Posted by Marc Hodak on August 22, 2008 under Scandal | 
ABC News has finally noticed that the political conventions in Denver and Minneapolis will attract a large amount of prostitution.
Typical for the MSM, they get story all wrong. ABC appears to be implying that politicos draw sex workers in unusual numbers, but that was belied way down in the article itself–all conventions draw sex workers in proportion to the number of attendees.
What ABC missed, of course, is the irony that sex workers, who are offering an honest exchange of companionship for money, have to pretend to hide what they do (well, sort of). In contrast, politicians who are offering a corrupt exchange of favors for money get to pretend that they’re doing something completely different.
Posted by Marc Hodak on August 6, 2008 under Scandal |
Ivin’s suicide has been viewed from two distinct perspectives. The government stenographers posing as a free press, dutifully typing up the selected FBI leaks provided by their sources would have us all breathing a sigh of relief; the FBI cracked this case, and saved us from the domestic terrorist. The inquisitive, skeptical press would have us reserve judgment, which is what civilized people do, even if the government hadn’t given us every possible reason to be skeptical of their claims.
The FBI says they will release the evidence shortly. I’ll believe it when I see it. Or not.
Update: WaPo is finally allowing some expression of skepticism. Touch a hot stove enough times, you start to get the idea, I guess.
Posted by Marc Hodak on July 2, 2008 under Scandal |
Lesson #1: It’s OK to take money that your boss gives you, but you better be willing to fight for it if the AG doesn’t like it.
Spitzer was basically suing Grasso for accepting what he was awarded. Grasso was given several opportunities to settle the case. He was, in fact, willing leave about $48 million behind to the NYSE, but Spitzer said it wasn’t enough. So Grasso fought for it all under the quaint notion that his bosses, the board, awarded him his pay, and so he was entitled to it. Five years and millions of dollars later, Grasso gets to keep his money.
Lesson #2: If you want to avoid being sued, be a good friend of the DA
Spitzer’s real complaint in this case would have been with the board of the NYSE by alleging that they weren’t acting as good fiduciaries. But that would have meant suing the heads of Wall Street’s major banks for not knowing what they were doing. Spitzer in his heyday would have no qualms about that, but it would have been tough to argue that people like Henry Paulson, then head of Goldman and now Treasury Secretary, Larry Fink, head of BlackRock, and Richard Fuld, head of Lehman, got all confused about the numbers. So Spitzer narrowed his focus to the compensation committee of the board. There, he had one committee member saying he knew exactly what he was doing, and another saying he had no idea what he was doing. Spitzer was able to thread that needle by going after the first guy, Home Depot founder Ken Langone, and gaving a total pass to the second one, fellow pol Carl McCall.
Lesson #3: The state will cause $12 worth of expense to recover $11.
Spitzer was trying to get back $110 million from Grasso. Langone said the total cost of litigating this thing for the defendants, the exchange, and former directors who were deposed approached $70 million. It’s very likely that the state (i.e., New York’s taxpayers) spent almost that much in prosecuting this thing.
I hear that Spitzer is now looking to start a private equity fund. I hope he gets better returns than this.
Posted by Marc Hodak on June 26, 2008 under Scandal |
Yesterday, the Department of Justice announced a round-up 21 children who were being prostituted in the United States. Few things evoke more horror than the idea of children in sexual bondage, and few things worth celebrating more than their release from that horror. It seems rather petty after such a success to ask “at what cost?” But the question is not just about cost in dollars (answer: about a quarter million dollars per child saved), but a question of cost in credibility of our government.
In 2001, the State Department estimated that about 45,000 to 50,000 people were trafficked in the U.S., defined as the use of force or coercion—violent or psychological—to exploit a person for commercial sex or the recruitment, transportation, or provision of a person for any form of involuntary servitude, debt bondage, or slavery. This is horrific stuff, especially in the “land of the free.” This report came out in the midst of one of those “white slavery” panics that has periodically gripped western nations.
