks seeming to agree with fellow Times columnist Paul Krugman, but the truth behind the humorous bite of the Brooks piece is remarkably consonant with a more seriously scribed Krugman piece where Krugman says that the out-of-touch wealthy, “safely ensconced in a bubble of deference and flattery” look ridiculous “when they attribute the weakness of a $15 trillion economy to their own hurt feelings” which is causing them to refrain from job making.  (See: Pathos of the Plutocrat, by Paul Krugman, July 19, 2012.)

Wealthy upset is the cause of the nation’s current economic troubles?  What about the economic upset wealth run amok caused, the fact that it was the out-of-control banks, hedge funds and high finance insurance companies that wrecked the economy in the first place?  (See: Friday, August 17, 2012, The New York Times Starts Reporting That New York Government Officials Are Looking At Suing Barclays Bank- Leading to. . . ?).

Am I being the slightest bit unfair?  Just because Mitt Romney is substantially richer, does that  actually make the rest of us poorer?  Yes indeed, that question is answered at greater length here: Friday, December 23, 2011, Why Someone Else Being Wealthier Actually Makes Me Poorer: Debunking a Suspect Claim.  If nothing else, the fact that Romney and the Republicans are making it a priority to cut taxes for the wealthy (who control an ever-increasing percentage of the nations income and wealth) to historic new lows while eliminating social programs that those taxes have traditionally paid for means all the rest of us are hurt.  The Republicans, calling for cuts in social programs, set up a "deficit clock" at the convention hall in Tampa.  What they neglect to say is that the deficit being measured is a result of cutting taxes on the wealthy even in a time of war when sacrifices were called upon from others.

Why Someone Else Being Wealthier Actually Makes Me Poorer: Debunking a Suspect Claim

I found that the assertion stayed naggingly with me after I heard it expressed by one of the conservative talking heads appearing one night on Bill Maher’s Real Time HBO program: “Just because someone else is wealthier than I am doesn’t mean that it makes me poorer.”

I didn’t believe the statement when I heard it expressed but the way it seems to relinquish any envy gives it an attractive quality, making it sound admirably virtuous, as if it bespeaks a magnanimity of spirit even though it’s a statement wielded by the sort of spokespersons who also espouse such theories as “trickle down” economics. Somewhat inconsistently, “trickle down” economics proposes a world where another man’s accumulation of wealth can indeed be counted upon to affect your own but, optimistically, only for the better: Those who have less are expected to be satisfied by all the extra crumbs that will spill off the table with overflowing wealth. (The math behind this involves a prediction that the overall pie will always be bigger by more than the amount the wealthy themselves take.) These are the same sort of folk who now speak about the 1% Club as munificent “job creators.” Those espousing such theories can be counted upon to argue against measures such as a progressive income tax structure in order to to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor by having the wealthy pay higher income taxes.

“Just because someone else is richer doesn’t make me poorer”: Does this kind of statement really need debunking? Isn’t it just obviously wrong when you think about it? Maybe only to some and what might not be so obvious is just how many ways the statement is wrong. Let me count some ways:

1. Compensation to top executives in the United States is now paid at absurd multiples of other employees’ salaries. Ben and Jerry’s may no longer limit compensation of its highest paid employees to seven times that of entry level employees but the fact that it once did puts in perspective the kind of huge differentials now prevalent. Exact reliable figures about the ratio of top executive pay to bottom level employee pay or average employee pay level for given years is not easy to come by and the figures depend upon which group of companies one is selecting to derive one’s statistics, but whether one is looking at a ratio of 531 average employees’ salaries to1 highly compensated CEO’s, 525 or 263 to 1, 185 to 1, or 325-to-1 (the last ratio involving executives getting paid an average of $10.8 million each), each of those multiples represent corporate resources that could be redirected into hiring more employees or paying other lower-paid employees more. And isn’t it reasonable to expect that in the face of a more progressive income tax system we would likely see that kind of redistribution as the attraction of high salaries waned just as was the case when taxes were once more progressive?

2. Further, as focus shifts away from jobs being chased and held just for the sake of very high salaries mightn’t the quality of corporate management improve as a result? This is something we’d perhaps be more apt to believe if, along with Warren Buffett, we believe that executive compensation for U.S. executives is too often “ridiculously out of line with performance” and that a cooperation’s board’s ability to rein in such excessive compensation is a critical test of proper corporate governance. These then are two ways in which wealth lavished excessively on select individuals means the impoverishment others.

