Lance Mannion

A nation of main-chancers: The ironic tragedy beneath the black comedy of "The Big Short"

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Friday night, February 14, 2020. Posted Wednesday night, February 26.

“Tell me the difference between stupid and illegal and I’ll have my wife’s brother arrested.”: Ryan Gosling in “The Big Short” as a top securities trader at Deutsche Bank gleefully looking forward to profiting off the collapse of the housing bubble in 2008 and with it the U.S. economy, a man so nakedly self-interested that, as another character says of him, you have to respect the guy.

Watched "The Big Short" for family movie night. Hadn't seen it in four years. You Know Who wasn't president when it came out in 2015 and didn't seem likely to be. So his name probably didn't cross my mind when I saw it the 1st time, except maybe toward the end when Ryan Gosling's character tells us how "they" will blame immigrants and the poor for the bubble and its bursting. Maybe not even then. Lots of people were at work doing that blame-shifting before he descended his golden elevator. He was just repeating what they were saying, doing what he always does, stealing other people’s ideas and claiming them for his own.

But tonight his name was running through my head almost from the opening title card to the final credits, because the name Deutsche Bank kept showing up from start to finish. Gosling's character works for Deutsche. And I had a thought.

Keep in mind I know less than nothing about these things. But my thought was: What if the reason Trump is hiding his tax returns is he's hiding something else?

Along with just about everyone else I’ve taken it for granted that what he's hiding is how deep into debt with the Russians he is, and the money's been laundered through Deutsche Bank.

And he doesn't want his adoring fans who love him for his money---they equate making money with intelligence, talent, strength, and God's favor---to find out he's not the billionaire he played on TV.

Plus I think he's doing it out of perversity. He does things just to make people mad. He does things just to prove he can. He does things just because it gets him into trouble. He does things to get attention, even, maybe especially, negative attention

So there doesn't have to be anything rational or cunning or advantageous about it. He is, after all, a lunatic

But here's my thought. What else doesn't he want them to know about him that his tax returns would show?

That he's honest?

Trump thinks everybody is as corrupt and crooked as he is. And, because of the worlds he's traveled in---show business, New York City politics, the business of making money by playing with other people's money---he has reason to think so.

And his base believes the same thing---that everybody in those worlds are as corrupt and crooked as he is. That's one of the reasons they love him. They believe he's their crook, pulling fast ones on the other crooks on their behalf.

What I was thinking, then, is that the returns would show that he wasn't working on their behalf. He was working against them.

He was in on it.

He made money off their losing their jobs and their homes and their pensions. He made money off their pain.

Again, keep in mind I know less than nothing about these things. And that's with my having read the book. I don't kid myself that I learned anything from Margot Robie in her bathtub and Anthony Bourdain and his fish stew.

I wouldn't put it past him though. He has the soul of a house flipper. So I was wondering, has anyone looked into it?

Well, I’m anyone.

So I looked.

There’s this thing called Google.

I Googled “Trump mortgage crisis”.

And I found...Trump Mortgage.

And I found that CNN had looked into it in 2016.

And they’d found that he at least tried to get in on it.

"I met my wife on match.com. My profile said that I'm a medical student with only one eye, an awkward social manner, and 145 thousand dollars in student loans. She wrote back, "You're just what I've been looking for!" She meant honest."

In 2006, the year after the real-life counterpart of Christian Bale’s character in “The Big Short” saw the housing market bubble for the bubble it was and predicted its coming collapse, Trump started a mortgage brokerage and began to lay the groundwork for a mortgage bank.

It was the most Trumpian business enterprise you can imagine.

He saw other people making money, the suckers lining up to buy in, and rushed to the head of the line to set up his own booth, without doing any real homework or preparation, hired the “best people”---

E.J. Ridings was tapped to run Trump Mortgage, but his business credentials raised some red flags.

A 2006 report by Money Magazine claimed Ridings made "false or misleading claims" about his professional background. The article called into question his claims of being a top Wall Street executive and his experience in the mortgage world....

---launched with a creatively hyperbolic sales pitch---”creative hyperbole” is his term for lying---that was mostly all talk, hot air, and self-promotion---

Despite the warning signs, Trump was still upbeat about the real estate market.

During an April 2006 interview on CNBC, Trump said he thought it was "a great time to start a mortgage company," according to a transcript of the interview.

"I've been hearing about this bubble for so many years from you and everybody else in your world, but I haven't seen it. I will let you know when I see it."

He also said during the interview that the company was "swamped" with customers seeking out financing and that "the real estate market is going to be very strong for a long time to come."

---quickly lost interest and focus when he didn’t make a pile of dough right away, got out while the getting was good, blaming the failure on others on his way out the door and at the same time implying his bailing on his own failure was proof of his business acumen---

Today, Trump's presidential campaign calls the failed business a "tiny deal."

"[That] was a tiny deal that Mr. Trump looked at, but never ultimately moved forward with because Mr. Trump decided he didn't want to be in this business foreseeing the market crash," Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks told CNNMoney via email.

When asked for further clarification, Hicks repeated that the company was "just a look."

"Mr. Trump has over 500 companies. This was just a look, but he decided he didn't like the market."

Of course this news failed to sink in, just like all the other news showing him up as a charlatan, mountebank, and business incompetent. In fact, his voters were inclined to see things as Trump wanted them to: that his record of botched schemes and failed enterprises of unmatched success and proved how smart and savvy a businessman he was and how fit he was to run the country.

