Avuncular American

"The Army of Crime" - Criminal, Terrorist, or Patriot?

L'Armée du Crime

The lump that was in my throat during the 139 minutes of L'Armée du Crime, Robert Guédiguian's dramatization of the "Manouchian Group" story has subsided, but the emotion remains.  This is a good, old fashioned, based-on-fact war story that needed to be told, and in the veteran French-Armenian director's hands, it has been done justice.

"Justice," such as it was during the dark years of the Nazi Occupation of France and the active collaboration of the Vichy government of Maréchal Pétain, was of course in the hands of the victors.  The Manouchian Group - we know their fate in the film's first moments - is given a show trial and accused of carrying out "terrorist acts" against the occupier.

The film does not actually glorify terrorism - few of the group are natural killers, least of all poet Missak Manouchian, who becomes its leader - but its portrayal of the various assassinations, ambushes, and bombings carried out in Paris is factual.  The Musée de la Résistance Nationale has lent its stamp of approval, even providing an excellent "teachers' guide" available on the film's official site.

The film's poster tells you the essentials: Manouchian's collection of resistance fighters - "Jews, Poles, Hungarians, Italians, Spanish, and Armenians" - came from the ranks of the MOI, la Main-d'oeuvre immigrée, foreign communists who had found refuge in France, and many of whom were veteran anti-fascists from the Spanish Civil War.  The film deftly shows their trajectory from simple immigrant workers lying low during the early days of the Occupation, through uncoordinated individual acts against the Germans, to full-blown integration into what became the Resistance.

Guédiguian has a stable of actors who regularly surface in his films, and one of his regulars, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, playing the composite character of "Commissaire David," manages to incarnate the contradictions and betrayals that were the hallmark of French officialdom's reaction to defeat at the hands of the Germans.  While Darroussin's understated performance captures all the ambiguity, the script sometimes hammers French culpability down our throats, especially when depicting torture by French police - not Nazis.

All of which, Guédiguian tells us, is based on historic documentation.  Even the soundtrack is historically significant: listen to Maurice Chevalier's "Ça sent si bon la France" and savor not only the irony in the 1941 song's selection for the soundtrack, but reflect that the crooner was long shunned after the war for his dalliance with collaboration.

Terrorism, torture... you might get the impression that the director is trying to send a contemporary message while educating his audience on a part of French history often overlooked.  That would be correct: Guédiguian is a committed leftist, who mourns the passing of the kind of militant trade unionism that was the petri dish for the Manouchian Group.

French men and women who remember that their soldiers tortured Algerians in their war of independence but forget that Frenchmen tortured Frenchmen in the Nazi cause will find L'Armée du Crime unnerving.  Americans who acknowledge that "enhanced interrogation" has been carried out in their name will be reminded that water torture is not always as clean and clinical as shown in stock Pentagon or CIA footage.  And we used to think it was only the Gestapo that did such despicable things.

At least the 23 members of the Manouchian Group, tortured and executed in the dank dungeons along the Seine for their adopted country, now have a fitting cinematic tribute to their bravery.

US Health Care: What's So Difficult?

Anyone passing through Brussels and interested in the history of medicine would do well to visit Notre Dame à la Rose in Lessines (photo, left), a town to the west of the city.  Given over to historical tourism since the 1980s, as a "hôtel Dieu" it served to heal the poor for hundreds of years.  You'll be forgiven if you think you're in a cloistered monastery: nuns dispensed treatment for body and soul in a self sufficient complex, replete with its own river and mill, vegetable garden, and farm.

You'll never complain about your doctor again once you've seen the wax image of his 17th century forebear (photo below, right).  Just take a look at his instruments (those were the days of bleeding and trepanation) and count your lucky stars that you only have to say "aahh" on a dry popsicle stick tongue-depressor.

Basic as the care was, it was the best that was on offer at the time, and the nuns, doctors, and other personnel knew that if they didn't care for the sick poor, no one would.  Not only would they care for body and maybe save souls, but they would have the personal satisfaction of salvation, and of doing the right thing.

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Okay, fast forward to the US Congress this week, where Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan, said this of President Obama's efforts to make health care available to all Americans:

You will have to call a bureaucrat and hope to God his calculator is more compassionate and smarter than your doctor. (NY Times)

Obviously Rogers hasn't checked with his doctor, who may be one of the 450,000 clamoring for health care reform.  Nor has the good Congressman had to deal with an insurance company "gatekeeper" whose job it is to find every conceivable excuse to disallow treatment of patients.  Give me a government bureaucrat any day.

