Danny Schechter - ColdType

the values enunciated by the founders like Thomas Jefferson
who is said to have said, “I believe that banking institutions are
more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.” Our
generation has read President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address
warning of the power of the military-industrial complex, but
far fewer have studied an earlier farewell by President Andrew
Jackson railing against “the moneyed power.”
That power is with us still, if anything stronger and more
arrogant than ever. I have no illusions that my words or arguments
will bring it down. Yet they must be expressed even
as crime and punishment remains at the centerpiece of the
American experience from the days of Murder Incorporated’s
Al Capone – who started his work life as an accountant –
through a bombardment of Hollywood heroes like Bonnie and
Clyde or John Dillinger or the Gotti clan, the Family Corleone,
or even the Sopranos.
Entertainers regularly make fun of the practices I write
about, comedians like Jon Stewart and Bill Maher, to cite two,
are often on target. Filmmaker Michael Moore calls his film on
the subject a “comedy.”
To me, this is not funny at all. It is a predictable tragedy, the
crime of our time.
In the spring of 2009, the hit TV series Law And Order was
renewed for its twentieth season. By chance, I was able to film
the filming of one of its shoots outside a New York Courthouse.
On that same day, an unlikely poster boy for corporate crime
was confessing to a Federal Judge just around the corner.
It is his story with which I begin.
lv