Street Banks Research Articles

The Fear of Freedom in Hyperreality and its Adverse Effect on Identity in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho

Neoliberal ideology immensely celebrated individual and collective freedom, yet fell short of realizing that freedom itself can sometimes be the cause of fear and anxiety. In seeking to “liberate” the processes of capital accumulation, neoliberalism essentially created a form of hypercapitalism: a relatively new form of capitalism marked by the advancement in technology, media, and virtual reality. This economic system lead to a fragmentation of social life by allowing commercial or business interests to penetrate every aspect of human experience, leading to, what Jean Baudrillard called, a hyperreal mode of existence. In Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991), the notorious Wall Street banker, Patrick Bateman follows an apparent decline from a cynical misanthrope to a psychotic serial killer within the free-market hyperreal environment of the Reagan era. The novel portrays a nightmarish vision of freedom, the unbearable anxiety it creates, and individual’s psychological urge to flee from it. Through three socio-psychological mechanisms, Erich Fromm calls, automation conformity, authoritarianism, and destructiveness, Patrick attempts to flee from the freedom that brings anxiety with itself. Although these unconscious attempts are employed to sooth Patrick’s loneliness and alienation, they do not solve the underlying problem. The cost is a crisis of Patrick’s individuality, subsequently forfeiting all comprehension of his own selfhood and identity.

Connecting the Dots: The Foundation of American Empire

Contrary to popular political pundit monkey chatter, the current political economy of the United States is not the result of the Bush Republicans, the Obama/Clinton Democrats, or even the Liberal/Conservative schism stemming from the New Deal era. The creation of the early American republic left numerous issues unresolved and set in motion machinery that has manifested itself in government by Wall Street bankers and war profiteers, a foreign policy dominated by militarism, and an economy hooked on war. By employing a potent combination of a close reading of the sources, good writing, and intellectual honesty, author William Hogeland connects the dots on the origins of corporate American hegemony.

Search Engines, Social Media, and the Editorial Analogy

Social media companies are in Congress’s sights. In May 2016, in the wake of allegations that Facebook workers had suppressed pro-conservative viewpoints and links while injecting liberal stories into the newly introduced Trending Topics section, Senator John Thune sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg demanding, among other things, a copy of the company’s guidelines for choosing Trending Topics, a list of all news stories removed or injected into Trending Topics, and information about what steps the company would take to “hold the responsible individuals accountable.” Facebook complied, with Zuckerberg himself meeting with lawmakers. During the recent hearings before the Senate and House intelligence committees on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign, Senator Dianne Feinstein told the general counsels of Facebook, Google, and Twitter — whose CEOs were conspicuously absent — “You bear this responsibility. You’ve created these platforms. And now they’re being misused. And you have to be the ones to do something about it. Or we will.” Despite intensive lobbying efforts by these companies, both individually and through their collective trade association, legislation imposing new restrictions on how they operate is, “[f]or the first time in years...being discussed seriously in Washington.” As one reporter put it, “In 2008, it was Wall Street bankers. In 2017, tech workers are the world’s villain.” That Bay Area tech companies are having something of a PR crisis is clear. And in the rough and tumble of politics, that these companies would meet with and appease legislators is no great surprise. But if Congress does decide to get tough, how credible and wide-ranging is the regulatory threat, under current First Amendment jurisprudence? Some prominent commentators claim that Facebook is analogous to a newspaper and that its handling of a feature like Trending Topics is analogous to a newspaper’s editorial choices. As a result, these commentators find congressional scrutiny of such matters to be constitutionally problematic. Moreover, the editorial analogy has been a remarkably effective shield for these tech companies in litigation. In a series of lower court cases, Google and others have argued that their decisions concerning their platforms — for example, what sites to list (or delist) and in what order, who can buy ads and where to place them, and what users to block or permanently ban — are analogous to the editorial decisions of publishers. And like editorial decisions, they argue, these decisions are protected “speech” under the First Amendment. While mostly wielded against small-fry, often pro se plaintiffs, courts have tended to accept this analogy wholesale. Large consequences hinge on whether the various choices companies like Facebook and Google make are indeed analogous to editorial “speech.” The answer will partly determine whether and how the state can respond to current challenges ranging from the proliferation of fake news to high levels of market concentration to the lack of ad transparency. Furthermore, algorithmic discrimination and the discrimination facilitated by these platforms’ structures affect people’s lives today and no doubt will continue to do so. But if these algorithms and outputs are analogous to the decisions the New York Times makes on what to publish, then attempts to extend antidiscrimination laws to deal with such discrimination will face an onslaught of potentially insuperable constitutional challenges. In short, these companies’ deployment of the editorial analogy in the First Amendment context poses a major hurdle to government intervention. Whether, or to what extent, the editorial analogy should work as a shield against looming legislation and litigation for companies like Facebook and Google is something this historical moment demands we carefully consider. My primary aim in this paper is to do just that. I will engage critically with, and ultimately raise questions about, the near-automatic application of the editorial analogy. The core takeaways are these: (1) we should be cognizant of the inherent limitations of analogical reasoning generally and of the editorial analogy specifically; (2) whether these companies’ various outputs should receive coverage as First Amendment “speech” is far from clear, both descriptively and normatively; (3) the proposition that regulations compelling these companies to add content (disclaimers, links to competitors, and so on) compel the companies to speak is also far from clear; and, finally and most crucially, (4) given the limits of analogical reasoning, our future debates about First Amendment coverage should focus less on analogy and more on what actually matters — the normative commitments that undergird free speech theory and how our choices either help or hinder their manifestations.

