NY Times Runs 3rd Article Mentioning That, Given Scandal, Promotionally Naming Subway Stations & Arena “Barclays” Is Problematic

Today the New York Times ran its third article including a mention of an obvious elephant in the media stream world: That promotionally christening of MTA subway stations and the heavily susbisidized Forest City Ratner/Mikhail Prokhorov “Barclays,” the name of the British Bank whose name is virtually synonymous with the LIBOR rate-fixing scandal of which that bank is a big part, could be awkward.  See: New Territory for Ads, With a Moving Target, by David W. Dunlap, September 16, 2012.

The Times first two articles mentioning the awkwardness of the promotional appliqué of the “Barclays” scandal-associated name to New York Subway station hubs and a private basketball arena being located in Brownstone Brooklyn mostly paid for with abusive subsidies and public give-aways were precisely about the awkwardness of the scandal association although those article skipped any concurrent mention of the scandal of the arena’s subsidization.  The earlier Times articles mentioning the awkwardness ran, in quick secession, over the Fourth of July holiday, see: Investment Banking/| Legal/regulatory July 3, 2012, What’s in a Stadium Name? Often Trouble for a Company, by William Alden and Sports Business:arena Names Can Spell Embarrassment, by Richard Sandomir, July 4, 2012, previously written about by Noticing New York here: Wednesday, August 15, 2012, With Discordant Synchronicity The “Barclays” Center Will Open At LIBOR Scandal’s Peak: What The New York Times Is And Isn’t Covering.

The now three mentions of the “Barclays” name awkwardness come amidst a sea of New York Times articles stenographically cheerleading the “Barclays” Ratner/Prokhorov arena opening and other articles of national and local interest about the LIBOR/Barclays Bank scandal itself that somehow fail to mention the awkwardness posed by the interconnections.  The Times has just begun to report that local New York government officials are likely to be among those suing Barclays among the banks involved in the scandal but have not yet pointed out how likely it is that the local New York government officials suing Barclays may have among them a very high proportion of the very same officials directing subsidy into Atlantic Yards and the arena promotionally endorsing the name “Barclays.” (See: Friday, August 17, 2012, The New York Times Starts Reporting That New York Government Officials Are Looking At Suing Barclays Bank- Leading to. . . ?)

The occasion for the third mention of the Barclays name awkwardness is an article about how rampant advertising is ubiquitously taking over MTA surfaces, in subway stations, on buses, on Metrocards.  As the article mentions that includes the sale of subway station naming rights, and cites the renaming of the Brooklyn subway hub stations “Barclays” as an example.  The article does not mention that the “Barclays” renaming of the stations is the initial spearhead for any such practice or that the MTA board authorized the sale of those naming rights for a mere pittance, without any apparent thought, as part of a rigged deal to pile further benefit on developer Forest City Ratner, to whom the Atlantic Yards mega-monopoly was bequeathed without competitive bid.

The article’s first mention of Barclays Bank makes it look like it will gloss over the bank’s LIBOR scandal just as the promotional naming of the arena assists in doing so every day:

Then there are naming rights: for $200,000 a year, the authority has added the designation “Barclays Center” to the name of the Atlantic Avenue stations in Brooklyn. The measure is one part customer service — the new arena by that name is a block away — and two parts marketing, as the arena and stations now carry the name of a giant international financial services company.  

The “name of a giant international financial services company,” without treading anywhere near the line of a libelously LIBOR mention, is probably an unduly respectful descriptive shorthand for the bank under its present-day circumstances.  But before getting annoyed with this, take into account that the pulled punch in this regard was probably intended by the reporter so that the article’s concluding paragraphs could have the full benefit of the final punch intended.  I will get to that in a moment.

The print article has one visual showing how the subway stations are now labeled “Barclays.” The slide show accompanying the article on the web has two visuals (out of eight) with three such visuals of the "Barclays" naming out of the total of thirteen visuals included in the web version of the article.

Noticing New York has written before about the significant negative implications of government sale of its own and public assets for commercial branding: Friday, June 29, 2012, Government Gets Branded.  And Noticing new York has also written about how, in recently reporting about such corporate branding, the Times has neglected to delve into the underlying policy issues even though in similar coverage back in 2004 it considered it worthwhile to do so.

Today’s article in the Times does include discussion of the basic policy question although briefer than the 2004 article.  It suggests these MTA sales communicate to the public a lack of governmental agency self respect:

    But revenues come with a cost of their own, suggested Siva Vaidhyanathan, the chairman of the media studies department at the University of Virginia.

    “We’ve gotten to the point now where the M.T.A. doesn’t respect its own environment and is filling it with sight pollution,” he said in a phone interview. “A bright yellow subway car, branded to sell something, is not comfortable, it’s not respectful and it’s not dignified.”

    “Environmentally, the city should be paying attention to dignity as a quality-of-life indicator,” Professor Vaidhyanathan said.

The discussion of policy would have had more bite had the reporter pointed out that, even with this sort of all-out push on selling every possible surface space for advertising, the total amount of money the MTA gets from advertising on the subway, on buses, on its two commuter railroads and on billboards along its routes is  exceptionally small in relative terms: The article says it is expected to be $120 million this year, whereas the MTA’s annual budget is about $12.5 billion, possibly headed to about $13.1 billion. The $2-$3 billion in subsidies being given, without bid, to the Atlantic Yards mega-monopoly might begin to compare with this figure, but not this small amount from advertising revenue.

Professor Vaidhyanathan is quoted again in the penultimate paragraph of the article echoing concerns Noticing New York has steadily kept front and center in writing about the tragedy of the publicly paid for promotion of the “Barclays” name:

    Professor Vaidhyanathan, for one, would like to see some more restraint. He bristled at the Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center name. “What happens if Barclays is convicted of massive fraud in the Libor scandal?” he asked. “What happens if Barclays goes out of business?”

Barclays may, indeed, go out of business but professor Vaidhyanathan’s other “what if” is just a tad off: Barclays has already entered into a  £290m ($450m) fine agreement with the United States and Great Britain for manipulating LIBOR rates.  Its manipulation is already acknowledged by that agreement and the payment of the fine, but one purpose of the bank’s payment of that fine was to preclude criminal prosecution and conviction of the bank.  Nevertheless, Barclays traders and possibly Barclays executives are likely to be criminally prosecuted, possibly convicted, separately.

Notwithstanding that this is the third Times article with a conceding mentioning that the publicly-financed parading of the “Barclays” name is obviously awkward, the sober observance of that fact in three articles is far outweighed by the many more celebratory articles the Times is running about the opening of the new “Barclays” center including the one featured on the front page of its special-edition Sunday Styles Magazine proclaiming Jay-Z in its front-cover caption to be “civic-minded” for promoting the arena, scandalous history and scandalous name “Barclays” name notwithstanding.

The Times has launched into its promotions without mention of its business relationship with the arena’s developer.  Furthermore, the Times’ relentless promotion of the developer/subsidy collector’s Atlantic Yards from its unveiling forward probably tipped the balance for the materialization of a boondoggle that is costly to the public in so many ways.  Such being the “Times Effect” on this issue, the clever casualness of the article’s conclusion equating of the naming of the subway transit hubs after “Barclays” with the naming of “Times Square” could be considered somewhat chilling-  because there is less coincidence than implied:

    Alternately, however, what if the bank and the new name show some staying power? After all, “Times Square” seems to have caught on.   