3. After another man is paid so many multiples more than his fellows the amount he is likely to invest should predictably be much greater than the rest of the populace and that investment will, in turn, spin off even more income. A fair amount of his wealth will probably be invested where so many of us inevitably think to invest: in stocks. Much of the nation’s wealth is owned through corporations. Ownership and control over a corporation is represented by its stock. The wealth of all of the nation’s investors intermingles in its ownership of the stock of those corporations but the intermingling is not equal in terms of ownership of the decision-making process because when it comes to corporate governance majority rules, the preferences of the minority must bend to the decisions of the majority. That majority is not added up in terms of stockholders as individuals; majority is counted up in terms of the majority of individual shares of stock. Which is to say the calculation involved is sheerly a measure of total wealth. As so much of the nation’s wealth is owned through corporations much of the nation’s policy is consequently set by the demands of those corporations but in the setting of such policy the voice of any minority ownership is lost as the corporate governance structure acts as a lens to focus the corporation’s influence behind the interests of aggregating wealth, much like a magnifying glass can bend the diffuse rays of the sun to focus on one concentrated incinerating point. Maybe I want my local environment kept clean and pure but maybe the corporations don’t, and maybe the wealthy will fly away to vacation in remote spots beyond my means where devastations to the environment will matter less to them.

4. When we think of influencing policy in the United States we think about appealing to our politicians and electing those we think will represent our interests, but every politician thinks of him or herself as having two constituencies: a.) Those individuals capable of voting for them, and b.) Their money constituency. The first is a finite constituency tied to a locality. In the United States every individual must decide where he will vote and there he will get to vote only once in each election. The monied constituency is free to cross lines. Those wealthy enough can support candidates anywhere no matter whether they live or vote where a candidate is running. They can even support candidates running against each other in the same election, and do. The amount of support supplied this way is limited only by one’s wealth and the will to deploy it. In the United States political spending in the form of contributions to political candidates is almost entirely the provenance of the very wealthy. Most of the money for the nation's political campaigns comes from .5% of the population,which means that it is really the .5% vs. the 99.5% that Occupy Wall Street ought to be talking about and 1 percent of the 1 percent account for almost a quarter of all individual campaign contributions to federal political campaigns in 2010. That means we have a government where it is going to be very difficult for ordinary citizens to get the attention of their political representatives because those representatives will spend most of their time preoccupied thinking about the donating elite. Unequal access to those entrusted with governing the nation leads, quite justifiably, to distrust of the system by those without access.

5. One reason that distrust of the system may now be very sensibly coming to the fore is that, as argued by Glenn Greenwald, the author of “With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful,” we have seen a two-tier justice system emerge, one for the nation’s uppermost class, another for the less politically powerful. Normatively, the idea that the same rules apply to all ought to supply a check and balance against draconian abuses in the legal system and against violations of the law. With a two-tier system liberties are no longer protected by this check and balance. So yes, when others become a lot wealthier than the rest of us we poorer souls all become still poorer because even our life and liberty are put in jeopardy.

6. Others being wealthier also makes us poorer when we are competing in the market for the same limited resources. This is really classic supply and demand economics. More money chasing a limited supply drives prices up. Since real estate is unique and can’t be duplicated it is very easy to see how the rules apply. In 2004 when apartment prices in New York were rapidly rising the New York Times ran an article about “gazumping” which, technically, is the acceptance of higher offer from a different buyer after a handshake deal on a lower apartment price was reached. With the market awash in new cash, offers significantly trumping already accepted offers for which contracts weren't yet executed were becoming commonplace. It created a lot of pressure to close deals rapidly. A “gazumping” buyer can be particularly effective in persuading a seller to accept an offer (in the bidding practice that is considered less than entirely ethical) if they offer cash and a substantial deferential in price. Sellers may appreciate the higher prices the wealthy pay but say, for instance, you have a property that has been in a family for many years: Members of the extended family who want to buy it and keep it in the extended family (essentially maintain the status quo) may be “gazumped” out of their opportunity to do so by those who have become disproportionally wealthy. Another example involving real estate would be a neighborhood townhouse providing homes to perhaps nine renting families which is then purchased by a bet-winning hedge fund entrepreneur who, with his newly minted wealth intends to occupy the entire building after he evicts all the long-term tenants. Those tenants will have to move elsewhere. Shifting wealth will subtract from their other choices and the prices they will pay will accordingly be higher. These examples involve real estate but the same rules apply whenever there is competition for commodities that are limited.

7. Others having wealth substantially exceeding my own makes life more expensive in other ways. Sometimes the cost of living gets established as a community package. Say I live in co-op or condominium building where the expense of maintenance and operation are handled communally. If everyone in the building has resources similar to mine we are all apt to have similar notions about the value of certain expenditures and the need to make careful resource-conserving choices. But if others in the building become far wealthier than I am then they may want to hire extra doormen and porters, multiplying expenses. They may also care less about close oversight of the the wisdom with which each community dollar is spent. They may be more inclined to delegate such oversight to hired professionals at extra expense. In their view the lobby might need to be grander. The wintertime heat in the building might be ratcheted up profligately allowing windows to be flung open. The building may become unaffordable to the less affluent but because the expenditures are communally undertaken and enforced those expenses must be paid by all who stay. Those who need to move as a result will bear an extra expense but those who don’t, won’t.

8. The community-determined expenses discussed above which are enforced are presented conceptually with the example of a residential co-op or condo, but the very same sort of situation can occur when government in a locality decides to provide a higher level of more expensive services, better roads, more frequent trash pick-ups, a more ostentatious Town Hall, etc. Or it can work similarly but in reverse: As an area fills with wealthier residents there may be fewer among them who feel the need for the services of a good public library open at convenient hours throughout the week. As a result these services may be cut back.

