America’s News-Media Hide America’s Corruptness

How America’s News-Media Hide the Extent of America’s Corruptness
Written by Eric Zuesse
03.04.2023

This article will show how America’s ‘news’-media carried-out a virtually total corruption — 100% censorship against reporting the basic truth — in order to protect the banksters who had masterminded and made billions from the corruptness that had actually produced the 2008 economic crash. If that corruptness had become generally known to the American people, then there would have been a political revolution instead of the cover-ups that followed it: those cover-ups by the press were essential in order for this ‘democracy’ to continue virtually unchanged, as it has done. Postponing till the indefinite future the 2nd American revolution (this one to overthrow America’s aristocracy and replace it by a democracy, instead of to overthrow Britain’s aristocracy and replace it by a democracy, as in the first time around) has merely built even higher the harms that America’s aristocracy has done, and is doing, not only to the American people, but worldwide — including their taking over Ukraine in 2014 and subsequent blowing-up of the two Nord Stream pipelines that had been supplying and were about to supply to Europe the inexpensive energy that was so crucial to making Europe the world’s showplace for beauty and for economic prosperity.

In the wake of the 2008 crash, America’s TIME magazine — which is the New York print side of Atlanta’s CNN Cable News Network — featured on its front cover for 13 February 2012, the face of the federal prosecutor for Wall Street crimes, Preet Bharara, and the headline extending over it, which read “THIS MAN IS BUSTING WALL ST.”. That feature-story inside the magazine was headlined “The Street Fighter: U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara has already taken down some of the financial world’s most prominent figures. He’s just getting started”. It included sub-heads such as “He’s won 56 convictions — seven cases are pending — and he’s had no losses.” But was that because Bharara had selected to prosecute the easy cases and not the ones against the bigwigs whose good graces would be necessary in order for him to be able to ‘earn’ big bucks in the future? The question wasn’t even raised in their article. Another was “He loves Bruce Springsteen and classic rock and has friends on all sides of the political spectrum.” But wouldn’t a good public prosecutor be far likelier to have few or no “friends on all sides of the political spectrum,” especially in a corrupt country, such as the U.S. so clearly is? That question, too, was simply ignored, and this fact displayed that TIME magazine was assuming its readers to be too stupid even to think of it. (I had noticed it then — and noticed that Bharara was prosecuting only small-fry, no banksters at all — but that the press at that time was adulatory about him, like this article in TIME.) Another subhead was “Insider trading turns Wall Street into a rigged game.” But had the financial crash resulted ONLY from insider trading? Was that what had actually — in and of itself — produced the crash? Yet again, TIME magazine simply assumed that its readers were too stupid to raise such questions. At the very top of the article’s opening two pages were six photos of Bharara’s most prominent charged alleged perpetrators: Raji Rajaratnam of Galleon Group, Danielle Chiesi of New Castle Funds, James Fleischman of Primary Global Research, Walter Shimoon of Flextronics, Rajat Gupta of McKinsey & Co., and Anthony Chiasson of Level Global. All of them were charged with insider trading, and were small-fry, nothing like the banksters who had scooped up billions of dollars in profits from the enormous and systematic economic frauds that had produced the 2008 crash.

On the same date as that ‘news’-story, 13 February 2012, the New Yorker magazine featured an article, “What Will Be Preet Bharara’s Legacy?”, which likewise refused to call a spade a spade, but instead ignored its own title-question — and likewise ignored that Bharara had prosecuted no banksters. That was just as much of an insult to the New Yorker’s readers as TIME’s was of their readers. People subscribe to such ‘news’-media? Sadly, they do. (That’s why we get the types of Presidents and Congress-persons that we do: lousy news-reporting.)

The first publication that called attention to Bharara’s scandalously bad performance — which ought to have been widely reported even in 2012, because Bharara had let all of the banksters off scot-free, and not even touched any of them — was in September 2015, when the very fine financial reporter William D. Cohan headlined in The Atlantic magazine “How Wall Street’s Bankers Stayed Out of Jail: The probes into bank fraud leading up to the financial industry’s crash have been quietly closed. Is this justice?” And he made clear that the answer was no. However, even Cohan’s article ignored the other mega-scandal about this entire matter: the cover-up of that reality on the part of America’s press till that time. Seven years now after the melt-down that had been brought on by systematic looting — mainly against poor and poorly educated Blacks who had signed lengthy mortgage contracts that they hadn’t read (and that was then followed by the looting against the investors who purchased, from the banksters, bundles of those shaky mortgage loans, which then crashed) — looting of those investors, by and for the benefit of the billionaire banksters who were into “take the money and run” — and, yet, still, no one was calling-out the press for its ongoing coverup of its own prior coverup of (and on behalf of) the crimes by and for those banksters. Now that laws and law-enforcement in the United States had failed, then, for four years (2008-2012), what was especially important was to call-out the nation’s systematically coverup-press, but this is something that it has never, ever, done. Anyone who thinks that in America, competing news-media will expose, instead of hide, the deceptions and frauds that are perpetrated by their ‘competitors’, doesn’t understand the way that America’s economy actually functions. It cannot be a free press if it is a virtually uniformly predatory press that exploits the prejudices of Democrats against Republicans, and of Republicans against Democrats, but that hides the crimes of the billionaires, who control the entire Government, including its complicit ‘free’ press.