Eighteenth-Century Brechtians: Theatrical Satire in the Age of Walpole by Joel Schechter

Reviewed by: Eighteenth-Century Brechtians: Theatrical Satire in the Age of Walpole by Joel Schechter Aaron Santesso Joel Schechter. Eighteenth-Century Brechtians: Theatrical Satire in the Age of Walpole. Exeter: Exeter, 2015. Pp. xii + 276. $95. Lloyd Evans concluded a recent review of a revival of The Threepenny Opera with the assertion that “this is the last century in which [Brecht’s] work will be performed” (The Spectator, June 11, 2016). For Evans, Brecht is chained to a particularly preachy version of Marxism, and his work feels ever more “puerile and dated.” Joel Schechter could not disagree more. For him, Brecht has never been more relevant. I suspect Mr. Schechter is closer to the truth than Evans: one need not be a doctrinaire Marxist to appreciate anew Brecht’s critiques of a world run by corrupt plutocrats. But while Mr. Schechter may have started out with a promising subject, the finished product is frustrating. The basic claim is that the writers attempting to criticize Walpole under the restrictions of the Licensing Act were “early Brechtians.” This argument is interesting enough—if somewhat vague, since “Brechtian” is used very liberally—and even plausible at points. But the desperate attempt to show the “relevance” of both eighteenth-century satiric drama and Brecht pretty quickly leads Mr. Schechter into some very odd places. Every academic wants his or her work to be “relevant,” but Mr. Schechter’s approach is scattergun and far from subtle. Occupy Wall Street is named several times. Chelsea Manning shows up randomly. Fictional interstitial chapters (“lost Messingkauf [End Page 79] Dialogues,” etc.) set up imaginary situations in which Georgian dramatists or Brecht himself are brought back to life to comment on modern-day events. These digressions range from odd to cringeworthy: particularly painful is a first-person essay from Macheath explaining why he has decided to become a Wall Street banker rather than a highwayman (Bernie Sanders and Goldman Sachs make awkward appearances). Eighteenth-Century Brechtians is recognizably one of those books that, while presenting a relatively conventional argument, sets itself up as iconoclastic and radical, something that will scandalize if not terrify all those dusty academics out there. Peter Thomson introduces the book as “a bid to jolt the Anglophone theatre out of its political doziness,” as if the real world were not doing enough in that regard. At its heart this is a kind of influence study, fleshed out with much interesting and possibly useful historical anecdote and contextualization. But Mr. Schechter claims his book is actually an attempt to “reduc[e] the authority of chronology,” so that Brecht turns out to have influenced John Gay rather than the other way around. Other critics (Claude Rawson, most notably) have played with this conceit, though as far as I know none has strung it out to book length. What we end up with are passages of straightforward theater history presented as Brecht avant la lettre, interspersed with various asides in which eighteenth-century authors complain about the fate of their works (so that Swift, for example, appears in order to complain about Max Fleischer’s 1939 animated version of Gulliver’s Travels—this is much less fun than it sounds). There is no real evidence presented, just the author’s general sense that this or that author is a member of the Brechtian club. And just in case we are tempted to take the conceit seriously, Mr. Schechter takes the time to clarify things for us: “It almost goes without saying that Gay and Farquhar did not set out to write Brechtian . . . plays.” Yes, almost. Meanwhile, the actual links to Brecht are often either nebulous or unconvincing (Theophilus Cibber is “an eighteenth-century Brechtian” because “his concerns anticipate a call to join with the discontented”). Several times Mr. Schechter seems to imply that any author writing satire is “Brechtian.” Why several of the works discussed resemble Brecht rather than, say, Karel Čapek, is unclear. Various other lines of influence are proposed, somewhat randomly, occasionally as a kind of flight-of-fancy: “Perhaps Henry Fielding would have cited a continuity between his work and Gay’s, too, if his adaptation of John Gay’s Polly had been...