Here's what I can't understand: all the statistics show that the US spends way more than other advanced countries on health care, but gets results that are sub-prime, to say the least.  The same Republicans who decry "government" intervention passed a massive giveaway to private insurers via Medicare during the Bush years.  Their defense of health care appears to exclude dispensing it to anyone save the insurance industry lobbyists who finance their campaigns.

Do they just want to send people to the Poorhouse, that other institution from a bygone era that has gone the way of the hôtel Dieu?

Come on, people, it's not so difficult.  Other countries spend far less, with better results, and it's just not an issue in politics.  It's a human right.  Something that the good nuns and doctors of the hôtel Dieu understood centuries ago.

Planet Earth: The Final Frontier

Yes, yes.  Happy 40th moon landing anniversary, NASA.  There are celebrations galore to mark the event, which I suppose is fine, given the general gloom prevailing.  But let's not get carried away.  There is nothing on the moon - or on Mars - that is nearly as important as there is on Earth.

Listening to all the Apollo nostalgia, you hear lots of stuff about not only exploring Mars, but colonizing it.  And some even see this as the ultimate escape from a dying Earth.  These people, I submit, have watched too many Star Trek episodes.

Even former astronaut Buzz Aldrin has succumbed to the mania, calling in today's Washington Post for "the first homestead in space: an American colony on a new world."  Oh my.

Climate change on a vast scale has reshaped Mars. With Earth in the throes of its own climate evolution, human outposts on Mars could be a virtual laboratory to study these vast planetary changes.

Well, Buzz, the real life laboratory is Earth in the here and now, and the goal has to be keeping Earth green and livable, not studying how Mars became the Red Planet.

Almost every day, there is a new dire report on how bad things have become so quickly, whether it's our seas becoming acidic, our glaciers melting, or the tropics heading north.  Doing the necessary on an urgent basis - drastically reducing greenhouse gases, protecting forests and wetlands, to name only a few priorities - will require effort that will dwarf that of the space program.

Do we want to divert precious resources from the fight to save Earth to mount a quixotic attempt to colonize a planet millions of miles away?  Talk about a distraction from Priority Number One.  Maybe we need a massive "place branding" campaign for the place that can't be replaced - Earth.

I'm no Luddite, and admit that research for space exploration has produced highly useful spinoffs in the battle to save planet Earth.  But we Earthlings cannot entertain notions of trashing our planet and finding refuge on Mars.  We can't just continue to pollute our way to the next pristine wilderness; there aren't any left.  It worked for a while - picture American pioneers heading ever Westward - but the trash builds up, if not in landfills, then in terms of carbon trash in the air and in our oceans.  The atmosphere - the ultimate bubble - holds it all in.

So honor those astronauts, engineers, and scientists who gave us the original Moon Walk, but harbor no illusions about Mars providing a home away from home.  And the next time you hear a politician go on about Mars exploration, bring him down to Earth.

(image: AppleWorks clipart)

Images of Immigration: Welcome, Visitor... to Eden

No, this is not a report on a film festival dedicated to "undocumented aliens" or "clandestins" as they're known in France.  In fact, it's not even the first time that a number of films treat the theme of immigration - Siegfried Mortkowitz of Deutsche Presse/Agentur thought the 2006 Cannes Festival did that.

But the last few months have seen at least three films treating "illegal immigrants" as individual human beings, surely not a bad thing when the tendency is to treat them as an abstraction - mere numbers, or faceless, nameless shapes furtively crossing the US-Mexican border at night, or washing up on Europe's shores.

Welcome

"Welcome" (poster, Mars Distribution), Phillippe Lioret's 2009 film, is an effective treatment of citizen solidarity with illegal immigrants.  The setting is Calais, the French port from which car ferries shuttle across the English Channel.  It's also a kind of no man's land for streams of young men (mostly) from the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, desperately hoping to sneak their way across to Britain.

France dismantled its processing center at Sangatte years ago, but demolition of the building did nothing to stop the flow of immigrants.  Instead of congregating in one center, they are now dispersed among the region's woods and sand dunes, camping rough and dependent on the charity of the region's residents.  While "Welcome" was still playing in French theaters this spring, protesters organized demonstrations against the "délit de solidarité" (the law whereby helping a clandestine immigrant can land you in jail, even if you are just distributing food) by parading with signs daring the authorities to "arrêtez-moi."