"If we're right, people lose homes. People lose jobs. People lose retirement savings, people lose pensions. You know what I hate about fucking banking? It reduces people to numbers. Here's a number - every 1% unemployment goes up, 40,000 people die, did you know that?"

Here’s the thing.

The trouble is that in order to get people to see Trump for the fraud and con man he is you have to get them to see themselves as the fools and suckers they’ve been.

No one wants to admit they’re that dumb and greedy.

What’s more, you have to get them to see themselves as complicit in their own defrauding and that the people they have most to blame are themselves.

It must be someone else’s fault. There must be someone else to blame.

That’s Trump’s base in a nutshell. That’s populism, right and left.

"I don't get it. Why are they confessing?"

"They're not confessing.""                       

"They're bragging."                                 

"We’re a nation of main-chancers, lookers-out-for-Number One, and What’s-in-it-for-mes. Rules are made to be broken is our motto. They’re not rules, so much, anyway. More like guidelines. There are exceptions to every rule anyway, loopholes in every contract, and all laws are subject to interpretation with us as the interpreters. Laws are to keep other people in line, anyway, and shouldn’t apply to us because we’re good guys and good gals and whatever we good guys and good gals need to get done for our own good must be good and for the good. If there isn’t a cop around and we can’t see how it will hurt anyone, laws and rules that get in the way of our doing what’s best for us can be ignored, circumvented, or straight up defied and broken.

Fundamental to “The Big Short’s” effectiveness as a satire is the way it starts out making us see it as a comedy, even a farce, then changes almost imperceptibly to an ironic tragedy as it goes, and when it finally gets there makes us realize it’s been one all along.

"You think I'm a parasite, don't you, Mr Baum? But apparently society values me, very much."

When they set out to short the mortgage industry, in essence betting against the housing market and with it the U.S. economy of which it’s a mainstay, our three teams of protagonists---the doctor turned hedge fund manager, Michael Burry (Bale); the naive neophytes Charlie Geller and Jamie Shipley (John Magaro and Finn Witrock), reluctantly advised and assisted by the disillusioned and paranoid Wall Street veteran in self-imposed exile in California; and the wiliest and most aggressive group led by star hedge fund broker Mark Baum (Jeremy Strong, Rafe Spall, Hamish Linklater, and Steve Carell as Baum), in an easy alliance with the nakedly greedy, ultra-cynical, and amoral securities trader Jared Vennett (Gosling)--- “I can't hate him,” Baum says of him, “He is so transparent in his self interest that I kind of respect him.”--- see themselves as good guys out to bring about a kind of rough justice by wresting a big chunk of the ill-gotten gains of the corrupt bankers, hedge fund managers, and mortgage brokers who have turned a system that’s supposed to help people realize their dreams of home ownership into a vast conspiracy to defraud them, the government, and honest investors. Baum, especially, sees himself as an agent of vengeance. But the closer they come to their goal, the less certain of their own virtue they become.The bad guys they confront are clowns, self-deluded fools, and cartoon villains. And they encounter few true victims. The characters they meet who have been taken advantage of made themselves easy marks through their own vanity, greed, and willful ignorance. Eventually it dawns, to varying degrees, on all of them that they themselves are among the bad guys they’ve been out to beat at their own game: their game is their game. Winning means benefiting from the corruption of the system and the collapse of the United States economy that follows from the system’s inevitable failure. Winning, then, means benefiting from millions of people’s pain, heartbreak, and misfortune.

What’s worse is the realization that they’re not going to refuse to accept the benefits. The realization is hardest on Baum. It breaks his heart to admit that he’s not the moral hero he thought he was and he’s going to take the money and and kill a piece of his soul as he puts it in his pocket.

"Saints don't live on Park Avenue."

In the end, only the cynic Vennett seems happy. But his happiness is not just with the money he pockets. He’s pleased that his belief in other people’s stupidity and greed has been validated and that no one appears to have learned a lesson. The greed and stupidity will continue. Vennett is the movie’s fourth-wall breaking narrator and he has the last spoken words in the movie:

In the years that followed, hundreds of bankers and rating-agency executives went to jail. The SEC was completely overhauled, and Congress had no choice but to break up the big banks and regulate the mortgage and derivative industries. Just kidding! Banks took the money the American people gave them, and used it to pay themselves huge bonuses, and lobby the Congress to kill big reform. And then they blamed immigrants and poor people, and this time even teachers! And when all was said and done, only one single banker went to jail…

____________________________________________________________________________________________

“The Big Short”, directed by Adam McKay, written by Charles Randolph and Adam McKay, and based on the book by Michael Lewis, "The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine", and starring Steve Carell, Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling, Marisa Tomei, John Magaro, Finn Wittrock, Jeremy Strong, Rafe Spall, Hamish Linklater, and Tracy Letts, with Brad Pitt and Melissa Leo, is available to watch instantly at Amazon.

Filed under Best Pictures of the 2010s according to Lance.

I’m an Amazon associate and earn a (very small) commission for books etc. bought through the links on the blog.

Where have you gone, John Galt? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

The infuriating irony of all these Randian sociopaths running around pretending to be wealth creators and excusing their monstrous selfishness on the grounds that they’re the reason the rest of us aren’t starving in the streets, as if there’d be streets without them, is that virtually none of them is the sort of Galtian hero they profess to admire.

They don’t build anything. They don’t create anything. They don’t run anything, they manage.  There are no schools of Business Creation.  Nobody gets an MBB, a Master’s of Building a Business.  The key word in their schools and on their degrees is Administration.  They are trained to be administrators, another way of saying bureaucrat. Bureaucrats do not build, create, or run things.  They maintain the bureaucracy for their own comfort and advantage.

