Karl Rove's book Courage and Consequence is less memoir than hoax. The chapters that relate to the CIA leak scandal are yet another attempt to deflect attention from his central role in the betrayal of Valerie Plame Wilson's identity as a covert CIA officer.
His distortions and fabrications are consistent with his approach throughout this sordid and criminal affair. Wasting his opportunity to tell the truth, he offers absolutely nothing new, and his selective use of facts and quotes are a transparent effort to continue his long campaign to confuse people, unfortunately consistent with his past behavior.
His book is a pathetically weak defense of the disastrous policies pursued by the Bush administration, involving our country in a war of choice based on false intelligence and badly tarnishing the good name of the United States of America.
Nothing in Karl Rove's book refutes those facts. His book, however, is illuminating in further exposing his political methods, especially his reliance on personal insults, not simply towards Valerie and myself, but also towards all those who opposed his unprincipled behavior.
If any additional proof to the irrefutable historical record were needed, Rove's book demonstrates once again the actions of a vindictive, angry and petty man. Karl Rove betrayed his nation; now he has betrayed history.
Karl Rove's book Courage and Consequence is less memoir than hoax. The chapters that relate to the CIA leak scandal are yet another attempt to deflect attention from his central role in the betrayal of Valerie Plame Wilson's identity as a covert CIA officer.
His distortions and fabrications are consistent with his approach throughout this sordid and criminal affair. Wasting his opportunity to tell the truth, he offers absolutely nothing new, and his selective use of facts and quotes are a transparent effort to continue his long campaign to confuse people, unfortunately consistent with his past behavior.
His book is a pathetically weak defense of the disastrous policies pursued by the Bush administration, involving our country in a war of choice based on false intelligence and badly tarnishing the good name of the United States of America.
Nothing in Karl Rove's book refutes those facts. His book, however, is illuminating in further exposing his political methods, especially his reliance on personal insults, not simply towards Valerie and myself, but also towards all those who opposed his unprincipled behavior.
If any additional proof to the irrefutable historical record were needed, Rove's book demonstrates once again the actions of a vindictive, angry and petty man. Karl Rove betrayed his nation; now he has betrayed history.
Silicon Alley Insider just published a rather lengthy investigation into the origins of Facebook. Specifically, it addresses the allegations that Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea for his social network from ConnectU, which he had been hired to help code. The report has also uncovered a pair of unsettling anecdotes that paint a less than flattering picture of its founder, including hacking into ConnectU and accessing data on Harvard newspaper writers covering the two networks.Continue reading Facebook's Dark Start: Zuckerberg's Hacking, Betrayal Exposed in New Report
Filed under: Celebrities, Web, Social Networking
Facebook's Dark Start: Zuckerberg's Hacking, Betrayal Exposed in New Report originally appeared on Switched on Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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On Monday night, in response to my article in this month's Vanity Fair on Lehman's Desperate Housewives (which was an excerpt from my forthcoming book, The Devil's Casino: Friendship, Betrayal and the High Stakes Games Played Inside Lehman Brothers), hundreds (literally) of Lehman's former women executives anxiously listened into a conference phone call helmed by Anne Erni.
Erni used to be the chief diversity officer at Lehman, and now works in the same capacity for Bloomberg. The participants on the call all used to belong to WILL -- the acronym for Women's Initiatives Leading Lehman, an organization set up by the diversity-obsessed former Lehman president Joe Gregory.
Erni, who was and remains a fan of Gregory (well he hired her, didn't he?) apparently told all of them to take note of the article, saying that Gregory and his wife Niki had been "bashed" both for their need to "flash their cash" -- remember there was talk of Niki Gregory's shoe closet being "twice the size of the Jimmy Choo store in New York"? -- and that Joe Gregory would likely come under further attack in my book for being too consumed with Lehman's laudable diversity and inclusion programs, at the expense of managing risk and closely monitoring the firms' core businesses.
She warned that the book would be a "doozie" (this author, being British, had to find out what a doozie was, since it does not feature in the Oxford English dictionary).
Still, good to know that despite what we all thought, Lehman, in a way, still lives. And as for the doozie, well I guess like everyone else, the members of Lehman's WILL will have to wait and see. I am very happy to come and give a talk on the subject at one of your monthly meetings. Erni did not return calls for comment at the time of going to press.
Recent surveys have shown that the trust and regard that Americans hold for their elected officials in Washington is at a historic low. And those government officials wonder why they aren't on anyone's Most Popular list these days.
Let me count the ways: bailouts, backroom deals, tax cuts for the wealthy, extreme partisanship, election-year politics, the list goes on and on. This behavior among those who purport to represent us is really just business as usual in the Beltway. But this wanton disregard feels like a real betrayal lately given that most ordinary Americans are having a hard enough time without being kicked while they're down by the very elected representatives who are supposed to be helping them up.