Welcome manages to depict this mess - for that's what French immigration policy is - credibly, and shows the authorities going about their grim business in a brusque but businesslike way.  The casting is first-rate, and there is no yielding to temptations for either stereotyping or happy endings.

The Visitor

In Tom McCarthy's The Visitor (released in Europe late 2008/early 2009), more kudos for casting, and for showing the diversity of the US immigrant scene beyond the Sonoran Desert.  Here it's New York, and the intertwined lives of an American teacher who stumbles into solidarity with a hapless guy who overstays his visa, a Syrian who falls afoul of the Patriot Act's roundup of people with a Middle Eastern look or name.  I found the depiction of the windowless detention center very effective, and Richard Jenkins' college professor is justifiably enraged by his impotence at the hands of the "please stay away from the window, sir" security guards, who are now ubiquitous in America.  Imagine how the immigrants feel (though the 2007 film more accurately portrays the aura of the Bush years, the laws have remained unchanged).

McCarthy, who toured the Middle East thanks to a State Department grant, came back wanting to delve more into the culture of an area of the world that so few Americans know first-hand.  The Visitor is by no means that cultural primer, but it does show in microcosm some of the difficulties of adaptation into post-9/11 America for people who just want to do what immigrants have always done in the US - settle down, earn a living, raise a family.  Hopefully America's immigration chief - Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who appears to have a nuanced understanding of her remit - will see The Visitor.

Eden à l'ouest

Costa-Gavras (he does have a first name, Constantin) has produced a sort of immigrant fable, "Eden à l'ouest."  It is an interesting addition to his oeuvre, which mostly consists of hard hitting political films like "Z" and "Missing," dealing with dictatorships, impunity, and repression.  Costa-Gavras, who himself made his way West to France in the 1950s, sees his film as an Odyssey - others have seen his principal character Elias as an updated autobiographical reference to Costa-Gavras' own journey.

There is a certain Euro-speak use of English in Eden à l'ouest, but it can be forgiven when put in its context of a Mediterranean resort dealing with an influx of boat people.  Other than "Eden" (Paris), you're never sure where the rest of the action is taking place.  Again, when migrants ditch their passports in the Med, people's origins - like those of Elias - become blurred.

Everyone wants a piece of Elias, symbolic perhaps of what Western societies get out of illegals.  We're happy to have our trash picked up by people whose papers may not be quite in order - Elias winds up working at some point for a recycling firm which profits from the precarious situation of its "temporary" employees.

Some may be put off by a subplot involving a magician, and there have been comparisons to an immigrant version of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton.  But the stress remains more on the realistic than the magical, and the lot of the modern migrant is more likely to be rags than riches.

Check Into the Parliament Hotel

Gluttons for punishment can check out the Guardian's special page on the furore over parliamentary profligacy in the UK.  There's everything from toilet seats to televisions.

Others, recognizing the utility of parliamentary democracy as long as it does not go the way of the Roman Senate, might want to check into the "Parliament Hotel," my suggestion for reigning in costs and giving elected representatives a better sense of being on the job, not on the take.

(Image thanks to the real Parliament Hotel in Cape Town South Africa, where Pretoria and Cape Town share in hosting the seat of government - the cabinet has to shuttle back and forth when Parliament is in session, perhaps not the best example of efficiency, but it does spread the wealth.)

So here is my proposal for Parliaments from London to Luanda, by way of Capitol Hill: find a decent hotel near your national assembly, buy it with stimulus funds, renovate it into adequate but Spartan suites, and make your congresspeople, MPs, senators, or deputies stay there when parliament is in session.  Presumably they are representing constituents from a home district, so that's where they should have their home.  But when they are in _______ (fill in the name of the capital city), they stay in their parliamentary hotel suite.

I'm not talking about a fold-down bed in the office (in this season of European Parliament elections, French TV showed an MEP in his minuscule office, pulling down what I swear was a couchette-sized "bed" for those late-night sessions).  No, Hotel Parliament would provide a spacious suite where the elected official could relax, even set up a kids' room for when they come to see the big city, and grab a snack at the in-house cafeteria when she doesn't feel like cooking).