And they don’t want to build anything, create anything, or run anything.  They just want the money that comes from things that have been built, created, and run by other men and women.

They are thieves and pirates, looters, moochers, parasites, and skimmers, and they want the money.  All of it. Now.

_____________________

Sorry. In a mood. Had to vent. I’m better now. Back to The Avengers.

Welcoming Committee

They weren’t all down in Union Square, but notice the dog is the only one paying attention to unsavory characters getting off the train from upstate.  Just outside Grand Central, looking up West 43rd Street.  Shortly after 5:00 PM this evening. Tuesday. May 1, 2012.

The Hillman Prizes

A heads up:

Since 1950, the Sidney Hillman Foundation has honored journalists who pursue investigative reporting and deep storytelling in service of the common good. Sidney Hillman was the founding president of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union of America, a predecessor union of Workers United, SEIU. Sidney Hillman, an architect of the New Deal, fought to build a vibrant union movement extending beyond the shop floor to all aspects of workers’ lives.

The Hillman Foundation is awarding its journalism prizes for 2012 this evening in New York City and I’m about to catch a train down to be at the ceremony.  Not to get an award.  To applaud the distinguished honorees and while there, blog about it, Facebook it, Twitter it, send of dispatches by carrier pigeon, and maybe mail a few post cards.  Best way to follow the action is to check in on my Twitter feed starting at around 6:00 PM Eastern.

There’ll be a bunch of other blogger types there, including hometown faves Tom Watson and M.A. Peel.  You can keep track of all of us via the Twitter hashtag #Hillman2012.

And of course I’ll be posting about it when I get home.

Very impressive list of prize winners, headed by the Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates.  But also Musician and activist Tom Morello will be honored with a special public service award.  (I hope he got his 10,000 guitar players to join his band at Occupy Wall Street today.)  He’ll be singing for his supper tonight, but here’s the man at work right now:

American pie

Together we make a pie.  We call it the country.  It’s the combination of the nation’s wealth and the nation’s bounty and the nation’s goods and good.  The Preamble to the Constitution gives the recipe and defines the finished pie.  We all kick in.  Most us contribute our money and our sweat.  We go to work, do our jobs, pay our taxes, pay our bills, buy stuff.  We do what we can to help keep our neighborhoods and our communities together. And the nation thrives and prospers.  The pie is made.

Some of us kick in more money than others.  Some kick in more sweat.  Some of us have nothing to give but sweat.  Some of us add nothing but money.  Doesn’t matter.  We’re all sharers in the making.  We all bake the pie.

Except when it comes out of the oven it turns out that the people with the most money---who are not necessarily the people who’ve kicked in the most money and who together haven’t kicked in anywhere near the most sweat---are standing right by the oven door to claim the pie as the own.

“We paid for this pie!” they say.

They didn’t, of course.  We all paid for it.  We all made it.  It belongs to all of us.  But while they may not have paid for the whole pie, they’ve bought the most politicians, they’ve had the laws written to privilege and benefit themselves, and the laws somehow allow them to claim first dibs. 

First dibs is not the same as owning the pie, though.  So they’re forced to give some of it up.

“Tell you what,” they say, “Since we paid for the pie”---they don’t mind repeating the lie---“but out of the goodness of our hearts we’re going to share it with you”---as if they have a choice---“We get to decide how to divvy it up.  We’ll slice the pie.”

And they do.  They slice it into thousands of pieces.  And out of every hundred of those thousands of pieces they keep ninety for themselves.

When they’re done it’s obvious they have way more pie than they can possibly eat and the rest of us barely have enough to fill a small plate.

“Hey, where’s the rest of ours?” we say.

“They have it,” they say.  “Those people over there.  The ones who didn’t kick in any money. The ones who didn’t contribute any sweat. The ones who aren’t as honest and hard-working as you.  They are eating your share of the pie.

“You’d better go take it back from them.  If you hurry, you can get it before there’s nothing left but crumbs.”

Of course it’s hard to hear what they’re saying because their mouths are full.

Morning in America

Politically and economically, the country is in the hands of people who came of age in the 1980s saying stupid things like:

“Greed is good!”

“I got mine, you get yours.”

“He who dies with the most toys wins.”

And:

“I want it all, NOW.”

And they’ve decided that it’s now.

Ode to joylessness

One of my favorite pieces of evidence of my youthful precociousness is a line I came up with in high school.  It’s so good that I’m sure I must have swiped it from somebody more grown-up and smarter (and perhaps deader) like Mark Twain.

“A Puritan,” I wrote in my journal, “is someone who is convinced that somewhere there’s a party to which he wasn’t invited.”

I still think it’s a good line, whether or not I thought it up myself or stole it.  Puritans, from the day Crowmell closed the theaters till now, resent the idea that other people are having fun without them.

Not that they would have fun if they were invited to the party or want to be invited.  But it’s the principle of the thing.

Puritans are also very big on being virtuous on other people’s behalf.  I don’t mean they practice virtues they think the rest of us should.  I mean they set out to make us practice virtues they believe we lack, their own virtue or lack thereof being beside the point.

