Laurie Essig

Should merry (ultra right) pranksters go to jail?

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="282" caption="Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife"][/caption]

Remember James O'Keefe, III, the ultra-right "merry prankster" who dressed as a "pimp" and brought along a friend to be his "ho" and went into an Acorn office and asked for help starting a brothel? Ah, the most fun I've ever had writing on True/Slant was calling O'Keefe's piece "fantasy" not "news."  Calling him the "Borat of the Right," I pointed out that Mr. O'Keefe's video of Acorn employees supposedly supporting prostitution rings was no more "true" than a Sacha Baron Cohen piece. Sadly, most of the media and nearly all our national politicians saw Mr. O'Keefe's highly-edited clip of Acorn employees trying to respond to his "pimp and ho" routine as an actual indictment of the organization. The website Big Government, who gave Mr. O'Keefe support and a national platform for his "reporting," linked my piece so that I received a lot of hate mail and more than a few death threats.  Less amusing  were the people who called my employer and insisted I be fired. Now Mr. O'Keefe is in deep doo doo and I find myself both wanting to defend his right to be a pain in the ass that is power AND thinking he needs to learn the difference between a prank and journalism. It seems that O'Keefe and a merry band of pranksters went to New Orleans and dressed up like telephone repairman to get "gottcha" footage of Senator Mary Landrieu's staff.

Mr. O’Keefe, 25, ...and three other men... were arrested and charged with a federal felony, accused of seeking to tamper with the office telephone system of Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana. Two of them were impersonating repairmen in the senator’s New Orleans office and were caught after being asked for identification. Mr. O’Keefe said Friday that the four men had been trying to determine whether Ms. Landrieu was avoiding constituent complaints about the Senate health care bill after her phone system was jammed in December. (Her office said no calls had been intentionally avoided.) On reflection, he said in a statement, “I could have used a different approach to this investigation.”

It's funny, right?  I mean, you're suspicious that a Senator is lying about "phone problems" and so you dress up as phone repairmen and ask the staff what problems they're having with the phones.  If you're lucky, you catch them saying "we're not having problems."  Hilarious. But it's not journalism, is it?  It's protest and activism and possibly even a joke and this is where O'Keefe steps over the line of "funny" and "right on" into "stupid" and "send him to jail." There is very little that I would be willing to die for, but our right to protest power while getting a laugh is worth dying for.  We have an obligation to point out the abuse of power.  We have a sacred duty as citizens to do so in the most entertaining manner possible. I myself have staged drag queen bake sales for peace or dressed up like an ultra conservative housewife who believes all our rights should be based on our marital status, including our right to vote. But I have never pretended as if this is "true" or "journalism."  It's protest.  That's the point.  It's clearly absurd.  Even the people who are the butt of my jokes--like Family Research Council representatives responding to my "Heterosexuals for Mandatory Marriage Manifesto"-- know that it's a joke and that the joke's on them. O'Keefe's protests cross the line between staged absurdity and absurd entrapment.  They are less a question of First Amendment rights and more "Boy, do you know there is such a thing as ETHICS, even with your enemies?" So although I support O'Keefe's right to stage as many absurd protests as possible, to throw metaphorical and even actual pies in the faces of his enemies, I must draw the line at presenting these protests as journalism.  I must also draw the line at breaking and entering under false pretenses. There is nothing wrong with standing up in public space and screaming "look the Emperor has no clothes."  There is something sleazy about sneaking into the Emperor's closet with a hidden camera. So although I hope O'Keefe and his merry band of ultra-right pranksters get off with a slap on the wrist, I also hope they learn that there is a difference between protest and journalism, staged absurdity and truthful reporting. And that they learn the lesson that even our worst enemies deserve to be let in on the joke, especially because the joke is on them.

The ' ARM ' pit of the housing crisis

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Image via Wikipedia"][/caption]

Here's the thing I don't get about the complete deregulation of banking.  People act like the housing crisis and credit crunch that precipitated the Great Recession were accidents.  But there were no more accidents in the banking industry than there were accidents in New Orleans. Everyone knew that when a major storm hit, the city would drown.  Everyone knew that the insanely predatory lending practices the banks came up with were going to blow up as soon as housing prices started to fall and the economy would drown. But here we are again, with hand-ringing and the "I just can't believe this is happening" attitude as we're told that Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs) are going to burst open a flood of bad debt and further threaten the recovery. Adjustable Mortgages Loom as Threat to Housing Recovery - NYTimes.com. ARMs are an interesting "financial product."  I suppose the idea was invented initially for rich, real estate investor types.  See, they could go in, buy a house, and actually pay less than the interest on the loan. Then, as housing prices rose, they could sell the house, play off the mortgage, and walk away with a profit.  All of that was great as long as it housing prices were rising and it was investor types taking out the loans.  But, of course, all sorts of people took out ARMs and what they didn't realize or didn't really bank on is after a certain number of years the mortgage payments explode as you have to start paying off the balance and the unpaid interest. Writing in Slate about the rising water levels in the levees that were ARMs, Mark Gimein warned that these loans would bring down the California economy not because of people who couldn't afford their homes, but because of people who could afford homes but were sold products where the mortgage payments would get so high, even the upper classes would have to walk away and hand the banks their keys.

if you bought or refinanced your house in the last few years, it's not unlikely that you have one. With an "option ARM" loan you have the "option" (which most borrowers happily take) of paying less than the interest; the magic of "negative amortization"... Just two banks, Washington Mutual and Countrywide, wrote more than $300 billion worth of option ARMs in the three years from 2005 to 2007, concentrated in California. Others—IndyMac, Golden West (the creator of the option ARM, and now a part of Wachovia)—wrote many billions more. The really amazing thing is that the meltdown in California is already happening and virtually none of these loans have yet reset.