Unfortunately for the Mother of Parliaments, all the attention on the expenses row has somehow created the impression that UK MPs are the worst offenders.  The BBC provides a nice, if limited, comparison of parliamentary perks in a number of European countries, where Italy comes out - again - as the most generous (they are already the highest paid MEPs) to its deputies:

Political journalists Gian Antonio Stella and Sergio Rizzo have exposed the excesses of the political class in a new book, The Caste: How Italian Politicians Have Become Untouchable.

How about the US House of Representatives and the US Senate, collectively known as Congress?  Ouch.  When you have to have detailed sets of rules about "Officially-connected travel paid by a private source" and "Travel unrelated to official duties and paid for by a private source," you know that you're entering ambiguous territory.  That terrain is called lobbying, and I daresay that the current imbroglio in Britain over reimbursement for moat-cleaning would pale in comparison to a full disclosure by Americans in Congress.

"Many Members travel home more than 40 times a year," says the helpful Congressional Management Foundation, which provides an eye-opening budget guide for the freshman Congressperson.  Try doing that - plus hiring staff for Washington and home district offices - on the average $1.3 million (2005 figures) in public money allotted and you'll understand just one of the reasons that American politicians look for help from lobbyists.  We know, of course, that such assistance does not come for free.

So, while "Hotel Parliament" would not solve all the dilemmas of parliamentary expenses, it would at least remove one excuse for all these contraventions of arcane rules.  Make sure the hotel security people keep lobbyists out of the lobby.

Unfinished Business: France's Colonial Liberators

64, not being a memorable number, doesn't have the same symbolism as, say, 65.  I'm talking about commemorations, as in today's ceremonies throughout France and other European countries, marking the beginning of the end of World War II - "V.E. Day."  Victory in Europe, May 8, 1945 - sixty four years ago.

Bill Clinton did the right thing by traveling to Moscow for the last big one, the 50th in 1995.  We tend to forget the crucial Soviet role in defeating the Nazis these days - but Russian President Medvedev won't let that happen.

Forgotten too are the promises made to rectify the unjust treatment of "colonial" troops who helped liberate France in the Second World War (the photo at left is of one of the Algerian tirailleurs buried in the First World War cemetery of Notre Dame de Lorette, regularly desecrated by vandals).

Today French President Nicolas Sarkozy, marking the anniversary of the German surrender at Reims, decided to travel to the Mediterranean coast, the scene of the landing by (mostly colonial) French forces in August 1944, and today a gathering of much of France's naval might.

"France will never forget their sacrifice," said the President of the colonial soldiers, nor their "admirable courage."  Perhaps.

But by choosing this particular site and by singling out the colonial troops, he called attention to one of the major items of unfinished business in post-war France: how it is that 64 years after the end of the war, the average metropolitan French war veteran gets an $800 monthly pension and the average North African gets about $100?

Was this a conscious decision to make them return to their villages in the Atlas Mountains?  Separate them from their children, born in France?  Many of these veterans still have only limited rights when it comes to length of stay in France.

"Les oubliés de la République," as they are called by an association of the same name (logo below right), do indeed appear to be forgotten by the Republic that they helped save.  As one of their members noted wryly on French radio, "will the last indigène get a state burial and then be forgotten?"  Indigènes, the 2006 film that brought then-President Jacques Chirac to pledge an end to discriminatory treatment of the colonial veterans, was a reasonably good war film that portrayed a group of North African French soldiers, "Band of Brothers" style.  It packed a powerful ending: a few minutes of flash-forward showing one of the heroes in present-day France, eking out a living in a decrepit one-room apartment.

The disgraceful treatment of these French soldiers of color began early, and not only at the hands of the French.  As German troops blitzkrieged their way through Belgium and France in May-June 1940, some 17,000 African soldiers were killed, many executed by the Germans after they had surrendered.  But the Allies were little more enlightened in matters of color.  Last month the BBC unearthed documents that showed how American and British generals insisted that their French counterparts constitute photogenic "all-white" units to parade through liberated Paris.

On this day of solemn commemoration and pious hypocrisy, "Les oubliés de la République" reminded us that President Sarkozy's first act in office was to give a generous "bouclier fiscal" or tax cut to his wealthier constituents.  And that it would cost a fraction of that bill to give the dwindling ranks of "les oubliés" a decent living.