The country is lousy with people who just can’t stand the thought that other people are having a good time.  Right now there are a whole bunch of spoilsports who’ve decided we need to do something about Social Security (cut it, raise the retirement age, privatize it, whatever) because beneficiaries aren’t actually starving or living in the streets or living as burdens on their children.  They’re mad because some old couple is finally taking that long-delayed trip to Europe.  Point out that the couple might have scrimped and saved to afford the trip, even with their Social Security, and these Puritanical grumps will growl about how that couple would have been smarter, better off, more virtuous, less annoying, if they’d given that money to their grandkids to pay tuition or make a downpayment on a house.  Tell them the couple worked hard to put their kids in a position to do that for their kids and grumps will mutter about how the couple should’ve saved it for the nursing home, just in case, and, by the way, we need to cut their Medicare too.

Naturally, these types would be attracted to repressive, authoritarian politics, which in the United States these days means the Republican Party, and Congress is full of them and their meanness.

The laid-off construction worker who uses part of his unemployment check to take his family to a movie, the single mom working two jobs who waits on line all night at Wal-Mart on Black Friday so she can buy an X-box---grasshoppers playing while the Randian, job-creating ants slave away!

And you expect a secure and comfortable old age?  You don’t want to sweep floors or wipe counters until you’re too old and feeble to push a broom or twirl a rag?  Well, you should have thought of that when you were younger and not listened to us when we promised you that greed was good, and he who dies with the most toys wins, deficits don’t matter, and you can have all the benefits of a liberal government without having to pay for them, just keep electing us Republicans.  Oh, you weren’t listening to us, because you were too busy working two jobs to pay for your kids’ braces and health insurance?  Well, tough.  Life is unfair, losers!

Money, of course, figures into this.  How dare these people have fun our our dime?

But there’s a moral bent to it or, rather, a bent morality to it.  The Puritans take satisfaction in watching others struggle because it’s good for us.  It’s what God intended.  Life isn’t meant to be enjoyed, it’s meant to be endured.

This is what I hate about their demon-haunted, witch-hunting Right Wing Christianity.  Besides their wanting to institutionalize ignorance, fear, and unquestioning obedience to a bigoted and bullying authority, they want to eradicate joy.

That’s the root of their hatred and fear of sex. 

Young people in love having sex are full of joy.

But although at the moment most of the Puritans are attracted to the party that styles itself conservative, I don’t think they or their joyless religion are conservative at all.  I don’t think it’s political at all.  It’s a strain of human nature, a mixture of envy and fear to which we are all susceptible.  Some of us are lucky and are inoculated against it early.  Some of us just have a natural resistance.  And some of us have tried being scolds and tried being the kind of people scolds like to scold and found that it’s more fun to be scolded than to do the scolding.

But for lots of us being in the position to do the scolding is attractive.  We like the feeling of being morally superior.  It’s self-flattering, self-aggrandizing, and…safe.

To be joyful is to be on the edge of losing control.

And then, I’m sorry to say, there are some of us who are just little and mean.

I’m convinced one of the things critics---and not just conservative critics---hate about the Occupy Movement is that so many of the protesters seem to be having a good time.

That people can derive joy from working for a good cause, from suffering and sacrificing for it, doesn’t occur to them.

All they see is a party to which they weren’t invited.

Who’s the boss?

Dear Governor Cuomo,

You can’t make up for not being as smart as your dad by being meaner than him.

Like I would know, but I think that the point of the sudden and needlessly violent crackdowns on the Occupy movement in various places is to show who’s the boss.

Andy Cuomo, the mayors of Oakland, Portland, New York City, the chancellor of UC Davis—they want it understood that they are in charge.

Who’s meant to understand this, though?  I’m thinking it’s not necessarily the occupiers.  I think in some cases it’s their chiefs of police.

“C’mon, mayor, if you’re really running this town, you’ll let me and my troops haul these hippies in.”

In other cases, it’s probably local business leaders.

“The holidays are coming up.  You think people are going to want to come down here to shop if they got to listen to drum circles and mic checks instead of Christmas carols? You going to let those freaks wreck our businesses? What kind of mayor are you?”

But in some cases, I think it’s themselves.

Deep down they don’t believe that they are the boss or that anybody takes them seriously as the boss.

Except for Bloomberg, who knows he’s king.

Whenever I go looking for an explanation for why somebody who ought to know better is doing something really rotten or dumb, I start with vanity and ego.  From there I move on to failure of will, failure of nerve, fear, and just plain stupidity.
____________________

Nicholas Kristof thinks the cops and the insecure bully mayors and administrators have done the Occupy movement a big favor.

He’s also pretty sure the evictions and crackdowns are too late, that the movement has occupied the high ground of the national agenda and isn’t about to give it up.

Solidarity

 

The two Michael Moore fans I wrote about in the previous post are probably just as disappointed as I am that our group split up and lost track of each other when we hit New York or we might have been in this picture too.  True, the tall guy second from the left’s no Michael Moore, but still.

Tim Robbins and members of Teamsters Local 445 at Occupy Wall Street, October 5, 2011.  Photo courtesy of Teamster Nation.

Karl Rove has called the Occupy movement “a weird cast of disaffected characters, ranging from anarchists and anti-Semites to socialists and LaRouchies” and said.

Rushing to identify with Occupy Wall Street could well threaten Mr. Obama’s re-election by putting off the very swing voters whom the president needs…Appearing to condone the crude personal behavior of Occupy Wall Street protesters can also further erode Mr. Obama’s standing with culturally conservative blue-collar voters.

I’d pay money to be there to hear Rove say this to the faces of some Teamsters and explain to them why they don’t count as blue-collar voters.