It seems clear to those of every political persuasion that many (dare I say most) politicians have lost touch with those whom they are supposed to represent. I can understand that politicians have different ideas about how to best serve their constituents, but their legislative efforts these days are so disconnected from the needs and goals of regular Americans that, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, they can't even fool some of the people some of the time into thinking that they care about us. Here's a great example. The Senate Banking Committee responsible for creating banking reform legislation recently met with representatives from the banking industry (read lobbyists) to get their input. Did the committee also meet with a representatives of, well, us regular folks to get our feedback about the legislation? That's a big negative. What input could the banking lobbyists provide other than to ensure that the reform was favorable to them and harmful to us? What benefit would the committee garner from such a meeting? Oh yeah, how naïve of me, campaign contributions.
I think that our elected representatives need to return to school to take American History again (which they obviously failed the first time around) and learn three words that might enable them to actually earn the title of "representative."
The first word our government should learn is "of," as in "of the people." The of of which I speak refers to the notion that our government should be comprised of people like us rather than from an oligarchical cabal that shows little resemblance to ordinary Americans. Yet, it has become painfully clear to those of us who belong to the "us" group that our government is dominated, both within and outside, by those with wealth and status who have little regard for anyone else.
The second word our government should learn is "by," as in "by the people." The by of which I speak refers to the notion that our government is a proxy for its citizens, in other words, they = us. In this role, we should be able to trust that our best interests are served in Washington because they want the same thing as we do because, well, they are us. Unfortunately, they ≠us, they = $$$ + power and we = nada. With this disconnect between America's citizenry and its elected representatives, they can still claim to be elected, but can't fairly claim to be representative.
The third word our government should learn is "for," as in "for the people." The for of which I speak refers to the notion, now seemingly quaint and outdated, that all activities in Washington are devoted to serving the best interests of its citizens. Even in a political culture as polarized as ours, we can all agree that the symbiotic relationship that currently exists in Washington between our elected officials and special-interest groups serves the best interests of those in power with only the occasional appearance of concern for us lowly citizens.
We need look no further than Jim Bunning, the retiring senator from the great state of Kentucky who is single handedly holding up a bipartisan bill to extend unemployment benefits for another month. He's clearly not concerned about the approximately one in ten of his constituents who are currently unemployed.
I would like to see two things happen to those gentlemen and ladies whom we did elect, but don't deserve to be called our representatives.
The next time they are up for election, we the American people assert the last vestige of power we still do hold and demonstrate to them in no uncertain terms that if they will not act as our representatives, then we will not elect them again.
But before that, those in Washington should be forced to stand in front of the American people and repeat the last sentence of the Gettysburg Address one time for every time that they met with a lobbyist or took special-interest money. Because those people in Washington whom we elected obviously don't know that last sentence, I'll provide crib notes (with special emphasis on the last words): "It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government: of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
As Obama's first year in office wraps we have to wonder how he squandered such a great opportunity to produce real "change," the theme that inspired his campaign. Those who expected it are disillusioned; those who didn't gloat on the marooned administration. The election rhetoric made many believe something was coming. In the final stretches of the campaign he indicted a failed generation of neoliberals that began with Reagan for taking us on the wrong course. But now Democrats frantically read focus groups and polls, perhaps even tea leaves, to keep their jobs. Obama's "army" has been left out of the picture, yet to find its war. Progressives, still hopeful the speeches and policies will coincide, appear stymied at the administration's steering of mostly the same course.
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          Is this betrayal, or the proverbial idealist facing unexpected obstacles once in power? Did we misunderstand what he represents?
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         He said in his chat with Republicans after the State of the Union address that he's not about ideology but working together with all parties to solve problems. He's a healer, as perhaps his choice of Rick Warren to kick off the inauguration showed. But this doesn't mean he's neutral and balanced. He coddles and courts the Republicans who are way out on the right. What if he at least glanced left on occasion and built on the passion in his speeches about the host of problems we face? What would his problem solving look like then?
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         Leaders inspire others to change course through their passion about certain ideas, so what does it mean to lack ideology? Ideologies are a narrowing of ideas, but they bear some relation to ideas. The bearer pushes something. It's like someone saying they aren't political when they merely support an agenda that doesn't have to be identified since it's the one that's in and the majority simply does your bidding. Obama claims to lack ideology but he's also devoid of passion. He never makes firm cases for positions, floating feelers for focus groups to test and interests to engage instead, letting well-funded lobbyists and other players decide what will work best. Generalities floated during the campaign galvanized troops, but specifics that could translate them into action were not forthcoming.
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           Obama's appointments were an early eye-opener. They were far from neutral choices, but a slate of dittos from the team he replaced. This was particularly distressing since there was the expectation he would do something about the mortgage crisis other than send checks to banks like Paulson; that he would push for some form of public fix of the health care system; that he would quickly move to get out of Iraq, and likely not increase the military budget; that he would re-regulate the financial industry, the cause of the whole mess, especially since deregulation was the centerpiece of the failed system he rejected.