Spies On the Prowl: Romeos and Rapists

Two stories, related only in that they involve spies, sex, and women as victims.

The first story is of the alleged rape of Algerian women by a CIA operations officer, Andrew Warren, who was the station chief in Algiers until removed after accusations that he had raped Algerian women after drugging them.  Yesterday, the Washington Post carried an extensive article about the scandal, which has the potential to cause problems in US-Algerian relations.  The excellent English-language blog on North African affairs, "The Moor Next Door," provides insights on the Algerian reaction.

In the process of explaining spy tradecraft, WaPo's Joby Warrick and Jeffrey Smith tell us that

As CIA case officers attempt to recruit a foreign spy, they often offer personal inducements, ranging from cash to medical care. In some cases, a potential recruit may be taken to a strip club or even to a prostitute if it is deemed critical to cementing the relationship, longtime officers say.

Now, we've always known that women have been used as enticements in all manner of circumstances, and it probably comes as no surprise that Puritan America is not beyond practicing the "honeytrap" approach in its spy operations.  The allegations against Warren go way beyond this, however, and would put him in the same category as John Worboys, the London taxi serial rapist who drugged his victims.

But how about when men are used to entrap women?  I recommend listening to BBC World Service radio's "Assignment" program, here on podcast, on the East German Stasi's use of "Romeo Spies," specially selected male specimens who lured unsuspecting West German women to spy for the East during the Cold War.  The program profiles the case of Gabriele Kliem, who was recruited by the Stasi for her access to US secrets as an employee of the American Embassy in Bonn, and who lost everything as a result.  The program points out that while some 30 western women were prosecuted in similar cases, ex-Stasi agents have been largely able to get away scot-free.

There is no link, as I say, between the Algerian and East German cases.  But the juxtapostion this week of the two stories this week is fascinating.

We Are Scandalized - Scandalized!

The Great American Sport of Witch Hunting

For American expats suffering bouts of insomnia, the 10:00 PM EST live feed of CNN's "AC360" (3:00 AM CET) is sometimes a way of checking the pulse in the "old country" (well, MY old country, in the sense of land of my birth).  Years ago, French "Canal +" TV used to rebroadcast the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather early the following morning, nicely shorn of commercials to a compact 20 minutes.  Like the Anderson Cooper show, it was a way of seeing what Americans were watching.

These days, that would be THE AIG BONUS SCANDAL.  For those who have been away from their news sources, you'd probably have to have been in the outer reaches of the Gobi Desert not to have heard of the millions distributed to the employees of the company that has received billions in bailout money for problem derivative debt in the trillions.

In "School For Scandal: The Larger Meaning of the Sordid Little Tale" in this month's Harper's, Laura Kipnis marvels at our capacity to continue to be shocked - shocked! - at the foibles of the high, the mighty, the fast, and the loose.  Kipnis, who is preparing publication of her own book "How To Become A Scandal," reviews two new books on the subject, the more interesting of which is entitled "The Art of the Public Grovel: Sexual Sin and Public Confession In America" by Susan Wise Bauer.

Unless I'm missing something, I'm unaware of a sexual angle in the AIG BONUS SCANDAL or for that matter in the BERNARD MADOFF SCANDAL.  No matter.  Laura Kipnis wants to tell us that we're down in the weeds (or is it the gutter?), and need to look up:

We're looking for the life raft that would save us, the crucial missing piece of knowledge - something that would change the outcome.  Clearly we're looking in the wrong place: the truths we need are hidden in plain sight; the depredations of power are no secret.  How much anger toward leaders and elites gets played out around their minor personal missteps, how much sense of social injury; yet how little of it is directed at the moral failures and inequities that actually matter.

What actually matters is apparently what was on President Obama's mind yesterday, at the town hall meeting in Costa Mesa California that AC360 juxtaposed with its own "town hall" in a Detroit area bar.

The President:

But these bonuses, outrageous as they are, are a symptom of a much larger problem. And that is the system and culture that made them possible – a culture where people made enormous sums for taking irresponsible risks that have now put the whole economy at risk. So we are going to do everything we can to deal with these specific bonuses. But what’s just as important is that we make sure we don’t find ourselves in this situation again, where taxpayers are on the hook for losses in bad times and all the wealth generated in good times goes to those at the very top.

"The system and culture that made them possible," as the President said, is still very much present, despite all the sputtering in Congress.

