Gyroscopic Investing

I'm really enjoying this show.

It's about Pablo Escobar and the cocaine smuggling industry in the 1980's in Miami.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7elNhHwgBU

I have heard that it's very good.

i have seen the first two episodes...  it captures the mood of the times well, and it does a nice job of splitting the difference between being documentary style/covering the history... and being a TV show that is out to entertain..

I watched the first couple episodes.  It's good except for the narration.  I think he's supposed to sound cynical, but it's too much.

There's one point where he says that the reason the US central gov't began to take action against the cocaine trade was that they just couldn't stand too see all that illegal income going un-taxed.  He implies that some Miami businessmen who went to Reagan to ask for harsher actions, were just going for their own self-serving desire to quash a market they weren't in on.

The implication being, I guess, that white business people from Miami couldn't possibly have the best interests of their community in mind, including its Hispanic members.  That's really unfair.  Drug prohibition may be misguided, but the people pushing for it are not operating in some racist conspiracy to keep the Colombian man down.  That's just left-wing propaganda, and it's disgusting.

EDIT : corrected spelling

Lowe wrote: I watched the first couple episodes.  It's good except for the narration.  I think he's supposed to sound cynical, but it's too much.

Really?  My take on it is that he's supposed to sound like a well-intentioned dope.

There's one point where he says that the reason the US central gov't began to take action against the cocaine trade was that they just couldn't stand too see all that illegal income going un-taxed.  He implies that some Miami businessmen who went to Reagan to ask for harsher actions, were just going for their own self-serving desire to quash a market they weren't in on.

The implication being, I guess, that white business people from Miami couldn't possibly have the best interests of their community in mind, including its Hispanic members. 

To me, it sounded like they were upset b/c something $5 billion a year was leaving Miami.  It's not far-fetched to think this would get powerful people in the US riled up.

AdamA wrote:

There's one point where he says that the reason the US central gov't began to take action against the cocaine trade was that they just couldn't stand too see all that illegal income going un-taxed.  He implies that some Miami businessmen who went to Reagan to ask for harsher actions, were just going for their own self-serving desire to quash a market they weren't in on.

The implication being, I guess, that white business people from Miami couldn't possibly have the best interests of their community in mind, including its Hispanic members. 

To me, it sounded like they were upset b/c something $5 billion a year was leaving Miami.  It's not far-fetched to think this would get powerful people in the US riled up.

Most large scale federal drug indictments include tax evasion.  Maybe the narrator is just using his limited intelligence to describe what he has seen happening in the drug trade--i.e., tax evasion being used as a pretext to put drug dealers in cages.

AdamA wrote:

Lowe wrote: I watched the first couple episodes.  It's good except for the narration.  I think he's supposed to sound cynical, but it's too much.

Really?  My take on it is that he's supposed to sound like a well-intentioned dope.

There's one point where he says that the reason the US central gov't began to take action against the cocaine trade was that they just couldn't stand too see all that illegal income going un-taxed.  He implies that some Miami businessmen who went to Reagan to ask for harsher actions, were just going for their own self-serving desire to quash a market they weren't in on.

The implication being, I guess, that white business people from Miami couldn't possibly have the best interests of their community in mind, including its Hispanic members. 

To me, it sounded like they were upset b/c something $5 billion a year was leaving Miami.  It's not far-fetched to think this would get powerful people in the US riled up.

Unless I am mistaken, the narration is in the past tense.  As in the narrator is recalling the things he once did, in the US and then in Colombia.  His tone is definitely cynical, and although of course I personally find it to be a dopey kind of cynicism, I doubt the writers intended it that way.  I think they intended him to come off as a hard-nosed realist, once naive, but now jaded by years of failure in drug enforcement.

There was a line read recently on the Al Fin Next Level blog.  "Cynicism grows and grows until finally, it becomes cynical of itself."  That really resonated with me, and honestly it was all I could think about when I heard that ridiculous narration implying Ronald and Nancy Reagan were bumpkins easily swayed by some greedy, old white men.

Even in a show about Pablo Escobar, they are unable to turn down the chance to paint Reagan and white men in a bad light.  Are you kidding me?  What big people these writers are.

Simonjester wrote: a cheap shot against Regan, conservatives, or rich white men is so SOP for the left media that it hardly even stands out any more... how sad is that..

now if they had said that TPTB in government and big business saw that money leaving the country and wanted to skim there chunk by financing the police/prison industrial complex, the CIA's black-op budget, while leveraging the addictive and other effect of drugs and drug wars in inner city's to create a self imposed cast system, at the same time as driving up prices so the drug-lords still got rich.  ....it would stand out for sure.... 
  but then that would probably be out of caricature for an ex DEA cop... 

Having lived through the Reagan administration and followed the news somewhat closely during much of that period (I was age 11-19 during the Reagan administration and my dad was always talking politics around the house), I know that there are are legitimate criticisms to be made of Reagan and the degree to which he knew what was going on inside his own administration (e.g., Iran-Contra scandal), but to suggest that Reagan didn't understand the overall narrative of his presidency and to fail to concede that it was in large parts successful is simply dishonest.

...and even if Reagan had somehow been the puppet of someone like James Baker, a country could do a lot worse than to have a leader like James Baker pulling the strings behind the scenes.  Imagine how the Reagan administration would have been if Dick Cheney had been in James Baker's role. 

Actually, you don't really have to speculate because Cheney did fall into a role similar to Baker's in the first Bush administration, and the country was at war within two years with a country that had not threatened us directly.  When Cheney fell into a similar role in the second Bush administration, guess what?  Two years into the administration the country was at war again with a country that had not threatened us directly. 

Simonjester wrote: a cheap shot against Regan, conservatives, or rich white men is so SOP for the left media that it hardly even stands out any more... how sad is that..

I really don't feel like the show is taking shots against Regan or rich white men.  The  narration makes Steve Murphy (the narrator) come across an average guy, who joined the DEA before it was the DEA that we usually think of...when drug dealers were "hippies wearing flip flops" selling "grass". 

There is nothing in the writing that makes me feel like we're supposed to be in agreement with anything this guy says.

They even give him a dopey looking cop-stache.