By 2003, the State Department estimates had dropped to 18,000 to 20,000, later to be further revised to 14,000 to 17,500. The attorney general later grudgingly admitted that even those estimates were likely too high.
These continual downward revisions, where the government ends up with a new high that was below the prior low, is not because the government has ferreted out tens of thousands of cases. The total number of sexual slavery cases identified by the government since 2000 through the end of last year has been 1,362.
Given the increased incentives since 2000 for government agents, and for the sex workers themselves, to characterize individuals as “sex slaves,” even this 1,362 number is cast into doubt.
Read more of this article »
Posted by Marc Hodak on June 25, 2008 under Scandal |
At first, I thought their headline “Mugabe’s remarkable comeback” was an Onion story. In fact, it was a BBC story that somehow managed to write about Mugabe’s brutal suppression of democracy with a sense of awe.
It has been done with great brutality, but Robert Mugabe has achieved an extraordinary turnaround here.
This reminds me–true story–of a trip some American executives took to Japan in the mid-1980s. At Hiroshima, one of the men commented to his host, “My, this city looks a lot newer than the others we’ve visited.”
I’m sure I could come up with numerous other parallels, but it wouldn’t be long before I Godwin the post.
Posted by Marc Hodak on June 20, 2008 under Scandal |
Quiz: What’s the difference between
versus 
Answer: In Medieval times, the person first had to have been convicted of something before suffering gratuitous humiliation
———
I’m preparing for my next semester of “History of Scandal,” and considering Rudy Giuliani’s unique contribution to this history–the “perp walk.” Today, a couple of other Wall Street desperadoes were handcuffed, and marched to the courthouse to face arraignment because, you know, they wouldn’t have just driven there with their lawyers by appointment.
The WSJ Law Blog also raises the issue, and gets some very interesting comments. My favorite:
I thought the perp walk was low and thuggish when I was a prosecutor, and I think so now that I’m a defense attorney. In almost every one of these cases the defense lawyers know that the indictment may be coming and have offered to surrender their clients at a time and place of the prosecution’s request. Prosecutors who think that unnecessary arrest is a legitimate tool will ignore this. (In fact on a couple of occasions I’ve been able to learn of the issuance of the warrant and sneak my client in to the U.S. Marshal’s office in the courthouse to spoil the prosecutor’s little show.)
You’d be surprised at how low prosecutors and police will sink. My partner had a client who was to be arrested (naturally, on a Friday morning so they could keep him for the weekend.) The police and DA Investigator showed up at his house. They had tipped off the press, but the reporter and photographer were late, so they had already put the client in the police car. So they took the client out of the car, walked him back into his house, then turned around and walked him back into the car so the press could take pictures. Of course, the press never reported that — because a pathetic abuse of power by police is not newsworthy compared to juicy pictures.
By the way, did you notice how pleased the police escort looks? You just know he got his hair cut and shirt pressed for this. And now he gets to bask in the adulation of having bagged a hardened criminal. Thank you, law enforcement man! I feel so much safer knowing that this suit is in custody, and we don’t have to worry about (oh, the horror) getting over optimistic information about a trading fund.
Posted by Marc Hodak on June 6, 2008 under Scandal |
The headline pops, and I’m trying to evaluate this statement well below the lede:
“None of the parties who entered into the settlement agreement has acknowledged any liability or wrongdoing and each made their contribution solely to facilitate a settlement,” Cablevision senior vice president Charles Schueler told Reuters.
Absent any additional information, the average reader of an article titled “Settlement reached in Cablevision lawsuit” would assume that this statement is corporate b.s. Since this was an options backdating case, it would be presumed that the participants were all guilty, and that they deserved to be punished.
On the other hand, few if any backdating cases resulted in shareholder harm. And the law firm prosecuting this case is as known as Milberg Weiss for going after high-profile corporate cases, often after the same defendants, where the distinction between legitimate and nuisance lawsuits is very fuzzy.