NY Times Report On Public Officials Suing On `Broadening' LIBOR/Barclays Scandal Doesn’t `Broaden' To Mention “Barclays” Center

In a new article (in today’s print edition) the New York Times has continued reporting about how government officials around the country are “working intensely behind the scenes to build a case for suing the nation’s largest banks” in connection with the LIBOR/Barclays rate fixing scandal. . . .

(See: Banks Face Suits as States Weigh Libor Losses, by Nathaniel Popper, September 4, 2012.)

. . .  It’s the second Times article about such government lawsuits.  Once again, the article doesn’t report that local New York government lawsuits against Barclays Bank would occur, ironically, just as the New York taxpayers are providing massive subsidy for the promotion of Barclays Bank with the opening of the Ratner/Prokhorov basketball arena to which the “Barclays” name is being affixed.  (See my Noticing New York article pointing out this dereliction with respect to the first Times article: Friday, August 17, 2012, The New York Times Starts Reporting That New York Government Officials Are Looking At Suing Barclays Bank- Leading to. . . ?)

The first Times article (very short) appeared immediately after I’d finished writing a Noticing New York article suggesting that the New York Times start reporting that local New York government officials are looking at suing Barclays Bank.  (See: Noticing New York’s Wednesday, August 15, 2012, With Discordant Synchronicity The “Barclays” Center Will Open At LIBOR Scandal’s Peak: What The New York Times Is And Isn’t Covering.)

"Big," "Widely Spread," "Broadening"- And Of Relevance To   . . New Yorkers?

That Noticing New York article made the point that in reporting about Barclays, the Barclays Center and the LIBOR rate-fixing scandal for which the “Barclays” name has become a near synonym, the Times reporting needed to be less compartmentalized and more integrative.  That would mean paying attention to what local New York government officials are doing with respect to suing Barclays Bank and mentioning the overlaps respecting those local officials involved in the possible lawsuits against the bank and those involved in promoting the Barclays Bank via unjustifiable subsidies for the “Barclays” Center.

The new Times article quotes one state official working to build her case saying:

We think this could be as big as the mortgage crisis settlement, that this could be a really high impact situation and that we should be aggressive on this,” . . .  referring to the $25 billion settlement that the nation’s biggest banks entered with state attorneys general.

The Times reporter adds this assessment:

The activity provides a glimpse at how widely the Libor scandal has spread through the financial world, and how much damage may still be in store for the banks accused of manipulating Libor.

Notably, despite this gloomy assessment about the future discovery of widespread damage, the quoted assessment that the LIBOR damages “could be as big as the mortgage crisis settlement” is not provided by a New York official, it is provided by Janet Cowell, North Carolina’s State Treasurer.  In fact, there are no quotes or similar assessments provided by New York government officials.  The article does, indeed, report that New York’s attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, is pursuing the possibility of such litigation but instead of including a quote or assessment from Mr. Schneiderman or his office the Times fills in with a quote from George C. Jepsen, Connecticut’s attorney general, who is working on this matter together with Mr. Schneiderman and his office.  Mr. Jepsen says his work with Schneiderman’s office, “has broadened significantly over the last few weeks and we are now coordinating with a much larger group of attorneys general.”

Mr. Schneiderman's Current Chosen Investigative Focus

Mr. Schneiderman is making himself much more available to the press (three New York Times reporters and presumably a photographer for a contemporaneous photograph) in connection with another of his investigations: Whether private equity firms have abused, perhaps illegally, the IRS code by manipulating to convert monies earned as management fees into “fund investments” so as to thereby pay a much lower tax than should be paid when management fees are received.  There is a reason to make that investigation important in the national news at this moment: Bain Capital is one of the private equity firms employing this tax device and Mr. Schneiderman has subpoenaed the firm in order to learn more.  Bain Capital is, after all, the private equity firm that made Mitt Romney exceptionally wealthy.  The Romney campaign issued a statement that at one and the same time defends the tax device (as both acceptable and legal) and states that Mr. Romney didn’t himself benefit* form the practice.  (See: Inquiry on Tax Strategy Adds to Scrutiny of Finance Firms, By Nicholas Confessore, Julie Creswell and David Kocieniewski, September 1, 2012.)

(* It is worth remembering that in a previous parsing the Romney campaign disavowed Mr. Romney’s associations with Bain Capital activities by asserting that Mr. Romney had resigned from Bain retroactively, notwithstanding that "retroactive" resignation is a  legal impossibility, and evidence showing that Romney was involved with and its sole stockholder of Bain several years later than he acknowledges.  The degree to which his ongoing “Managing Director” title meant involvement in day-to-day management- vs. benefit?- involves some debate and additional parsing.)

The Schneiderman investigations of the private equity firms are being justified as “an effort to recover more revenue” for the state under New York State (not federal) tax law  (Wouldn’t the recoveries in the LIBOR suits be potentially even greater?), but the Times reports that executives at the firms under scrutiny are accusing Mr. Schneiderman, "a first-term Democrat with ties to the Obama administration," (as observed by the Times) of acting politically.  That accusation hearkens back to the motif, examined in the last Noticing New York article on the subject, that Mr. Schneiderman may pick and chose among his investigations with political motivation: Schneiderman said when running for office that he saw reasons to investigate the Atlantic Yards mega-monopoly but has so far bypassed his opportunities in that regard.

The Times story about government officials suing over LIBOR doesn't correct one ongoing omission: Notwithstanding that the Times is presumably supposed to serve as New York City’s local newspaper the Times has still not reported Mayor Bloomberg’s statement that he expects the city will join in the LIBOR scandal-based lawsuits.  Although the article mentions possible lawsuits against the LIBOR/Barclay Bank cohort by the states of North Carolina, Maryland, Massachusetts and Connecticut and contains a quote from the Connecticut attorney general, the article is seen largely through the eyes of  Ms. Cowell, the North Carolina Treasurer who is running as a Democrat for another four-year term in that office.  It could therefore be accused of being an example of press release journalism in its almost complete reliance of statements from Ms. Cowell’s office to present its picture of the news.

One service the article performs is to explain with relative clarity how localities may have lost funds and suffered damages for which they can sue banks such as Barclays.  Though clear in describing “two areas of the state’s finances” “primarily” focused on by North Carolina in its pursuit of damages, Noticing New York’s previous coverage described more ways that local governments may have incurred damages.

Hot Off  the Press: New York Times Own Version of "Less Compartmentalized" and "More Integrative"

Meanwhile, it may be that the New York Times has considered taking my Noticing New York advice that its reporting about Barclays needed to be less compartmentalized and more integrative, but not in the way I had intended.  When I argued that everything reported about comprises an interrelated fabric and tableau of relevancy I had meant that questionable government subsidies to promote the name of Barclays at the “Barclays” Center are relevant to the LIBOR Scandal, especially since the officials involved in each sphere of activity are largely the same.  Accordingly, the public relations push and spending for the “Barclays” Center should not be treated as sacrosanct to be kept inviolate of any mention of the glaringly obvious and embarrassing scandal it evokes.

That’s what I meant . .   but the Times has decided to implement its less compartmentalized and more integrative reporting in quite the opposite way. . .  By expanding and integrating its public relations, press release-based articles promoting the opening of “Barclays” Center into a disingenuously faux mimicry of its other city news reporting . . . 

