The Financial Meltdown: Crime on the Street

To Organize Against Wall Street, We Need a Narrative Focusing on Crime and Massive Fraud by Danny Schecter

In politics, it’s always all about the narrative, about how issues are framed.

As we ask ourselves, how we can be experiencing the largest economic meltdown in decades with millions out of work, and millions more losing their homes, and yet, with no real mass mobilization or ongoing response from the progressive world.

To understand this paradox, we need to reflect on how most of us we define the problem.

To this day, there has not been an aggressive investigation of who and what brought down the system ala the Pecora Commission appointed by FDR. Instead we have a wimpy ineffectual body that can’t get its act together. The New York Times, which hailed its appointment, now buries its defacto obit way back in the business section, noting it has “been hobbled by delays and internal disagreements and a lack of focus,”

At the same time, the bookshelves are filling up with volumes of complicated treatises on the complexities of derivatives, risky profit models and credit default swaps. The practitioners of the “dismal science” of economics are having a field day with longwinded dissertations that fail to engage the popular imagination.

We had a word for this when I worked in network television—MEGO, standing for “My Eyes Glaze Over!”

More popular writers are spinning catchy “yarns” like “The Big Short” which put it all down with psychologically-driven, character-based storytelling to how deluded everyone on Wall Street was. That leaves us feeling superior to the dunderheads who lost us trillions and, then, laughed all the way to their mansions in the Hamptons.

Hahaha.

Missing is a hardnosed look at the financial crisis as a crime story---an approach that allows for morality as well as indignation, and resonates with public anger. It touches the nerve that most people feel.

This is why former Bank Examiner William Black focuses on looting and CEO fraud. He helped send over a thousand bankers to prison during the S&L crisis in the l980’s.

And, this is also why Senator Ted Kaufman of Delaware, the state where most of our corporations are registered, says categorically the whole crisis rests on a foundation of crime.

The rest of the story: To Organize Against Wall Street, We Need a Narrative Focusing on Crime and Massive Fraud by Danny Schecter (Global Research 2010-04-14). More about Plunder.

Action: contribute to the production of Plunder at dissector@mediachannel.org.

Filmmaker and News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org and is a frequent contributor to Global Research (Global Research articles by Danny Schechter).