Would a company pay out $34 million to make a high-profile lawsuit go away and eliminate the risk of a jury trial? Could happen. The point is, we don’t know, but most of the readers of this headline would profess to have a certain knowledge.
Posted by Marc Hodak on May 20, 2008 under Scandal |
It’s becoming increasingly clear that this was the approach taken by Texas CPS in the FLDS raid that took over 460 children away from their mothers. What reason was there for this?
Joseph and Lori Jessop…said they didn’t know where the state had sent their 4-year-old daughter and 2 1/2 -year-old son, but as a nursing mother Lori Jessop has been allowed to care for her infant son, who is in a foster care facility in San Antonio, during the day.
Joseph Jessop is 27, and Lori Jessop is 25, according to court documents. They’re not in a plural marriage and lived in a single-family unit at the Yearning For Zion Ranch.
So, why are their children still stripped from them? Why they still forbidden to return to their home under the threat of not being able to see their kids at all?
Update: A Texas court of appeals has spanked CPS, and restored a sense of semblance to this travesty.
Posted by Marc Hodak on May 16, 2008 under Scandal |
ABC News answers the question: How divergent can a headline be from the content of a story? When it comes to CEOs, the headline and story apparently don’t have to have anything more than the flimsiest connection. Here’s a recent headline and lede (and accompanying ‘fat-cat’ photo):
Hard-Charging CEO Rakes in Millions
Blankenship Earned More Than $23 Million in 2007
The CEO of the country’s fourth largest coal company raked in more than $23 million in 2007.
And here is the last paragraph:
Blankenship receives the lavish perks that many CEOs are accustomed to, such as the use of the Massey corporate jet, which cost the company and its shareholders more than $180,000 in 2007.
So, this story is clearly about how much money a CEO made, right?
Well, the entire rest of the story, completely sandwiched between the first and last paragraphs, was about this CEO funding a lavish trip and election campaign for a state supreme court justice. The actual lede, buried two-thirds of the way into this story is this:
Fellow justice Larry Starcher told ABCNews.com he believes Blankenship has effectively bought himself a seat on the Supreme Court of West Virginia.
Apparently, the media, and presumably their readers, are more concerned with the raw amount that a CEO legally earns than about a possible corrupt relationship between that CEO and a state court judge.
Read more of this article »
Posted by Marc Hodak on May 8, 2008 under Scandal |
This from a recent BBC report
Mr Fritzl reportedly criticised media-coverage of his case as “totally one-sided”, and added that he was “not a monster”.
I don’t doubt that the reporting has been one-sided, given my research into how the media exploits scandals. But how one-sided is the statement that, “He has, however, admitted holding Elisabeth captive and repeatedly raping her.” Over 24 years. And what is the other side of his story, the side that points out his humanity? Referring to his captive daughter/grandaughter’s severe illness that required hospitalization:
“Without me [she] would not be alive anymore… I was the one who made sure that she was taken to a hospital,” Mr Fritzl said.
“I could have killed all of them – then nothing would have happened. No-one would have ever known about it,” he added.
I don’t know if “monster” is the right word, but in this case I would consider that a fine semantic distinction, not a fundamental issue of media bias.
Fritzl’s attempt at defending his humanity strongly reminded me of the following quote attributed to another man captured just a few miles from Fritzl’s home:
My name is Franz Ziereis, born 1903 in Munich, where my mother and brothers and sisters are still living. I, myself, am not a wicked man…
In the same note, here is his description of the prison that he commanded.
The inmates had to haul stones until they collapsed, then they were shot and their record was annotated “Trying to escape”. On 30 April 33, inmates of the camp office were ordered to assemble the court yard. There they were shot like wild animals by SS Oberscharfuehrer Niedermeyer and the Gestapoagent Polaska. Altogether, as far as I know, 65,000 inmates were murdered in Mauthausen. In most cases, I myself took part in the executions.
The theology of evil is a difficult, some might argue loaded, philosophical issue. But the psychology of evil is straightforward: apparently, nobody believes that they are a wicked person.