Lots of good stuff at the Teamster Nation blog on the union support for the Occupy movement.

Meanwhile, up in Boston

Couple days after I was in New York for Occupy Wall Street, my niece Violet Mannion, who’s in college in Beatown, went to Occupy Boston.  She’s a good photographer and she brought her camera along.  Here’s one of her photos.

It’s the nuns’ doing

Whatever you did for the least of my brothers and sisters, you did for me…

Some last notes from my march with Teamsters Local 445 at Occupy Wall Street two weeks ago.  October 5, 2011. It’s gone way beyond ironic, past ridiculous, to pound your head on the desk infuriating that we’ve got a whole political party that revolves around white, suburban, heterosexual Protestants who think of themselves as an oppressed minority, victims of racism and religious bigotry, barely holding out against the forces of secularism, internationalism, communism, feminism, homosexuality, and the would-be imposers of Sharia law.  As far as they’re concerned, they are the least of Jesus’ brothers and sisters, and doing for the least of his brothers and sisters means doing unto themselves and sticking unto everybody else, including and especially the hungry, the homeless and friendless, the sick, and the imprisoned.

All these years of watching the Religious Right hard at work trying to take over the government and turn the United States into their idea of a “Christian” nation built around not a single one of Jesus’ teachings and I still don’t understand where these Christians got their notions of what it means to be Christians.

But that’s probably because my own notions of what it means to be a Christian are parochial.  As in parochial school. From kindergarten through eighth grade I went to a Catholic School where I was taught by nuns who year in and year out emphasized five lessons.  “Love one another as I have loved you,” “Do unto others…”, the good Samaritan, the Beatitudes, and Matthew 25: 31-46:

‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’…

‘Whatever you did for the least of my brothers and sisters…’

Boiled down, I was taught by the nuns at my school what Michael Moore was taught by the nuns at his:

…that we will be judged by how we treat the least among us, that you cannot get into heaven without a permission slip from the poor.

The bus taking us home from New York City was about ready to go but we were still missing two members of our contingent.  HVALF’s Beth Soto, who was in charge of keeping track of us, was worried.  Our MIAs were a pair of older women---I’m not going to guess exactly how old, I’ll just note that they both had grown grandchildren, which means they were old enough to be great-grandmothers---and Beth was concerned that they had gotten lost or that they’d worn themselves out in the march or that one or the other of them had suffered some sort of physical breakdown.  Neither of the two was carrying a cell phone.  No way would Beth have let the bus leave without them but she wasn’t sure how long to wait before calling out the cavalry.

Turned out they weren’t lost.  They weren’t hurt or sick.  And they were far from worn out.

The two appeared at last, strolling towards us down Albany Street as briskly as if they were half their age and instead of marching to occupy Wall Street they had spent the better part of the afternoon occupying a nice tea shop where they’d enjoyed a satisfying but light dessert.

They wore big smiles and as soon as they were in earshot one called out in a high, fluting voice:

“WE SAW MICHAEL MOORE!”

“And Tim Robbins,” said the other.

“AND TIM ROBBINS!” said the first. “WE SAW MICHAEL MOORE AND TIM ROBBINS!”

At the end of their march the two washed up in Zuccotti Park against a knot of people surrounding Moore and Robbins who were giving joint interview to a TV crew.  The reason they were late was they’d stayed to listen to the interview and then hung around hoping to get close enough to shake Moore’s hand.  They’d have shaken hands with Robbins too, but it was Moore who was their true hero.  

“You know what I love about him, when I really loved him?” the first one said, reining in her excitement for the moment.  “When they stuck a microphone in his face one time and asked him how he’d become such a radical and he said he was just doing what the nuns taught him.”

This impressed both women because they were products of Catholic schools too and they attributed their own liberalism to the nuns who’d taught them all those many years ago.

The crowd of journalists and photographers around Robbins and Moore never did thin out for the women to get close enough to shake their hands, but that didn’t seem to have disappointed them too much.

“I CAN’T BELIEVE I SAW MICHAEL MOORE!” the first cried out. 

“And he was wearing his orange cap,” said the second approvingly, as if Moore had put it on, not for them, but because the nuns had asked him to.

Here’s a clip of Moore and Robbins giving that interview.  I can’t make out if the two women are chanting for Moore along with the crowd.

“Enter At Your Own Risk”

Guy can work up an appetite occupying Wall Street and I can’t tell you how many times during last Wednesday’s march I was tempted to jump a barrier and make for a hot dog stand.  But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It wasn’t fear of cops that kept me in line. I’d like to say it was solidarity. What it was, though, is that I decided to hold out for something more than a hot dog.  I wanted a sandwich.  Corned beef.  Pastrami.  Roast beef.  Something substantial but portable because I’d be taking it on the bus.  Roast beef!  Roast beef on rye with Russian dressing! That’s what I wanted.  I figured, I’m in New York, I’ll find a good deli, I’ll be golden.

Turned out to be a more difficult proposition than I expected.

The first and only place to eat I saw when I came out of the bottom of Liberty Park onto Church Street was a Burger King.  No big deal, I thought, as I walked on, Bound to be something better not too far along.  And there was.  I passed several inviting-looking bars and pubs and although they all looked crowded if I’d had the time to sit down to eat I’d have happily gone into any one of them.  But I pressed on, confident of finding a deli just up the block or around the corner, and if not then a pizza joint---I’d settle for a slice or three---or a falafel stand.