To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party. By Heather Cox Richardson. New York: Basic Books, 2014. 416 pp.

To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party. By Heather Cox Richardson. New York: Basic Books, 2014. 416 pp. Few questions boggle modern political observers more than that of the great in Republican Party ideology. How did the Party of Lincoln become the Party of Reagan? How did a party based in anti-slavery activism among Northern progressives become the redoubt of Southern white conservatism? Heather Cox Richardson's To Make Men Free provides one of the first comprehensive answers to this conundrum. Rather than seeing a complete shift in party ideology, Richardson identifies a tension within Republican ideology present at the beginning of the party and continuing to this day. On one side was Abraham Lincoln's vision of a country where all people could pursue their dreams of economic prosperity. The government's job was to level the playing field and establish the physical, legal, and political infrastructure to make men free. Against this egalitarian vision was one that sanctified private property, seeing its defense as essential to ordered liberty, even if the result was a highly stratified society where the poor remain locked in a perpetual mudsill and the rich grew richer. The egalitarians were dominant among Republicans at first, able to push through a robust agenda in the absence of Democrats from seceded Southern states. This program included a Homestead Act, a Land Grant Education Act, an income tax, a protective tariff, and, by the Civil War's end, a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery. As former Confederates threatened to reimpose slavery under President Andrew Johnson's lenient Reconstruction plan, radical Republicans pushed through several Military Reconstruction Acts, passed a Freedmen's Bureau and Civil Rights Act, and then amended the Constitution two more times, enshrining the egalitarian principle of equal civil and political rights into the nation's basic legal framework. From this point on, Richardson notes, Republicans began to split over tactics and, eventually, ideology. For some, the egalitarian pull of the radicals continued until the end of the nineteenth century. But for most of the Republican leadership, the party's future lay with the industrialists, Wall Street bankers, and mine prospectors of the West. The threat of radicalized workers following the 1871 Paris Commune and labor activism during the Depression of 1873 cemented the party's leadership behind the forces of capital. By the 1890s, the Republican Party paid the barest lip service to the rights of African Americans and took a laissez-faire approach to monopolies and labor relations. By the turn of the nineteenth century, however, a new force within the Republican Party pushed the party back toward its egalitarian roots. Theodore Roosevelt and the new Progressive wing of the party embraced a strong federal government as the only force capable of reining in the industrial trusts that had found such favor with Presidents McKinley and Harrison. …

Get Rich Quick With Old Generic Drugs! The Pyrimethamine Pricing Scandal.

