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On December 16, 2010, The Federal Reserve Board proposed a new rule that would lower by as much as 84 percent the $16.2 billion in fees that merchants pay annually when you swipe your debit card at their cash registers. (The Fed asked for public comments on the proposal by February 22, 2011.) The idea is that merchants will save money and pass along savings to you.
Immediately, large U.S. banks and credit card issuers attacked the proposed rules as a threat to their industry, a handout to merchants who get out of paying their fair share of money network costs, and a booby-prize for consumers who gain no assurance of savings but almost surely would face higher banking fees. See “Debit Card Fee Cap Could Mean Higher Prices for Consumers”
Behind the proposed new rules and the arguments against them are some key questions: Why should you care? What are the real costs? Who should pay?
Why Care?
According to the Fed, debit card use in the United States now exceeds all other forms of noncash payments. The interchange fee that merchants pay when you use your debit card is largely hidden from you, but it funds a network of technology and services that ensure you can trust using your debit card without risking your bank account. Like all infrastructure, this network requires money to build, maintain, operate and improve. Banks will not operate these networks for free, so if merchants pay less, it’s likely that you will pay more, either directly or indirectly, to use your debit cards.
What does it cost to operate?
The new Fed proposal caps the fee for running a debit card transaction at between 7 and 12 cents, a huge reduction from the average of 44 cents per transaction charged currently. That’s the Fed’s estimate of costs. The real costs are much harder to measure.
These technology costs are fairly easy to estimate. No physical money actually moves when you swipe your debit card at the store. Only digital information gets exchanged between the merchant’s bank and your bank. In this way, the debit card network is kind of like the wireless phone network that carries text messages from phone to phone.
What’s difficult to measure is the cost of security, reliability and exception handling. If money was lost or misrouted at the same rate as text messages, we would all be stashing hard cash under our mattresses. For reliability, the banks use debit networks operated by Visa, MasterCard and others, and they are good. Even during the week before Christmas, the networks route card transactions from anywhere in the world to anywhere else in under two seconds. More importantly, the network operators handle problems. You can’t unsend a text message, but you can reverse a debit payment. And you can get help on the phone when you need it. Although banks’ customer service isn’t always perfect, the rules and processes for handling mistaken or fraudulent card transactions work well enough for us to trust the banks with our money.
The reason it’s hard to measure support costs when there’s a problem is that no fewer than three parties are involved: the merchant’s bank, your bank, and the payment network in the middle. Unlike the decreasing costs of transmitting bits of information across digital networks, the human-intensive costs of managing fraud risks and providing customer support have increased. Factoring the human costs across three levels of intermediaries is very nearly impossible.
Who should pay? And how much?
It’s good to pry open the debit card to improve transparency and foster more competition. But I was surprised that the Fed picked such a low range — 7 to 12 cents — as an interchange cap while admitting that it had not considered all aspects of the problem (such as customer support costs) and was not sure if it would serve the interest of consumers. The proposed cap is not a good first step. It will surely ignite an endless debate by less-than-candid incumbents about why the chosen number is wrong. It also avoids the question of who will pay the debit network operating costs if the merchants don’t do so? The banks aren’t interested in losing money, so it’s reasonable to assume the consumers would pick up the merchant’s share by some means or another.
I’m curious about a different approach based on positive pricing and transparency. Today, banks use a form of negative or “penalty pricing” in which they offer you “free” checking accounts and debit cards but make money from your mistakes in the form of overdraft fees and such. Instead of penalizing you for mistakes, what if banks offered a menu of services that you chose to pay for upfront, including a small price for using your debit card? You could shop around for the best deals and know you’re not going to get hit with hidden fees. It would help fund the cost of operating debit networks while relieving merchants — many of them small, local stores – of bearing the full cost of the network.
There are complications to a positive pricing approach, but overall, letting you see what you’re actually paying and giving you the choices must be better than meddling with behind-the-scenes fees in ways that you’ll probably end up paying for anyway.
Disclosure: I am CEO of Plastyc, a company that offers prepaid card services (prepaid cards are a sub-category of debit cards). My company is not directly affected by the proposed interchange rules, which only apply to prepaid card issuers with assets of $10 billion or more.