. . . On Tuesday the Times ran two stories complete with seven pictures and a map (four of the pictures and the map being in color) that took up a full one and two thirds pages in all.  Both stories were promotional pieces about where the Nets players “who will play at the Barclays Center” will live.  The coverage was prominently introduced on the first page of the SportsTuesday section but carried over to cover the entire last page of the sports section where, looking suspiciously like the Times Real Estate pages (and unlike a sports section), it might snare and draw in unwary readers curious about Brooklyn living.  The page even borrowed the real estate section’s customary formatting, fonts and layouts- See, below: Can you tell which is which?  Which is the sports section page and which, alongside, is the page from the Times actual real estate section?  (Keep reading for the answer. . . .  Click to enlarge and inspect more closely.)

(Answer: This week’s real estate section page, from just two days prior, is on the RIGHT side.)

I suppose this is all in the tradition of the kind of advertorial that this so closely resembles being, something the Times is helping along here: Making something look like the news reporting that it is not.  

Norman Oder of Atlantic Yards Report wrote up the two Times articles, which he described as “fanciful”: Tuesday, September 04, 2012, OMG, where will the Nets players live? Times devotes two articles, six reporters, to investigation, promotion .

Despite the substantial ink and page spread devoted to the work product of what Mr. Oder notes was a mustered force of six reporters (not to mention four photographers), nowhere in all of this reporting about the coming of the “Barclays” Center that promotes Barclays Bank does the Times mention the Barclays LIBOR scandal.. .  or the Times business relationship with the Atlantic Yards developer, without which the Atlantic Yards mega-monopoly might never have gotten this far.

The New York Times Starts Reporting That New York Government Officials Are Looking At Suing Barclays Bank- Leading to. . . ?

No sooner had I finished writing a Noticing New York article suggesting that the New York Times start reporting that local New York government officials are looking at suing Barclays Bank than the Times ran its first (very short) article to that effect. (See: Noticing New York’s Wednesday, August 15, 2012, With Discordant Synchronicity The “Barclays” Center Will Open At LIBOR Scandal’s Peak: What The New York Times Is And Isn’t Covering, and the New York Time’s August 15, 2012, State Regulators Widen Libor Investigation, by Ben Protess.)

Times Starts Reporting (Sparsely) About New York Attorney General’s Subpoenas Served on Barclays and Several Other Banks

The Times article didn’t report that the New York government lawsuits against Barclays Bank would occur, ironically, just as the New York taxpayers are providing massive subsidy for the promotion of Barclays Bank with the opening of the Ratner/Prokhorov basketball arena to which the “Barclays” name is being affixed. My Noticing New York article made the point that in reporting about Barclays, the Barclays Center and the LIBOR rate-fixing scandal for which the “Barclays” name has become a near synonym, the Times reporting needed to be less compartmentalized and more integrative.

The brief Times website article (which I was unable to find in my print edition) actually provided very little information. It wasn’t integrative. It was fairly cryptic actually. For more (a lot more) of what the Times could be reporting on this see these two recent Noticing New York articles on this subject, including links back to earlier Noticing New York Articles (that go back to mid-July): Saturday, July 28, 2012, More On Why Sued-For LIBOR Losses May Be Substantial And More On Figuring Why Mayor Bloomberg Is Minimizing The Public's Loss and Thursday, July 26, 2012, “Barclays” Center Opening Pending; Fellow Government Officials Don’t Back Bloomberg Re Minimizing NY Lawsuits Against Barclays Bank.

The Times story told us that in pursuing the investigation of the rate-rigging case Eric Schneiderman, the New York Attorney General, recently served subpoenas on Barclays and several other banks (four other banks are named in the article). Barclays' $450 million settlement is mentioned without mention of it being a record amount or that it was with the U.S. and U.K. governments. The settlement will also serve to limit criminal prosecution of the bank. The article says, “News of the subpoenas was first reported by Bloomberg News.”

The article also tells us that the “New York regulator’s push to ramp up his investigation reflects the broader escalation of the rate-rigging case” and that the Connecticut attorney general has joined in the New York investigation and state attorneys general in Massachusetts and Maryland have each opened similar investigations.

Potentially Relevant Background Respecting Attorney Generals Office And Atlantic Yards

On an integrative note, Mr. Schneiderman, when running for the office of Attorney General once dangled the promise that elected as attorney general he would investigate the Atlantic Yards mega-monopoly of which the “Barclays” Center is a part (you see he could be conducting two investigations involving "Barclays" name) and that he would act to prevent such eminent domain abuse in the future. Based on those remarks Noticing New York endorsed voting for him. Making that endorsement Noticing New York offered these words:

It really would be a shame if our next New York State Attorney General doesn’t investigate the misconduct of state officials with respect to Atlantic Yards and the associated abuses of eminent domain there and elsewhere in New York State. And it will be a glorious new day if they do investigate and bring the powers of that office to bear on those problems.

(See: Monday, September 13, 2010, It Now Comes Down To This: Democrats Should (Run Off and) Vote Tomorrow For Eric Schneiderman as Attorney General.)

Asked about Atlantic Yards and projects that abuse eminent domain Mr. Schneiderman said:

Also, the Attorney General can also just conduct investigations into the way these projects are carried out. Because even if they are technically complying with some of the laws I assure you that there are other issues that can be raised by an attorney general willing to take a look aggressively at the way these folks are proceeding.

And,

The idea [of eminent domain] was not to get land so someone can build a megadevelopment for a shopping mall or something else. This is just completely out of balance. Now if I’m in the Attorney General’s office- - * * * The next Attorney General’s ability to move program bills which is part of the Attorney Generals’ function * * * I would move program bills to correct this and I would enforce them rigorously.

The same night Mr. Schneiderman provided this envisioning of his own elected future, Eric Dinallo, another candidate running against Mr. Schneiderman for the same office, said that the recent “complete” change in interpreting eminent domain to allow seizure of one private owner’s land to turn it over to another private owner for that other owner's private benefit was wrong and that he would:

. . . use the appeals and opinions section of the attorney general’s office to issue a revisitation of it. So I think the office now has such prominence both in the state and across the country that I would issue an opinion that would explore this again and disagree with it pretty clearly and then lead that into the signaling of a potential lawsuit around getting the laws changed and in an approach that I think should include returning back to more of a public enterprise condemnation proceeding and not a private taking.

The bottom line is, as most of the candidates in that night’s forum helped make clear: There are things an elected attorney general could now be doing respecting the improprieties reflected in Atlantic Yards and the “Barclays” Center.

Since arrive in office, Mr. Schneiderman was presented with at least one very clear and obvious opportunity to tackle the sort of Atlantic Yards issues that, as Mr. Schneiderman put it, could be raised by, an “attorney general willing to take a look aggressively at the way these folks are proceeding,” but as Atlantic Yards Report’s Norman Oder identified, Schneiderman did not. . .

. . Schneiderman ended an investigative probe with a settlement wherein the New York City's economic-development agency admitted illegal use of local development corporations to lobby the City Council for tearing down and rebuilding Willets Point and Coney Island, both major multi-acre projects that were, like Atlantic Yards,l favorites of Mayor Bloomberg. Very similar lobbying activities had been engaged in by the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership in connection with a Downtown Brooklyn rezoning and for state approval of Atlantic Yards. Though the Attorney General’s investigation was reported as having been extended to the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, nothing dealing with it was reflected in the settlement finally arrived at. (See: Wednesday, July 04, 2012, Missing from the AG's settlement with NYC EDC: a mention of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership and Atlantic Yards.)