            No question there are obstacles to getting this done, but Obama's first year actions seem close to Republican ones, especially when it comes to defense. They're pitifully close to George Bush. What better homage than to tap him as a figurehead in the Haiti response! The post-Scott Brown health plan emerging from the "summit" this week is basically the one the Republicans proposed as an alternative to the Clinton plan in the 90s. His economic policies are filter-down retreads. The congressional black caucus has nearly abandoned him since he's virtually ignored the plight of African-Americans. Some reverse racist!
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           Had McCain-Palin won, things would likely not be very different. They would have propped up large corporations and defense, probably even doled out stimulus money, though less of it. Obama's stimulus program lacks even the fumes of the Great Society anyway, certainly the parent New Deal, providing minimal funds to the states. It basically props up the existing order.
            It's because Obama is so near to the Republicans on policy, talks liberal some of the time, and keeps things vague, that they can strike at him assured he can't come back with much. He politely sidesteps charges of being a fascist or a socialist. But they hardly need substance to continue the badgering through other means, getting mileage calling him liberal from those on the right who don't need much convincing.
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      The chair of the Orange County Republican Party said recently in an interview with Larry Mantle on KPCC's Air Talk that while Obama campaigned as a moderate, he's governed as a liberal; he's just another tax and spend Democrat. When pressed for an example, he just stuttered and changed the subject. The rant about his "socialism" produced the same clichés, that he's increasing big government and "taking away our freedom."
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          Rush Limbaugh aptly called him a "post-accomplishment" and "post-racial" president. He and others know that most people don't sit around and evaluate facts and policies since they have neither the time nor the preparation. But many are receptive to clichés passed down by elites. We learned from Bush that saying something over and over again convinces people it's true. And if folks miss Obama's occasional liberal clichés then Limbaugh and the gang will make sure they get repeated for them.
            Obama's outreach to the Republicans is notable however in trying to heal the political body. His predecessor inflamed the red/blue state rift. So rather than simply try and ram his "change agenda" down Republican throats, which would have deepened the polarization, Obama apparently felt a responsibility to console the losers and make them players. They still aren't playing, but these gestures suggest Obama is a team player, and should deflect some blame to the Republicans for inaction.
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           Reaching out to his adversaries, and those responsible for our problems, to push forward needed change is also intriguing. So the administration turned to the drug and insurance industries for advice on how to reform health care. And it let those who defaulted our lives and swapped our fortunes through financial speculation take charge of the repayment plans. And it gave the prior administration's head soldier the nod to solve our "wars on terror."
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           After all, they might've seen the light and their actions filtered down to shape his version of a better society, whatever that is. It would have been an amazing coup; giving the bad guys a chance to be good guys. Many fence-progressives feel this was a great idea since the system doesn't change that easily, and the problem is also with the bureaus and Congress. There's no question that Obama faces considerable blockages.
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           But it's also a stretch to believe the system will correct and regulate itself. The industries and bureaus Obama defers to are delivering more of the same. Some say we need a movement to pressure him in a "progressive" direction. Others that it is simply difficult to govern, and we need to be more patient. We do await the movement that will push him to do what he seemed to promise in that magical campaign.
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           But the campaign was fueled by a movement of sorts, the vast recruitment of mostly the young--those who inevitably make up movements--through the internet. This sizable "army" helped get Democrats their majority in Congress, and now the administration has virtually abandoned them, according to Micah Sifry (To the Point, KCRW, Santa Monica, 1/29/10). Though a substantial outsider force for change during the campaign, once the election was over the "army" was incorporated into the Democratic National Committee. As Tim Dickinson says in Rolling Stone, this people-powered revolution became part of the amorphous mass of partisan bodies and lost its edginess. From engaged activists they became receptacles of emails, retired into a shadow of its previous self ("No We Can't," 2/2/10).
            Obama has freely made his choices. He didn't side with the move to deny Bernanke another term. He was against moves to audit the Fed, as well as the more aggressive plans to regulate the financial industry. The problem is he accepts the center as the space to start the problem solving. It sounds so right. The center is where differences are worked out and leaders find common ground between opposing parties. But there's a difference between ending up in the center versus beginning there. This talk manages the consent of the players who've staked claims on the wealth and power with just enough reform to make changing the rules of the game unnecessary.
            Obama's position on health care has taken the public option, and obviously single payer, off the table. What criticism of the insurance companies there is gets drowned out by the assumption that reform needs to happen within the private system. They get what they want before committees sausage the product. He rants about banks and borrowers being collectively responsible, but talks little about the plight of homeowners.
            When I hear the word centrist I think of Gray Davis, former California Governor who was recalled for the Terminator. He was a problem-solving "new Democrat" who believed in practical solutions. In office the utility deregulation framework engineered by both Democrats and Republicans in the 90s unraveled. Privatized companies gobbled each other up, leaving weakened competition and eventually fewer players and a mess of too-big-to-fail survivors that threatened the state with insolvency if it didn't bail them out. Mr. Davis never minced his words, sending checks to those who caused the crisis. California then experienced a huge budget shortfall, leading to mass layoffs and extensive cuts in education and social services.