9. Besides communally undertaken and enforced expenses there are expenses associated with living alongside wealthier people that are not enforced but nevertheless hard to avoid. Those with fewer resources appreciate some of the changes that come with a gentrifying neighborhood (renovations, cleanliness, policing may improve and some new stores may be appreciated) but one of the complaints such residents often have is that many of the stores selling merchandise at price points geared to their own incomes disappear and are replaced by stores selling merchandise at price points they can’t afford. A Starbucks may have a certain novel cachet but the Starbucks coffee can be a lot more expensive than the alternatives.

10. Looking for a new home one might also find one’s choices of apartments circumscribed by the wealth and more affluent life style of others when one encounters apartments that are available only if one pays unaffordable “amenity fees.” The amenity fees may boost the cost of renting more for those looking to save money by doubling up when they are required to be paid on a per person basis. Developers have been packing new New York City buildings with amenities like swimming pools, party and entertainment rooms, screening rooms, roof decks, etc. - There is no free lunch (although amenities sometimes include ostensibly-free regularly-served breakfasts) so these would be paid for in increased prices somehow but now developers make a practice of charging overtly for these amenities by required fees imposed in addition to the rent.

11. The very best schools, particularly colleges, are also likely to exceed the reach of the less wealthy for a variety of cumulative reasons: a.) tuition b.) higher SAT scores by virtue of hired tutors and prep c.) preference for legacy admissions based on prior family member attendance d.) Attendance at better feeder schools, and e.) donations from the family to the school. Whether or not one succeeds in sending one’s children to the nation’s select set of very top schools would not be such an significant issue (many schools are very good and more than sufficient for providing excellent educations) were it not for the fact that attendance and socializing at premier schools significantly eases the entry of the next generation into a privileged club whereby they can expect better opportunities in terms of earning wealth. Ultimately it becomes a self-perpetuating system.

The above list can no doubt easily be expanded. I invite readers to suggest additions by commenting on this post. I know the list is not all-inclusive.

I originally thought to write this article months ago back when I first mused about what had been said on Bill Maher’s show. Since that time there was an influential article in the May 2011 edition of Vanity Fair by Joseph E. Stiglitz that makes similar and related points even if its theme is not exactly the same. On point Stiglitz makes that could be added to the above list is that the nation’s decisions with respect to war are affected when there is a class wealthy enough not to send any of its children to war. Surely we are poorer when another disinvolved individual makes a decision to send our children to war. I strongly suggest that if you have appreciated this National Notice article and haven’t yet read Mr. Stiglitz’s, you read it: Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%.

A final point to mention: After acknowledging that another man’s wealth can, indeed, make me poorer in all the ways mentioned, there is another economic truism to remember. . . The value of a dollar is greater to a poor person than it is to a rich person. Ergo, when a wealthy man’s wealth makes a less wealthy man poorer, the significance in the shift is greater to the poorer individual. To the extent that the shift reflects an injustice, that injustice is consequently greater.

Republican Party Plutocracy At Work: The Big Money Wants Romney Over Gingrich or Ron Paul- Steering the Selection of Candidates

I am not inclining to vote for any Republican candidate in the next presidential election. It is not that I couldn’t ever bring myself to vote for a candidate that represented proper Republican principles, at least as I once understood those principles to be, but what we are getting out of the national Republic party is just so absurdly contorted. . . Why even go into it?

But that doesn’t stop me from wondering at the way that the national candidates are selected, and most specifically the fixated way that big money will always keep steering toward what it wants: In this election the big money wants candidate Romney.

The Republican primary race has been a fascinating roller coaster ride as potential candidates emerge, surge and are then purged when they can’t stand the light of day. Then as front runners in the race (focusing on the important first state of Iowa) we recently got the candidate who was cavalierly dismissed by the pundits as never having had a serious chance (Ron Paul) and the first candidate in the race who first demonstrated how the emerge, surge and purge cycle worked (Newt Gingrich). Gingrich, as a result of what we are about to discuss has dropped in the Iowa polls and also slide in the national polls.

From the sidelines I can certainly see what any electorate might like better about Ron Paul or Newt Gingrich.

Ron Paul has been resolutely courageous in his willingness to say what he apparently believes about what’s wrong with wars, a foreign policy wastefully bending toward imperialism, and his libertarian precepts about limiting governments interventions. I would even endorse much of what he has to say if it were properly tempered.

While ultimately very scary, Newt Gingrich’s relentless energy has an attraction and the roguish self-interest of his pursuits has a rascally charm. It’s hard not to grudgingly admire someone who can cross all sorts of lines when it comes to principle (for instance, what ought to be the legitimate goals of charities) and thereby quickly amass a personal fortune of $50 million Beltway dollars by selling, to corporations subscribing for access, his ability to schmooze.

Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich as comprehensible individuals each supply a more emotionally satisfying narrative than Mitt Romney’s dutiful shape-shifting which registers as mechanically robotic and programed, which it is. Conventional wisdom says that Romney is a better choice for a candidate likely to defeat Obama. While making him less recognizable as a human his malleability also makes him less threatening in other ways: He is less threatening to electorates because, on the outside, he conforms himself to the latest polls and fashionable view affecting whatever race he is in (a familiar trait in politicians in general, and one not necessarily completely unhealthy for the nation’s governance) and, on the inside, Romney is no doubt ready to mindfully hew to instructions from the powers-that-be (another not uncommon trait amongst politicians who are all likely to be cognizant of their monied constituency).

What’s fascinating in this election cycle is the way in which Romney’s steady attraction for the 1% money providers diverges from the affection the general populace of the Republican party have for him. As far back as August I’ve listened to people telling me that Romney’s appointment as the Republican nominee was a certitude. Mostly these people have been those who track and predict the future based on where the big money is going and I guess there was never any significant disagreement amongst the big money contributors as to which candidate they supported this cycle. But if Romney wins this time there will be some necessary explaining to do within the Republican party as to whether everyone in the party has an equal voice and vote or whether it is simply a top-down plutocracy. Big money’s sharp elbows are more apparent than usual this season.

As we get down to the short strokes of the primary season with Romney running third in various recent polls and Gingrich having experienced a surge that put him well ahead, big money has pulled out all the stops to support Romney and we are beginning to see the effects.

According to a December 19th Associated Press story more than $1 million has been spent in negative advertising attacking Gingrich in Iowa: Attacks Hurt Gingrich In Iowa, No Letup Pre-Caucus.

Much of the money is being spent by a Super PAC called “Restore Our Future” supporting Romney. As result of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United case such spending is unstoppable and it is not currently possible to know who are all the individuals and corporations funding the Super PAC. In theory, although that Super PAC is run by political operatives who used to work for Romney, Romney can’t communicate or coordinate with the PAC or the people running it to, for instance, ask that they dial down the negativity of the attacks. Gingrich says that this theoretical inability is “baloney.” It will be interesting to see what Gingrich says about such conceptual niceties if he ultimately becomes the Republican nominee. (See: Romney, Gingrich Spar Over Negative Super PAC Ads, by Kathy Lohr, December 21, 2011.)

That the monied establishment will protect itself and go after what it wants is self-evident. It moves in less than mysterious ways. This week’s New York Times has in it at least two more stories that are essentially about how clearly the Republican monied establishment wants Mitt Romney as its nominee: One is again about how well-funded attacks are being mounted against Newt Gingrich and the other is about how past writings appearing in Ron Paul’s newsletters include bigoted statements.

This problem of big money steering the selection of candidates is not just a Republican party issue or a problem that presents itself only on the national level. I just finished writing about how similar problems are present in the race to select nominees for mayor in New York, which in NYC is a problem that clearly affects the Democrats’ primary process ( In New York City the big money problem is headlined by the real estate industry): Tuesday, December 20, 2011, John Liu And the Mayoral Race: We Are Confronted by A Misfortune. Can Misfortune Be Turned Aside?

A partial window into what Gingrich is up against in terms of how big money is working for Romney is provided in a December 21, 2011 CNN story:

According to an analysis of disclosure forms from Restore Our Future conducted by the nonpartisan government watchdog Center for Responsive Politics, the pro-Romney super PAC has spent $430,380 on ads in Iowa. That's more than the $325,770 spent by the Romney campaign. Combined, they are outspending Gingrich in Iowa by more than seven to one.

Bain employees have given $1.25 million to Restore Our Future. Contrast that to the $84,500 contributed by Bain employees directly to the Romney campaign.

(See: Pro-Romney super PAC slams Gingrich, by Jim Acosta, CNN Political Correspondent.)

Outspending Gingrich “by more than seven to one”? And look at the amount of money coming just from Romney's former investment firm, Bain Capital.

Why Are Hearings on High-Volume Hydraulic Fracturing (“Fracking”) Held In New York A NATIONAL Issue?

(Above, evening hearing attendees in the 900 seat auditorium)
Last week I presented Noticing New York and National Notice testimony when the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation held a day’s worth of hearings in Manhattan concerning Governor Cuomo's proposal to start allowing High-Volume Hydraulic Fracturing, aka “Fracking,” in the state for the first time by lifting the current moratorium under which it is now effectively banned. An account of the hearings, the testimony I provided and amplification for my testimony is available here: Thursday, December 1, 2011, Wednesday’s Department of Environmental Conservation Hearings on High-Volume Hydraulic Fracturing (“Fracking”): Noticing New York’s Testimony Plus. .

A shorter article providing, for pith’s sake, just the testimony I delivered that day is available here: Thursday, December 7, 2011, Testimony at Department of Environmental Conservation’s 11/30 Hearings on High-Volume Hydraulic Fracturing (“Fracking”): The LONG and the SHORT of It.

