Beautiful Horizons

Too big to be held accountable for grand theft ?

Seems to be the case...

It's time to pardon bank robbers. Their actions seem no less than prescient...and nothing close in terms of creating havoc or financial loss the to the serial crimes of the Banksters. 

Via Atrios.

The Baader Meinhof Complex

When I lived in Germany in the 1970's, the Baader Meinhof Gang aka the Red Army Faction (RAF), were the Al Qaeda of that decade. A group of leftist middle class terrorists, they targeted media, especially the Axel Springer Group, publisher of the wretched Bild Zeitung, US military sites in Germany, including Campbell Barracks in Heidelberg, resulting in the death of three, and numerous bank robberies to finance their activities, one of which took place in Kaiserslautern about nine months before I moved there.

I recently got the BluRay disc of The Baader Meinhof Complex, a film that was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in 2008 and cannot recommend it enough. It faithfully captures the era, but it is also an excellent character study of the main protagonists: Andreas Baader, the leader was captured effectively in all his rage, sexism and bombast, Gudrun Ensslin, Baader's girlfriend and a fiercely dogmatic and subtly cruel "revolutionary" and Ulrike Meinhof, the journalist turned terrorist, willing to wreck her daughter's lives in the name of "revolution." The two scenes that resonated with me deeply were the blatant culture clash at the Fedayeen training camp in Jordan and the moment when Ulrike Meinhof has the opportunity to say no to terrorism and, by jumping out a window, says yes.

I am also reading the book on which the film is based, Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F., by Stefan Aust. While the book is gripping, it appears to have been translated rather poorly and for a British English reader, using such terms as holdall (a duffel bag in England, I believe) and boot for a car trunk.

Notwithstanding the fact that he and Ulrike Meinhof worked for the same publication at one point and he knew her, he injects precious little of himself in the book. Indeed, it was him along with a former RAF member who rescued Meinhof's daughters from being turned over to a guerrilla training camp in Jordan and reunited them with their father. He did so, I might add, at great personal risk. His account in the preface may be one of the most dry examples of understatement I have ever read:

There was an attempt after that to shoot us in Hamburg, but it failed.

I do believe that I would find it difficult to be quick that casual about it.

A Sensible View From the Right

Greg Weeks tips me to this article in The American Conservative. Unlike much of the hysteria from the right, his comments are sensible, fact-based with extensive documentation and worth a read. As Greg notes, here's the major takeaway from the article:

The evidence presented here powerfully refutes the widespread popular belief that America’s Hispanics have high crime rates. Instead, their criminality seems to fall near the center of the white national distribution, being somewhat higher than white New Englanders but somewhat lower than white Southerners. Taken as a whole, the mass of statistical evidence constitutes strong support for the “null hypothesis,” namely that Hispanics have approximately the same crime rates as whites of the same age.

This part resonated with me:

Prior to moving back to my native California, I lived for five years in Jackson Heights, Queens, one of the most heavily immigrant and ethnically diverse parts of New York City. There as well, white Europeans were a small minority and immigrants from various Latin American countries were the largest ethnic group, close to an absolute majority of the local population. On a typical afternoon or evening, probably 80 percent of the people walking the streets of my neighborhood were non-white, and on dozens of occasions I returned home from Manhattan on a late-night train, the only white face in the subway car. Yet in all my years of living there, I never encountered a hostile or menacing situation, let alone suffered an actual criminal attack. Hardly what one would expect from television images, let alone the wild claims made by conservative magazines or talk radio.

I have lived in Jackson Heights for nearly nine years and in my experience it is the safest place in which I have lived in New York. I urge you to read the article. While there are probably many things I wouldn't agree with Unz about, I do respect the care and intelligence with which he wrote the article.

We're Number One!

And it's nothing to be proud of, as Gary notes.

My Only Comments About Roman Polanski

I've enjoyed some of Roman Polanski's films. Yes, Chinatown was brilliant, but I'm inclined to give more credit to Robert Towne's screenplay, Cul-de-sac, may be his most under-appreciated work and Repulsion still gives me chills as does Rosemary's Baby.

Some of have been dreadful. What may be the single greatest argument against the use of cocaine.  The Tenant had me chuckling at the end. Pirates? The Fearless Vampire Killers? If you can't say something nice about someone . . .

It is worth noting the level of misogyny in his films:

• The wife with the straying eye in Knife in the Water
• The disturbed and homicidal young woman in Repulsion
• The cheating wife in Cul-de-sac
• Mia Farrow spawning the devil's baby
• Lady Macbeth (!)
• The Faye Dunaway character in Chinatown

All of this is irrelevant to his guilt or innocence as Jay Smooth so eloquently explains. Hat tip to Jessica Valenti.

Ruth Madoff

This is for you, Ruth Madoff: the world's smallest violin.

