Bernie Madoff, the man behind the Ponzi scheme that exemplifies the excesses of the “complex financial instruments” that brought our — and the world’s — economy to the brink in 2008, has been in prison for eight months now.
In case you were wondering how your favorite financial philanderer has been doing since he was last seen in New York City, the Wall Street Journal has an article out today that is replete with gems of his life behind bars at Butner, a medium-security federal prison in North Carolina.
The article starts with an analysis of media reports relating to Madoff’s Dec. 18 temporary transfer to a prison medical facility. The official word from the Bureau of Prisons was that he was being treated for dizziness and hypertension, but recently released inmates say Madoff was really “treated for a broken nose, fractured ribs and cuts to his head and face.” READ FULL POST
Even as Senators skipped town last Friday before a two-week break without extending unemployment insurance and COBRA health subsidies, hopes are rising among congressional liberals and unions that stronger job creation measures could win the backing of emboldened Democratic leaders and President Obama. (Some state-based officials also expect state agencies to tide over workers at risk of losing their benefits before the Senate takes action in mid-April, while advocates for the unemployed are far more alarmed.)
But will progressives be willing to mount the strong campaign needed to overcome conservative and centrist resistance to major jobs spending? That’s the political challenge, especially after the first stimulus bill last year was effectively smeared as a waste of money although it saved or created nearly two million jobs. As George Packer notes in his devastating New Yorker article, “Obama’s Lost Year,” 94 percent of Americans don’t think it created jobs in their areas. The AFL-CIO has launched a “Make Wall Street Pay” campaign asking for taxing financial transactions and returned TARP money to spend on jobs programs, but it seems that Congress has not really felt the heat from the public to push for dramatic jobs programs.
This post originally appeared on Think Progress.
President Barack Obama has made comprehensive energy reform a key issue of his presidency, with massive investments in clean energy, initial efforts to confront climate change, and a commitment to “ending our addiction to foreign oil.” Today, Obama announced a sweeping new offshore drilling policy, opening “vast expanses of water along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling” for the first time. This plan would also restore the ban on drilling in Alaska’s Bristol Bay and the West Coast. White House officials “pitched the changes as ways to reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil and create jobs,” the Associated Press reports. For years, however, Obama has correctly explained that new offshore drilling would do nothing to “reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil”:
This post originally appeared on the Daily Kos.
For some reason, the RNC just won’t stop talking about their party’s recently revealed affinity for bondage and lesbian sex-themed strip clubs.
Today they tried to put the shoe on the other foot … or perhaps more accurately, the six-inch stilleto … by sending out already public expenditures by the DNC to various media outlets. Here’s the DNC’s response to what can only be described as the most idiotic push back in the annals of politics:
Like everything else, the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal is the fault of hippies and gays, according to some people desperate to blame anyone but the cowardly, patriarchal Catholic leadership that maintained a massive cover up for decades while shuttling pedophile priests from church to church.
Ross Douthat, demonstrating the conservative reverence for personal accountability, puts lots of the blame elsewhere: namely, on the culturewide moral permissiveness wrought by the sex-crazed hippies of the 60s and 70s. “The permissive sexual culture that prevailed everywhere, seminaries included, during the silly season of the ’70s deserves a share of the blame, as does that era’s overemphasis on therapy,” says Douthat.
How does the brightest light of young intellectual conservatism back that bold claim? In that particular column he doesn’t at all; in a follow up post he tries to, poorly, by citing a report that says abuse cases of boys 11-17 peaked in the 1960s and 70s, and diminished in 1980 (that’s when Reagan became President and chased all the pedophiles back to Russia).
Originally posted on ColorLines.com
Our economic crisis is about a lot more than lost jobs and evaporating 401Ks. It’s closing off options for women in abusive relationships.
By Daisy Hernández
Today marks the end of Women’s History Month and I spent these last couple of weeks at colleges across the country talking about feminism, racial justice and media. From Michigan to Florida to Minnesota, I heard students debate what activism looks like for their generation while fielding their questions about immigration and hearing their fears that when graduation comes they might not find a job.
The conversation that stayed with me though took place in Michigan, a state where the economy has imploded spectacularly.
A student at Eastern Michigan University, Laura Hoehner, 24, works part-time counseling women who are getting beat up by their boyfriends or husbands. Sometimes the violence is physical; always it’s emotional and psychological. Increasingly, she says, it’s economic.
“He has the job; she doesn’t. She has to ask for an allowance,” says Laura. “He gives her X amount for groceries. He’s the dad in the picture.”