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Wassan Al-Khudhairi is the chief curator and acting director of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, which opens December 30, 2010, in Doha, Qatar. With a collection of 6,300 works, plans for a research center, and a growing library, the museum is the first of its kind in the region. As the museum’s opening day approaches, Al-Khudhairi opens up about the growing market for contemporary Arab art, censorship, and why Picasso and the Middle East have more in common than we think.
Q. You are chief curator for a modern and contemporary art institution in a region
that does not have a long-standing history of appreciating it. How do you plan to engage the local community, as well as the international one?
A. There is quite a lot of interest in contemporary art for art from the Arab world. The modern period was less studied because it was hidden away in private collections. So, it is very exciting to finally have these works be accessible. A lot of contemporary artists are trying to learn about the artists that came before them. We want to connect the contemporary with the modern and we finally have a place to showcase the works of these artists, and the works of scholars, too.
We open with three exhibitions. The main exhibition is an ongoing series called Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art, which showcases modern Arab artists and works from the collection. The word Sajjil means to record and the premise of the show is about trying to record a history that is not fully recorded, namely, the production of art and artists from the Arab world from the late 1800′s through the mid 1900′s. The second exhibition, Told, Untold, Retold: 23 stories of journeys through time and space, features contemporary artists and twenty three new pieces that we commissioned. In the middle is, Interventions: a dialogue between the modern and the contemporary, which is the link, showing the newly commissioned works of five artists alongside their existing ones. The three exhibitions represent three different moments in history and we hope the public can connect through access points. For instance, Sajjil is arranged around ten loose themes, like family, which looks at representations of family in the modern Arab world. The more we can make the connection between the public and the artists transparent, the more we make it feel real and the easier it is to engage.
Q. You mention that Mathaf will be a place for scholars to showcase their work. Will the museum be as much of a home for them as it will be for artists?
A. Yes, our plan is to situate the museum academically. One of the first things we’re doing is establishing a research center to foster academic development with workshops and lectures. There are pockets of that out there but we want Mathaf to be a center for that.
Q. Perhaps this is an obvious question with an obvious answer but, in your mind, why is there so much interest in contemporary Arab art?
A. Whenever there are problems and challenges in different places people want to understand those challenges. Art can help mediate those challenges. That puts a lot of pressure on art but it has encouraged the market, the auctions, the more commerical results. All of this is positive but what makes it hard is that the ecology in the Arab art world is unbalanced. There are art fairs, auctions, galleries but there are no institutions. We’re hoping Mathaf can be a balance to other commercial based activities in the region.
Q. Are you concerned that some exhibitions might alienate devout muslims? Will
censorship have to play a role?
A. Ah, this is the question everyone wants to ask. We have freedom to curate the collection. The collection features nudity, and we are free to discuss any political moment we choose, for instance, the Palestinian struggle. Many of our artists studied in the west, in Paris and Rome, and their work and subject matters reflect this. We want to show the context these artists worked in. We do not want to jeopardize our curatorial premise. And we’re hoping to tackle this question, to foster an open dialogue with our public and to be able to host these discussions. We don’t know how we will be received until we open because this is the first time anybody has done something like this here.
Q. If so much of modern Arab art was, as you say, hidden away in private collections, it must have been difficult to build Mathaf’s permanent exhibition: how was this achieved?
A. The collection was started in 1986, as the private collection of His Excellency Sheikh Hassan bin Mohammed bin Ali Al Thani. At the time, he was a student of art history and was trying to understand the role of Arab art in modern art. There was no institution where he could go to learn. So he started putting it together himself. At the time he aquired his first piece, in 1986, auctions weren’t even thinking about Arab art. Everything was collected from private collectors and dealers. In 1994, [H.E. Sheikh Hassan] opened a private museum to engage his peers and his community, who were completely confused by what he was doing. The collection grew and in order to achieve the impact he wanted, he realized he needed to create an actual institution. In 2004, the museum was adopted by the Qatar Foundation, which promotes science, and a few years later it was acquired by the Qatar Museum Authority, so now it belongs to the government. Today, the collection has 6,300 works in it and we are commissioning new pieces. [H.E. Sheikh Hassan] also collected many books, which he graciously gave to the collection as well to build our library.