Get Rich Quick With Old Generic Drugs! The Pyrimethamine Pricing Scandal.

Capitalizing patriotism: the Liberty loans of World War I

Although taxes were raised substantially in the United States during World War I, recourse was had to five bond issues, the famous Liberty loans, to finance the bulk of war expenditures. The Secretary of the Treasury, William Gibbs McAdoo, hoped to create a broad market for the Liberty bonds and to limit their yields by following an aggressive policy of ‘capitalizing patriotism’. He called on everyone from Wall Street bankers to the Boy Scouts to volunteer for campaigns to sell the bonds. The campaigns have become legendary. Some of the nation's best-known artists were recruited to draw posters depicting the contribution to the war effort to be made by buying bonds, and giant bond rallies featuring Hollywood stars were organized. These efforts, however, enjoyed limited success. The yields on the Liberty bonds were kept low mainly by making the bonds tax exempt and by making sure that a large proportion of them were purchased directly or indirectly by the Federal Reserve, turning the Federal Reserve into an engine of inflation. Patriotism proved to be a weak, although not powerless, offset to normal market forces.

Management Compensation and the World Economic Crisis: Evidence from Bosnia and Herzegovina

Much has been written about the (still present) world economic crisis in the past few years, and in those scientific discussions the main factors – causes of crisis have been often analyzed. All those (up to now) analyzed factors make the crisis long-lasting, harder, uncertain with hardly predictable implications. On the other hand, understanding the cause and preventing the consequences of crises are an important precondition of economic and social development of any country. With regard to this, the main aim of research by the authors of this paperwork has been based on the attempt to explain the view according to which, the greed of Wall Street bankers caused by excessive management compensation has also been, inter alia, one of the relevant factors causing and deepening the 21 st century world economic crisis. Furthermore, the paperwork provides an overview of possible directions of regulation in the field of management compensation, all with the aim to prevent large scale crises in the future. Finally, to complete the research, the authors have analyzed the state in the field of management compensation in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Green Gallows for the Wall Street Bankers

Green Gallows for the Wall Street Bankers

The monster: how a gang of predatory lenders and Wall Street bankers fleeced America--and spawned a global crisis

Lie, swindle, steal. It's another day at work for the sales professionals of the mortgage industry. Amid the wreckage of the S&L scandal, a group of maverick entrepreneurs hatch a new money-making scheme: writing 'subprime' loans at exorbitant prices and bundling them into securities for eager Wall Street banks. In this stunning narrative, award-winning reporter Michael W. Hudson brings us inside the boiler rooms and banks that flooded the nation with high-risk, high-profit mortgages. At Ameriquest Mortgage, the nation's largest subprime lender, salesmen sniff out homeowners vulnerable to refinancing pitches, and use Wite-Out to doctor documents. At rival FAMCO, employees memorize 'The Monster', a high-pressure sales tactic crafted to obscure interest rates - and so unscrupulous that one loan officer calls his state attorney general. With support from Washington bureaucrats and Wall Street, subprime grows into a $1.5 trillion behemoth - devastating the lives of millions of homeowners and wounding the U.S. economy. Provocative and gripping, The Moster is a searing tale of a sales culture gone out of control and the bottom-feeding fraud and topdown greed that fuelled the financial collapse.

Reflections on 25 Years of Health Promotion—Where Have We Been and Where are We Going?

Reflections on 25 Years of Health Promotion—Where Have We Been and Where are We Going?

