18 February

Movie Review: “The Big Short.” A Wrenching Tale Of Stupidity And Fraud

by Jon Katz
Taking It Personally
Taking It Personally

I saw “The Big Short” last night and it hit me harder and more personally than I expected. It is a very good movie about the credit and housing bubble collapse that led to the Great Recession of 2008 and beyond. I left the theater feeling sad and a bit.

Steve Carell and Ryan Gosling were especially powerful in their portrays of two of the four financiers who saw what no one else saw – the housing mortgage mortgage was a fraud and a sham, a  vast banking bubble built on greed and denial. Against all advice, they decided to beat the big banks at their own game.

They bet against the mortgage market.

And they won big.

The movie is an adaptation of Michael Lewis’s book of the same name, it is a movie with a conscience, but also a film of wit and energy. For the first time, I actually understand what happened and why.

The film is about greed and the almost numbing lack of foresight  and integrity on the part of the media, the government, the regulators, bond raters, traders, and even the banks themselves.The recession, as many of you reading this know only too well, devastated the economy and the lives of many millions of people, and the anger and trauma of that time echo through the country today, especially in the anger and mistrust of authority that are infecting the political system.

The movie was surprisingly personal for me.

I was traveling on a book tour in September of 2008, I remember seeing people staring open-mouthed at airport TV monitors crying openly or staring in shock. My life changed on that day, my agent called me up and told me that the publishing world as I knew it had just been destroyed, and nothing about my writing life would ever be the same.

It took me longer to figure out the collapse of the housing market would cost me the first Bedlam Farm, destroy my savings and financial security and nearly force me out of my new home as well. On so many levels, my life was never the same. I don’t know anyone who wasn’t deeply affected by the havoc the big banks wreaked on the economy and our lives.

More than eight million people lost their jobs,  a million people lost their homes, and the lives of almost every creative person in the country became immeasurably more difficult, even frightening. The gap between the rich and everyone else began to widen dramatically after 2008, the catastrophe has probably touched the lives of almost every American but the now famous one percent.

It took me a long time to realize that people with power and money are not necessarily smarter than anyone else. They are often blinded by their own greed and delusions. It is a treat to see the characters in the movie come slowly to see that yes, the powers that be can be both dumb and blind. They sometimes live in the clouds. Or as one of the characters saw it, the banks were guilty either of stupidity or fraud.  And nobody involved seemed to know the difference.

It is still a shock and mystery to me that no one was ever punished or held accountable for all that damage, and the banks seem to be doing almost exactly the same thing again, raking in billions on risky financial bond speculations, according to the financial press.

It disturbs me to see the hatred sweeping across the civic landscape, much of it seems to have sprung directly from the collapse of 2008. So many people lost faith in the institutions of government, so many people felt betrayed, so many people were hurt. Sometimes, evil conspiracies seemed the only logical explanation.

As Carell’s agonized character put it, the banks have been screwing people for years. This time, he vowed, they wouldn’t get away with it. He was right about the mortgage market, but wrong about the banks. They not only got away with it, they passed out tens of millions of dollars in fat bonuses the next year. And they are siphoning off billions of dollars again.

The movie is two hours and ten minutes long. It moves quickly, it does an especially ingenious, even brilliant job of explaining the elaborate system of swaps, sloppy and fraudulent banking short buys and wild speculation that led to the financial disaster. It makes it clear that the system of government and oversight failed on almost every conceivable level to protect the people from capitalism run completely amok.

“The Big Short” makes a strong case for government oversight, and the film wonders – through its characters – how it could possibly be that no one was punished or even investigated for what appear to be crimes of fraud and misrepresentation. Surely, said one of the character, someone would go to jail, the banks would be broken up, the system changed.

But none of these things happened, and that is the hopeless part of the film. I was entertained, for sure. I learned a great deal about what happened to me and why, but the movie did leave me without much hope, or to feel reassured that it won’t happen again. Or that anyone is really watching.

For me, government works best when it protects the people from harm, from predators within and without.  And journalism works best when it uncovers the truth. Both failed here. Foreign terrorists have never done as much damage to most of us as the greedy marauders on Wall Street, and who is going to protect us from them?

