Peg Kerr's Journal

This is the first live interview with the Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen, who was hit by a police projectile and suffered a skull fracture during the Occupy Oakland protests.

"There are three ways to make a living in this business:
Be first
Be smarter
or cheat."

I ran across a reference to the movie Margin Call a couple of times in the past few weeks, in the course of my obsessive reading about the Occupy Wall Street protests and the larger issue of how this country got so off track in the financial markets and political process. My interest was piqued by a couple of reviews that singled it out as 'the finest Wall Street movie ever made.'

Well, I haven't seen all the Wall Street movies ever made and so can't judge whether that's true, but I did go see Margin Call last night and found it to be really good. Specifically, it was a well done story that particularly examined a panalopy of characters who come to make dubious, even reprehensible, ethical decisions in the workplace. The writer/first time director, J.C. Chandor does a superb job with a helluva cast. (It must be in the blood: Mr. Chandor's father was with Merrill Lynch for forty years.)

What it particularly reminded me of was the movie that was made from John Dean's book Blind Ambition. (John Dean was Richard Nixon's counsel and was a central player in the Watergate scandal). Dean's book was so memorable, probably the best written of all the players caught up in those events, because it is mercilessly self-analytical. As one reviewer put it, "Rare indeed is a memoir so utterly lacking in self-righteousness, false piety, and special pleading." I vividly remember reading the passage where Dean sits down with his law books and carefully researches how far, exactly, he has broken the law. When he wrote the memoir, he pinpoints the first bad decision he made, a temptation to shade the truth just a little. It happened about a month after he started working at the White House. And when he finally sat down with those law books and faced the truth about what he had been doing, he realized that when he stepped over the line, he didn't even see it, and from there he continued most of the way down to hell. By the time it dawned upon him what he had done, he had long since fashioned the jaws of the trap that was at that very moment closing over his head.

Margin Call is like that. It takes place in a thirty-six hour period, when it dawns upon a young hotshot in the risk department of an brokerage firm (clearly based on Lehman Brothers) that the firm is overleveraged and in serious financial trouble. His boss gets called in, and his boss's boss, and as the question of what to do rises inexorably up the ladder, the dreadful truth becomes clear: they can admit what has happened and in doing so destroy the company--or they can sell these toxic assets, attempting to clear them off the books in one day before everyone else discovers their worthlessness, in an attempt to save themselves. Of course, once they've done so, they'll spread the poison outside the firm, ruining people's lives, and probably destroying the company anyway. Who would ever buy from them again?

One by one, the characters must face up to the ethical decision, and we learn the reasons why they decide the way they do. And in that harrowing thirty-six hours, some realize that the ethical decision was already made, possibly in some cases years ago. And they never even saw it when they first stepped over the line. And just as it's too late to save the firm from the toxic assets, it's too late to turn aside from the path of doom.

( Here's the trailer )

Have you seen Margin Call? What did you think?

I think I also want to see the documentary Inside Job.

Amazing video below gives you the infamous UC-Davis incident from four angles at once in real time. Starts with just two angles, then more.

An interesting article in the Washington Post about an internet meme springing up, which photoshops the image of the cop spraying the protestors at UC Davis into all sorts of famous paintings. See the Tumblr here. The closest similar example I can think of were the various photoshop jobs that added pictures everywhere of Princess Beatrice's hat, or Aretha Franklin's hat at Obama's swearing in.

What do you think? Is it a mistake to turn this episode into a joke? Or is it a clever commentary on the nature of brutality against peaceful protest, and a useful device to shame the cop?

Reich may be diminutive in stature (he's always been my secret choice to play Miles Vorkosigan if they ever cast the movie), but his ideas are huge. The UC Berkeley public policy professor and former U.S. Secretary of Labor is famously outspoken on issues of wealth and poverty (he teaches a class with that very title, after all), and has a keenly activist bent on the subject. He delivered the Mario Savio Memorial Lecture last night to a crowd of thousands who had gathered on the steps of Berkeley’s Sproul Hall to see him, to rally the thousands of students, alumni, and other occupiers stationed at Berkeley's Sproul Plaza, and you can hear the entire speech below, courtesy The Daily Californian.

The annual lecture—which honors the most prominent figure from Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement—was originally supposed to be held in a ballroom in the student union. But that changed after police were caught on video last Thursday beating students and professors who were refusing commands to disperse from the same area where some of the most famous events of the Free Speech Movement had took place almost 50 years ago. After Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau issued a statement saying the police had been “forced” to use their batons on the protestors—he has since said he hadn’t seen the video when he made that statement—faculty and student associations called for a general strike. And the decision was made to merge the lecture with the protests.

Reich argues that maldistribution of economic clout results in unbalanced political power. This, he says, is why the whole 99% vs. 1% thing is such a problem; because it's causing the upset of American democracy. Now close your eyes and picture yourself at the foot of the "Mario Savio steps":



For some very helpful context about the significance of the namesake of the lecture series, Mario Savio, see Rachel Maddow's show last night.

Okay, the (barely) underlying music is cheesy and manipulative.

It's still a great rant.

Remember that anti-Occupy Wall Street blog We Are the 53% that I had linked to earlier?

Well, someone has done some nifty detective work to demonstrate that this image on that blog is a total fake.

This is a must-read, with jaw-dropping charts.