November 22, 2009

Broadcast Date: 
Nov 22 2009

Nomi Prins on the financial regulations being debated on Capitol Hill; two exhibitions focus on the work of avant garde artist Stuart Sherman; plus Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir explores the obsession with anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in his film Defamation.

Episode segments
  • Is Financial Reform Possible?
    National Politics, Domestic Policy
    Nomi Prins is a journalist and senior fellow at Demos.  Her most recent book is It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses and Backroom Deals, from Washington to Wall Street.  She is also the author of Jacked: How Conservatives are Picking Your Pocket and  Other People's Money: The Corporate Mugging of America.  Her new thriller, The Trail, is out under her pseudonym, Natalia Prentice.  Before becoming a journalist, Nomi worked on Wall Street as a managing director at Goldman Sachs and running the intrnational nalytics group at Bear Sterns in London
    Esther Kaplan and Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

    In June the White House submitted a white paper sketching out their ideas for financial regulation.  Since then, both the House (under the aegis of Rep. Barney Frank) and the Senate (under Sen. Christopher Dodd) have been trying to craft legislation that will at least give the appearance, if not the reality, of reining in Wall Street. We talk with Nomi Prins about what's on the table in these efforts: creating a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, ensuring congressional oversight of the Federal Reserve, regulating banks that are both larger and more profitable than they were before the crisis.   And also about what's not currently being considered:  two proposals that critics say would do more than anything else to prevent a replay of the recent meltdown: breaking up those institutions that are "too big to fail" and restoring the fire walls created by the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act.

  • Stuart Sherman avant-garde artist and muse
    Theater, Visual Art, Arts & Culture, Exhibits
    Artist Jonathan Berger's work encompasses the fields of sculpture, drawing, architecture, installation, performance, design, philosophy, and curatorial projects. His most recent curatorial project is Stuart Sherman: Nothing Up My Sleeve.
    Esther Kaplan

    Jonathan Berger talks with us about Stuart Sherman who, as a member of the important generation of American avant-garde artist of the late 1960s and early 1970s, developed his own unique style across various media, the impact of which constinues to resonate with the avant-garde eight years after his death.  Sherman is at the center of two exhibitions:

    Beginningless Thought: Endless Seeing: The Works of Stuart Sherman (1945-2001) at New York University, 80 Washington Sq. East, between 4th and Washington Place. Until December 19, 2009.

    Stuart Sherman: Nothing Up My Sleeve, a group exhibition at Participant, Inc., 253 E. Houston Street, through December 20, 2009.

  • Defamation
    Holocaust, American, Film, Arts & Culture, Global, Anti-Semitism
    Israeli cinematographer Yoav Shamir directed and narrated Defamation.  His previous documentary films include Checkpoint (about Israeli soldiers serving in the Occupied Territories) and Flipping Out (about what happens to them after they leave the military).  He talks with us from his cell phone in Amsterdam.
    Esther Kaplan and Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

    In Defamation, documentarian Yoav Shamir tries to understand the contemporary obsession with anti-Semitism and the Holocaust by visiting the Anti-Defamation League's (ADL) offices in NYC, tagging along with an ADL delegation to Europe and travelling with a group of Israeli teenagers on a March of the Living trip to Poland and Auschwitz.

    Defamation is currently showing at Cinema Village, 22 E. 12th Street, in Manhattan.  To see the trailer, click here.