This is fast-paced, often funny and polished movie without any  happy ending. The truth about us and our world comes as a slap in the face sometimes, but one of those slaps we need.

I confess that the movie turned out to be very personal for me, the recession turned my life upside down, and I am dealing with it still. But I have no regrets about seeing it and I can recommend it enthusiastically.

In fact, I recommend the movie highly, it is a movie every citizen ought to see and ponder. It is as entertaining as it can be and Adam McKay deserves great credit for making a movie that is also as honest as it could be.

18 February

The Feeding

by Jon Katz
The Feeding
The Feeding

The feeding is a sacred thing on a farm, a deep and old ritual that has existed  for all of our known history. Feedings are part of the ancient connection between people and animals. When you feed an animal, you give her life, she will know you and remember you forever. It is a peaceful and expectant, it seems hallowed to me.

18 February

Animal Rights: The True Story of Ginger, Joanne And Her Fencepost

by Jon Katz
Joanne And Her Fencepost
Joanne And Her Fencepost

Joanne (not her real name) is a real person and this is a true story. It was told to me by Joanne’s mother a month ago and I was able to confirm it in several different ways. It is a small story in some ways, a powerful story in others, emblematic, like the New York Carriage Horse controversy,  of the great confusion and failed good intentions of people who say they love animals and wish to grant them rights but have lost all balance and perspective.

I am sorry to say Joanne’s mother tried to tell me this story a dozen different times before she got my attention, the truth is there are just too many stories like it now.

As always, the loser is the animal, in this case, a loving and sweet Lab, and also a good person. In this story, the person is a brave young woman who is intelligent and ethical and is a great animal lover. She has risked her life for her country and for some foreign dogs but was not deemed humane enough to adopt a Lab she loved in North Carolina because two slats in a  fence post in her back yard was loose.

The story begins five years ago in Afghanistan. Joanne was there on behalf of a military branch of the United States government. She was stationed in a remote village in Hellman Province, which is an especially dangerous part of that troubled country. Her mission was to support and protect the schools that educate young women, many of whom risked severe punishment or death if they tried to go to school and educate themselves.

Joanne risked her life many times, was under fire, injured slightly in a frightening roadside bombing, shot at several times while driving, decorated for bravery, assaulted more than once by men who were enraged at her presence and mission. She is a passionate dog lover, she has owned dogs her entire loved and missed them so much in Afghanistan that she adopted three different starving strays, animals caught in the crossfire there.

Her dogs actually shared a barbecue with the then President of Afghanistan, and an Army vet said she saved the dogs lives, and   ultimately managed to ship all three of them back to the United States for adoption when she decided her mission was too dangerous for them to stay with her.

The Taliban kills  the dogs of Americans there, also.

Joanne was in Afghanistan for four years, she returned to the United States in 2014 and was  re-united with a black Lab named Ginger who had been living with her mother while she was away. Last year, Ginger died of cancer and Joanne went to a well-funded local animal rescue group to adopt another dog.

She was asked for three references. First, she was told the shelter required references from two different vets and two different people who were not family members. She was asked to submit proof of financial resources and solvency – they wished to see bank statements and tax returns.

She also had to show proof of employment and certify that she was healthy and able to exercise dogs.

Joanne saw on the group’s website that Sandy, a four year old female Lab whose owners had moved away, was available for adoption. She sent the group all of the forms and references they requested.

She thought their demands were extreme, but she had a powerful feeling about Sandy so she complied.  Sandy had been injured by a car and had some orthopedic issues with a rear leg. That made Joanne want her all the more, she saw so many dogs in Afghanistan with similar injuries. The rescue group said they first had to make an on-site inspection before they would even consider the application for Sandy.

Two people from the shelter came to her house – she had a free-standing single family home with a fenced-in yard on a quiet street in a suburb of Charlotte, Joanne is now married with a young daughter.

The shelter workers went through her house room-by-room and carefully inspected each of the three orthopedic beds she had purchased for Ginger, who had lived to be 15. She said they were professional and somewhat cold, more like police detectives than animal people.