Hard Lessons: Neoliberalism, Education, and the Politics of Disposability

In spite of the almost unprecedented financial and credit crises gripping the United States, the legacy of jaded excess lives on as both a haunting memory and an ideological register that continues to shape contemporary politics. After all, it was only a few years ago when it was widely recognized, if not celebrated, that the New Gilded Age and its updated ‘”dreamworlds” of consumption, property, and power’ had returned to the United States with a vengeance.[1] The exorbitantly rich along with their conservative ideologues publicly invoked and lionized that bygone period in nineteenth-century American history when corporations ruled political, economic, and social life and an allegedly heroic entrepreneurial spirit brought great wealth and prosperity to the rest of the country. Even with the economic blowout and its now visible register of corruption and greed on the part of Wall Street bankers and traders, the dominant press cannot relinquish its love affair with the super-rich, regardless of how greedy they appear. How else to explain stories about how the rich are going through hard times as exemplified in their either moving out of their high-priced mansions into more modest million-dollar condos or being forced to give up riding in limos for more discreet modes of transportation? In some cases, these highflying entrepreneurs of the now devalued Gilded Age are celebrated because of their unmitigated belief in the gospel of wealth and their sheer courage to spend in tough times. Or, as the New York Times puts it, ‘When the times get tough, the smart spend money’.[2] And while tent cities are emerging all over the country, the ultra-rich provide a lesson in what it means to be ‘smart’, capitalizing on their spending habits by buying $14-million condos in New York City, dishing out $3000 at the Goldbar Lounge for a bottle of Louis XIII Cognac, or paying $656,000 for a Rolls Royce Phantom convertible.[3] What these stories often forget to mention is the legacy of corporate swindling, corruption, and financial adventurism that was responsible for bankrupting the country. There is more at work in these examples of Gilded Age excess than a predatory narcissism, a zany hubris, and a neo-feudal world-view in which self-interest and the laws of the market are seen as the only true measure of politics. There is also an attack on the idea of the social contract – the state’s provision of minimum guarantees of security – and the very notion of democratic politics. Moreover, in this free-wheeling, deregulated market society, the citizen is reduced to a consumer, or if labeled as a flawed consumer, rendered as excess, redundant, and disposable. Rampant greed, market deregulation, and cut-throat individual competition, lauded in this world of free-market fundamentalism, have produced over the last thirty years an unparalleled degree of social inequality in the United States along with massive dislocations in the basic foundations of society. Clearly, any understanding of the present financial crisis and its disastrous effects has to include a consideration of free-market fundamentalism or neoliberalism and the ideologies, cultural

Merchant of Venice (review)

