Danny Schechter - ColdType

estimate the strength of hostile elements. When open mass
resistance fails, there is still the opportunity for traps, stratagems,
intrigues, undermining all the resources of guerilla
warfare. … More than ever, we must maintain our vigilance.
If we do not, Wall Street may yet prove to be not unlike that
land, of which it has been said that no country is easier to
overrun, or harder to subdue.
In the end, the reviewer was not hopeful that the Obama
Administration is up to the battle that must be waged:
Let us recall that no Congress since the passage of Sarboanes
of 2002 has passed important legislation to limit or
prevent the housing and credit bubbles or, the power of Big
Finance. We note that the President’s two main finance and
economic advisers are Robert Rubin protégés.
It therefore would appear that the chance that this Administration
and Congress will truly take on Big Finance in any
way, shape or form as did Ferdinand Pecora in alliance with
Franklin Delano Roosevelt will remain vanishingly low unless,
perhaps, a yet greater calamity engulfs our financial system
and it would then be expedient for politicians to turn on their
current allies in Big Finance.
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So it may be that we cannot depend on the government and
need to consider creating a People’s Inquiry instead, something
like the tribunal Nobel Laureate Bertrand Russell organized in
1967 to get at the truth about Vietnam War atrocities when
they were not being reported in the media.
There is no reason why top economists, labor leaders and
intellectuals couldn’t do their own probe. It may not get the
media attention that a government panel like the 9/11 Commission
received, but it may be able to do more honest probing…
The public has to be educated and mobilized to demand
more criminal prosecutions, and the issue itself has to be
reframed. It is unlikely that the government and the media