by Eric Zuesse, The Duran:
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
Postponing till the indefinite future the 2nd American revolution (this one to overthrow America’s aristocracy and replace it by a democracy, instead of to overthrow Britain’s aristocracy and replace it by a democracy, as in the first time around) has merely built even higher the harms that America’s aristocracy has done, and is doing, not only to the American people, but worldwide — including their taking over Ukraine in 2014 and subsequent blowing-up of the two Nord Stream pipelines that had been supplying and were about to supply to Europe the inexpensive energy that was so crucial to making Europe the world’s showplace for beauty and for economic prosperity.
In the wake of the 2008 crash, America’s TIME magazine — which is the New York print side of Atlanta’s CNN Cable News Network — featured on its front cover for 13 February 2012, the face of the federal prosecutor for Wall Street crimes, Preet Bharara, and the headline extending over it, which read “THIS MAN IS BUSTING WALL ST.”. That feature-story inside the magazine was headlined “The Street Fighter: U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara has already taken down some of the financial world’s most prominent figures. He’s just getting started”. It included sub-heads such as “He’s won 56 convictions — seven cases are pending — and he’s had no losses.” But was that because Bharara had selected to prosecute the easy cases and not the ones against the bigwigs whose good graces would be necessary in order for him to be able to ‘earn’ big bucks in the future? The question wasn’t even raised in their article. Another was “He loves Bruce Springsteen and classic rock and has friends on all sides of the political spectrum.” But wouldn’t a good public prosecutor be far likelier to have few or no “friends on all sides of the political spectrum,” especially in a corrupt country, such as the U.S. so clearly is? That question, too, was simply ignored, and this fact displayed that TIME magazine was assuming its readers to be too stupid even to think of it. (I had noticed it then — and noticed that Bharara was prosecuting only small-fry, no banksters at all — but that the press at that time was adulatory about him, like this article in TIME.) Another subhead was “Insider trading turns Wall Street into a rigged game.” But had the financial crash resulted ONLY from insider trading? Was that what had actually — in and of itself — produced the crash? Yet again, TIME magazine simply assumed that its readers were too stupid to raise such questions. At the very top of the article’s opening two pages were six photos of Bharara’s most prominent charged alleged perpetrators: Raji Rajaratnam of Galleon Group, Danielle Chiesi of New Castle Funds, James Fleischman of Primary Global Research, Walter Shimoon of Flextronics, Rajat Gupta of McKinsey & Co., and Anthony Chiasson of Level Global. All of them were charged with insider trading, and were small-fry, nothing like the banksters who had scooped up billions of dollars in profits from the enormous and systematic economic frauds that had produced the 2008 crash.
On the same date as that ‘news’-story, 13 February 2012, the New Yorker magazine featured an article, “What Will Be Preet Bharara’s Legacy?”, which likewise refused to call a spade a spade, but instead ignored its own title-question — and likewise ignored that Bharara had prosecuted no banksters. That was just as much of an insult to the New Yorker’s readers as TIME’s was of their readers. People subscribe to such ‘news’-media? Sadly, they do. (That’s why we get the types of Presidents and Congress-persons that we do: lousy news-reporting.)
The first publication that called attention to Bharara’s scandalously bad performance — which ought to have been widely reported even in 2012, because Bharara had let all of the banksters off scot-free, and not even touched any of them — was in September 2015, when the very fine financial reporter William D. Cohan headlined in The Atlantic magazine “How Wall Street’s Bankers Stayed Out of Jail: The probes into bank fraud leading up to the financial industry’s crash have been quietly closed. Is this justice?” And he made clear that the answer was no. However, even Cohan’s article ignored the other mega-scandal about this entire matter: the cover-up of that reality on the part of America’s press till that time. Seven years now after the melt-down that had been brought on by systematic looting — mainly against poor and poorly educated Blacks who had signed lengthy mortgage contracts that they hadn’t read (and that was then followed by the looting against the investors who purchased, from the banksters, bundles of those shaky mortgage loans, which then crashed) — looting of those investors, by and for the benefit of the billionaire banksters who were into “take the money and run” — and, yet, still, no one was calling-out the press for its ongoing coverup of its own prior coverup of (and on behalf of) the crimes by and for those banksters. Now that laws and law-enforcement in the United States had failed, then, for four years (2008-2012), what was especially important was to call-out the nation’s systematically coverup-press, but this is something that it has never, ever, done. Anyone who thinks that in America, competing news-media will expose, instead of hide, the deceptions and frauds that are perpetrated by their ‘competitors’, doesn’t understand the way that America’s economy actually functions. It cannot be a free press if it is a virtually uniformly predatory press that exploits the prejudices of Democrats against Republicans, and of Republicans against Democrats, but that hides the crimes of the billionaires, who control the entire Government, including its complicit ‘free’ press.