(People lined up after me Wednesday morning to get into DEC's first hearing, the afternoon hearing on introducing the new technology of fracking to New York state.)
Why are such hearings held locally in New York a national issue on which National Notice readers would want to focus? Because:

• The brand new technology of fracking, which involves injecting huge quantities of poisonous “hyperslick water” into the earth at enormous pressure in combination with underground explosions, is associated with an enormous amount and a great variety of pollution that travels across multiple state lines, particularly flowing down through river basins and blowing through the air, thereby involving many states, and is likely to pollute, in toto, much of the country’s natural resources.

• By seeking to target a win in the very heart of the opposition, the fracking industry is seeking to hijack New York State’s history as a leader in protecting its environment. As I point out in the longer article linked to above, if the industry can sell its despoliation and overturn environmental protections in New York it can, by “spreadin’ the news,” parlay that into a sales pitch for fracking anywhere else in the country. A sort of “New York, New York” refrain mentality: “If I can frack it there, I'll frack it anywhere, It's up to you, New York, New York.” Conversely, as also discussed in that linked-to article, the industry is attempting to use experiences since 2007 in North Dakota (population 640,000) and New York's neighboring Pennsylvania in order to stage manage a super-hyped sale of fracking in New York.- - In fact, as you can read, what the industry is trying to promote in New York is the idea of “unregulated or lightly regulated fracking” as if any kind of fracking at all isn’t enough to ensure disaster.

• The attempt to get fracking introduced in New York is being pressed by Governor Andrew Cuomo, a man recognized to have presidential ambitions likely viewing this as fulfilling a cherished goal his father, former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, fell short of. Andrew Cuomo’s tactics to force the introduction of fracking in New York bespeak some sort of behind-the-scenes political deal which falls in line with an observation that is more and more being offered about Mr. Cuomo: That whatever people may commend him for in terms of his effectiveness, he operates without transparency, and in this case without regard to the true needs of the voters who are properly his elective constituency.

• And then, of course there is the whole giant planet-affecting issue to which all the rest of this is integral: How many years do we have left to forestall pushing beyond a disastrous climate change tipping point?

So you may want to read and find out exactly how matters with respect to those “local” New York hearings are playing out.

(Hazmat suited protester. The first thing many saw approaching the hearing location)

Times Editorial Page Quandary: After He’s Dubbed Free Speech Champion Bloomberg’s Police Suppress Press During Occupy Wall Street Eviction

This weekend the Times ran an editorial that must have posed a fascinating challenge to write. It criticized the suppression of the press when the police executed Mayor Bloomberg’s orders to evict the Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zucotti Park. (See: Editorial, Police and the Press, November 25, 2011.)

Off On the Wrong Track: Reporting That Mayor Bloomberg is Backer of Free Speech
How exactly does the New York Times editorial page get out of a bind like this- The Times in writing about Occupy Wall Street had just dubbed Mayor Bloomberg a champion of the First Amendment and backer of free speech, including running an article that conveyed this assessment in its front page headline. Almost immediately thereafter, and this is what the editorial was dealing with, the editorial page was confronted with a letter written by one of its own attorneys, a vice president and assistant general counsel, that said that the police actions in executing Bloomberg’s orders to evict the Occupy Wall Street protesters were “more hostile to the press than any other event in recent memory.” That letter gained a high profile in that it was signed not just by the Times itself but also by almost every news organization of importance in the city that was conceivably available to sign it.

This article follows up from another angle on others I have already posted here about how off course it has been to promulgate the notion that Mayor Bloomberg is a free speech protector . . .

. . . I have previously written about how the Times suddenly christened Bloomberg a champion of the First amendment and defender of free speech in its Occupy Wall Street coverage. (In fact, I noted that part of this strange behavior included an editorial page buy-in to the notion that Bloomberg was defender of free speech.) The Times was apparently succumbing to recent PR management emanating from Bloomberg’s City Hall since, as I documented, the Times prior coverage of Bloomberg’s attitudes about protesters was strictly at odds with such a characterization. (See: Sunday, November 20, 2011, Question of Truth For The Times: The Meme of Bloomberg as Champion of the First Amendment & Free Speech, Firmly Planted Before OWS Eviction.)

. . . I also wrote about how Bloomberg’s biographer, Joyce Purnick, discussing the OWS protesters (before their removal) proclaimed Bloomberg to be “a firm supporter of the First Amendment,” probably having been influenced by the recent stories in the Times; what appears in her biography is directly contrary to that notion. (See: Tuesday, November 22, 2011, Orwellian Purnick Purge: Bloomberg Biographer Rewrites Billionaire Mayor’s Record On First Amendment Free Speech Rights.) The documentary about the New York Times, “Page One: Inside the New York Times” describes something it terms “The Times Effect” which is that the Times can make something virtually true by reporting it, setting the agenda, and then afterwards everyone imitatingly follows suit, reporting similar things. Perhaps this is an example of that effect.