NY State Investigation Garners $340 Million Settlement From Another British Bank

Meanwhile, another story about New York regulators pursuing a British bank broke at almost the exactly the same time as the Times story about the Schneiderman subpoenas: Standard Chartered Bank which was being investigated for colluding with the Iranian government to launder billions of dollars entered into an agreement with the New York State Department of Financial Services (the recently consolidated banking and insurance departments) to pay New York State a $340 million settlement and submit to two years of monitoring. (See:August 15, 2012, UK bank settles Iran money probe in NY for $340M.)

In case one is wondering about how jurisdiction works and who can investigate banking misconduct it is useful to note that, “Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance has been investigating Standard Chartered, with federal partners, for more than a year. His office declined to comment on the settlement.”

Putting $340 Million Settlement In Context For New York Taxpayers

WNYC News added a nifty contextually interpretive twist: It pointed out that the $340 million settlement being taken in by the investigating regulators could assist substantially in closing the state’s budget gap. (See: WNYC News- Settlement With Bank Over Iran Money Laundering Could Aid NY’s Budget, Wednesday, August 15, 2012, By Ilya Marritz.)

The WNYC story pointed out that the $340 million amounted to “about a third of next year's anticipated budget gap of $982 million” and that the amount “comes to more than the entire budget for state parks and historic sites ($284.9 million and $298.7 million, respectively).”

Noticing New York has done such financial comparisons in the past and it is instructive to note that the $340 million being looked at with such salivation is just a small fraction of the $2-$3 billion in subsidy that is supposed to get plowed into the Atlantic Yards mega-monopoly, albeit that the $2-$3 billion in subsidy going into that single developer/subsidy collector’s Atlantic Yards mega-monopoly is supposed to be spent over a period of time, not all in a single budget year.

The Banking Benefits of Paying a $340 Million Settlement Fine

Notwithstanding WNYC’s analysis that $340 million being paid by Standard Charter is so significantly sized that it can salve New York’s budget woes for an entire year, the story that the New York Times wrote about Standard Chartered paying the multi-million fine is that the agreement for the bank to pay that huge amount caused the bank’s shares to rally, rising about 5% in London afternoon trading. (See: August 15, 2012, Standard Chartered’s Shares Rally on Settlement, by Mark Scott.)

Apparently, this “positive reaction” was because the agreement to pay the fine terminated “speculation that Standard Chartered might lose its New York State banking license” and the market was relatively unconcerned about the bank being monitored for the next two years.

The Times article furnished information about how far apart the bank and the regulators were in their assessment of the situation when they agreed to settle: The regulators measuring in hundreds of billions, the bank accused of misbehavior measuring in tens of millions:

New York authorities had claimed that Standard Chartered schemed for nearly a decade with Iran to hide 60,000 transactions worth $250 billion from regulators. The bank has maintained that the transaction value of the laundering activities had totaled only $14 million.

A banking analyst, Ian Gordon at Investec in London, was quoted assessing the situation with British cool:

“Whilst disproportionate, the settlement protects shareholder and customer interests against the regulatory assault,” . . . “In our view, Standard Chartered has acted with pragmatism and integrity in the face of extreme provocation.”

A Missing $1 Billion ($1.6 Billion?) For Which Financial Executives Can’t Be Prosecuted

The next day the Times ran a shocker about the impunity with which those in the financial world can behave very badly: According to the Times no criminal charges are likely in the case of MF Global, the 8th largest bankruptcy in history, where over $1 billion in costumers’ private investor money disappeared after being improperly accessed and raided in a flailing and failed last minute attempt to prevent the company from going under from risky financial bets it had made. (See: August 15, 2012, No Criminal Case Is Likely in Loss at MF Global, by Azam Ahmed and Ben Protess.- Note that Ben Protess’ byline is also on the Times story about Barclays being sued.)

The MF Global failure involves the famous internal e-mails that were seemingly going to implicate Jon Corzine, former New Jersey Governor and former Goldman Sachs chief in connection with the accessing and disappearance of the $1 billion in costumer funds.

Not surprisingly the Times site was instantly deluged with 300 comments on this story, the “Reader Picks” all being in the same vein: “This is just sickening. The entire financial machine now operates with impunity and in collusion with the government to pillage the populace.”

The article, written from the point of view of the vaguely identified “criminal investigators” and “federal authorities” who are apparently deciding they won’t prosecute Corzine and his confederates, was likely mostly sourced via communications with those “federal authorities.”

For a very good overview and feel for what actually happened at MF Global I recommend watching PBS Frontline’s 21-minute Six Billion Dollar Bet (May. 22, 2012) which, as of May, estimated the disappeared client funds higher than the Times, $1.6 billion as opposed to $1 billion. The Frontline Corzine coverage was presented as essentially a coda to Frontline’s superb April/May four-part, four-hour documentary series “Money, Power & Wall Street” (April 24 & May 1, 2012) that chronologically provides a careful anatomy of the global financial crisis. The series was quite respectful of the Occupy Wall Street view of the crisis and of the likelihood that those within the OWS movement may be able to provide solutions. Like the MF Global Corzine coda the series is available to watch on-line, something I heartily recommend. The 21-minute MF Global Corzine coda makes clear that, four years into the crisis, nothing has changed to prevent such extraordinary financial abuses in our economy.

WNYC News immediately followed up on the article that was handed to the Times with a much fuller story, including an interview that drilled down on the frustrating absurdity that something like MF Global can happen and yet those charged with law enforcement can throw up their hands asserting that nothing can be done about it. (WNYC News Blog, Criminal Charges Against Corzine, MF Global Execs Unlikely, Thursday, August 16, 2012, by WNYC Newsroom.)

I endorse the perspicacity of the questions WNYC’s Amy Eddings asks in her interview of lawyer Robert Mintz, a former federal prosecutor (Can’t financial executives be sued for negligence?). In response Mr Minz correctly identifies the kinds of reasons that can be given for decisions not to prosecute abuses (You have to have clear fact trail) but I can’t endorse his abject despair about the impossibility of prosecuting financial executives for recklessness they indulge in with a calculating eye for what will benefit them at the expense of everyone else. (Listen to the 8-minute interview below.)



Michael Powell on Unrepentant Impunity

In a Michael Powell column that appeared a little earlier this month in the New York Times, Mr. Powell reported that he recently visited Manhattan Criminal Court to witness people answering charges for such things as being in a neighborhood park after hours (shades of the Bloomberg removal of Occupy Wall Street from Zucotti Park! Are we all constrained to keep corporate hours and lead cooperate lives?) Mr. Powell commented that afterwards he was hankering “for a more ambitious, not to mention less repentant, class of wrongdoer.” - By this he specifically meant corporate executive bankers. (See: In the Financial Industry, a Less Scrupulous Class of Lawbreaker, by Michael Powell, August 6, 2012.)

Considering the misdeeds going on in the banking sector he noted how HSBC bank:

. . . let Mexican drug cartels launder money on a grand scale, according to a Senate report, and it evaded laws intended to stop banks from doing business with Iran and North Korea. Perhaps most astonishing, the report said it had conducted business for many years with Al Rajhi, a bank in Saudi Arabia whose founder was an Al Qaeda benefactor.

