News Corp. headquarters in New York. (Photo: Mary Altaffer/AP/DAPD)Here in Manhattan the other day, you couldn’t miss it — the big bold headline across the front page of the tabloid
New York Post,
screaming one of those sick, slick lies that are a trademark of Rupert
Murdoch’s right-wing media empire. There was Uncle Sam, brandishing a
revolver and wearing a burglar’s mask. “UNCLE SCAM,” the headline
shouted. “US robs bank of $13 billion.”
"The
problem: ideology and self-interest trump the facts or even caring
about the facts, whether it’s banking, Obamacare or global warming."
Say
what? Pure whitewash, and Murdoch’s minions know it. That $13 billion
dollars is the settlement JPMorgan Chase, the country’s biggest bank, is
negotiating with the government to settle its own rip-off of American
homeowners and investors — those shady practices that five years ago
helped trigger the financial meltdown, including manipulating mortgages
and sending millions of Americans into bankruptcy or foreclosure. If
anybody’s been robbed it’s not JPMorgan Chase, which can absorb the loss
and probably take a tax write-off for at least part of it. No, it’s the
American public. In addition to financial heartache we still have been
denied the satisfaction of seeing jail time for any of the banksters who
put our feet in cement and pushed us off the cliff.
This isn’t
the only scandal JPMorgan Chase is juggling. A $6 billion settlement
with institutional investors is in the works and criminal charges may
still be filed in California. The bank is under investigation on so many
fronts it’s hard to keep them sorted out – everything from deceptive
sales in its credit card unit to Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme to the
criminal manipulation of energy markets and bribing Chinese officials by
offering jobs to their kids.
Nor is JPMorgan Chase the only
culprit under scrutiny. Bank of America was found guilty just this week
of civil fraud, and a gaggle of other banks is being investigated by the
government for mortgage fraud. No wonder the camp followers at Fox
News,
The Wall Street Journal, CNBC and other cheerleaders have
ganged up to whitewash the banks. If justice is somehow served, this
could be the biggest egg yet across the smug face of unfettered,
unchecked, unaccountable capitalism.
One face in particular: Jamie
Dimon, the chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase. One of Murdoch’s Fox
Business News hosts, Charlie Gasparino, claims the Feds are on a witch
hunt against Dimon for criticizing President Obama, whose
administration, we are told, “is brutally determined and efficient when
it comes to squashing those who oppose their policies.” But hold on:
Dimon is a Democrat, said to be Obama’s favorite banker, with so much
entree he’s been doing his own negotiating with the attorney general of
the United States.
But that’s crony capitalism for you, bipartisan
to a fault. Rupert Murdoch has been defending Dimon in his media for a
long time. Last spring, when it looked like there might be a
stockholders revolt against Dimon, Murdoch was one of many bigwigs who
rushed to his defense. He tweeted that JPMorgan would be “up a creek”
without Dimon. “One of the smartest, toughest guys around,” Murdoch
insisted. Whether Murdoch’s exaltation had an effect or not, Dimon was
handily reelected.
"Ignorance will kill
democracy as surely as the big money that funds and encourages the media
outlets, parties and individuals who spew the lies and hate."
Over the last few days,
The Wall Street Journal,
both Bible and supplicant of high finance as well as one of Murdoch’s
more reputable publications — at least in its reporting — echoed the
“UNCLE SCAM” indignation of the more lowbrow
Post. The
government just wants “to appease their left-wing populist allies,” its
editorial writers raged, with a “political shakedown and
wealth-redistribution scheme.” Perhaps, the paper suggested, the White
House will distribute some of the JPMorgan Chase penalty to consumers
and advocacy groups and “have the checks arrive in swing congressional
districts right before the 2014 election.” We can hear the closet
Bolsheviks panting for their handouts now and getting ready to use their
phony ID’s to stuff the box on Election Day with multiple illegal
ballots.
Such fantasies are all part of the Murdoch News Corp.
pattern, an unending flow of falsehood and phony populism that in
reality serves only the wealthy elite. Fox News is its ministry of
misinformation, the fake jewel of the News Corp. crown, a 24/7 purveyor
of flimflam and the occasional selective truth. Look at the pounding
they’ve given Obama’s healthcare reform right from the very start,
whether the non-existent death panels or claims that it would cause the
highest tax increase in history.
While it’s true that the startup
of Obamacare has been plagued by its website nightmare and other
problems, Fox News consistently has failed to mention Republican
roadblocks that prevented the program from getting proper funding or the
fact that so many states ruled by Republican governors and legislatures
— more than 30 — have deliberately failed to set up the insurance
marketplaces critical to making the new system work. Just the other day,
Eric Stern at
Salon.com fact-checked a segment on Sean
Hannity’s show. “Average Americans are feeling the pain of Obamacare and
the healthcare overhaul train wreck,” Hannity declared, “and six of
them are here tonight to tell us their stories.”