Now here’s where I show that despite the many times I’ve been to the City I’m still a tourist.  Sure, I was in New York, but I forgot to take into a account where in New York.  The bus was picking us up over on West Street and that meant I was wandering deeper into the ghost town the Financial District and the area around the site of the World Trade Center becomes at night.  It wasn’t that there were no places to eat.  There were none that were open.

By this time I was starving and now, facing the prospect of going without food for an hour or two until the bus stopped at a Thruway rest stop, I began to grow a little desperate.  Desperate enough that if I’d spotted a McDonald’s I’d have made for it on a run. Not desperate enough, however, to try the dismal and dingy-looking Thai restaurant I found down a side street in a block of otherwise empty storefronts.  A few more futile circuits of the neighborhood and I might have been that desperate, but then I turned another corner and…there it was.

It was a clean, well-lighted place, small but not cramped.  Not many tables, but the tables that were there were full.  A good sign. The tall, cheerful counterman looked, I thought, more Persian than Jewish, but what was I expecting, the Carnegie Deli?  This was New York in the 21st century not New York in a movie in 1950. More to the point, the counterman seemed to appreciate the urgency in my voice as I placed my order.

I had another urgent need.

“You got a rest room?” I asked as he set to work on my sandwich.

“Right through the door at the back,” he said pointing with his knife.

The door at the back had a fake brass plastic sign that said in large raised letters ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK.

I entered, hoping that all I was risking was that they were out of paper towels.

The door was metal and, it turned out, soundproof. 

The risk was to my hearing.  The music was pounding.  It was so loud I couldn’t make out a tune.  All I could hear distinctly---feel, really---was the drums.

The room I’d entered was dimly lit.  The walls were painted black.  It took me a few seconds to realize I was in a bar and a few seconds more to realize that the woman bartender was topless.

The only customers at the bar, two men sitting far apart from each other, stared glumly out over their drinks through cutouts in the wall behind the bar into an even darker room on the other side.  I couldn’t see anything in there.  I did get a sense of bodies in rhythmic motion but that might have been my imagination filling in.

Believe it or not, this was my first time in a strip club.

I took care of business and hurried back to the deli where, once the door slammed behind me, all was quiet and peaceful and bright and full of good cheer.  The counterman handed me the bag with my sandwich.  It was as plump and heavy as a Pony Express rider’s saddlebag.

The can of cream soda I bought with it was ice cold.

Out on the sidewalk I took a look at the awning of the establishment next door to the deli, which I hadn’t paid attention to on my way in.

The deli shares bathrooms with the Pussycat Lounge.

On the bus people openly coveted my sandwich and asked where I’d gotten it.  I told them about the Pussycat Lounge.

Everybody joined in on the same joke.

“You should have stayed for the show!”

I would have, I told them, but the guy had my sandwich waiting.

Roast beef.

On rye.

With Russian!

h/t Steve Jobs

More notes from Occupy Wall Street. Wednesday, October 5, 2011. Hated to have to say so long to my marching comrades Tom Watson, Lindsay Beyerstein, and company, as soon as our contingent set foot in Liberty Park, but I had to dash to catch my bus home.  While I was dashing, they strolled over to a bar on Fulton Street to rest and recuperate and sort out their impressions of the day.  They’d barely settled down with their drinks when the news flashed on the TV screen over the bar.

Steve Jobs had died.

There was CNBC announcing the sad death of America's most successful (and indeed, truly beloved) capitalist, the man most responsible for an explosion in portable digital entertainment. In the watering hole of the neighborhood that can safely be described as the backyard of the New York Federal Reserve, our gaggle of technophiles gasped aloud at the news. At the table there were a couple of iPhones and one majestic iPad - that sleek George Jetson consumer device that seems straight out of Vonnegut to me - along with the usual sad copycattish Android screens (including my own). To Twitter we did go, like we're supposed to.

Meanwhile, I was hearing the news as our bus bounced its rattletrap way onto the Monsignor Deegan Expressway from a fellow rider reading it off her smart phone and I can’t tell you how hard I was kicking myself for having left my iPad at home or how frustrated I’d have been if I’d had it with me but had to wait to reach our rest stop an hour up 87 to get online.

Tom immediately made the connections between Steve Jobs’ life’s work and Occupy Wall Street, the obvious ones: that the protests here, and in the cities it spreads to, have been organized and coordinated on devices built to transport information electronically and instantly that exist mainly because of Steve Jobs; that the hedge fund managers and bankers whose control of the economy Occupy Wall Street has come together to challenge are as dependent on what Jobs accomplished as the protesters---try separating a broker from her smart phone; that the coverage of the occupation and today’s march and the arrests that would come that night, along with the gathering and delivery of the news of every kind from everywhere, including the news of Jobs’ own death, was carried out via technology that Jobs pioneered, developed, or made commercially viable and nearly universally available, and every news story, blog post, Facebook status update, tweet, and text message should probably conclude with h/t S. Jobs.

But Tom also picked up on the ironic connection.

The news of Steve Jobs' death at 56 flashed on the television screen above my head in a neighborhood bar on Fulton Street, about five blocks from the spot where cops were swinging their truncheons at the subset of protesters who were trying to invade the holy shrine that is the intersection of Wall and Broad Streets, a  symbolic corner that represents the American public stock markets that made Jobs a billionaire.

Jobs and his partners got rich selling computers, but they got really rich selling pieces of the company that made those computers. A lot of people lined up and continue to line up to buy into Apple.  What made Jobs a billionaire was the price of the stock he owned.  Jobs and Apple are creatures of the stock market as much as any modern corporation and its CEO are and its not stretching it too far to say that over the course of time Wall Street has ended up helping to finance and equip its own occupation.

