Where Have All The Journalists Gone?

I'm of the age when journalists were once viewed as heroes. Edward R. Murrow was an icon in our home even with my Republican father. Our family watched Person to Person together in the living room around our RCA television, which had been built in the United States of America.

Walter Chronkite, Huntley and Brinkley, and of course, as played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

Our family was friends with Ralph Morse, the photojournalist at Life Magazine who followed the first astronauts into survival training and into space.

And now? We aren't getting investigative reporting from newspapers anymore with their publishers cutting news room staffs, closing bureau offices, and isolating America to its major cities. And television news is merely entertainment.

Investigative reporting seems to be limited to the internet site ProPublica.org. Funded by the Sandler Foundation, the family behind the fall of Wachovia Savings when it purchased Golden West Financial, and JEHT Foundation, tumbled by the Madoff ponzi scheme, somehow ProPublica is still doing some of the best investigative reporting around. Check out what the bank bailout is really doing, pain killer mills in Florida, psychiatric care in Illinois public hospitals. This might be the future, links between newspapers, radio stations, and well-funded nonprofit websites. This isn't the Drudge Report or The Daily Beast. This isn't just opinion writing, but real old-fashioned investigative reporting. Take a look.

Because we aren't witnessing much reporting unless hyping Obama's trip to Europe and Turkey is still considered reporting. It reminds me of Beatlemania. OK, we want to feel some optimism, we want Obama to succeed, but we have really serious restructuring issues: we have to undo the privitizing of governmental functions that Bush took to new heights, we have to transform our economy, we have to examine our health care, education, and retirement systems. We need critical thinking not cheerleading.

Where Has All the Money Gone?

In the turmoil of the collapse of the world financial markets, the Bernard Madoff scandal, and the lesser Mark Dreier scheme, the question is obvious: where did all of the money go? Who knows how much money the banks have lost. What we do know is that TARP has already given the banks $350 billion out of a possible $700 billion bailout, not including the other $140 billion the Federal Reserve provided banks by a little noticed change in the tax code. Bernie Madoff claims to have lost $50 billion in his ponzi scheme and Mark Dreier, who remains in jail, stole $380 million. This doesn't include the loss of funds to the down trend on the world stock markets, the loss of 401 (k) assets, pensions, and savings.

In addition to the losses that have left college endowments depleted--Harvard, Wellesley, Yale, to name a few of the prestige schools have sent out letters to students and alumni about losses, there is Yeshiva University that lost $110 million to the Madoff ponzi scheme. Anthony Romero sent out an email alert to contributors to the American Civil Liberties Union claiming that it lost over $850 million in grants from two foundations for the uncoming year. One of those funding sources is no doubt the JEHT Foundation, known for its progressive funding of criminal and social justice programs--$26 million last year alone--which closed its doors after the Levy Church family lost its family fortune to Madoff.

This morning the New York Times ran a story about the Sandlers, Herbert and Marion, who started World Savings Bank, sold to Wachovia in 2005, and seen as one of the causes of Wachovia's near collapse.

World Savings Bank developed something called an option ARM — and named “Pick-A-Pay” by World Savings. Pick-A-Pay allowed homeowners to make monthly mortgage payments that were so small they did not cover their interest charges. That meant the total principal owed would actually grow over time, not shrink as is normally the case.

The Sandlers walked away from the sale of World Savings Bank with $2.3 billion in cash and stock in Wachovia. The ARM--Pick-A-Pay that made World Savings such a mortgage giant, although it didn't sell the mortgages like other lenders, is now under federal investigation. Far too late, since everything World Savings did was quite public for a very long time. (Also in this morning's Times, is a story about how few criminal prosecutions for stock fraud the Bush administration has initiated.)

Which places another progressive funding source in jeopardy: Sandler Family Foundation. After the sale of World Savings, the foundation received a gift of $1.3 billion in cash, the second largest charitable gift in 2006. However, according to Herbert Sandler, the foundation is fine, it's his personal fortune that has diminished because he and his wife retained ownership of stock in Wachovia, which has tumbled. That will diminish the size of the Foundation after the Sandlers die; they are both in their late 70s.

The Sandler Foundation is a primary source of funding for ProPublica.org, the investigative journalism website--up to $30 million over three years--, as well as the liberal think tank, Center for American Progress, started by John Podesta, who is now heading up Barack Obama's transition team.

Progressive funding is never easy to find. Organizations that try to change the power dynamic, want to examine and eliminate the causes of poverty, ill-education, despair, aren't easy sells to wealthy peoiple who often made their money exploiting these faults in the system. But with banks, corporations, and now private family foundations decimated, our philanthropic infrastructure is fragile and failing.

Barack Obama issued a Christmas statement this morning, in text and video, which speaks about working for common purpose at this time. It's really the only solution: for us to work together in our own communities and not wait around for government to reform itself and start working again.

Extreme Financials--What's Happening to the Very Poor?

This morning The New York Times posted a list of the biggest losers in the Madoff ponzi scheme. The list includes a lot of very rich people, their charitable trusts, and banks throughout the world. My sadness is that the charitable trusts and consequently funding to charitable organizations have been ransacked by poor management and greed.

One very big victim is the JEHT Foundation, one of the most progressive funders in the country--$26 million was given away last year to social justice causes, often to organizations whose missions are just too scary for most foundations.

This entire story is about greed and a sense of entitlement that some wealthy people have: I'm entitled to a 10% return on my money. For what?

Since funding will be so scarse at a time when government and corporations, as well as individuals, have been caught in the worst economic crisis of our lifetimes, many people will suffer.

The very poor are already suffering, and no one seems to be noticing.

According to the December 29, 2008 issue of The Nation, in 2007, more than 37 million Americans were living in poverty, that's 12.5% of the population. This figure doesn't include the impact of the unemployment rise that acccompanied the recent banking failures. 1.9 million Americans lost their jobs just this year. The consequence, is that between August 2007 and August 2008, the food stamp program caseload rose by 2.6 million people. One in five American children is living on food stamps.

This economic analysis was calculated by Robert Pollin from the University of Massachusetts in an article called "How to End the Recession."

He suggests, and it appears that Barack Obama was listening, that only massive spending by government can end the downward spiral.

35 days left of Bush. Will there be anything to govern by January 20th?