Bloomberg’s “Free Speech Zones”

The previous articles dealt principally with Bloomberg’s attitude and treatment of protesters wanting to exercise their right to free speech and freedom of assembly. As captured in what the Times and Ms. Purnick had historically written, Bloomberg’s attitude was always one of disrespect for-- at best ‘brusque’ impatience with-- the principles of the rights being exercised. Bloomberg was even impatient with those who might merely wander near to such protesters, to him a stupid mistake. His `pragmatic’ preference was to circumscribe and impede the exercise of these rights to the best of his abilities, particularly so when ideas being expressed were in opposition to ideas he was supporting, as in the case of the 2004 Republican National Convention. One Bloombergian tactic standing out prominently as a symbol for how Bloomberg believed he could regulate protesters’ speech so as to minimize its effectiveness was his creation of “free speech zones” set up as far as possible from the object of the demonstrators’ protest. In other words: “You can speak, but if we can set it up that you are far enough away, maybe you just won’t be heard.”

Bloomberg’s “Freedom of the Press Zone”

The Times editorial, although it dealt with the suppression of the press rather than the suppression of the protesters’ speech itself, dealt with something quite analogous. The Times weekend editorial and the letter signed by the press organizations to which it referred both wrote about how with chilling calculation the police set up a freedom of the press zone to keep reporters far enough away from the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators so that the press would not be able to see what happened as the police moved in to evict the protesters. According to the Times editorial, “Before clearing tents and other structures from Zuccotti Park, for example, a police representative asked journalists in the area for press credentials.” Why? The letter describes the next step complained about by the press organizations:

credentialed media were identified, segregated and kept away from viewing, reporting on and photographing vital matters of public concern. A press pen was set up blocks away and those kept there were further prevented from seeing what was occurring by the strategic placement of police buses around the perimeter.

The Times editorial makes the point that this was a violation of the Police Department’s own policy expressed in a “1999 reforms and policy statement”: “under no circumstances should the press be provided less access than that afforded the general public.” There is a good reason why that is the official policy that has to bind the police. It has to be there because of what is in that First Amendment of the Constitution of which Bloomberg is supposedly a champion. The First Amendment, binding upon New York’s mayor and his police department, says that the government shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press. That is why the Times editorial objected to the use of press credentials as a mechanism to regulate and prevent reporters from witnessing what was going on, saying: “Reporters and photographers do not need credentials to be in a public area. The passes are supposed to give them better access. .”

Suppression of the Press During the OWS Eviction: A Litany

A Gothmist blog headline addressed the gist of what was going on, and the penning in of the credentialed reporters blocks away from the scene of the eviction was only part of a bigger picture: “The NYPD Didn’t Want You To See Occupy Wall Street Get Evicted.”

Other ways the police prevented the press from being witness to the events:

• As noted in the Gothamist article, “Airspace in Lower Manhattan was closed to CBS and NBC news choppers by the NYPD”. Really? Was this done for any other reason except to block images of police routing the demonstrators? Did the police believe that Occupy Wall Street protesters were going to call in air support they had at the ready to resist eviction?

• Credentials were peremptorily and illegally seized from credentialed reporters.

• Police did not want reporters admitted to the interior private space of nearby office buildings to watch the eviction from behind the glass of those buildings from where other members of the public could witness events.

• Reporters were ordered off the streets and kept as far as three blocks away.

• When a photographer close to Zucotti Park raised his camera to photograph police carrying a protester covered with blood two police officers shoved a barricade into the photographer, “screaming” (according to the Times editorial) “that he was not permitted to take pictures even though he was on the sidewalk.”

• Journalists who were clearly journalists were “roughed up” by the police, held in choke-holds, thrown to the ground, pushed to the ground, sent to the hospital for injuries from being thrown and dragged around, and reporters (and in at least on case also that reporter’s camera) were struck with police batons. One chief police spokesman, Paul J. Browne, dismissed what was reported, officially denying that he had personally witnessed any of the multiple incidents of roughing up reported.

• Over 25 Journalists were arrested though never formally charged and many more were threatened with arrest for being in public places.

“Free Speech Zones” and “Free Press Zones” - Never The Twain Should Meet?

The evident Bloomberg philosophy is to suppress the protest and to suppress the coverage of the protest. The cumulative effect is a monumental suppression of free speech. There is undoubtedly a reason the First Amendment nestles its protection for freedom of the press in between its protection of “freedom of speech” and “the right of the people peaceably to assemble.” If you have the other two freedoms but the press can’t report it, it’s like the proverbial tree falling in the forest with no one to hear. In fact, a large part of what the Occupy Wall Street protesters are attempting to communicate in their protests is about exactly what the police actions were attempting to suppress, the response by the “Government” [and those like Bloomberg representing Wall Street and the 1%] to their request via protest “for a redress of grievances” (to employ yet one more phrase in that First Amendment).