She points to one of her clients as an example. The woman had given birth to the couple’s first child and her partner’s family gave him $300 to help with groceries. But her partner, who received the cash, lied and said it was only $100, only enough to buy milk, eggs, juice and a Swifter mop. The new mom was left to dip into what money she had to provide groceries for the family of three. Money had become one more weapon for the abuser.
Advocates call it “economic abuse” and it’s part of the rise in domestic violence that they report happening nationwide in this recession. The last data available on the issue is a 2004 report by the National Institute of Justice, an agency of the Department of Justice, which found that when unemployment rates go up among men so does violence against women. This is of particular significance for Black and Latino communities where unemployment rates are in the double digits.
Stats on domestic violence though aren’t released every month along with unemployment data. As such, we’re trained to place the major issues of the day into their little silos: Women’s rights over here. Job issues over there. Health care to the left and the war in Afghanistan to the right.
But the stories Laura shared with me suggest that if we don’t pay attention to the so-called women’s issues then our chances at a real economic recovery are nil because creating more Dunkin Donuts-type jobs isn’t going to save women (or anyone else for that matter).
Last month, for example, our ColorLines video team released a half hour TV show on race and the economy. In it, Tisha, a single Black mom in Connecticut, spoke about reaching a point where she had to go back to her child’s father, an abusive partner. In one of the show’s most poignant moments, she said she felt she had no other option because she knew he could help pay the bills.
Low-wage jobs—in the absence of access to higher education, child care and a political education—simply keeps women vulnerable.
In Michigan, one of Laura’s clients left her abuser and moved in with a sister. Now that her sister’s losing her house in a foreclosure, the young woman is trying to decide if she should go back to the abusive ex or move to a shelter.
And then there’s the safety plan.
Safety plans are what advocates create with women in domestic violence situations. The idea is to have a plan in place for when a woman is ready to leave. This can mean putting an extra set of keys, copies of birth certificates and clothes in a safe spot like the trunk of the car. Ideally of course it means putting aside any little bit of money, a task that’s hard with low-wage jobs and impossible when those jobs disappear.
These problems won’t go away because Walmart or Starbucks start opening more stores and hiring more people. As Siobhan Brooks wrote in a ColorLines essay years ago, when she took part in union negotiations she realized she had never thought of making demands on any system. It was a classic moment of the feminist personal is political ethos, of realizing that what a person can fight for at work is closely tied to what they believe they can have in their personal lives.
And men need this just as much.
The year my own father started working as a janitor after almost two decades in manufacturing as a union member, he seemed to come undone in new ways, snapping at me when I just asked about his work. I don’t think it was that cleaning other people’s dirty plates alone hurt his self-esteem, although clearly it did, but it was also that there was no collective work, no union, no organizing, no sense that he could do anything about what was happening.
In the end, economic problems, as well as domestic violence, are expansive and complex. If our solutions are going to last—and if we really want to honor the histories of the women who’ve come before—then we need to step outside the silos and start thinking about these problems in ways that are much more intricate.
This post originally appeared on the Booman Tribune.
Bret Stephens takes disingenuousness to a new level today in the Wall Street Journal. Stephens examines some of the writings of Sayyid Qutb and concludes that Lady Gaga is much more of a security threat to the United States than Israel’s permanent settlements on Palestinian land.
This post originally appeared on the Washington Monthly.
We talked earlier about the Obama administration’s apparent intention to allow new oil and natural gas drilling along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and the north coast of Alaska. Given that this move could be used as a bargaining chip with Republicans during negotiations on energy policy, I questioned what the White House would get in exchange for the president’s concession. If the president has already effectively given Republicans what they wanted on energy, what will he get in return?
A Hill staffer I know emails with an alternative look at the same dynamic, suggesting President Obama is playing a game we’ve seen before. I’m republishing the staffer’s email with permission.
Obama preempts the other side’s most resonant arguments, which forces them to come up with more and more extreme claims in order to differentiate themselves. In the end, he occupies the reasonable middle ground and his opponents are Palinized. It doesn’t always work — on the national security/gitmo/Miranda stuff, for example, it turns out the utter extreme positions the right is left with given the centrist ground Obama has staked out turns out to be fairly popular. But even there, the Administration has had reasonable success pushing back on the Miranda nonsense and, because they effectively occupy the tough, pragmatic middle ground, they routinely get cover from non-crazy Republican national security voices, which has helped blunt the force of these issues. (I understand that the term “middle ground” is very slippery and dangerous here, but I basically use it to mean policies that, before the great crazy of 2009 had broad consensus support from large portions of both parties and the Broder/Friedman/Brooks axis.)