He observed:

The financial industry in 2012 New York City offers itself as almost a Medellín cartel of shady and unscrupulous dealings.

And focused attention on Barclays:

Northeast of HSBC’s headquarters sits that of Barclays, a venerable bank that of late admitted to fixing Libor, an obscure interest rate that underpins trillions of dollars in investments. A wee nudge here and there, and a clever bank insider could make tens of millions of dollars. If such corruptions result in New York City’s paying a million dollars more to build a block of low-income housing, que sera sera and all that.

He scolds Wells Fargo for its “habit of systematically targeting blacks and Latinos for the worst loans” and JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon “for losing a few, maybe 10, billion dollars” from “badly supervised trades.” (It was curious fun to watch how JPMorgan slowly rolled information about exactly how many billions had been lost in these trades, increasing the acknowledged amount with each new round of trade releases.)

Unrepentant Impunity Carried Over To The Real Estate Community

That sense of unrepentant impunity Mr. Powell picks up on is true about the banks for whom seeming large fines loom as only small practical inconveniences and whose senior executives routinely escape criminal prosecution (See Noticing New York’s discussion here.) It is also all part of the same fabric and tableau that extends to the interrelated New York City real estate industry with the corrupt abuse of eminent domain and direction, without bid, of vast public subsidy into the Forest City Ratner Atlantic Yards mega-monopoly.

While this is all best reported as interrelated, who knows whether the Times will start reporting it that way. In the same Noticing New York article where I wondered whether the Times would start reporting about the possible suits by local government officials I wondered whether the Times would decompartmentalize its reporting to acknowledge in articles about promotion of the “Barclays” Center that the bigger story is that the “Barclays” Bank name being promoted with taxpayer dollars is tainted by serious scandal. My wondering was answered immediately by a 1587-word Front Page Times story specifically about the promotion of the arena where the arena’s troublesome “Barclays” name was mentioned only twice and the associated scandal was mentioned not at all. Not to do so only further emboldens those who already have that sense of unrepentant impunity.

Schneiderman Criticized For Not Investigating. . . The National Mortgage Fraud Task Force He Headed

Despite the minimal reporting it is getting in the Times, the question of whether Attorney General Eric Schneiderman will vigorously pursue and bring home the bacon in connection with the Barclays scandal is an important one. As attorney general Schneiderman was once investigating the mortgage fraud in the banking industry. He was viewed as being aggressive in this regard, even antagonizing the Obama administration which was perceived as wanting instead to let bygones be bygones. Ultimately, that perception of aggressiveness changed in the view of many after Schneiderman was appointed by President Obama (announced in his January State of the Union speech) to help lead a national Mortgage Fraud Task Force charged with investigating the cause of mortgage meltdown, the efforts of that task force were viewed by many as a sham and the settlement it inaugurated was similarly viewed by many as a sweetheart deal for the banks, neutralizing the possibility of further investigation and prosecution. Many often refereed to the task force as the “Schneiderman Task Force.”

See:

Eric Schneiderman, Feds On Defensive About Mortgage Fraud Task Force ,04/19/2012,

SUNDAY, APRIL 29, 2012, Memo to Schneiderman Mortgage Task Force: When You are in a Hole, Quit Digging,

Eric Schneiderman's Office Spars With Foreclosure Activist, Blogger,06/08/2012

Potentially, Schneiderman could, by suing Barclays, bring home for New York much more than the $340 million the New York State Department of Financial Services garnered from Standard Chartered Bank. But will he? Why didn’t Schneiderman act on his promises to investigate Atlantic Yards? Because its developer/subsidy collector contributed politically to Governor Cuomo? If Schneiderman was unwilling to upset the "Barclays" applecart by taking action with respect to Atlantic Yards and the arena, would he be willing to upset Barclays or other New York banks by being too aggressive in pursuing the LIBOR scandal? And will the New York Times put pressure on the attorney general by putting all the actions he is taking in a bigger context where the outcomes from what he does and does not do are perceived as important to the public? If the Times doesn't, wouldn't that further embolden those enjoying that sense of unrepentant impunity? They are clearly bold enough already!

The Count: In Midst of Barclays LIBOR Scandal, Big NY Times Story About Jay-Z Promotion of Barclays Center Mentions “Barclays” Twice, Scandal Naught

(Above, a still from Jay-Z’s 2012 Olympics Budweiser Advertisement, slightly altered to promotionally say “Barclays” instead of promotionally saying “Nets”- Or, the alteration could have been to have the hat say “Ratner/Prokhorov.”)

If you wonder whether I am counting. . . I am.

Yesterday I posted a Noticing New York article* observing that the biggest “Barclays” story in the New York Times, in fact the only story that comes up in a long list of stories if you search the Times site for “Barclays” is the Barclays LIBOR scandal. I therefore suggested that the Times start appropriately contextualizing its stories about the “Barclays” Center (the Ratner/Prokhorov basketball arena), opening awkwardly in the very midst of this scandal, by referring routinely to the arena as the “problematically-named Barclays Center” or something else of that informative ilk.

(* Tuesday, August 14, 2012, With Discordant Synchronicity The “Barclays” Center Will Open At LIBOR Scandal’s Peak: What The New York Times Is And Isn’t Covering.)

I wondered whether the Times would begin to do so or continue compartmentalizing the news. I didn’t have to wait long for an answer. No sooner had I posted the Noticing New York article than an article went up on the Times site (which was then featured on the next day’s front page) that was about Jay-Z’s promotion of the Ratner/Prokhorov “Barclays” Center: The 1587-word story, ripped straight from the developer-subsidy collector’s press-releases, skillfully managed to mention the arena’s troublesome “Barclays” name only twice and to never mention the scandal associated with that name at all. (See: With Arena, Rapper Rewrites Celebrity Investors’ Playbook, by David M. HalbfingerAugust 15, 2012.)

How about that? A front page article in the Times the subject of which is how the new “Barclays” Center is being promoted and that article makes no mention of the awkwardness of the name of that arena in that promotion?

As for whether the Times is dedicated to compartmentalizing news about the opening of the arena to facilitate glowing developer-pleasing PR style articles, Atlantic Yards Report’s Norman Oder was on the spot with analysis confirming that this is, no doubt, the case: Wednesday, August 15, 2012, NYT: Jay-Z & Nets have "written a new playbook for... strategic celebrity investor" (and generating unskeptical publicity).

Among Mr. Oder’s observations in this regard:

• The article didn’t note that the arena promoters used Jay-Z “at the groundbreaking to distract people from the fact that a Russian billionaire [Mikhail Prokhorov] was getting the benefit of public subsidies.”

• That “Jay-Z was important in generating publicity, and in getting journalists/tv hosts like Rosanna Scotto to turn into simpering fans. And he's still generating publicity, as with this article.”

• That the Times left out of the front page article (it was carried over to run prominently on the bulk of page 3 as well) its disclosure about developer Forest City Ratner (offered with whimsically erratic inconsistency): “The company, which was the development partner for the Midtown headquarters for The New York Times Company....”