Q. Mathaf is currently located in a former school building in Doha’s Education City that was redesigned by French architect Jean-Francois Bodin. Can you tell us anything about the plans for the museum’s permanent site?
A. No site or architect has been chosen yet. But the fact that we’re in a reused building is strange for the Gulf, where there is a culture of knock-it-down and build something new. A lot of people locally don’t understand but I think people will come to see why reusing a building that was made for one purpose for something new can be interesting. We hope we can provoke people here to rethink space and how it is used.
Q. Your expertise is in Iraqi art, with a particular focus on women Iraqi artists. Looking at that, or at the broader picture, what might the rest of the world be surprised to know about modernism in the Middle East?
A. It’s interesting. The notion we’re trying to engage in the Sajjil exhibition is that artists in the Arab world were not engaged in an alternate modernism. These artists were engaged with modern art, which was an invention of the west. A lot of Arab artists studied in Paris and Rome and then came home and traveled through Arab countries, so there has been much movement across these regions. One of our artists even studied with Picasso. We want to show that they were apart of this western movement. We want to challenge the idea that our modern art is an after-thought, or that everything we created is a copy. Arab artists engaged, shaped and contributed to modern art.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Snow is political.
You’ve probably never heard of Thomas Meskill, who was a very successful governor of Connecticut in the early 1970s — until a huge snowstorm clobbered the state. Meskill was on a skiing vacation at the time. He did not immediately return home.
The public never, ever, forgave him. The outcry was so ferocious that Meskill dropped his plans to run for another term the following year and retired from politics. He later found happiness as an appellate court judge – a job which does not require a keen sensitivity to people’s feelings about snow.
When snow falls in much-larger-than-usual amounts, people are inconvenienced, irritated and uncomfortable. The job of elected officials is twofold: 1) Get rid of the snow and 2) Sound sympathetic. The first takes a while, but the second is a no-brainer. Be on the scene and never let anybody sound more concerned than you are about getting things back to normal. Never, ever let the public suspect that you think they’re over-dramatizing their suffering.
As in: Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “The world has not come to an end. The city is going fine. Broadway shows were full last night,” the mayor said in his famous initial response. “There are lots of tourists here enjoying themselves. I think the message is that the city goes on.”
Nononononono.
This has to go down as one of the worst snow responses in political history. Every single sentence is terrible beyond belief. The tourists are happy? Tens of thousands of actual voting residents are stranded. Their cars are buried. Their subways aren’t working. And you’re exulting over the ability of the tourists to get to a Spider-Man preview?
In one day, the Bloomberg mayoralty became a Spider-Man preview itself, thanks to terrible snow politics.
It is true that the storm was an unusually evil combination of snow and wind and cold. It’s possible that the Sanitation Department did the best it could. The department has suffered from budget cuts lately, but sometime down the road cooler heads may decide that the cuts were reasonable and that the city is in no economic condition to maintain its snow-removal system at a level that will only be called for once every decade or so.
We can have an excellent discussion about that later. Preferably in May or June.
But this was no time for the mayor to be defensive, especially since the snow removal situation has played into many of the city’s longstanding neuroses, including the conviction of Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten Island that Manhattan always gets the best of everything while the “outer boroughs” get ignored.
It was probably not possible for the mayor to arrange to have every primary street in Manhattan cleared except the one he lives on. But he should have been in Queens, preferably on a snowplow, by Tuesday at the latest.
The best snow politician in the region was, hands down, Mayor Cory Booker of Newark who was out there personally shoveling snow off cars, delivering pregnant women to the hospital, taking diapers to stranded mothers. And Twittering about it like crazy.
“People far 2 rough on @mikebloomberg – still fighting 2 clear snow in NWK & we are 1/29th size of NYC,” Booker wrote supportively. Nice gesture, but it didn’t help.
The worst snow politician, by the way, was not Mayor Bloomberg but New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. He didn’t come back from Disney World? Disney World??