There may be times when the protesters’ absolute right to engage in specific demonstration tactics may be questionable: Remember that one judge (Lucy Billings) issued a court order that said the protesters had a right to remain in Zucotti Park, a court order which the Bloomberg administration blatantly defied for the half day it was in effect, and then a more administration-friendly judge, Michael D. Stallman, was pulled into the fracas to rule the other way. But even when the protesters are with careful calculation choosing civil disobedience such as setting up the preplanned November 17th arrest of a symbolic 99 volunteers to be arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge (in a prearranged and orderly staging) to commemorate the Saturday, October 1st arrest of 700 Occupy Wall Street protesters as they crossed the Brooklyn Bridge with police in the lead, they are doing so as a free speech communication to be noticed and reported upon. Among other things, intentional civil disobedience is a comment that not all laws are good laws. Sometimes it is the way that all those laws converge in their affect that makes them unjust. The press needs to be able to cover such events as part of our public dialogue.

Reconciling Bloomberg Administration Suppression of Press With Characterization of Bloomberg as First Amendment Champion

How did the New York Times editorial page manage to reconcile its complaint about the “numerous inappropriate, if not unconstitutional actions” by police officers during the eviction with the Times’ recent proclamations that Mayor Bloomberg is a defender of free speech and champion of the First Amendment? It concluded with the stern admonition:

It is time that Commissioner Kelly made a serious effort to enforce the department’s own code.

In other words, as serious as the subject was, the editorial never mentioned Bloomberg once, directly or by implication.

Does this mean that despite how the police actions reflected Bloomberg’s trademark traditions Bloomberg might not have been involved? That seems unlikely: The Times reported on the day that Bloomberg evicted the Occupy Wall Street protesters that the police raid was planned in advance, carefully, minutely and in secrecy at the very highest levels with the intention that it be a surprise. (See: After an Earlier Misstep, a Minutely Planned Raid/Operation to Clear Zucotti Park, Carefully Planned, Unfolded Without Warning- the second headline is the Times print edition’s, by Al Baker and Joseph Goldstein, Published: November 15, 2011.)

In fact, there seemed to be coordination between New York City and other similarly timed Occupy Wall Street evictions elsewhere in the country. Then there is the fact that Diana Taylor, Bloomberg’s live-in girlfriend and companion, is on the board of Brookfield Office properties, the company that technically owns the public Zucotti Park space and whose security guards were involved in the police actions the day of the evictions.

If Bloomberg was going for plausible deniablity with respect to the actions taken by his police the question is how could he be doing so and still maintain that he was doing his job, especially after so many years of receiving criticism, including from the New York Times, for the way that he has dealt with protesters in years prior. In 2005, the Times editorial page addressed itself directly to Bloomberg as mayor, in criticizing his administration’s use of agent provocateurs in a “a deliberate effort to incite violence that would in turn justify a tough police response” when dealing with protesters.

Bloomberg’s Endorsement of Keeping the Press Away

That being the record how could it be appropriate for the mayor to refrain from the involvement necessary to ensure that similar things not happen again. And that being the record you can see how important it was for the press to be there and observe if similar things were, indeed, happening again.

What most damns the Times editorial’s failure to admonish Bloomberg alongside of his admonished police commissioner is that Bloomberg has already connected himself with the police tactics and endorsed their intent to keep the media away. In essence the Times editorial page was either ignoring or disavowing coverage in two of the paper’s own stories, the first covering the media blackout that day and the other covering the subsequent press complaints about it, each of which ran practically identical versions of the paragraph below:

At a news conference after the park was cleared that day, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg defended the police behavior, saying that the media were kept away “to prevent a situation from getting worse and to protect members of the press.”

(See: November 15, 2011, Reporters Say Police Denied Access to Protest Site, by Brian Stelter and Al Baker and November 21, 2011, News Organizations Complain About Treatment During Protests, by Brian Stelter.)

New York Magazine reported the mayor’s endorsement of the police tactics, following up with a terse comment) this way:

Mayor Bloomberg previously defended the NYPD's actions. "The police department routinely keeps members of the press off to the side when they're in the middle of a police action," he said last week. "It's to prevent the situation from getting worse, and it's to protect the members of the press."

That's all nice and good, but there's a difference between keeping people "off to the side" and launching them into pavement.

(See: 11/21/11, Journalists Protest Police Treatment During Occupy Wall Street Eviction, By Brett Smiley.)

Addressing Unaddressed Complaints

The letter of complaint signed by the news media was addressed to Bloomberg’s Police Department (its full text is here: New York media organizations demand meeting with Kelly, Browne about Zuccotti Park 'abuses' of the press, by Joe Pompeo, Nov. 21, 2011- I can't find the full letter on the Times’ own web site). A second similar letter sent by the New York Civil Liberties Union was addressed first to “Honorable Michael R. Bloomberg, Mayor” and secondly to Raymond Kelly as commissioner of the Police Department. That letter expresses concern about the “media backout” imposed by the NYPD effectively blocking first-hand reporting, details physical abuses and mentions the closing of the airspace over Zucotti Park to prevent news helicopters from documenting the police actions. It goes on to say that it is:

clear to us that the NYPD is aggressively blocking journalists from doing their constitutionally protected work and in some instances is even targeting journalists for mistreatment. That this has happened during a nationally important protest is all the more disturbing.

A copy of that letter is available here.