            Working out serious differences through compromise is key to a functioning democracy. But this requires a reasonably equal field of players who have the ability to influence decisions. The voices that mostly matter now are those funded by the corporate elite that owned most successful candidates even before the recent Supreme Court decision that removed obstacles on campaign financing. Privatization is the enemy of democracy. It's because Charles Grassley and the other players drafting health care legislation can legally deposit funds from lobbyists that skews the voting proportions and mocks the spirit of compromise.
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       So if Obama wants real compromise he must at least bring the weight of ideas from the side wanting change to battle those who fiercely resist it, and have extraordinary power to influence others. The center unfortunately is where leaders have often hidden their sectarian beliefs in what they claim are practical, value-free decisions.
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     We got a glimpse of this attitude after WWII when Daniel Bell and others argued that our socio-economic system had reached such a level of success and affluence that all problems had become mere technical ones. There was no need for alternatives since our brand of capitalism had proven to be the best. If there were any imperfections remaining, like scarcity in income and resources for some citizens here and there, this could be alleviated with policies crafted fairly and objectively. This was also about sending a message that there was no need to get attracted to social democracy, an alternative that appeared to be increasing in popularity elsewhere.
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           The end of the Cold War in '91 was another moment when this was especially appealing, as the popularity of Fukuyama's "end of history" notion shows. Soviet Communism's collapse was proof positive the system left standing was the best.
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           But the end of ideology is the ideology that supports the alignment of power that takes place behind the talk. Not only do leaders in love with the center (who always promise reform) avoid discussing the structure of society. Their value-free rap also monopolizes the discussion and lets the privileged have their way so that "solutions" mostly benefit them. Health care is another example. Obama pitches the need for universal reform from the center while the industry's players can do what they think necessary to reform itself.
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           The avoidance of the structure of society has a long history. It comes from the first celebrators of industrial capitalism, like Comte in the early 19th century who augustly claimed that progressive improvement was built into the system that survived the ruinous transition from feudalism--and so must be the best!--and therefore all that remained was to twist out the facts usable for eliminating the minor aberrations, the messy exceptions, that inevitably trail progress. Herbert Spencer's dog-eat-dog diatribe was only a few tracts away.
            One of the most famous early tourists of America, Alexis de Tocqueville, found the perfect lab in the 1830s to reflect on these concerns. His very first chapter of Democracy in America identifies our "philosophical method." We distrust ideas and preexisting formulas about society, living in the moment and relying on our own individual opinions, which are a sort of "intellectual dust" that's "unable to cohere." And the result of this "independence of mind" is that "interests" bind us together, not ideas.
            As individuals we may not have read the right books or sifted through the best arguments, but we know what's right. We merely perform under the hand of god and progress toward more perfect unions and complete bank accounts, doing the things that matter on the spot. It's about what's happening now. No need for last year's news or power shifts, let alone the relevance of what happened in the previous generation that locked in the power that narrows the ideas available and restricts present options. Does anyone remember the $700 billion bailout, or even care whether the disappearance of this money, or whose pockets it ended up in, has anything to do with the nature of the recession the media mostly ignores?
            Tocqueville felt it was our "equality" that kept us fixed on the present and future. We were not bound by class and could effortlessly move on toward the next opportunity. The 1830s was when European immigration was gearing up, pulled by promise but pushed by economic collapse. The prospects for transcending your origins and bypassing your neighbor were real. But is it our very real myth of equality, inherited from these circumstances, that now keeps us pitched toward the future and fuzzy about present and past?
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           The bad is only ever temporary. We will all be somewhere else better down the road. So the news doesn't have to give us the depressing stories that advertisers feel dampen the urge to buy, but which unfortunately also might educate us and help solve important problems. Keep the messages upbeat, especially since the chaos of the recession threatens to disrupt our ways of thinking and doing and make us disbelievers. Ignore the foreclosure crisis; focus the great opportunities for those who can buy the foreclosed properties! The next boom is right around the corner once we flush all the impediments, the homeowners who shouldn't have bought, the "losers" who couldn't bypass their neighbors, out of the system.
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     Like those frequent ups and downs at the gas pump that picture the idea of a free market, centerspeak mimics the core values of the American experiment: freedom, equality, fairness. It says we should all stream into the main and most evident spaces and arenas. Fringes are un-American. We weigh options on both sides, but avoid rigid position-taking within either. The middle, not the ends, is what matters. This is where the mass of individuals lay, the groups of ordinary people who make up the middle class, Obama's rhetorical target. It's where the common resides, not the special and preferential, as in common denominator, the everyday essence of the American republic.
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     While the connotations reel from the metaphors, the "interests" that comprise the power structure, the PACs and think tanks and institutes and lobbyists that mostly represent business and elite labor positions and have most of the funds, get going. It's these voices after all that are dictating the legislation while bipartisanship and compromise, the center's official rap, distracts us.
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    As Arianna Huffington said on This Week recently, when responding to the issue of why real "change" is not occurring in the Obama administration, we get bipartisanship when the laws are voted on, but lobbyists are the ones writing them! Splitting the difference in negotiations about issues that have been legislated in advance by interests outside of the body which supposedly represents the people in the middle, is illusory democracy. The content of legislation needs to be shaped by the larger plurality. And we could use a different batch of voters in Congress as well.