Gail Collins in today's New York Times ("The Grievance Committee"), who can be counted on to get to the sardonic root of things, is "totally angry at everybody in Congress for trying to pretend that they’re angrier than I am."  She thinks she's figured out where the President is on this:

Sure he keeps saying he’s mad. But you can tell that he secretly thinks it’s crazy to obsess about $165 million in bonuses in a company that’s still got $1.6 trillion in toxic assets to unravel.

I think Collins/Obama are right.  And I think CNN got it way wrong, yesterday, trying to out-populist and out-town meeting the Prez, and trying to link his White House and his party to some sort of responsibility for allowing the (fat) cats to escape the bag.  He's The Solution, not The Problem - let's keep that straight.  He's Roosevelt, and we just said goodbye to Herbert Dubya Hoover.

But TV news, whether CNN or Fox, likes to rub its hands in glee over scandals of its own devising.  Human nature never changes.  Read this, from my current bedtime reading:

To think about events realistically, in terms of multiple causations, is hard and emotionally unrewarding.  How much easier, how much more agreeable to trace each effect to a single and, if possible, a personal cause!  To the illusion of understanding will be joined, in this case, the pleasure of hero worship, if the circumstances are favorable, and the equal, or even greater pleasure, if they should be unfavorable, of persecuting a scapegoat.

The excerpt is from Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudun, which is as old as I am but makes for great reading (maybe that's what caused my insomnia: director Ken Russell did justice to this horribly true tale in his extravagant 1971 epic The Devils).

Hero to... scapegoat.  Such was the fate of Father Grandier, popular "virtuoso orator" in Huxley's words, who threatened  vested interests but eventually fell afoul of public opinion.  He was burned at the stake.

CNN, which should know better, should be wary of any tendency to want to contribute to the Rush Limbaugh "I want him to fail" movement opposing Barack Obama's attempts to steer the ship of state away from its current very dangerous waters.  Supertankers, we are told, take a long time to change course.  Inauguration Day was all of 58 days ago.

Blind Bloviators: Comedic CNBC + MoJo Hits WSJ

If you haven't seen the Daily Show's Jon Stewart giving it good to CNBC "financial commentator" (that's a bit like calling Bernie Madoff a "banker") Jim Cramer, then here is the extended version (unexpurgated).  It's full of quotable stuff, but my favorite is Cramer's explanation of why CNBC has so much junk financial talk on tape, providing Daily Show editors with a gold mine: "We've got 17 hours of live TV to do" daily.

To which Stewart replies, "Maybe you should cut down on that..."  Which goes to the heart of the problem of TV "news" or, more accurately, infotainment.  CNBC has to say something during those 17 hours of live (presumably they are not better informed during the remaining 7 hours of taped material).  And that's just one network.  Can you imagine the total amount of drivel that America's hundreds of cable channels must churn out daily?

It used to be "the news," as in "did you see the news last night?"  There was CBS in pride of place, followed in order of reputation by NBC and ABC.  Only later did PBS come along.

Less, in the case of TV news, was more: in the sixties and seventies, Americans getting their information from one of the networks could count on a rich mix of reports from foreign correspondents, in-depth investigative reporting, and the occasional prime-time documentary.  Now you have to fork out upwards of $10 to see "Why We Fight" or "SiCKO" at the local multiplex, when the networks used to do stuff almost as good, and all you had to do was watch their commercials from the comfort of your sofa.

And don't get me started on the disappearance of American correspondents from points beyond the continental shelf.

Enter MoJo - Mother Jones, which is making a name for itself for the quality of its investigative reporting - to take on the print media.  Actually, MoJo beat the Daily Show by a couple of months in its castigation of the princes of print financial reporting.  In "Buying the Bull: How could 9,000 business reporters blow the biggest story of their beat?" former WSJ reporter Dean Starkman's ire is no less heartfelt than Jon Stewart's.  But he goes deeper:

but it wasn't just the media abdicating their watchdog role: Just as financial news outlets were weakening, regulators were also abandoning the field, leaving business reporters starved of the investigative leads they rely on. Back in the 1980s, a great deal of tough Wall Street coverage was driven by the aggressive work of prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission (sec). But then came the Clinton-era push toward deregulation that reached its extremes during the Bush administration as the federal government unceremoniously pulled the finance cops off the beat. For a time, Eliot Spitzer filled the void with his aggressive prosecution of Wall Street misdeeds, but for the most part, covering financial corruption without regulators was like trying to clap with one hand.