Then, on 10 July 2018, Mr. Cohan bannered in The Nation magazine, “The Flawed Legend of Preet Bharara: After being fired by Trump, the former US Attorney wears a halo of martyrdom. But he failed to prosecute the Wall Street banksters who brought us the financial crisis.” He noted the complicity by America’s Presidents in this: Bharara “had been appointed by President George W. Bush, and then reappointed to the position by President Barack Obama. … Appointed by Obama in 2009, Bharara just wanted to keep his job under the new president, Donald Trump. Bharara came close to getting his wish.” Trump was actually less atrocious than had been Bush and Obama. This bad performance by those Presidents could now be reported. But the bad performance by America’s press? No: that’s off-limits for it to cover. And the only thing that’s as insidious as lying banksters, is a lying press to cover for them.

Cohan listed Bharara’s small-time successes, and then focused upon what Bharara had refused to do: “The glaring omission from this impressive list of successes has been his abject failure to prosecute any Wall Street bankers, traders, or executives for their roles in exacerbating [Cohan understated: the banksters had principally created] the 2008 financial crisis in fraudulent ways. There was plenty of evidence — e-mails, documents, reports from bankers to the legal authorities — that some on Wall Street knowingly packaged up into securities billions of dollars of mortgages that did not meet the underwriting standards at various big banks, including Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, and sold them off as supposedly money-good securities all over the world. Such prosecutions are usually the preserve of the Southern District of New York. But Bharara abdicated that responsibility.”

Cohan also noted that:

    In the years leading up to the financial crisis, Richard Bowen, a former senior mortgage underwriter at Citigroup, saw wrongdoing in his business unit — the bank’s underwriting standards were being routinely ignored — and he blew the whistle on it, first with his bosses and then with the legal authorities. He was fired, of course, and his warnings were ignored at the highest levels of the bank, including by Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary who was then in Citigroup’s office of the chairman.

But the complicity by the press itself? No one would publish anything about that. It’s coverupville. America is actually a closed society: honesty is unpublishable here, if it’s against the owners. Such honesty isn’t allowed by the people who control the country — and I am not referring here to “the Democrats,” nor to “the Republicans,” but to the billionaires (all of them, of both Parties). They’re the people who take the money and run. Their stockholders might suffer penny-on-the-dollar fines, but the banksters themselves don’t suffer for it at all. This is “capitalism”: the main owners just take the money and run. And their press look the other way. That’s how to postpone a revolution, until it will be more like what happened in France, than like what happened in America’s first Revolution. Like in France, aristocrats’ heads would then roll in America. If that’s the only way it can be done. It’d be their choice, if that happens — i.e., if it’s delayed that long. There will be a revolution in America, but what type?

This was covering up not only for the people who control America — the richest 1% of the richest 1% of Americans — but for their political agents, such as Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden. Obama was the worst of them all: he won the Presidency in 2008 by promising to prosecute the banksters, but did the exact opposite, as I headlined on 5 August 2015, “Bankster Prosecutions Plunged After Bush’s Presidency”. Obama secretly told them on 27 March 2009, “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks. … I’m not out there to go after you. I’m protecting you. … I’m going to shield you.” Though he had lied to the American people, he fulfilled his promise to the banksters. They had been crucial to his getting there. And the press covered all of that up, too. The public are just suckers of the billionaires, and this is how it is done.

NOTE: In the years after the 12 February TIME article that heroized Bharara, they made the article virtually not findable on the Web — not even at the Web archive — so, I created, at the Web archive, what is, at least as-of now, the only complete copy of its text that’s available online, in order that people now will be able to see (even though only long in retrospect) how untrustworthy America’s ‘news’-media are. To my knowledge, the present article is the only exposé which has yet been done of that article. Unfortunately, however, all six of TIME’s parts of that article, when it had been online, stripped out its sub-heads which I quoted here, as well as eliminated the photos of the six featured (embarrassingly minor) individuals whom Bharara had prosecuted, but all of those especially embarrassing details that had been in the printed article but removed from the printed version can be seen on pages 24-27 of the printed article, at whatever libraries still retain that.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.