At the same time, the policy is a tailored, measured version of what the Republicans have urged — so, yes, the headline is, ‘Obama Allows New Offshore Drilling/Presses For Energy Independence,’ but at the same time, California/Oregon/Washington where opposition is strongest isn’t included, and there are environmentally-friendly changes to Alaska leasing policy announced at the same time. And again, as we’ve seen before, Republicans are sort of forced to twist and parse, and even to oppose things they have long supported, just because the Administration hasn’t gone far enough.
Finally, by announcing the drilling policy without seeking to extract concessions, the Administration makes clear that it is their policy and they are the centrist/flexible/pragmatic ones — making it harder for Republicans to argue that they accomplished this or that they forced Obama to do it. [...]
[O]f course, if there was any reason to believe that Republicans would engage in normal negotiation/compromise, then I see why holding this back and trading it for support of a broader package would make sense. But does anyone really think there are Republicans to negotiate with on this stuff? And if Republicans do come to the table, Obama still has plenty of room to give, including by simply agreeing to sign a law that makes proposals like this a matter of statute, not executive discretion.
That’s an interesting take. Something to keep in mind.
And by the way, right on cue, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) denounced the administration’s drilling plan, despite its similarity to GOP demands, with Boehner expressing his outrage that the president didn’t go further. What a shock.
This idea, as it turns out, is maybe not as good as it first sounds. (It sounds good enough, in fact, that apparently user demand has shut down the site for at least two days going.)
[GameCrush is] an entirely new interactive social gaming experience allowing gamers to meet, match and pay to play online games with other users (PlayDates). GameCrush is the only online service that allows gamers to choose a companion to spice up their favorite online games. Both Players and PlayDates define the experience they want- either “flirty” or “dirty”, choosing from some of the most popular console titles and casual web-based games.
On GameCrush, players can find their perfect PlayDate through browsing their profiles and chatting live with them. Players can then purchase a live one-on-one private gaming session, complete with two-way video and text chat.
OK, skipping over the “flirty or dirty” part — I mean, how many of us ignore red flags at the outset? — it seems kind of genius: meet and get specifically match-made, with someone with similar interests, while doing exactly the thing that in some cases, um, keeps you from getting matchmade! But, as Postbourgie.com notes, it’s not quite that innocent: “On GameCrush the Players are male and the PlayDates are female. There are about 1200 profiles registered thus far of women recruited using (you guessed it!) a Craigslist ad. They’re also paid. Each PlayDate keeps 60% of the cash she earns. Players can also rate their PlayDates:
After a session you can rate your PlayDate on her hotness, gaming skill, and flirtiness. The highest-rated girls will receive preferred placement on the site. GameCrush is assembling a team of its most highly regarded PlayDates called JaneCrush, which would be positioned similar to Ubisoft’s Fragdolls in that members of JaneCrush will generate content for the site like blogs and editorials.
Hooookay. now it’s starting to sound a bit more like GameGeisha. Postbourgie continues: “It seems like it has the potential to walk the line between being a relatively innocuous social service to something a bit more…distasteful…For the most part the PlayDates are just girls who want to play and get paid and guys who want to flirt with an attractive girl while enjoying a game. And as my blogmate R.A.B pointed out, if this had existed 10 years ago he would have been a much more happy and well-adjusted adolescent, so the benefits may outweigh the possible pitfalls. Even so, I can’t help but wonder when Rule 31 and Rule 34 are going to kick in and it all devolves into ‘Show me ur b00bs! </fap fap fap>’. Is everything all good or am I just being hypervigilant and seeing possibilities for sexism and general ickyness where there are none?”
Echoing one of Postbourgie’s commenters, I’d say, option C: Seeing possibilities for sexism and general ickyness…right where they are.
I would have thought this was a joke, but it was reported by the AP and they usually don’t kid around:
McDonald’s inaugurated its first Hamburger University in China on Tuesday to train new generations of managers as foreign companies step up efforts to develop and keep Chinese talent.
Hamburger U? Seriously? So, what does one study at Hamburger U, you may be wondering. The AP reports that it is not making burgers and fries. And it is apparently also not learning about obesity and diabetes. “The emphasis is on running businesses better,” the article says.
This is news to me, as well as the fact that this is the 7th Hamburger U to open worldwide.
The school’s dean, Susanna Li, is quoted as saying, “We will do our best to be the Harvard for our industry.” I wonder what that really means to be the ‘Harvard’ of unhealthy, crappy food. How about instead we open up Sustainable U and teach people about running a business that doesn’t trash the planet and make people ill.