Besides the suggestion that future Times stories about the arena’s promotion be contextualized by referring routinely to the arena as the “problematically-named Barclays Center” I suggested that the Times start running stories about how local New York government officials are looking at suing Barclays Bank even as New York taxpayers have been committed to simultaneously subsidizing the bank's promotion. . . . Well. . .

No sooner was my Noticing New York article making this second suggestion posted than the Times ran its first short story about New York officials taking action against Barclays. More on this available from Noticing New York soon.

With Discordant Synchronicity The “Barclays” Center Will Open At LIBOR Scandal’s Peak: What The New York Times Is And Isn’t Covering

Good news reporting needs to be integrative. You make reported news events more meaningful to your readership when you acknowledge the broader context in which those events are taking place and how they likely relate to your readership community. Compartmentalization of the news may sidestep cognitive dissonance but it is nonetheless a disservice to anyone wanting to make sense of the world.

I am thinking about this because I am thinking about how the New York Times is reporting the LIBOR interest rate-rigging scandal in connection with which the name “Barclays” has become a new shorthand synonym for how low the ethical standards of Wall Street can sink. How will the Times relate that reporting to what is relevant to residents of its home town, New York City?

A Times Search Centering on "Barclays" vs. One Centering on "Barclays Center"

If you do a search of the New York Times site for the word “Barclays” everything that comes up first is relevant to the scandal notoriously besmirching the bank’s name; see below.

Conversely, with the Barclays LIBOR scandal so prominently in news in recent weeks, if you do a 30 day search of the Times site for the term “Barclays Center,” the new Forest City Ratner/Mikhail Prokhorov-owned basketball arena scheduled to open soon, and therefore destined to open contemporaneously with criminal indictments of Barclays traders, you get a list of hype and hoopla articles about the center that make no mention of the darkening cloud of the Barclays scandal; see below.


At "Public Information Session" No Sign of Really Big Barclays Sign To Come

(Above, NY Post/Dana Sauchell photo from New York Post story about the affixing of the Barclays sign to the side of the arena on August 7, 2012.)

This omission of reference to the icky oddness of brandishing the “Barclays” name is going on even as new plans were unveiled to plaster an additional Barclays logo in super giant lettering on the top of the arena. When you look down from a helicopter at Brooklyn, the borough will be prominently branded with the scandal-associated name! (FYI: In the fall of 2009 when the arena design was released to the public and a public information session was held- the closest approximation to to a public comment hearing that took place- the renderings and models shown to the public were all presented WITHOUT this “Barclays” top-side emblazoning. Its possibility was discreetly kept under wraps.*)

(* I’ll have to go back and find the question about signage I am sure I asked at that September session. My recollection with the aid of some notes is that I asked specifically about the possibility of very large signage, possibly illuminated, possibly animated and that Forest City Ratner spokesman Joe DePlasco said that it was not part of the “current concept” for the arena design and assured everyone that anything done would be “within ESDC design guidelines.” To get a truly forthcoming answer about what was planned I should probably have crafted my question more carefully.)

(Above, rendering and model of the arena released when the public was being informed about its design. Below, renderings released long afterwards and a photo of Barclays logo lettering as, just a week ago, it it is begun to be painted on the roof.)

Fourth of July Celebration of the Name's Interdependence

The Times hasn’t failed entirely to notice the awkwardness associated with the fact that the new heavily promoted arena is prominently parading the scandal-associated name. On July 3rd and 4th (are these heavy Times readership days?) the Times ran two articles in quick succession each observing the awkwardness. The first was a business “Deal Book” article, the second was by its sports business reporter Richard Sandomir. Each referred to how naming sports stadia and arenas to promote corporate brands can run afoul of the haunt of a running “curse” or history of “ill-fated choices.” There is a long list of such stadia and sports venue names that have been embarrassingly affixed at almost exactly the wrong time: like Enron Stadium (for the Houston Astros), Adelphia Stadium (for the Titans in Nashville), Citi Field Stadium (for the NY Mets), the almost Allianze Stadium (for the NJ Jets and Giants- the problem was German concentration camp associations), Trans World Airlines Dome (for the St. Louis Rams), the almost CMGI stadium (for the New England Patriots), PSINet Stadium (for the Baltimore Ravens) and the first of the two articles also mentions the sponsorship deals of Conseco, and, American Airlines. (See: Investment Banking/| Legal/regulatory July 3, 2012, What’s in a Stadium Name? Often Trouble for a Company, by William Alden and Sports Business:arena Names Can Spell Embarrassment, by Richard Sandomir, July 4, 2012).

In an accentuation of the awkwardness, the William Alden Times Deal Book article astutely observes that in 2007 (when the Barclays scandal activities were cooking but not unveiled) the Times had quoted Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg as saying “People will be talking about the Barclays Center all the time, all year, for decades to come.”

The question for me is, having for the record reported about the extreme awkwardness in these two Fourth of July week stories, should the Times now be setting the elephant-in-the-room observation aside, maintaining radio silence on subject, as if it was never mentioned at all?

Calling For a Collocation, a Shorthand Set of Acknowledging Words

I vote for adoption of shorthand reference for all articles about the Ratner/Prokhorov “Barclays” Center going forward, the sort of collocation or pseudo-title formulation the press frequently uses as a reminder to quickly orient the reader to key, presumably understood, facts. Remember when Robert Vesco was never simply “Robert Vesco” but always “fugitive financier Robert Vesco”? Similarly, you always read about “convicted bomber Timothy McVeigh,” “disgraced reporter Judith Miller,” or “reputed New York Gambino family associate Guido Penosi.”

Rather than zeroing out future Times references to the Barclays name problem going forward (which seems to be the way things may be shaping up) I suggest adoption of a phrase that can be included in every Times article mentioning the Center like the “awkwardly-named,” “problematically-named,” or “embarrassingly-named Barclays Center.”

William Safire, the Times former language columnist, weighed in about whether journalistic pseudo-titles conform properly to appropriate Times style but he concluded that while in most cases simple descriptions work (like “an architect” after a name) this can be “a bit silly” when what is being referred to is well known:

‘Frank Gehry, an architect’ would make us seem clueless. In those cases, we often use the description before the name, with ‘the’ — ‘the architect Frank Gehry.*’

(* As in “architect Frank Gehry was jettisoned from design duties for the Atlantic Yards project by developer Forest City Ratner which has decided to save money switching to cheap modular construction instead”?)

Scandal a Free-Ranging Free-For-All, Involves Local New York Governments Subsidizing Promotion of "Barclays" Center

On the business story writing side of the equation, which the Times perhaps considers more serious, the Times is, indeed, covering the LIBOR rate manipulation scandal. It isn’t writing Barclays Bank out of the story as the lead player and central focus of attention in the rate-manipulation fraud. The most recent of the Times stories repetitively returns to references to “Barclays” to anchor the key points being made. It uses the bank's name a total of fifteen times counting the one time the bank’s name appears in one of the article’s picture captions. (See: August 5, 2012, As Libor Fault-Finding Grows, It Is Now Every Bank for Itself, by Azam Ahmed and Ben Protess.)

Notwithstanding, the Times hasn’t been covering another important part of the local story about which Noticing New York has been reporting even though it should be of special interest to New York City residents: The fact that various branches of New York state and local government may be suing Barclays Bank over its rate manipulation. This is especially interesting and relevant to the stories about the awkward naming of the arena given that there is a chance that all four local government entities providing very substantial subsidized financing to the “Barclays” Center and the Atlantic Yards mega-monopoly (at a huge net loss to the public) may be among the vast number of potential plaintiffs suing Barclays over the rate manipulation.