Tom notes one more connection, which might be best described in terms of a generational disconnect.  Most of the people behind Occupy Wall Street and the occupations of everywhere else are just young enough to take Steve Jobs and his achievements for granted.

“Apple,” Tom writes, “is the exceedingly rare corporate entity with hordes of cultish fans who treat retail shops like churches and product launches like encyclicals.”   But he means the Apple product users who are now middle-aged or bordering on it.  For their children and younger brothers and sisters, an iPhone is just a tool.

Their vision of technology is far more utilitarian and radical. They look up from their screens. They unplug their earbuds. They keep the message short and wide. Chants and drum circles, cardboard signs and masks. Tiny performance art pieces and costumes. Derided as spoiled trustafarians stinking of patchouli, they don't seem to care. Radically, they're using decentralized digital technology to power a massive amplification of their movement. Twitter and Facebook are just the glaze on their sweet profiterole network, with hashtags used to effectively lure tens of thousands of more casual supporters and hangers on…

…on the day when the last beloved CEO died, the use of media and technology was changing - not in the labs of Silicon Valley, but on the streets of New York.

Read all of Tom’s reflections in his post, Here we are. Now, entertain us.

Photo by Matthew Yohe via Wikipedia.

h/t Steve Jobs.

Marine vets have a message for Sean Hannity

For the record, while Herman Cain and Larry Kudlow have called Occupy Wall Street un-American, in the radio show the interviewer refers to Sean Hannity didn’t call the protester he was talking to un-American.  He called her a Marxist and said she didn’t “believe in freedom”. I think the vets’ message is still apropos.

Till the landlord sweeps them out

People looking for "a coherent message" in the park would do well to talk to Brendan Burke, a tall, tattooed truck driver with a degree from NYU and The New School, who's based at the center of the park, where four or five young people are crouched over laptops, shouting into the wind in their own way.

"People are informed today. People are online," Burke explains. "People in Kansas do yoga, you understand. Country's different, you understand? There's no more mooks in the citizenry. We are working people and we're not getting a fair shake, so we took to the streets. It's an irrational act, an act of passion, but we need to use self-control and respect. Those who want to go down with the ship will go down with the ship. Those who will be there will be sensible people who are out here for a reason. The kids who are out here who just want to party, well, they're beautiful children and we protect them every night. I can't even tell you what's going to happen after today. The cops may sweep this when the landlord says I want them out.

"Not anti-anybody. We're pro-American citizen. Millions of Americans are getting kicked out of their house. They're losing their education, their health care. They can't take care of their parents. This is about people. Republicans are opening their bills. Democrats are opening their bills. I'll go all the way to $250,000 if you want. Everybody's opening their bills and they're thinking, 'Who's protecting me from people stealing from me?' This isn't what I agreed on when I signed this agreement with this company. You add all these hassles up in your life — your hospital, your credit card, your education, your mortgage — and you're getting nailed.

---Charles Pierce. Esquire. What They’ve Come to Find at Occupy Wall Street is America.

One man's mob is another's democracy

So in [Eric] Cantor's world the Tea Party is an exciting grass-roots movement and Occupy Wall Street is a bunch of seditionists. Here is what he really means when he worries about Americans being pitted against other Americans:

People who don't think like him being a clear and present danger to people who do.

---Mike Lupica. New York Daily News. Phony Eric Cantor…

The panic of the plutocrats

What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.

Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.

This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage. In fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she must be demonized…

---Paul Krugman. The Panic of the Plutocrats.

St Paul’s Churchyard

Towards the end of the march.  Wednesday evening, around six. October 5, 2011.

Disorderly

As I was saying, Wednesday’s march was peaceful and orderly and, as far as I could tell or have heard since, kettling and pepper spray free from start to finish.  I was already boarding the bus for home when the batons came out over at Wall Street and Broadway Wednesday night.  But I did see one person get into it with the cops.

He wasn’t a protester.  He was a driver for a car service.  This was on Church Street.  I was hurrying away from Liberty Park to catch the bus for home and came upon him just as he was hopping out of his black sedan to start shouting at a bicyclist he clearly felt had done him wrong.

He was a heavyset character around thirty whose opened black suit jacket probably wouldn’t button over his broad expanse of white shirt.  His black hair was neat and cut short.  He was mad as all get out but he also looked scared, as if in a collision between a bike and a car the car would get the worst of it and so he’d just seen his life flash before his eyes.  More likely, of course, he was terrified at having come close to running her over.  Or he was thinking of how he might have had to explain the dings and dents in the car to his boss.  Whatever it was, he was not happy and he was letting her know it and half of downtown Manhattan along with her.

His car was stopped at a slight angle in the middle of the street.  The bicyclist was straddling her bike, facing him, her front wheel about half a foot from his right front fender.  If I had to guess what’d just happened, I’d guess she was in the wrong.  She’d either crossed over where she shouldn’t have and cut him off or tried to nose out to when she shouldn’t have and he’d barely missed flattening her.  It was possible, though, that she’d been headed in the right direction and he’d come up behind her and she had her bike turned around in order to explain to him how it’s impolite for drivers of cars to try to run riders on bikes off the road.  Whatever was the case, he didn’t want to hear her side of it.

He cursed her out royally.

Then he cursed out the first cop who’d wandered over to see what the problem was.

Then he cursed out the hipster passing by on the sidewalk who’d instantly taken the bicyclist’s side and was cursing him out.