For these people, whose debt is now much higher than the value of their once million-dollar home, walking away may be the only option.  Of course that might make it more difficult to buy a new home in the future, but with so many people in this position, it might not.  Like getting a new credit card just a couple of years after declaring bankruptcy, the de-ARMed might end up with more conventional mortgages in the future. All of this seems both too confusing to understand and at the same time much closer to "home" than the subprime mortgage crisis for most people reading this.  But it's really no more difficult to get than the drowning of New Orleans.  Banks invented all sorts of dangerous financial products that lured even the most educated among us into taking on ridiculous amounts of debt. We banked on the rather crazy idea that a hurricane of declining home values would never hit us directly.  Then, as the reality sunk in that housing prices were falling, that what goes up really must come down, the flood of insanely high mortgage payments arrived. Like Katrina, there were warnings.  This was not last month that Gimein was warning about exploding "ARMs;" it was April of 2008.   And he was not alone in warning us about the subprime mortgage crisis of the middle and upper classes.  But like New Orleans, the people who were supposed to be making sure we were safe- which is to say, the government- were looking the other way.  Why?  Because the "market would solve everything."  The market, also known as unfettered greed, was the hurricane.  Now homeowners are being told to suck it up and somehow pay off the mortgages.  But they'd be better off abandoning their doomed homes and finding shelter elsewhere. What will happen after the storm of exploding "ARMs" is difficult to know.  Perhaps the government will be better at helping these (middle and upper-class) homeowners than it has been in New Orleans.  Or perhaps a lot of formerly posh people will be living in the equivalent of FEMA trailers.

The ' ARM ' pit of the housing crisis

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Image via Wikipedia"][/caption]

Here's the thing I don't get about the complete deregulation of banking.  People act like the housing crisis and credit crunch that precipitated the Great Recession were accidents.  But there were no more accidents in the banking industry than there were accidents in New Orleans. Everyone knew that when a major storm hit, the city would drown.  Everyone knew that the insanely predatory lending practices the banks came up with were going to blow up as soon as housing prices started to fall and the economy would drown. But here we are again, with hand-ringing and the "I just can't believe this is happening" attitude as we're told that Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs) are going to burst open a flood of bad debt and further threaten the recovery. Adjustable Mortgages Loom as Threat to Housing Recovery - NYTimes.com. ARMs are an interesting "financial product."  I suppose the idea was invented initially for rich, real estate investor types.  See, they could go in, buy a house, and actually pay less than the interest on the loan. Then, as housing prices rose, they could sell the house, play off the mortgage, and walk away with a profit.  All of that was great as long as it housing prices were rising and it was investor types taking out the loans.  But, of course, all sorts of people took out ARMs and what they didn't realize or didn't really bank on is after a certain number of years the mortgage payments explode as you have to start paying off the balance and the unpaid interest. Writing in Slate about the rising water levels in the levees that were ARMs, Mark Gimein warned that these loans would bring down the California economy not because of people who couldn't afford their homes, but because of people who could afford homes but were sold products where the mortgage payments would get so high, even the upper classes would have to walk away and hand the banks their keys.

if you bought or refinanced your house in the last few years, it's not unlikely that you have one. With an "option ARM" loan you have the "option" (which most borrowers happily take) of paying less than the interest; the magic of "negative amortization"... Just two banks, Washington Mutual and Countrywide, wrote more than $300 billion worth of option ARMs in the three years from 2005 to 2007, concentrated in California. Others—IndyMac, Golden West (the creator of the option ARM, and now a part of Wachovia)—wrote many billions more. The really amazing thing is that the meltdown in California is already happening and virtually none of these loans have yet reset.

For these people, whose debt is now much higher than the value of their once million-dollar home, walking away may be the only option.  Of course that might make it more difficult to buy a new home in the future, but with so many people in this position, it might not.  Like getting a new credit card just a couple of years after declaring bankruptcy, the de-ARMed might end up with more conventional mortgages in the future. All of this seems both too confusing to understand and at the same time much closer to "home" than the subprime mortgage crisis for most people reading this.  But it's really no more difficult to get than the drowning of New Orleans.  Banks invented all sorts of dangerous financial products that lured even the most educated among us into taking on ridiculous amounts of debt. We banked on the rather crazy idea that a hurricane of declining home values would never hit us directly.  Then, as the reality sunk in that housing prices were falling, that what goes up really must come down, the flood of insanely high mortgage payments arrived. Like Katrina, there were warnings.  This was not last month that Gimein was warning about exploding "ARMs;" it was April of 2008.   And he was not alone in warning us about the subprime mortgage crisis of the middle and upper classes.  But like New Orleans, the people who were supposed to be making sure we were safe- which is to say, the government- were looking the other way.  Why?  Because the "market would solve everything."  The market, also known as unfettered greed, was the hurricane.  Now homeowners are being told to suck it up and somehow pay off the mortgages.  But they'd be better off abandoning their doomed homes and finding shelter elsewhere. What will happen after the storm of exploding "ARMs" is difficult to know.  Perhaps the government will be better at helping these (middle and upper-class) homeowners than it has been in New Orleans.  Or perhaps a lot of formerly posh people will be living in the equivalent of FEMA trailers.