I Predict The Best Picture Oscar Goes To.......SPOTLIGHT (Minor Spoilers)

"Spotlight" denotes the name of the investigative reporting unit at The Boston Globe. Newly arrived editor Marty Baron (from The Miami Herald) is briefed by Spotlight editor Walter
Robby' Robinson (Michael Keaton) on its warp and woof, in which a given investigation can take 6 months. The critical thing is it be done properly. Well, it's left to the new guy (played by Lev Schreiber), to use a past Globe column as a basis to push the team to look more deeply into the possible coverup of priest sexual abuse in the Archdiocese of Boston.

The bulk of the film follows the Spotlight team of 4 as they dig into the assorted personae and document trail,  tracing back to a lawyer (Mitchell Garabedian) who claimed in an earlier Globe article that Cardinal Law (the Archbishop of Boston) knew that a priest John Geoghan was sexually abusing children and did nothing to stop him.

The suspense in the film is embodied in virtually every scene where roadblock after roadblock is thrown up -  both by Garabedian and Boston's powerful RC Church whose tentacles reach into almost every nook and cranny of the city. But ultimately, it is the victims themselves who are encouraged to finally come forward and lead to the public release of files that break the case open.

For anyone who recalls that investigation and the ones that followed, exposing priest pederasts in hundreds of locations in the U.S. and overseas, it should be a slam dunk that this is the stuff of 'Best Picture' mettle.  It is a serious film about a serious subject that still has left tectonic shifts in the Church itself and in particular undermined its moral authority, especially on sexual issues.

After all, it was only somewhat later that Marty Baron's objective paid off, i.e.  to show the abuse was part of a derelict,  cynical system that was also morally blind. The mandate to hide and shift pedophile priests  from parish to parish extended all the way to the Vatican and the Office of the supreme "inquisitor" (head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - the modern name for the Inquisition) Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger - who in turn was following orders from John Paul II.  Most of us at the time perceived  the changes in rules for canonization were done to cast a more "saintly" light on John Paul II and take attention away from the still metastasizing Church sex scandal.

Anyway, one hopes Oscar attention to the movie will spur many more to see it, as I did last night. This is not to take anything away from the other contenders, including "The Revenant" and "The Big Short" but to me, Spotlight ought to be the clear Best Picture winner.  Still, "The Big Short" must be at least a powerful dark horse contender given its light shed on the financial crisis. (Though a number of reviews in the financial media, e.g. the WSJ, panned it for being "too cartoonish". Noting you shouldn't need or use a woman in a bubble bath to explain credit default swaps.)

Amazingly, the much better picture ("99 Homes" )  dealing with the credit meltdown in depth, never got an Oscar nod and did poorly at the box office, with barely a $1.8 m take.  I have to believe the main reason may have been the choice of title. It is incredible how a few words - say in a header or title - can make a huge difference on whether people train eyeballs on it or ignore it.

Lastly, if DiCaprio doesn't win Best Actor for Revenant than surely Brian Cranston will for his role as commie-blackballed screenwriter Dalton Trumbo in 'Trumbo'.  (I was actually amazed the film wasn't also an Oscar Best Picture nominee given all its homage to courageous Hollywood actors that stood up to the 1940s-50s commie witch hunts.) But maybe after last year's win for 'Birdman' the Academy felt one such winner was enough in a two year span.

It's a shame that the "#Oscarssowhite" meme has crept in to challenge the level of diversity of this year's Academy Awards, but hey - what would you expect for a nominating bunch (Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences) that is more than 60 percent composed of old white men over 65?  At least the Academy has taken steps to improve the membership proportions but until all the old white actors, members croak don't look for much.

In the meantime, the host - Chris Rock - should provide some interesting and even suspenseful moments as he draws attention to any deficits.

Piketty, Capital, Soaring Stock Markets and Why Americans Aren't Rioting in the Streets

It's incredible but for the past couple years, on successive European junkets, a question that invariably pops up from the Euros - be they Austrians, Germans or Swiss is: "Why aren't Americans rioting in the streets? Why aren't they burning everything down like those folks in Kiev? Why do they tolerate the super rich getting off at their expense?"