The Times has reported nothing about any of New York’s local governments possibly suing Barclays, but the list includes New York City itself, the MTA, the New York City Housing Development Corporation, the New York City and New York State Comptrollers, their respective pension funds and the New York State Attorney General.

Here are two recent Noticing New York articles on this subject, including links back to earlier Noticing New York Articles (going back to mid-July): Saturday, July 28, 2012, More On Why Sued-For LIBOR Losses May Be Substantial And More On Figuring Why Mayor Bloomberg Is Minimizing The Public's Loss and Thursday, July 26, 2012, “Barclays” Center Opening Pending; Fellow Government Officials Don’t Back Bloomberg Re Minimizing NY Lawsuits Against Barclays Bank.

Per its headline, the most recent Times article gives a good picture of how the LIBOR scandal is shaping up on Wall Street as a sort of every bank for itself kind of affair. Blame-spreading finger pointing is going on that is quite abnormal for Wall Street. Normally the industry works to put up a common front when dealing with regulators and investigating prosecutors. One lawyer involved in the case is quoted as saying “There is no information-sharing among banks unlike the past 15 years of federal investigations.”

The article gives some sense of the scope of the frenetic free-for-all that is shaping up. Here is another article from Bloomberg News from just a few days before that also conveys the disparate and diverging interests of the banks but also makes clear how this also means that everybody in the financial world can be expected to sue everybody else: Fidelity Joins BlackRock in Weighing Libor Action Against Banks, by Christopher Condon and Alexis Leondis - Jul 26, 2012.) (Previously, NNY noted that Bloomberg News wrote about this as a “feeding frenzy of sharks” with “everyone’s preparing for war” in the litigation area.)

The Bloomberg News article notes that Baltimore is among those suing in a case that “stems from its purchase of interest-rate swaps” to protect the city from interest rate changes after it sold variable-rate bonds and quotes Baltimore’s Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake as saying, “I am going to fight for this city and do what I can to protect the city taxpayers who ultimately suffered financial damage as result of Libor manipulation.” Mayor Rawlings-Blake’s statement is the kind of statement we should be expecting from leaders in local New York government but it is not the kind of statement we have heard from Mayor Bloomberg who is downplaying the fact that he admits the city may similarly be suing Barclays.

Another article appearing in the Times in recent days doesn’t actually mention the Barclays name (referring only to “banks”) but it ought to be considered as clearly having importance with respect to the ongoing Barclays scandals: Corporate Fraud Cases Often Spare Individuals, by Michael S. Schmidt and Edward Wyatt, August 7, 2012.

Corporate Fines Paid, Corporations and Top Executives Move On, Escaping Criminal Prosecutions, To Promotionally Buff Their Image, Quite Affordably

It makes the point that the infrequency with which criminal charges are brought against corporate executives encourages executives to pursue illegal activities that defraud government:

Pharmaceutical companies, military contractors, banks and other corporations are on track to pay as much as $8 billion this year to resolve charges of defrauding the government, analysts say — a record sum and more than twice the amount assessed last year by the Justice Department.

* *

But while the collections are a boon to the government and taxpayers, they are resurrecting questions about the relative lack of charges against executives at the companies that are getting the stiffest penalties.

In writing about the ignominy of Bob Diamond’s abrupt departure as the chief executive of Barclays Bank, I provided some calculations that made pretty clear that after Barclays payment of fines both Barclays and Mr. Diamond would still have tons of netted cash left over to pay the relatively small sums that may then be required (illegal and disreputable conduct notwithstanding) to refurbish their names and reputations as the Barclays name gets promoted on the arena and New York City subway stations and Mr. Diamond’s name shines out on a building next to Colby College’s admissions center. (See, Tuesday, July 24, 2012, No Sparkle In Barclays’ Bob Diamond: Societal Mores Unmoored, What And Who We Honor Today- That Which We Used To Shun.) People should keep in mind that the fine that was paid by Barclays was paid partly to preclude criminal prosecution of the corporation. Criminal prosecution of lower level brokers is, however, predicted.

In that same article about Mr. Diamond I picked up on an applicable quote from law professor Frank Pasquale (appearing in a July 19, 2012 Boston Review essay):

Many naming-rights deals are not merely advertising. Rather, they are transparent efforts by dubious enterprises to buy goodwill by permanently associating themselves with famous landmarks.

(See: Names, Trains, and Corporate Deals: Why Public Transit Shouldn’t Sell Naming Rights. See also Atlantic Yards Report’s review of that article: Tuesday, July 24, 2012, Naming-rights deals, suggests law professor, are "transparent efforts by dubious enterprises to buy goodwill by permanently associating themselves with famous landmarks".)

The Enron Stadium Time Line: Lessons To Be Learned

Who is to say how embarrassingly the naming of the Barclays Center will be in the end? Up to this point, perhaps the most embarrassingly named stadium of all time was Houston’s Enron Stadium.

The time line on the naming of the Enron stadium runs thus.

The Enron Corporation began to engage in fraudulent accounting manipulations in the mid 1990s.

In March of 2000 the opening of the Enron Field was getting good pre-publicity from the New York Times sports page that sounds roughly like some of the publicity the Barclays Center is getting from that page currently:

What used to be an abandoned railroad yard and station and a downtown eyesore is now Enron Field, an impressive addition to the downtown skyline -- from the deep center-field fence 436 feet away to the modest distance of 326 feet down the right-field line to the tempting 315-foot clearance down the left-field line, the shortest in the major leagues.

Enron Field opened in April of 2000.

In January 2001 Enron was involved in secretly manufacturing the California power crisis. 2001 was also the year that Enron collapsed.

By January 2002 the world knew Enron was being criminally investigated.

As of February 27, 2002 agreements were negotiated in connection with Enron’s bankruptcy filing to eliminate the Enron name from the stadium whereupon the name became Astros Field instead.

Notwithstanding the rosy glow aspect of the Times sports page reporting about the stadium in 2000, by January 2002 the Times was on the spot with a “backdrop” article summarizing everything that went wrong with the company, the regulators and the supportive politicians and power players involved in the scandal like both president Bushes. It begins by describing the scene the day the stadium opened, making clear how it epitomized what was seriously out of whack:

On the day that Enron Field made its debut in April 2000, its ''Diamond Club'' was a portrait in power.

In the state-of-the-art baseball stadium's most exclusive section, behind home plate, there were the George Bushes -- a former president and a president to be -- along with the younger Mr. Bush's running mate, Dick Cheney, and his successor as governor, Rick Perry. Nearby was Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, whose husband, Ray, is a lawyer with Enron's chief law firm, Vinson & Elkins. And then came the executives of Houston's biggest companies, who had vied to become the younger Bush's most prominent fund-raisers, just as they had jockeyed to buy the prized luxury seats.

And at the center of it all, down on the pitcher's mound, was Kenneth L. Lay, the man responsible for building Enron into an American powerhouse, throwing out the first ball.

If the cozy intertwining of business and politics at Enron Field is not unique to Houston or to Texas, it is pronounced here, and it was starkly visible that day. Now, in the company's spectacular collapse, the relationships are starkly visible once more, as Congress and the Justice Department ask whether that closeness, a part of the city's heritage, was at least partly to blame.