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      We really need a third party that represents those left out. Most other advanced industrial nations have multiple parties, and certainly one that represents middle class interests better, and especially worker interests. Such a represented chunk of the citizenry could add to the plurality and at least force the administration to negotiate with those on the forgotten side.
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    Just as the economic "recovery" can occur without the nearly 20% who are under-or-unemployed, in the broken system Obama brokers, those in power, or claiming it, don't need all of these forgotten citizens to maintain their positions and get reelected. They only need media blitzes and astroturf flare-ups to engineer the appearance of an army of support to hold on. And for well over a generation the system has done without a significant number of citizens who've become apathetic, driven from the voting booth by a sense of disillusionment about their chances to influence the process.
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    Which makes the fate of Obama's "army" all that more tragic. An inspired mass of activists wanting real change, and led to believe they could help shape it, they've become another alienated group.
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      Obama's "liberalism" is actually consistent with structural and demographic shifts that have been underway for some time. According to Eric Foner in a recent piece in the Nation, he's far from being a New Deal liberal. Obama came of age in the Democratic party when labor was no longer a significant part of its base, and so issues of inequality, unemployment and workers' struggles have not taken priority. His perpetual referencing of the middle class as the designated target for change meshes with this assessment. And certainly the lower middle portion, these days not too close to any middle, has fallen into the bottom rung that's of little interest to the Democrats. Obama's sympathies are mostly with the upper range of the middle. If Obama has a liberal twitch, Foner concludes, it can be seen in talk for the issues of women's reproductive rights, gay rights, environmentalism and racial and ethnic diversity (2/1/10).
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     All well and good, even if most of this thus far is talk. But liberal rhetoric has a better chance of finding fruition if power and resources are not stacked so much on one side. Very little can change without resources or firm legal changes in rights. Obama's optimistic encouragement of individuals to act and do things on their own is commendable, but until the system provides more options we can't expect much real progress.
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       Right at the top of the AOL homepage every day, ads proclaim that Obama encourages moms to go back to school. But since there's been no change in the tax structure and a revamping of budget priorities that can release more funds to the responsible authorities, business as usual has led to mass layoffs of personnel, class cuts, and larger sizes for the classes that do remain. Some climate for returning to school!
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           We're being pelted with commercials to read more. Well, with nearly 20% of the working population effectively out of work, it's indeed a good time for it. But what about the exorbitant cost of books caused by the oligopoly that produces them? What about the shrinkage of alternative periodical distributors caused by the same oligopoly? Antitrust regulation lays dormant. The aspirants can of course go to the public library, where due to severe budget cuts there's been a freeze on new books and periodicals for some time, as well as fire sales on existing stock.
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           Until there's something done about the way wealth is accumulated and distributed, the tax structure, unfair competition, usurious interests rates, financial speculation and other matters, individual initiative can't lead to much of substance on a broad scale. The only way that individuals can be all they want to be is to join the military.
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           Just letting things take their course, allowing the "free" market do its magic, makes matters worse in a world that Paul Krugman (New York Times, 2/10) calls "lemon socialism," where the losses from economic activity are borne by taxpayers, and the gains by the corporate elite. This amounts to no less than a redistribution of wealth upward.
            It's Obama's refusal to confront these fundamental structural flaws, particularly the "free market" that he railed against in the campaign, hesitantly marooned as he is in the center, that makes change virtually impossible. But blame the shift in liberalism that's made Democrats so similar to Republicans, and whose weakness has allowed the extreme right to gain footing. The tea baggers are only the most recent symptom of this weakening, and whose ranks reflect significant numbers of Obama voters, as well as Democrats and independents.
            But post-Scott Brown, isn't Obama changing, some are saying? He's endorsed the "Volcker Rule" according to Robert Scheer (Truthdig, 2/2), which involves restoring the "spirit, if not the letter" of Glass-Steagall, the legislation from the 30s--repealed under Clinton--that prevented commercial and investment banking from merging. But then eight days later in an interview with BusinessWeek, he endorsed the multimillion dollar bonuses paid to Chase's CEO Jamie Dimon and Sachs' CEO Lloyd Blankfein because they are "savvy businessmen" and he doesn't "begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free market system."
            A few days later he came out to the cameras fuming about Anthem's decision to raise premiums on health policies by 39% in the face of record profits in the previous quarter. So much for universal coverage and those deals made at the White House to cooperate on passing a health care bill that would control costs!
            Tomorrow's another day. Back and forth, up and down: whatever gets you through the election cycle and satisfies this or that potential focus group...
A new book, The Devil's Casino: Friendship, Betrayal and the High Stakes Games Played Inside Lehman Brothers, depicts the lives of Lehman Brothers wives as pampered, yes, but also lonely and rather mundane. One wife gave "tours of her vast shoes closets," and lived with her husband Joe Gregory on an annual personal budget of $15 million. They had both "a seaplane and a helicopter ready for the daily commute," but beyond all that stuff, keeping up appearances was simply exhausting.