Then he cursed out those of us who’d stopped to gawk.

Then he went back to cursing out the cop.

Then he cursed out the other officers who came over to ask the first cop what the problem is.

You might think it’s a bad idea to lose your temper with a police officer when you’re in a part of town where there are at least a dozen other officers in sight the first can call on for backup.

But at least with citizens who aren’t carrying protest signs New York City cops are remarkably patient and understanding.

So if you’re wondering how many cops you can tell to go fuck themselves and fuck off and shut the fuck up and let you talk without getting arrested, the answer is apparently five.

Assuming you aren’t carrying a protest sign.

Orderly

Nice waking up Thursday morning still a free man.  Of course I really had no expectation of waking up anything but.  Just about everyone I told I was going down to Occupy Wall Street Wednesday  with the Teamsters made a joke about my getting arrested.  Several good friends told me to call them in the event, promising they’d put up bail money.  But, truth is, I felt that even considering the possibility I might end up in the slammer was self-romanticizing.  How likely was it to happen?  The protesters have shown from the beginning they’re determined to keep things peaceful and non-confrontational, so if things got out of hand it would have to be that cops got out of hand, again, and I figured they’d be anxious not to make that mistake again. They knew they’d embarrassed themselves with the pepper spraying and the mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge and the City already had one class action suit to deal with, so the police were bound to be extra careful, especially considering that the odds were that every other person they’d haul in on Wednesday would be Union.  It’s one thing to be seen on the news arresting dirty hippies and slacker college kids, something else to be seen cuffing teamsters, ironworkers, electricians, pilots, nurses, school teachers, and classical musicians.   Besides, one of the benefits of belonging to a union is access to very good, and very fast-working, lawyers.

At any rate, the march was orderly to the point of making crowds at Disneyland look unruly.  Orderly to the point that for long stretches it stopped being a march at all and became more like a very long queue at the DMV.  We weren’t parading, we were taking part in a twenty-thousand foot group shuffle.  If you’ve seen Metropolis and remember the scene of the workers on their way into work, that’s how it felt from inside the crowd.

People around me complained that the police were slowing things down deliberately and trying to make us frustrated and impatient by squeezing in the steel barricades and narrowing the designated marching lanes.  Some thought the object was to back things up in order to annoy would-be marchers still stuck in Foley Square in hopes they would get tired of waiting to start marching and go home.  Others thought the cops wanted us to make us antsy and irritable so that we’d start to push and shove and break out of line, giving them the excuse to start making arrests and busting heads.  People pointed to apparently empty city buses parked along side streets and warned each other to be ready.  But I think it was just the case that it’s very tricky to move ten or more thousand people through downtown at rush hour without shutting the city down.

The cops we passed along the route weren’t giving anything away.  They were mostly stone-faced and seemed determined to avoid eye contact.  They were probably under orders not to let themselves get baited by jerks like the one Sam Graham-Felson saw waving a sign in a cop’s face that read  "Quick, sell everything and invest in pepper spray."  I didn’t see any jerks like that anywhere around me.  Considering who was marching, what a cop was likely to hear from any protesters who wanted to engage was a reminder that police are Union too, fellow members of the 99%, whose jobs, pensions, and benefits are being threatened by the corporate tools in Washington and the state houses all across the country.  Right at that moment, up in Albany, supposed Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo was trying to browbeat the Public Employees Federation into paying for his deal with Republicans to cut taxes for millionaires with either big chunks of their paychecks and pensions or 3500 member jobs, take your pick.

Mostly, though, it seemed the marchers were as determined to pretend that the police weren’t there as the cops were determined to pretend the marchers weren’t there.  I did talk to some cops, but at the end of the march, after we’d reached Liberty Park and I had to hurry to catch the Teamsters bus for home.  The cops opened up a gateway in the barricades and let people stream through onto Church Street.

“Thank you, officers,” I said.

“You’re welcome,” replied a tall, apple-checked, broadly smiling young patrolman who looked as though he was barely out of college, “You have a good evening, sir.”

Other officers nodded and smiled.  I thought they seemed relieved that it was all over for the day.

__________________________

Turned out it wasn’t over.  People did get arrested.  Twenty-eight were hauled in.  You probably know that Occupy Wall Street isn’t actually occupying Wall Street.  Wall Street is off-limits for marches and protests and large gatherings of any kind and has been since 9/11. [See editor’s note at bottom of post.]  But after the march, a group of protesters decided they would challenge that and they broke through some barricades and started in that direction.

Unless they were idiots, I’m pretty sure they wanted to spend the night in jail.  That’s part of the point of civil disobedience. I’m not sure what the rest of their point was.

But they pretty much asked to get arrested, and the police obliged.

The night sticks and the pepper-spray were lagniappe.

Notice it looks like the white shirts were at it again.

I expect that a lot of the people arrested Wednesday were back on Thursday.

Thanks to Gary Farber.

Editor’s note:  That Wall Street itself has been “off-limits” for large gatherings and mass demonstrations since 9/11 is one of those things I just “know.”  But prompted by a question from Ken Muldrew in the comments, I went googling for a story that would explain things and turned up zilch.  Instead I found news articles reporting that the City had declared Wall Street off-limits in the lead up to Occupy Wall Street. Wall Street has been closed to traffic and there’s been a heavy police presence round the clock.  If anybody can explain how come I “know” something that isn’t there to be known, I’d appreciate it.

Also, the updated figure on the number of people arrested is 27.