Sunday, 15 May 2011

The People vs. Goldman Sachs

They weren't murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it.
Thanks to an extraordinary investigative effort by a Senate subcommittee that unilaterally decided to take up the burden the criminal justice system has repeatedly refused to shoulder, we now know exactly what Goldman Sachs executives like Lloyd Blankfein and Daniel Sparks lied about. We know exactly how they and other top Goldman executives, including David Viniar and Thomas Montag, defrauded their clients. America has been waiting for a case to bring against Wall Street. Here it is, and the evidence has been gift-wrapped and left at the doorstep of federal prosecutors, evidence that doesn't leave much doubt: Goldman Sachs should stand trial.
The great and powerful Oz of Wall Street was not the only target of Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse, the 650-page report just released by the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan, alongside Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. Their unusually scathing bipartisan report also includes case studies of Washington Mutual and Deutsche Bank, providing a panoramic portrait of a bubble era that produced the most destructive crime spree in our history — "a million fraud cases a year" is how one former regulator puts it. But the mountain of evidence collected against Goldman by Levin's small, 15-desk office of investigators — details of gross, baldfaced fraud delivered up in such quantities as to almost serve as a kind of sarcastic challenge to the curiously impassive Justice Department — stands as the most important symbol of Wall Street's aristocratic impunity and prosecutorial immunity produced since the crash of 2008.
To date, there has been only one successful prosecution of a financial big fish from the mortgage bubble, and that was Lee Farkas, a Florida lender who was just convicted on a smorgasbord of fraud charges and now faces life in prison. But Farkas, sadly, is just an exception proving the rule: Like Bernie Madoff, his comically excessive crime spree (which involved such lunacies as kiting checks to his own bank and selling loans that didn't exist) was almost completely unconnected to the systematic corruption that led to the crisis. What's more, many of the earlier criminals in the chain of corruption — from subprime lenders like Countrywide, who herded old ladies and ghetto families into bad loans, to rapacious banks like Washington Mutual, who pawned off fraudulent mortgages on investors — wound up going belly up, sunk by their own greed...

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Matt Taibbi @'Rolling Stone'

Google and Facebook are fighting for our lives

Censors told to ignore artistic merit of child pictures

Photograph: Bill Henson

One of Australia's most prominent child protection advocate, Bravehearts, has weighed into the art censorship debate, calling for the Classification Board to be overhauled and for matters of ''artistic merit'' and expert evidence to be scrapped when deciding if art is pornography.
Bravehearts's submission to a Senate inquiry into the film and literature classification scheme was one of several submissions highly critical of the board for allegedly sanctioning the exhibition of photographs of children that would otherwise be illegal, and for failing to halt the proliferation of images that demean women and pressure young girls to act in sexual ways.
Other community and Christian groups wanted the board's power increased so it could censor outdoor advertising, which is at present self-regulated by an industry body, the Advertising Standards Bureau.
The executive director of Bravehearts, Hetty Johnston, an outspoken critic of the work of the photographer Bill Henson, called for NSW employment laws that ban taking photographs of naked and semi-naked children to be replicated across Australia and said such photos should be refused classification by the board.
''How is it that it was illegal to take the photos but not illegal to exhibit them?'' she said, referring to photographs Henson took of a naked 12-year-old girl that were exhibited at a Sydney art gallery in 2008, sparking a ferocious debate about pornography and art.
Ms Johnston said the Classification Board should not be able to render such images ''inoffensive to reasonable persons'' and therefore legal just because it had rated them G or PG.
''Deferring such critical decisions to a panel of selected individuals in a separate process is, in our view, not only unfair and unwise, it is dangerous. The Henson debate proved that.''
The group Collective Shout criticised the board for not censoring sexualised images in films, TV and the internet, and demeaning depictions of women in music recordings. It said self-regulation in advertising was ''lazy, irresponsible government'' that ''effectively [demanded] lone citizens enter into an exhausting and often futile battle with the government classification board which appears to defend corporations''.
Kids Free 2B Kids was angry children were bombarded with adult sexualised imagery on billboards, including images that if displayed in the workplace would be considered sexual harassment. It said it seemed the only criteria for an ad to be pulled was if a female's nipples or genitalia were exposed.
No matter how many complaints were received by the Standards Bureau, advertisements such as one for Wranglers jeans showing part of a woman's buttocks, topless women in GASP Jeans ads, and outdoor ads for brothels would continue to be permitted in the public domain, it said.
The director of the Classification Board, Donald McDonald, defended the board's work to the Senate inquiry but said that while the Classification Act was ''perfectly in tune'' for some things it was outdated for others. He said also that it would not be unreasonable for outdoor advertising to fall under its auspices.
''[The act] works perfectly for films and DVDs. It works quite well for publications. What it does not work for are things that are published on the internet,'' Mr McDonald said.
Wendy Frew @'SMH'