To promote an atmosphere of trust for its clients, Lehman Brothers wanted all its executives to have happy and healthy (looking) marriages, which meant that "If you were married to a Lehmanite, you belonged to the firm," writes the book's author Vicky Ward (excerpts are published in April's Vanity Fair). As such, “canceled dinners, weekends, and vacations”were routine. Speaking of vacations, company trips were also a real bitch. "Hiking was mandatory for all,” recalls one wife, adding that packing was “an absolute nightmare."
Any scintilla of sympathy one feels while reading these passages isn't brought on by the knowledge the wives will soon lose all their shoes and aircrafts, but at the whole mess they've gotten themselves into to begin with. Ward writes that the women became social piranhas when their husbands lost their positions in the firm, so when Lehman Brothers comes crashing down it seems as though they should be relieved. Ward say one wife, Kathy Fuld, learned what "Lehman wives had learned before her: 'When your husband leaves Lehman, you become a ghost.' But in Kathy's case, Lehman had become a ghost along with her."
Reconciliation is one of those words that sounds great when used in another country
Right-wing whites along with the rest of the world embraced South Africa's peace and reconciliation process as a way to put apartheid crimes on the record without a punitive witch-hunt that would intensify racial and political tensions. Archbishop Desmond Tutu chaired a panel to hear evidence without the power to execute or imprison or execute wrongdoers.
The idea was to disclose the truth while attempting to bring a dangerously polarized society together. Forgiveness, it was thought, could help the country move on.
In the US, at least these days, reconciliation has another meaning and purpose: to allow legislators to find compromises in enacting legislation by reconciling Senate and House versions of the bill.
Republicans used this tool to pass the Reagan budgets and Bush tax cuts that benefited the wealthy and arguably helped bankrupt the economy. Their legislative maneuver was justified as a necessary method of getting done what they wanted done. There was no moralizing about it, no shame.
Now that Democrats are talking about reconciling the Senate and House versions of the Health Care Reform Bill, (so that it can be passed by majority vote) many of these same Republican windbags are up in arms charging treason and worse. Nevertheless, President Obama is going ahead, calling for an up or down vote. Majority Leader Pelosi says she has the votes.
The Republicans are apoplectic. Suddenly when a tactic they used may be used against them, they are on the ramparts screaming about a betrayal of the Constitution.
Never mind that more than a year has been spent debating ---and watering down so-called reforms including the junking of a wildly popular public option. Never mind that way more than a majority of Senators and a majority of the House backed the measure with certain differences of course.
To the Republican bluster uber alles squad, the only acceptable remedy would be to "start over," as if the election of 2008 never happened. It is always their way or the highway. For them, the political jihad comes first and killing the bill and all health care reform is the crusade dujure, smirks, invented arguments and all. They have wrapped themselves in their message points and just love the drone of their echo chamber.
Wink, Wink!
It was so obvious at the CSPAN Summit that Obama was talking to the wallpaper.
Also obvious was how unwilling the Obamacrats have been to leave what they perceived as the political safety of the center, unwilling to use what power they have to push their agenda through, and in the process incur the wrath of Fox News and middle of the Road DINOS (Democrats In Name Only) who are totally integrated into the system, if not, bought off, or at least leased, by the Insurance lobby. They live in a gut-free zone.
They may pay lip service for the need for change but lack the spine and will to fight for it. They had already disregarded and dissed those in their own ranks pushing for Single Payer, Medicare for all etc. They bombed a public option the way the Israelis want us to treat Iran. (Israel, by the bye, has a government backed health care system.)
You can't totally blame Obama for this muddle of the middle, because of the way Wall Street bought the Congress. What is troublesome is his continuing stated hope against hope that somehow he can use rationality and logic to appeal to the illogical and irrational. At the same time, he worked on the Hill and must know who he is dealing, or not dealing with. (Yes I remember Rumsfeld's dicta, "you go to war with the army you have.")
This is a political game that has more dicey parts than a Toyota. The partisans on the right project more certainty in their convictions and in their demagoguery. They have a big noise machine to drive them on -- even if it is to the abyss. As one of my readers noted, they seem programmed by Fox News. (In the old days media outlets reported what politicians say; today some are browbeating them into what to say!)
As for health care for all, they don't care about it. They never did.
There can be no reconciliation between these two "sides" -- or, should we say wings on the same plane, even if there may be more similarities here than appears. Most of the Dems have a stake in serving the system; few have the independence or willingness to go to the mattresses or stand up for what they claim, at times, to believe in.
They wouldn't be politicians if they were not wedded to wheeling and dealing and perpetual compromise. It is their waffling that also gives Republicans the encouragement to take a harder and harder line. They project no patience for "wusses" and whiners. They believe they will cave, and they may be right.
The Dems know a hotly contested election is coming and banking on their incumbency and money raising capacity to insure re-election. They don't like ideological battles maybe in part because they don't know what they think most of the time.