Reviewed by: Merchant Venice, and: Merchant of Venice Yu Jin Ko Merchant of Venice Presented by Chicago Shakespeare Theatre at the Courtyard Theatre, Chicago, Illinois. September 2-November 12, 2005. Directed by Barbara Gaines. Scenic Design by Daniel Ostling. Lighting by Robert Wiezel. Costumes by Mariann Verheyen. Sound by Lindsay Jones. Fight Choreography by Robin H. McFarquhar. With Mike Nussbaum (Shylock, Old Gobbo), Scott Jaeck (Antonio, Arragon), Timothy Edward Kane (Bassanio), Kevin Gudahl (Gratiano), Kate Fry (Portia), Rengin Altay (Nerissa), William Dick (Salerio), Jay Whittaker (Solanio), Matt Hawkins (Lorenzo), Bethany Caputo (Jessica), Blaine Hogan (Launcelot Gobbo), Bruce A. Young (Morocco, Tubal), and others. Merchant of Venice Presented by The Atlanta Shakespeare Company at the New American Shakespeare Tavern, Atlanta, Georgia. January 5-February 5, 2006. Directed by Jeff Watkins. Lighting by Lorraine Lombardi. Music by J. C. Long. Costumes by Anne Carole Butler. With Doug Kaye (Shylock, Old Gobbo), Troy Willis (Antonio), Paul Hester (Bassanio), J. C. Long (Gratiano), Claire Christie (Portia), Bahama Lynch (Nerissa), Tony Brown (Salerino), Drew Reeves (Solanio), Matthew Felten (Lorenzo), Rachel Lee (Jessica), Kirk Harris Seaman (Launcelot Gobbo), Barry Stewart Mann (Duke of Venice, Morocco, Tubal), David Weber (Arragon), and others. Because of the modern history of anti-Semitism and the play's role in it, directors are often reluctant to let The Merchant of Venice speak for itself on stage. This holds true even for concept-averse directors who are thoroughly convinced that the play is not anti-Semitic. They might invoke Shakespeare's universality to suggest that he saw through the destructive intolerance within all of us, but they will also fear, understandably, that the play could enflame the very prejudices it is thought to expose. The play certainly provides opportunities for examining prejudices (and ourselves), especially in the safe remove of a study, but in the theatre, reflection can easily be trumped by a dramatic rhythm that sets up the humiliation of a Jew as the springboard for comic celebration. Hence [End Page 75] great pains are often taken to ensure that the production sends the right message about tolerance and self-examination. But what kind of a production will best deliver this message—the one that speaks more, or less, for itself? A comparison of two very different productions by Chicago Shakespeare Theatre and The Atlanta Shakespeare Company can help us address, if not answer, this question. Chicago Shakespeare performs in a lavish "courtyard theatre" with plush seats and elegantly crafted wooden galleries that surround a spacious thrust stage. This playing space is only one part of its seven-story, glass-enclosed complex on Chicago's Navy Pier. The list of patrons who made the substantial donations to build the complex is staggering. The company is composed almost entirely of Equity actors. One might say that its Merchant for the 05–06 season was a perfect fit for this theatre. And that was precisely the problem. In its look and feel, the production was modern and stylish, but with a certain slick eclecticism that often felt more corporate than hip. Some of this was deliberate. Shylock dressed like a Wall Street banker, and our first view of Belmont presented Portia in the designer-chic dress of rich leisure (trim gold jacket over maroon slacks with a golden chain slung through the belt loops) with Nerissa as her personal assistant, holding a ledger. We were to understand that Portia was a child of mercantile privilege. But this sleek look extended to other design elements as well and sometimes took on the glossy polish of Madison Avenue: smoky fog drifting down from the ceiling of an upstage café in which the first scene was set; stage movements between scenes, choreographed to sirens and street noise, that had a little touch of Harold Prince; a stagy tableau of a Muslim, a Christian, and a Jewish pair (Shylock and Jessica) in prayer in three different spots. Matching this general polished feel was the production's determination to deliver a moral tale on modern anti-Semitism that felt not probing and challenging, but rather too corporate as well—inoffensive and easy on the moral senses in its reliance on facile oppositions. Mike Nussbaum's Shylock was a...

A Closer Look at Business Education - Finance

According to Wikipedia, Finance studies and addresses the ways in which individuals, businesses and organizations raise, allocate and use monetary resources over time. To many people, finance is business. Many of the brightest stars in the business world - from Wall Street bankers to hedge fund managers to corporate CEOs - made their names (and fortunes) in the realm of finance. And finance is seductive. It is numbers-intensive, based on fundamental mathematic principles, and seems values-neutral, almost scientific. Yet finance involves substantial moral judgments about the world in which we live. And financial tools can help to solve deep social and environmental problems. This paper sought innovation in the teaching of Finance, with the following questions in mind: - How does the penetration of social and environmental issues into the Finance discipline compare to other disciplines? - When such issues are present, what forms to they take? - What teaching resources are available to faculty who want to broaden the scope of their classes? - What are the key social and environmental issues as regards Finance?