''It's a classic example of the circle of influence and inside connections that this entire case typifies,'' said Scott Harshbarger, president of Common Cause. ''And it's not only about these guys. It's what has been happening in Washington for so long now.''

(See: Enron's Collapse: Backdrop; In Houston, the Lines Dividing Politics, Business and Society Are Especially Blurry, This article was reported and written by Don Van Natta Jr., John Schwartz and Jim Yardley, January 20, 2002.)

If the Times were willing to look hard enough it could be reporting about how the opening of the Barclays Center, without coincidence, similarly represents and symbolizes the same sort tangle of politics, powers and interrelated crony capitalism connections that communicates how things are very wrong. Will it?

Times on the Issue of Corporate Branding of Public Assets, Generally

The Times has written about the issue of government selling out the right to corporately brand public assets. The most recent article appeared in June: Your Ad Here, on a Fire Truck? Broke Cities Sell Naming Rights, by Michael Cooper, June 24, 2012. I wrote about it here: Friday, June 29, 2012, Government Gets Branded. I hope my article added significantly to the depth of the discussion. The June Times article was mainly a catalog of examples of what is happening around the country and skirted any real discussion of the policy issues behind what was reported.

In contrast a Times article from July 2004 about an interest on the part of the MTA and Bloomberg to sell to corporations the right to name city subways systems and parks included the following observations. They sound much like some of my Noticing New York coverage:

Another challenge for governmental institutions seeking sponsorship deals is public acceptance. In Boston, Ralph Nader and an organization he helped found to fight the spread of advertising in America, Commercial Alert, lobbied vigorously against the plan to add corporate sponsors to the names of subway stations.

''This is part of the decline of American values,'' said Gary Ruskin, the group's executive director. ''We used to name things after people who were heroes, people we were proud of. Now we name things after the corporation with the deepest pockets.''

''How low will New York sink?'' he said.

Although renaming a subway station or bridge or tunnel may seem harmless, there are subtle but important effects, said Siva Vaidhyanathan, an assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University, who has written about the cultural impact of trademarks.

''The moment you slap any sort of private trademark on a public institution, you're reducing the sense of public investment,'' he said. ''I feel less invested in the quality of Verizon Grand Central Station or Eddie Bauer Central Park.''

(See: Now a Message From a Sponsor Of the Subway? By Michael Luo, July 27, 2004.)

Bloomberg And The MTA Once Said That Selling Corporate Naming Rights Was About Raising Money, . . . BUT. . .

Responding to the lead of Bloomberg and MTA spokesmen, this 2004 article analyzed the pro-side of the argument for selling corporation naming rights for city subway stations as being of financial benefit for the public, not to benefit corporations. It was to bring in money for the transit system and city. In the end, that turned out not to be the case because when in June of 2009 the MTA sold the right to name two of the systems biggest subway stations “Barclays” the MTA did so for a pittance, essentially taking nothing back for the public at all, only $200,000 per year for 20 years, far below what ought to have been paid or what those rights were worth. It would seem that if the MTA had been thinking about selling these naming rights since at least the summer of 2004, five full years, they should have been able to structure a more competent deal to benefit the public had they wanted to.

Public Disfavor For Naming Rights Sales (Scandal-Associated or Not)

The public isn’t enamored of these naming rights deals and laws have been sought to end them. When the Citibank’s name wound up going up on the new heavily-publicly subsidized Mets Citi Field stadium at the same time that Citibank was being publicly bailed out by the federal government with TARP funds Ohio Democratic Representative Dennis Kucinich and Republican Texas Representative Ted Poe sought federal changes to require Citigroup to cancel the naming arrangements and recoup the money. (See: Should We Call it Bailout Stadium? February 10, 2009 by Tom Gallagher and Citi Field or Bailout Ballpark? Two Congressmen are urging Treasury to force Citigroup to pull out of its $400 million naming rights deal for the Mets' new stadium. Here's why that's a bad idea., by Paul R. La Monica, CNNMoney.com editor at large, January 30, 2009)

In a sense, we may now have come almost full circle because one of the charges being investigated in the LIBOR rate manipulation scandal is whether, given the interest rate manipulations, the banks taking TARP loans failed to pay the federal government everything that should have been owed on those loans.

The public doesn’t necessarily need a scandal, TARP-flavored or otherwise, to think that selling corporate naming rights to public assets is a bad idea. In the Fall of 2004 San Francisco voters passed a referendum by a 55%-45% margin prohibiting sale of corporate naming rights for Candlestick Park, the home to the San Francisco ‘49ers. Candlestick Park had originally been named in a public naming contest: It doesn’t have cooperate associations.

Here from a news release reporting on the referendum:

Huge majorities of Americans want government to restrict the creep of advertising into nearly every part of our lives and culture. According to a Yankelovich Partners poll in April, 60% of Americans have amuch more negative opinion of marketing and advertising now than a few years ago, 61% of Americans feel the amount of marketing and advertising is out of control, 65% feel constantly bombarded with too much advertising and marketing, and 65% think there should be more limits and regulations on marketing and advertising.

(See:For Immediate Release: November 4th, 2004, San Francisco Approves Referendum Against Sale of Naming Rights for Candlestick Park.)

That rejection of the sale of naming rights is without a scandal as a reason the public might not want to be bombarded by the Barclays Bank name. What about with a scandal of the magnitude that continues to brew?

(Below, pictorial evidence of community resistance to the naming of its subways stations "Barclays": T Shirts available for purchase that protest the name change and some guerrilla political street art commenting on what associations the promoted "Barclays" name should evoke. Other of the modified subway signs said "Barclays always has the best fixed rates" and Barclays was totally cool with apartheid in South Africa.")

I hope future New York Times sports articles start referring regularly to the Ratner/Prokhorov arena as the “problematically-named Barclays Center” or something else of informative ilk. The last article written about the discordance of the curtain going up on the “Barclays” promotion at just this time was written by Richard Sandomir. He hasn’t written any articles about the “Barclays” Center since so it remains to be seen whether his next article will hearken back to his last in this key respect. Mr. Sandomir has written stories about naming rights before (and been taken to task about the need for careful accuracy and balance by Norman Order of Atlantic Yards Report: Wednesday, January 06, 2010, When it comes to details of the Barclays naming-rights deal, the Times plays "he said, she said," leaving Ratner with the last word.)

Will The Times Cover How The Barclays LIBOR Scandal Interrelates To The News of What's Going On Locally, Including The Local Atlantic Yards Scandals? We'll See. . .

I’ve written before that it is my opinion that the Times cannot adequately cover national stories if it compartmentalizes away the obvious links involving what needs to be reported about Atlantic Yards. I have also written about how the Times seems disinclined to write unfavorable stories about Atlantic Yards and the mega-monopoly development real estate developer, Forest City Ratner, the same developer who at a critical time as the Atlantic Yards story was unfolding entered into a business relationship with the Times to build the Times new headquarters.

We’ll see what happens but I think that the Times, in writing about the Barclays LIBOR scandal should also keep writing about the Barclays naming rights scandals and should also get around to writing about the fact that the very same government entities that plowed far too much subsidy into the “Barclays” Center and Atlantic Yards also, ironically, have cause whereby they may be suing that same Barclays Bank at the very same time that publicly paid for arena promoting that bank opens.