They also inspected the very expensive organic food that Joanne fed her dogs. She had purchased some for Sandy and wanted them to see it. It grated on her, her mother said, to have to try to prove her worth to the shelter workers in such detail, but she had always gone over the top for her dogs, and she was committed to adopting Sandy, who had sweet and soulful brown eyes.

One of the rescue workers walked the length of the white picket-fence in Joanne’s back yard.
“After careful inspection,” said her mother, who was present, “the rescue people said that two slates on the fence looked loose. They could not let her adopt a dog with a back yard like that, they told her.”

Joanne was stunned. Her mother said she told the rescue workers she didn’t know the slats were loose, there had been no dog there for more than a year. She said she would be happy to tighten the slats right there while they watched, or they could return to make sure she had done it. She said she never left her dogs in the yard if she wasn’t present.

Too bad, said the shelter workers, she didn’t quality and could not adopt Sandy or any dog from the shelter.

“I could not believe it,” her mother said, “they just kept saying she didn’t qualify. That poor lab lost the best home it could ever have had.”

Joanne did not wish to be identified for security reasons, because of her work overseas.

She did confirm the story her mother told me. I called the shelter. They said they couldn’t discuss specific applications, but they did say that loose fence posts were on their checklist of reasons to deny adoption applications. They said the Lab named Sandy had been adopted. Perhaps it was adopted by a friend of Joanne’s, perhaps the story does end happily.

There are somewhere between ten million and 12 million animals in shelters in America awaiting adoption. In recent years it has become both more difficult and expensive (Ginger would have cost $325 plus fees to adopt) to adopt dogs and cats. People are routinely denied adoption because they work full-time, are old, are poor, or have loose fence posts (or no fences) in their yards, even if they are always walked.

Countless animals languish in crates for years because good people who would love to have them do not meet the very new and increasingly irrational and stringent standards set by our twisted idea of animal rights, were animals frequently suffer or are even killed rather than find their way into the lives of human beings who very much want them.

It would be hard to find a more deserving or worthy applicant for a dog than Joanne, who has demonstrated her love of animals, her integrity, her commitment to decency in every possible way. This is a system that is broken, and that has lost all perspective.

References from vets or friends are not guarantee of a good life for dogs, and I know many wonderful dog owners who do not have fences, but walk their dogs several times a day (like every dog owner in New York City does.)

I hear these stories all the time, so, I’m sure, does almost everyone reading this.

A New York carriage driver was denied the right to adopt a dog in Long Island because the shelter said he was an abuser of animals. A young man in Illinois was denied a dog because he had a full-time job. An elderly woman was refused a dog because she was confined to her home and couldn’t walk it several times a day. She would have loved a small lapdog to keep her company.

This is wrong. We need an animal welfare system that brings people and animals together, not one that keeps them apart or removes them from one another.

We need a wiser understanding of animals than this.

 

18 February

Morning Reverie

by Jon Katz
Morning Reverie
Morning Reverie

We walked in the deep woods this morning, and came to a clearing at the top of the hill, we looked across to the Green Mountains Of Vermont, and I took a deep breath at the sight of these beautiful hills. We can choose anger and regret or we can choose love and peace and connection. Our choice.

18 February

Poem: I Used To Live In A Dark House

by Jon Katz
Sunrise
Sunrise

I used to live in a dark and cramped house,

the rooms were filled with fear and uncertainty.

The upstairs was filled with pain.

One night, I met a friend,

and fell in love,

and I went to each room

of the house, and danced all

night and sang with great energy and joy.

The house grew angry with me, and

warned me over and over again:

you can’t act this way here,

it is not your house,

“if you don’t stop I will choke you

with the dark and damp. Confusion and pain

are the landlords.”

One night I pretended to be asleep,

I waited until the sun came over the mountain,

and touched all of the trees in the woods, one by one,

until the reflection was almost too bright to see.

I heard confusion and fear and worry and pain

snoring in the bedrooms of the dark house,

spent from a night of misery.

“I’m leaving,” I sang at the top of my lungs, and

climbed out of the window. “Thank you!”

And left.

Behind me, the house shrieked in rage and

frustration. But the sun touched me also,

and my friend was waiting for me,

and we touched and held ones,

we were just two more trees.

 

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