Well, as I informed them, it's not as if the images of the rich haven't been circulated, including their $100,000 gold-plated bathtubs, special electronic, auto-wiping, super-sanitizer butt-cleaner toilets and so on. Not to mention images like these showing the rich at play using the gains from the labor of the rest of us:




And:

And:

























The $ 25,000 (apiece) Frrrozen Haute Chocolate fills the bellies of the wealthy layabouts  as an every day dessert but would incite a workingman to barf.


This isn't "blowing smoke" or instigating  insurrection either. In one candid conversation with Frank Rich last fall, Chris Rock said, “Oh, people don’t even know. If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets.” Further, the findings of three studies, published over the last several years in Perspectives on Psychological Science, indicate that Rock is right. We have no idea how unequal our society has become and to address the Europeans' question, most Americans really don't care  (e.g. http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2015/03/clutter-capitalism-and-inequality-why.html   ) since they fancy that one day they will become rich too - just by working hard. Of course, they are deluded. As author Michael Parenti has noted ( 'Dirty Truths') 94 percent of wealth comes by way of the wealthy not doing a damned bit of work but by inheritance.

Thomas Piketty noted the parlous effect of this inherited capital in his masterpiece book: 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century', where he noted the innate tendency for capital to increase  encapsulated by the shorthand,  r > g  with r the long run returns on capital and g is the rate of economic growth. Basically, it shows the "past devours the future". This is highlighted by the fact that the heirs of the fatcats  pay zero capital gains taxes on their stocks or other assets.  Such “unrealized” gains now account for more than half the value of assets held by estates worth more than $100 million. At the same time, the estate tax has been slashed. Before George W. Bush was president, it applied to assets in excess of $2 million per couple at a rate of 55 percent. Now it kicks in at $10,680,000 per couple, at a 40 percent rate.

No wonder these little bastards can afford to eat two or three Frrrozen Haute Chocolates  each day then whiz off to St. Kitts for 18 holes each weekend while their wives enjoy rose wine wraps.

Piketty's data shows  that indeed, inherited wealth has  metastasized inequality because the scions of the wealthy can then park their capital in rentier venues: dividends, profits, capital gains, interest and so on- and just let it grow while they sit on their asses. As a result, the gaping inheritance disparity actually grows more gaping each year after the inheritances have been received.

Worse now, is that the Fed has been feeding these layabouts with crack money via quantitative easing which has propelled the stock market to new heights. (Of course, it will have to come down eventually, which will be when the Fed finally gets the cojones to raise interest rates again instead of feeding crack to the markets and subsidies for chronic borrowers - while savers suck salt.)

Of course, the reason Americans are hard to enrage about this is not only their pie-eyed optimism but also their woeful ignorance.  From recent studies, the average American believes that the richest fifth own 59% of the wealth and that the bottom 40% own 9%. The reality is strikingly different. The top 20% of US households own more than 84% of the wealth, and the bottom 40% combine for a paltry 0.3%. The Walton family, for example, has more wealth than 42% of American families combined.

As the journalist Chrystia Freeland put it I her book about the plutocrats,  “Americans actually live in Russia, although they think they live in Sweden. And they would like to live on a kibbutz.” Norton and Ariely  in their own study also found a surprising level of consensus: everyone — even Republicans and the wealthy—wants a more equal distribution of wealth than the status quo. (Of course, the intelligent wealthy had better get on board if they have any recollections of what transpired during the French Revolution.)

Of course, the Republican Party itself - in the maw of the wealthy business class- is determined to exacerbate the inequality and make the Gini coefficient even lower. Their most recent budget attests to this, cutting not only Obamacare and Medicaid (which more than 20 million currently depend upon) but also Medicare (using Paul Ryan's infamous vouchers or "premium support" - more like premium abort) and cutting Social Security.

If we ever do end up in a scenario in this country resembling the French Revolution you will be able to lay most of the blame on the Republican Party.

See also:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/john-chuckman/61645/the-enduring-reality-of-government-by-wealth-and-some-of-its-consequences