They want to please their voters, not challenge them,
The media bigs know that interest in politics has gone way down except among the most politically aligned. They know that to build bigger audiences, they have to pour oil on the flames and amp up the confrontation,
Heat sells, light doesn't.
Keep the scandals and the manufactured "showdowns" coming!
So can you reconcile this -- our vast needs and a political system that can't address them? An economy in free fall and policies that fall way short of fixing it? And, politicians who want to posture and lecture each other rather than organize their supporters and defend their programs?
If health care reform disintegrates, if financial reform flames out, if the consumer protection agency is deep-sixed or pushed into a back office in Tim Geithner's Treasury Department, many of Obama's backers will have fewer reasons for reconciling themselves with a Titanic that seems to have nowhere to go but down.
Will this lead to a new political initiative? If not now, when? Help me reconcile all this, help me now.
News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org. His new film, Plunder treats the financial crisis as a crime story. (Plunderthecrimeofourtime.com) Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org
Journalism training in Korea has all the hallmarks of a good reality show: Cub reporters must drink themselves silly, stay awake around the clock, sleep together, and stab one another in the back. It makes Columbia look like Coney Island.
South Korea's brutal, overcrowded j-hazing programs bring chaos and body odor to police stations and wherever else cub reporters congregate, according to a Los Angeles Times article, a situation exacerbated by "marathon boozing sessions... on the theory that plying sources with drinks will be part of [cub reporters'] routine." Trainee reporters also sleep ten-deep on 10'-by-12' platforms, and are ordered to "produce scoops at the expense of their fellow cubs." This gives Korea the world's most realistic journalism school until the Steve Dunleavy Center for Communications opens in 2011, inside Langan's bar. (Via)
(Pic: Just another day in South Korea's parliament. This 2009 brawl sent two people to the hospital. Who's ready to ask one of these guys for an interview??)
It is the lynchpin of the legal case for prosecuting the war criminals of the last administration. We have known for a while that the Justice Department's old guard was going to protect itself and even those who violated basic norms of legality and morality within it. We have known for a while that president Obama and attorney-general Eric Holder have decided to remain in breach of the Geneva Conventions and be complicit themselves in covering up the war crimes of their predecessors - which means, of course, that those of us who fought for Obama's election precisely because we wanted a return to the rule of law were conned.
Whether this betrayal is a prudential and reluctant attempt to play a long game, to avoid, Lincoln-like, a deeply divisive and explosive political war for the sake of the country; or whether it is a cynical and Clintonian form of rank and cowardly opportunism (yes, Rahm, we know who you are), will surely become clearer in due course. I certainly hope the former. I believe the president knows what occurred, and his repeated public use of the word "torture" for the policies of his predecessors is a way of telling the world and future prosecutors in the US or around the world what Cheney and his team did. For the record. Deep down, I still trust him on this, in what is an awful and potentially explosive situation.
Holder has restricted the investigation of the Cheney era war crimes to those that went beyond the torture "legally" allowed by the OLC memos. But it remains possible that once you start pulling on that thread, any serious legal investigation will find it impossible to make such absurd and semantic distinctions when the guiding laws and treaties are so abundantly clear that such distinctions are absurd.
To take one simple obvious example: If we know for a fact that all legal precedent in the US and the world requires one incident of waterboarding to be prosecutable as torture under any circumstances and we also know that the Cheney team subjected someone to it 183 times, I find it simply impossible that any DOJ investigation can somehow only look at instances beyond those authorized by Cheney ... without making a mockery of the rule of law and the Justice Department itself.
So I remain convinced that this matter is not over, even though the way in which the DOJ has now softened and protected the clear and political manipulation of the law by lawyers sworn to uphold it remains a travesty, a disgrace, an abomination, another example of how the government treats its own members in ways it would never ever treat anyone else.
That Lynndie England went to jail for doing things that John Yoo made legal, and Yoo does not even face disbarment, tells you all you need to know about the current state of justice in America. In the end, the current president and attorney-general have assented to this massive injustice. The responsibility is theirs'. But the arc of history is long. And justice will come in the end. Of that I am sure.
I'm exhausted this weekend so please give me time to read the full OPR report carefully before commenting on it. Its details may be so damning, the facts it has assembled so glaring, that the gloss we have heard - leaked, cowardly, on a Friday afternoon - may soon be exposed as such a travesty of the evidence within that what dismays me this morning may encourage me soon.
So let me merely say this: I believe in America. I believe it is still here beneath all this. I believe it will come back. But I also believe it is the duty of all of us who love this country to make sure it does.
That means you as well as me.
Remember: we are the ones we have been waiting for.
A reader writes:
I am an employee of Catholic Charities in the Archdiocese of Washington, and I am glad you have picked up on this story once again. I can say that nearly everyone I know below the Executive level is absolutely astonished, disgusted, and anxious at the Executive team's utter obtuseness about their intentions moving forward, not to mention Catholic Charities' continued betrayal of our mission to serve the poor, on behalf of a political fight.