Starkman then provides some amazing examples of just how lax the Bush Administration had gotten in its fiduciary responsibilities: "Since 2002 the ftc has brought no major consumer lending cases. Zero. The last such case brought by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, against Providian National Bank, came in 2000."  That's it.  No wonder financial journalists weren't getting the leads. He quotes Jonathan Weil, who helped break the Enron story, who wrote in the waning days of the Bush era:

"Is there anybody left in the government with a pulse? Where's the yellow police tape? How about a cease-and-desist order to prevent document destruction? Can anyone give me a good reason why Lehman offices shouldn't be treated as a crime scene now?"

As Weil, Starkman, and Jon Stewart know, Bernard Madoff isn't the only perp.  But the perps were aided and abetted by see-no-evil "regulators" and "financial reporters."

Crisis: In the Beginning, There Were Homes

Bankruptcy should always be a last resort in our legal system.  If someone does not pay his or her debts the rest of society ends up paying them.

President George W. Bush, 20 April 2005, signing the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act

The worldwide financial, economic, political crisis - "la Crise" as it's know in these parts - had its origin you know where: in the United States.  George W. Bush's ignominious departure from the scene makes it more difficult for foreigners to assign blame - the White House being under new management and not responsible for the mess - but foreign leaders know that the crime scene is squarely on U.S. soil.

I say this because even the charmed Barack Obama, who starts his Presidency with an immense reserve of international good will, gets reminded with regularity that American solutions cannot include American protectionism.  Obama has taken notice.

Domestically, cognitive dissonance among Republican politicians - the malady where those most responsible for creating the mess try to transfer blame onto the new Democratic President - runs rampant.  Presidential post-partisanship doesn't yet show any signs of paying off.

Perhaps tomorrow (we're told that the Treasury Secretary's unveiling has been postponed) we'll learn more about the one item missing so far from all the bailouts: help for homeowners (how about former homeowners?), or should I say mortgage payers (or non-payers?).

Paul Reyes ("Bleak Houses: Digging Through the Ruins of the Mortgage Crisis") wrote about it in the October 2008 Harper's.  No other eyewitness account gets quite as close to the desperation as Reyes', but last weekend in the New York Times, Damien Cave gave us an update from the same mortgage ground zero "In Florida, Despair and Foreclosures."  He quotes Randy Burns, a local store owner:

“Until there’s jobs and foreclosures stop,” he said, “nothing’s going to change.

Jobs are presumably a large part of the fiscal stimulus bill having such trouble with those righteous Republicans, who don't see the connection between spending and jobs.  But foreclosures, repossessions, evictions, homelessness... What's being done about that?

George Packer in The New Yorker has a short video report from the same area.

As Damien Cave puts it: "Welcome to the American dream in high reverse."  Housing, sorry, homes - that's what used to set things apart in the United States, including for people new to its shores.  Sure, they might have been thrown up in days, made out of wood and gotten thrown around in tornadoes and hurricanes, but they were home.  And they made life decent for people who were trying to make the most of limited incomes.

But the same selfish attitude apparent in Bush's "Bankruptcy Abuse" act - making it harder for people at the low end of the scale - drove Republican responses to the emerging Sub prime Crisis in the latter Bush years.  Here's my question: what would it have taken, early on, to solve the mortgage crisis? A trillion dollars, at most?  Scary figure, but today Bloomberg puts the figure for government commitments (Treasury Department, FDIC, Federal Reserve) at "$9.7 trillion, enough to pay off more than 90 percent of the nation’s home mortgages."

Back in the old Sub prime days, it was mostly just people at the bottom end of the scale who were getting thrown out of their homes.  Now, as The Economist put it last week, it's "Move over, subprime: Decay is spreading to the upper floors of America's mortgage market."

So, my question: when will the trillions in commitments, guarantees, pledges, TARPs and TALFs make their way down to those who are most in need?  We know that nasty fund managers have been spreading bonus money to their favorites from bailout bucks, but how many families have been kept in their homes thanks to one of these programs?  Anyone?

Mr. Geithner, we await your presentation.  Meanwhile, maybe the US Government should partner with Habitat for Humanity to get some of Paul Reyes' Bleak Houses habitable again.