Who Signed News Organization Complaint Letter? And One Organization That Didn’t

The letter of complaint by the news organizations that the Times addressed in its editorial this weekend was signed, in addition to the Times, by more than a dozen of the most important news organizations and associations in New York, a veritably complete BINGO of everyone conceivably of importance available to sign. It includes the following:

1. The Associated Press
2. The New York Post
3. The Daily News
4. Thomson Reuters
5. Dow Jones & Company
6. The Associated Press,
7. WABC
8. WCBS
9. WNBC (NBC Universal and WNBC-TV)
10. National Press Photographers Association
11. New York Press Photographers Association
12. Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
13. New York Press Club
14. Deadline Club

Although it includes one organization, Rupert Murdoch’s Dow Jones & Company, owner of the Wall Street Journal, that famously reports on Wall Street, it does not include another major company reporting on Wall Street, Bloomberg, L.P. whose “Bloomberg TV” was given a prominent spot on the NYC Time Warner dial by City Hall (Bloomberg) and which publishes BusinessWeek. It seems that if you own the press you might no longer need to worry that it will criticize you.

Owning One’s Journalistic Principles

The Times editorial this weekend doesn’t say so but you should probably infer from it that a press that is free to go where it wants and report what stories it wants is important and a good thing. That, however, is something that the Bloomberg administration and apparently Mayor Michael Bloomberg himself doesn’t want. But if you fight for these rights in principle, what difference does it make to win them if, in the end, you are only going to report things as the administration would like them reported? Isn't that what the Times has done by compliantly passing along the administration’s recent PR that Mayor Bloomberg is defender of free speech and a champion of the first amendment. And it furthers that misguided notion by failing to chastise the mayor for the blatant suppression of the press when the Occupy Wall Street protesters were evicted. Michael Bloomberg may own Bloomberg, L.P. and that may be one of the many ways that he, with various forms of paid speech, ensures that messages he wants promulgated get out (or, alternatively are ignored), but what hold does Michael Bloomberg have on the editorial page of the New York Times that it should be guilty of such a gross lapse in not holding Bloomberg himself accountable?

Pepper Spraying Cop Gets Around: National Notice Found Him Spraying Mayor Bloomberg’s Dogs Bonnie and Clyde at Zucotti Park

If you are at all exposed to the contagions that rage through the social media then you have already been exposed to the ubiquitous meme of the “casually pepper spraying cop.” The image plays off and derives from police Lt. John Pike pepper spraying a line of seated Occupy protesters at the University of California, Davis that was also captured in a video that went viral. The protesters and those witnessing the incident responded by chanting “Shame on you” and “Who do you protect?” (Video below).



One of my more frequent encounters with the CPSC was seeing on people’s Facebook pages an altered version of George Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” below. Another favorite is Christana of Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World” getting a facefull.

Images are collecting at this Tumblr site: Pepper Spraying Cop.

The list goes on, Peanuts characters, Cindy Loo Who, Muppets, Gandhi, an appearance in Picasso’s Guernica, or flipping things, CPSC becomes part of the "Clockwork Orange" gang.

The phenomena has been covered by National Public radio’s “All Things Considered” ('Casually Pepper Spraying Cop' Meme Takes Off: Categories: Technology, National News, by Mark Memmott, November 21, 2011) and in an article of surprising thoughtfulness in the New York Times (Pepper Spray’s Fallout, From Crowd Control to Mocking Images, By Katherine Q. Seelye).

I thought it was time for National Notice to contribute images to the furiously compiling flurry of images. My immediate instinct was to build upon a Photoshop theme I have played with before although it makes for multi-step mental process to appreciate the product rather than what might be achieved by riffing off an immediately recognizable icon: Mayor Bloomberg’s dogs, bizarrely named after Bonnie and Clyde, two bank robbers who, via folklore and a movie directed by Arthur Penn, have become imbued with a certain Robin Hood reputation, robbing from those who have too much.

The dogs are not as quintessentially helpless, nonthreatening, or carefree as some of the images others have composited. Nor are they classic pacifists as in other compositions that involve Jesus and Gandhi. They don’t epitomize American liberty as do the iconic images pressed into service by others.

Originally I Photoshopped the dogs joining the Occupy Wall Street protesters because it seemed that if they were named after Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde the dogs, having more in common with the protesters, ought to be joining them. It also seemed especially absurd that, the way things were originally going to happen, the New York Times was going to run a `Mayor loves (or tolerates) his dogs story’ on the same morning he was going to evict the Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zucotti Park, although it didn’t finally happen that day.

Anyway, I figured that these days the mayor’s dogs, if they could, would still be hanging out with the Occupy Wall Street protesters and that means that the “casually pepper spraying cop” would naturally want to show up to spritz the placid animals.

For more about Bloomberg’s Bonnie and Clyde including pictures see:

• Saturday, October 22, 2011
Occupy Wall Street and the Banks- Messages From Bonnie & Clyde, “They’ve Got Too Much Money”: Ownership of the Public Forum by the Wealthy?

• Monday, October 24, 2011
On NPR, Echo of Coinciding Principles Noticed: What the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street Ought To Agree On