Without DC government contracts, most CC programs in the District are doomed to the same fate as the foster care program, yet the Archdiocese (who calls all the shots - our Board of Directors is totally powerless, and worthless) still won't tip their hand about whether or not we are actually going to continue to provide services, let alone reassure employees that the Archdiocese is concerned about us keeping our jobs.
Unofficially, I hear the Archdiocese will play ball with the District, and follow the lead of Georgetown University by providing benefits to "legally domiciled adults," or some other generic construction, who co-habitate with CC employees, thereby including same-sex spouses without recognizing the marriages - but there has been no official word.
Every day that this process is dragged on, and reported on in the press, further sullies the reputation of the largest social services agency in the city, and worsens our chances of renewing funding with government and private foundations, whether or not CC ends up complying with the law and providing benefits to same-sex spouses.
No one is asking the Church to perform same-sex marriages or bless same-sex couples, but only to afford these couples the same civil rights they are guaranteed by law, and the human dignity the Church so staunchly defends for everyone else. A more forward-thinking, less reactionary, organization would have had a strategic plan in place for this the moment Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage years ago, and would be ready to make the necessary compromises to ensure that we continue to stay in business, and fulfill our mission, without drawing undue attention by showing contempt for the localities we serve.
But the hierarchy of the Catholic Church has zero desire to read the prevailing cultural winds, let alone adjust to them. It disgusts and saddens me that our leadership is so callow as to put culture wars above the poor, the homeless, the mentally ill, and others whom the Catholic Church is dedicated to serve.
Several people I know, both gay and straight, have recently left Catholic Charities for other agencies, and with any luck I won't be too far behind. Thank you for your continued attention to the Church's failures to prioritize between it's core values, and those on the periphery.
Something is rotten in the heart of the Catholic hierarchy. It is time real Catholics started standing up against it.
The Guardian's Damien G. Walter issues a passionate plea to Iain M. Banks to complete an unofficial Culture trilogy that began with Consider Phlebas and Look To Windward. But really, Walter seems to want the Culture to die.
Walter rightly praises Banks' Consider Phlebas as an eye-opening masterpiece, which established Banks as an important SF novelist and the Culture as one of SF's most memorable universes. And even though Banks has written many other books about or around the Culture, Walter sees Phlebas and Windward as the two crucial novels to date, which show the Culture under threat or being challenged fundamentally.
Writes Walter:
At the close of Look to Windward, the Culture is all-powerful, a lone superpower with a galaxy to play in. But it is suggested that the Culture faces an uncertain future, and the threat of betrayal from within. We waited eight years for the next volume in the Culture saga, but while Matter teased us with details of other superpower races in the galaxy, it did not bring the story to its resolution. If the Culture novels have returned to any idea over and again, it is the absolute certainty of change. The Culture can not last forever, so what will the fate of the ideal, utopian society be? Will it ascend to some higher state of being, or will it fall back into the chaos and barbarism it so long resisted?
So. It has been 10 years, and we're still waiting for the third volume of the unofficial trilogy begun with Consider Phlebas and continued in Look to Windward.
I have to admit, I hadn't thought of those two novels as being especially pivotal, or two parts of a trilogy, before. But it's an interesting thought. It seems like what Walter really wants is the story of the fall of the Culture - which makes me sad, in some reflexive way, because I long to live in the Culture the way some people long to live on Pandora.
I have a feeling that for Banks, the Culture is a setting rather than the subject of his story. I'm not convinced that Banks thinks there is a story to tell about the rise and fall of the Culture, but rather, that he's interested in telling stories within the Culture and using it as a backdrop. But I could be wrong, as I so frequently am. And it's hard to argue with a plea for more Culture novels generally. [Guardian]
Arch-conservative Catholic blogger, Mark Shea, takes on Thiessen:
[T]he thing I find most baffling about all this: the spectacle of pro-lifers going to the mat to defend torture, all while claiming that it is virtually impossible to even know what torture is.
The ridiculous and insulting tendency among so many who do this is to imply that if you oppose torture you do so because you are secretly supporting abortion or trying to derail the pro-life movement. The obvious reply to this is that it is precisely Catholic pro-life belief that rejects the ends-justifies-the-means thinking behind both abortion and torture advocacy.
If pro-lifers would simply stop defending the use of torture, there'd be no problem and I for one would never make another peep about it. But the fact is (as Raymond Arroyo, Marc ("Scott Brown Shows Waterboarding Wins") Thiessen, Austin Ruse and a depressing roster of other prolife Catholics demonstrate in percentages greater than the average population, we are now so required to be in bed with whatever consequentialism the GOP leadership demands that a principled prolife stand that rejects consequentialism in all its forms is spoken of as betrayal of the prolife movement.
The solution is simple: it's not that Catholics who repeat the plain and repeated teaching of the Church should be quiet about torture. It's that Catholics who claim to have no idea if the Bush Administration committed torture or not (since they are helpless to define torture) should stop defending what everybody (including the Reagan Administration and the Vatican, as well as Geneva, the UN, Britain and the Red Cross, as well as the rest of the civilized world) calls torture.
My take here.