Ira B. Black 1941–2006

Ira B. Black 1941–2006

Internal marketing: a means for creating a sales or marketing orientation? The case of UK retail banks

The concept of 'internal marketing' has received considerable coverage in the literature, but even its most ardent supporters have noted problems in translating the concept into reality. This paper discusses the findings of an exploratory case study carried out within 35 UK high street retail banks. Internal marketing is an initiative adopted by the organizations studied in order to nourish a marketing orientation.The implementation approach shapes the nature and form of the internal marketing communications that organizations adopt. Even though UK retail banks intend to implement internal marketing effectively, in reality the current implementation approach appears to be counter-productive to the achievement of the core aims of the initiative. The core finding from this exploratory research suggests that there are substantial barriers to the successful implementation of internal marketing within the banks studied, barriers such as the focus on short-term sales goals, the lack of a formal and 'holistic' implementation approach and the creation of 'personnel discrimination' and negative internal competition.

Corporate Finance

The capital markets, in league with the Internet, are creating a unique moment in business history. Of course, past courtships between capital and technology have driven economic growth and changed society. After all, venture capitalists and Wall Street bankers helped entrepreneurs launch semiconductors, main frame and personal computers, and biotechnology. But the catalytic change the Internet has ushered in is so extensive that it is really a change in kind rather than one of degree.

The Rise and Fall of the SEC in Bankruptcy

As commentators have long pointed out, once established, administrative agencies are almost impossible to kill. Scaling back the authority of an agency is somewhat easier, but even retrenchment proves difficult. Given these political realities, the trajectory of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in corporate bankruptcy is remarkable. Led by William Douglas (head of the SEC before his appointment to the Supreme Court), the New Deal reformers and their allies in Congress transformed corporate reorganization practice by enacting the Chandler Act of 1938. In addition to destroying the influence of Wall Street bankers and lawyers, the Chandler Act positioned the SEC at the heart of the reorganization process. At first, the SEC did in fact play a dominant role in bankruptcy. But over the next several decades, the SEC slowly lost its grip. The end came in 1978, when Congress ushered the SEC out of bankruptcy almost completely as part of its next major reform. This Article addresses a single question: what happened? Why did the SEC, whose oversight had been seen as crucial to investor protection, disappear from bankruptcy? Drawing from recent positive political theory on Congressional institutions, I argue that the answer to these questions lies in the initial structuring of the SEC's role. In their zeal to destroy the Wall Street banks and lawyers who had previously dominated reorganization practice, William Douglas and the other New Deal reformers strengthened the hand of two interest groups, the general bankruptcy bar and bankruptcy judges, who each had strong incentives to resist SEC oversight. Congress's enactment of the Chandler Bill, rather than a companion bill considered at the same time, further compounded the SEC's troubles by subjecting subsequent reforms to a committee (the Judiciary Committee) that is more likely to favor bankruptcy lawyers than the SEC. Although these political factors explain the SEC's near disappearance from bankruptcy, this Article concludes that the time may now be ripe for the SEC to increase its profile once again, though in a more limited way than the New Deal reformers envisioned. Many of the securities law issues that the SEC regulates, from takeovers to securities trading, now figure prominently in major corporate reorganization cases as well. Regulation by the SEC would be the best means of coordinating the treatment of these issues inside of bankruptcy and out.

Securitization: a state attorney general's perspective

Securitization will put hundreds of millions of dollars in the hands of utilities and line the pockets of Wall Street bankers, but it's a highly dubious proposition for consumers and advocates of competition.

Detecting the Soviet Bomb: Joe-1 in a Rain Barrel

In April 1947, a former Wall Street banker. Admiral Lewis Strauss, became a member of the newly established Atomic Energy Commission. At the time, both General Leslie Groves and J. Robert Oppenheimer believed that the Soviets were still a decade away from nuclear success; Naval Intelligence estimated the earliest date for a Soviet nuclear weapon as 1952, five years hence. Nevertheless, just one week after Strauss's appointment, he asked Secretary of Defense James E. Forrestal if any measures had been taken for the long-range detection (LRD) of a hypothetical Soviet atomic bomb test, and the one-time banker was surprised by the answer: No. Although he had little scientific knowledge of atomic weapons effects, Strauss felt intuitively that the military could and should have such a detection capability. He therefore pressed his deep concern to the military. The Office of Naval Research responded immediately.