Eric Stern
tracked down each of the Hannity Six and found that while their
questions about health reform may have been valid, the answers they
received from Hannity or had decided for themselves were not. “I don’t
doubt that these six individuals
believe that Obamacare is a disaster,” Stern reported. “But none of them had even visited the insurance exchange.”
And
there you have the problem: ideology and self-interest trump the facts
or even caring about the facts, whether it’s banking, Obamacare or
global warming. Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists say that
climate change is happening and that humans have made it so, but only
four in ten Americans realize it’s true. According to a new study in the
journal
Public Understanding of Science, written by a team that includes Yale University’s
Anthony Leiserowitz,
the more that people listen to conservative media like Fox News or
Limbaugh, the less sure they are that global warming is real. And even
worse, the less they trust science.
Such ignorance will kill
democracy as surely as the big money that funds and encourages the media
outlets, parties and individuals who spew the lies and hate. The ground
is all too fertile for those who will only believe whatever best fits
their resentment or particular brand of paranoia. It is, as an old song
lyric goes, “the self-deception that believes the lie.” The truth will
set us free; the lie will make prisoners of us all.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Journalist Bill Moyers is the host of the new show
Moyers & Company,
a weekly series of smart talk and new ideas aimed at helping viewers
make sense of our tumultuous times through the insight of America’s
strongest thinkers.. His previous shows on PBS included
NOW with Bill Moyers and
Bill Moyers Journal. Over the past three decades he has become an icon of American journalism and is the author of many books, including
Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues, Moyers on Democracy, and Bill Moyers: On Faith & Reason.He
was one of the organizers of the Peace Corps, a special assistant for
Lyndon B. Johnson, a publisher of Newsday, senior correspondent for CBS
News and a producer of many groundbreaking series on public television.
He is the winner of more than 30 Emmys, nine Peabodys, three George Polk
awards and is the author of three best-selling books.
Michael
Winship, senior writing fellow at Demos and president of the Writers
Guild of America-East, is senior writer for Bill Moyers' new weekend
show
Moyers & Company.
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Jon Stewart Goes on Epic Smackdown Against CNBC, FBN 'F*ck All Y'all!'
Published on Oct 23, 2013
Jon
Stewart does not often dip into the shenanigans of the financial world,
but when he does, it's certainly something to see. And he set his sites
Wednesday night on financial networks CNBC and Fox Business Network for
their incredibly hyperbolic outrage over JP Morgan paying a settlement
fine of $13 billion.
Business analysts are calling the settlement a
"shakedown and a jihad." Stewart took it one step further, suggesting
"it's like if the Holocaust had sex with slavery while the last ten
minutes of Human Centipede watched!"
Stewart pointed out how JP
Morgan anticipated potential litigation issues and set aside a rainy day
fund. "And guess what? It's raining, motherfucker!" He mercilessly
mocked the two networks for their unqualified defense of anyone and
everything in the business world, and ended the segment with an
impassioned "Fuck all y'all!"
..........
JPMorgan Chase's $13 Billion Fine Pales Next To Profits From Crisis Deals
If
JPMorgan Chase is a scapegoat, it is an extremely well-paid scapegoat:
The crisis-era mergers that are costing the bank a small fortune in
fines probably have racked up an even bigger fortune in profits.
Many on Wall Street, including
the Wall Street Journal editorial page, are in a fit of rage over the news that JPMorgan
has struck a tentative deal to pay $13 billion to settle federal charges that it sold bad mortgage securities to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ahead of the crisis.
The
source of the rage is the fact that most of these securities were sold
by Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, two banks that JPMorgan bought in
2008 to help calm the financial crisis.
It seems JPMorgan is
being punished unfairly for its kind-hearted assistance to the U.S.
government at its darkest hour. That should make JPMorgan and other
massive banks far less likely to come to the rescue in the next
financial crisis, in Wall Street's view.
“My only hope,” bank analyst Gerard Cassidy of RBC Capital Markets
sobs on the Wall Street Journal's MoneyBeat blog,
“is that the next time a large financial institution gets into trouble
and the government calls a large bank CEO to help with a bail out that
he chooses not to pick up the phone.”
But before we start playing
the world's smallest violin for America's biggest bank (by assets), it
is worth remembering that JPMorgan and its CEO, Jamie Dimon, knew the
risks when they bought Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual. They took the
good with the bad, and there will likely be a lot more good from those
deals than bad.
When asked for comment on this story, JPMorgan
spokesman Joseph Evangelisti pointed to Dimon's annual letters to
shareholders in the
past two years,
saying "he gives plenty of detail on the pluses and minuses of the WaMu
and Bear purchases." You can read them for yourself, but I didn't see
all that much detail in them. The 2010 letter has a
little bit more detail, but no tally of the pros and cons.
In
each letter, Dimon brags that the bank absorbed Bear Stearns and
Washington Mutual without hurting its capital levels. That is at least
partly because JPMorgan bought both banks at fire-sale prices.
Read More and Watch Video Here
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Posted: 10/21/2013 11:42 am EDT | Updated: 10/22/2013 2:57 pm EDT