 

Sen. Jim Webb and the possibility of criminal justice reform

Is there some hope on the horizon for dealing with this festering complex of problems ?

From TPM:

Washington, DC--Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) today introduced bipartisan legislation to create a blue-ribbon commission charged with conducting an 18-month, top-to-bottom review of the nation's entire criminal justice system and offering concrete recommendations for reform. Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA), Ranking Member on the Judiciary Committee, is the principal Republican cosponsor.

The National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009, S.714, is the result of decades of investigation and more than two years of intensive fact-finding in the U.S. Senate. In the 110th Congress, Webb chaired two hearings of the Joint Economic Committee that examined various aspects of the criminal justice system. In October of 2008, he conducted a symposium on drugs in America at George Mason University Law Center.

"America's criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace," said Senator Webb. "With five percent of the world's population, our country houses twenty-five percent of the world's prison population. Incarcerated drug offenders have soared 1200% since 1980. And four times as many mentally ill people are in prisons than in mental health hospitals. We should be devoting precious law enforcement capabilities toward making our communities safer. Our neighborhoods are at risk from gang violence, including transnational gang violence.

Webb continued: "There is great appreciation from most in this country that we are doing something drastically wrong. And, I am gratified that Senator Specter has joined me as the lead Republican cosponsor of this effort. We are committed to getting this legislation passed and enacted into law this year."

More here.

Another Step Backwards

This is bad:

In a major shift of policy, the Justice Department, once known for taking down giant corporations, including the accounting firm Arthur Andersen, has put off prosecuting more than 50 companies suspected of wrongdoing over the last three years.

Instead, many companies, from boutique outfits to immense corporations like American Express, have avoided the cost and stigma of defending themselves against criminal charges with a so-called deferred prosecution agreement, which allows the government to collect fines and appoint an outside monitor to impose internal reforms without going through a trial. In many cases, the name of the monitor and the details of the agreement are kept secret.

Deferred prosecutions have become a favorite tool of the Bush administration. But some legal experts now wonder if the policy shift has led companies, in particular financial institutions now under investigation for their roles in the subprime mortgage debacle, to test the limits of corporate anti-fraud laws.

Of course they'll test the limits - and break them. Fines can merely get included as the cost of doing business. Criminal prosecutions and the prospect of jail time is the only thing that they fear.

Experience II

I just read that the Fed-backed deal by JP Morgan to buy Bear Stearns, which tanked in the wake of the totally predictable sub-prime mortgage market collapse, has just been sweetened. Originally the price offered was $2 per share. Now it's been upped to $10 a share. Which means that overnight the estimated price of this entity has increased by a factor of five. One Wall Street analyst, Richard Bove (who also argues that because of the way the deal is structured over time Morgan will end up paying at least five times as much as the $10 per share on offer) states flatly, "Bear Stearns is a deeply troubled company which would have no value if the Federal Reserve had not stepped in to bail it out."

Far be it from me - a lowly taxpayer dragooned into securing J.P. Morgan against losses from this acquisition - to understand these machinations and fluctuations, but I believe it's also fair to say that the "experts" involved in these deals - and the sub-prime crisis in general - are at least as clueless. Also rather remarkably shameless.

I Feel Vindicated

Last month I wrote this in a post about the recovery of the Picasso and Portinari works stolen from the Museum of Art in São Paulo (MASP):

I have never understood the point behind stealing works of art. If the Mona Lisa were stolen again, would someone really display it in their home? Would someone actually be stupid enough to buy it from the thief?

It appears that art thieves are generally a rather stupid bunch:

“No one theory can fit all examples of art theft, but I think it’s often an I.Q. test for not-so-smart criminals, and a lot of them fail,” said James Mintz, the principal of a corporate investigations firm with offices in New York, London, Zurich and other cities that has handled art cases.

Many of the most notorious art thefts in past decades bear him out and illuminate a strange disconnect between the enduring mystique of art theft and the reality of its perpetrators. The theft in Vienna in 2003 of a gold-plated saltcellar made by Benvenuto Cellini, valued at $60 million, was traced to a 50-year-old alarm-systems specialist with no criminal record. The police, who caught him after he tried to ransom the sculpture, called him a “funny guy” who had decided to take the Cellini more or less spontaneously. A divorcé who lived alone, he kept the sculpture under his bed for two years.

Just last year, two men suspected in the theft of two paintings and a drawing by Picasso from the Paris home of Diana Widmaier-Picasso, a granddaughter of the artist, were caught on the street carrying the paintings, estimated to be worth more than $60 million, rolled up in cardboard tubes.

It's practically enough to get even Mike Huckabee to believe in natural selection.

One small correction to my original post last month. It appears that the MASP theft was a theft to order for a collector.