Shining light on sexual abuse

Films generally rely on drama to attract the attention of viewers. And with viewers’ attention spans becoming shorter and shorter, a drama like Spotlight is a rarity.

The film tells the story of the investigation by a team at the Boston Globe newspaper, beginning in 2001, of cases of sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests in the Boston diocese.

 

 

That investigation took many months of sustained, difficult work. And the film is faithful in showing the careful, persistent work that journalism requires, especially in uncovering a story of such magnitude.

Marty Baron, an outsider—“an unmarried man of the Jewish faith who hates baseball”—arrives from Miami as the new editor of the Globe and assigns a team of journalists to investigate allegations against John Geoghan, an unfrocked priest accused of molesting more than 80 boys.

The paper’s “spotlight” team, the oldest continuously operating newspaper investigative unit in the United States, is led by editor Walter “Robby” Robinson and includes reporters Michael Rezendes, Matt Carroll and Sacha Pfeiffer. They interview victims and try to unseal sensitive documents.

They run into many roadblocks. The cases brought against various priests were settled in mediation, and the information about those cases is sealed and unavailable.

The culture of Boston is infused with the sense that the Catholic Church is an important and necessary player in the city’s life. Robinson keeps hearing warnings to back off. The church does many good things; you don’t want to spoil that.

As part of their investigation, they interview some victims who are now adults. These are the most moving scenes in the film. While the abuse happened when they were young boys and they are now grown men, it’s clear their souls are broken. We get a glimpse of track marks on one man’s arm. Another man explains that he’s now sober but struggled for years with addiction.

A greater damage to these victims, however, is that the abuse helped destroy their faith in God. Even Rezendes, the reporter, who, like most of the others, grew up Catholic, says that while he hasn’t gone to church in years, he always thought he would return. Now, it’s clear, he won’t.

Pfeiffer, while going door to door, encounters the retired priest who had molested one of the men she had talked to earlier. He admits what he did, then adds, “but I never felt gratified myself,” as if that made it OK.

The film is especially good in its attention to detail. It gets so much right about journalism—how diligent reporters must be to obtain multiple sources, how they have to write everything down, how every piece of information is important.

In one scene, Rezendes is talking with a lawyer named Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci) about addenda to court documents. Garabedian says, “You don’t know the half of it.” Like a good reporter, Rezendes says, “Tell me the half of it.” And that leads to a key piece of evidence in breaking the story.

When they’ve turned in their initial story (they end up publishing over 600), Baron, the editor-in-chief, is copyediting the piece and says, “Too many adjectives.”

The film also shows that Robinson had a chance to break this story five years earlier but buried it and didn’t pursue the information he received.

Spotlight is an outstanding film that shows the power of the press in exposing the injustices of powers, like the Catholic Church, that try to hide their sins “for the greater good.”

Banks are no friends of the poor

I have a friend who lives below the poverty line. She and others I know do not use banking services. They can’t afford it. At her job, she receives her weekly pay in cash because she can’t cash a check. One time she lost her pay. This meant it was lost for good. She couldn’t go to her employer and say, “Cancel that check and write another.” It was gone.

I volunteer for Circles of Hope, which works to help people get out of poverty. Every month, we hold a “big view” meeting to consider issues that affect people in poverty. We’ve looked at transportation, housing, health care and employment, among others. One evening, a man spoke about financial services and told people to keep in mind that banks are about making a profit.

 

 

You may say, Of course, they have to make a profit. However, as Mehrsa Baradaran of the University of Georgia School of Law argues in her book How the Other Half Banks, by denying financial services to the poor, banks have broken the social contract that justifies their public charter.

In his article “When the Bank Robs You” (In These Times, November), David Dayen points out that “the average unbanked family spends more on financial transactions than they do on food.”

The Ferguson Commission, convened by Missouri Governor Jay Nixon to identify root causes that led to the social dislocation of racially segregated cities around St. Louis, named banking as one of those causes. “Without a bank or credit union account,” Dayen writes, “simple functions like converting government benefits into cash or converting that cash back into a check to pay bills or securing a small loan in emergencies become exorbitantly expensive.”

Dayen refers to Baradaran’s book, noting that modern banking wouldn’t exist without the state. “Customers freely deposit trillions in banks because of government-backed insurance, and the quasi-public Federal Reserve lends directly to banks at slim interest rates.”

Under the Reagan administration in the 1980s, when deregulation ruled the day, “banks won the argument that they should be treated like any other industry, without a public responsibility,” Dayen writes.

With this profit motive in mind, and with the blessing of the government, banks abandoned poor areas because the poor don’t make profitable customers. “Between 2008 and 2013,” Dayen writes, “banks shuttered nearly 2,000 branches.” Of these, 93 percent were in postal codes with incomes below the national median.

Baradaran recounts the history of this kind of behavior. One 19th-century Chicago banker even said his firm levels “a prohibitory charge upon all accounts which average less than $300 for the express purpose of driving them away.”

Most attempts to bring the poor financial services have failed. Even credit unions are today more likely to serve upper- and middle-income customers, and community banks have been overwhelmed by mega-bank consolidation.

What to do? Baradaran notes that from 1911 to 1967, the post office offered savings accounts, attracting millions. She calls it “the most successful experiment in financial inclusion in the United States” and thinks we should restart it.

A USPS bank would not only reduce inequality, writes Dayen, “it would shore up the Postal Service’s finances and sustain post-office employment as a middle-class career.”

It would also eliminate predatory payday lenders and check-cashing operators, “interested only in skimming a hefty take for providing financial services the middle and upper classes take for granted.

The Bible denounces usury, lending money at exorbitant interest rates and preying on the poor. We need banks that provide public, not just profitable, service.