He is so Meskilled.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

I know that power – with all the authority, physical comfort, and quality of life it brings – strongly pushes a person into a world of material possessions, and people and things that stimulate their senses. Gradually, they start to protect this material paradise with walls to defend it from threats and keep from it anything that may unsettle life inside. As the blessings in that paradise increase, the walls around it multiply to the same degree.
Only great willpower and moral strength can enable a person to get to know those that live outside these walls, engage with their concerns and wounds, and even struggle for them. As a person embellishes their life in their paradise, the human and moral effort required to live the struggles of others increases. As I began to recognize this truth as someone who lives outside the walls, my understanding and respect grew for those who have been able to break through the walls of their paradise, for those who leave it and come towards me in solidarity to live my concerns and wounds, as a people who live under the oppression of occupation, lacking freedom and justice.
On December 27, prominent Israeli activist Jonathan Pollak was sentenced to three months in an Israeli jail for protesting the occupation. Jonathan’s upcoming imprisonment highlights two little-known stories – the support of some Israeli activists for our growing movement of Palestinian-led unarmed civilian protests, and the Israeli government’s effort to crush our joint struggle against the Israeli occupation. Over the last eight years, Jonathan has participated in hundreds of Palestinian-led protests in the West Bank against Israel’s military occupation. Along with other Israelis and internationals, he participated in our successful protest campaign in my West Bank village of Budrus in 2003-2004, that pushed Israel to reroute its wall and saved our farmland.
Jonathan Pollak is a great man – as great as the material temptations that the paradise of his nation affords him, in which his skills as a graphic designer would allow him to live in safety and unimaginable affluence. He is as great as the human and moral effort he exerted to know the other, to understand them, and struggle on behalf of the other for their freedom. His greatness is also the more for its rarity. He may not be the only one who stands at the borders of his moral and humanistic principles, but he remains, along with his many colleagues, part of a small group in their society. Their unusual status increases the magnitude of their struggle for justice, freedom and true peace.
Jonathan Pollak, the Israeli, and his Israeli colleagues, possess the same human qualities, and believe exactly as I do as a Palestinian, and as does every Palestinian like myself. We believe that freedom, peace and justice are human rights that do not distinguish between one individual and another, wherever they are, whatever their color, ethnicity, religion or gender. We also believe that these rights must be seized by the oppressed from the oppressor and are not given as a gift. They also believe as we do, that the struggle for these rights is the duty of all in the world who are free and all who believe in freedom, and not just the duty of the oppressed. We also believe that this struggle has a price that we all must be willing to pay.
Jonathan Pollak is a friend whose friendship I am proud to share, despite all the efforts of the Israeli intelligence services that tries to depict the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis as either one of treachery or normalization based on our adoption of the notion that Israelis have the right to superiority over us in their daily lives and that we must get used to this or live as servants or traitors. Israeli intelligence tries to distort the image of any Palestinian-Israeli relationship based on joint resistance to occupation, an occupation that is the root of our problems in the region. We want to reach a point where there is no such occupation, and rather relations based on justice and true peace between equals, and not a peace between a slave and master.
I, a Palestinian, admit now that my friendships within Palestinian society are not all based on resistance to the occupation, but I wouldn’t dare to build a friendship with an Israeli outside of resistance to the occupation, because of how the occupation distorts the meanings of human relationships, and because dignity would not allow me to have a relationship with someone who feels superior to me because of their power, gender, religion or ethnicity.
Jonathan Pollak is a man trying to prove that those who believe in occupation cannot claim to be humanitarian or civilized. He also wants to prove that resisting oppression and occupation does not mean being a terrorist or killing.
This freedom fighter, Jonathan Pollak, leaves a prison cell only to be sentenced again by the Israeli occupation authorities, and recovers from one of his solidarity demonstrations only to be injured again in the next one. We can’t let his work be lost without our appreciation because we lack confidence in ourselves or in our relationships of joint struggle. Palestinians should be proud to give him the name “freedom fighter” against oppression, occupation and racism.
We have all the respect in the world for this freedom fighter and for all his colleagues from all parts of the world, from over forty countries. They left the temptations of life where they are from, and left their families and friends to join our struggle for humanity on this planet, choosing the path of those who sacrificed themselves for freedom in Palestine. International activists like the American Rachel Corrie and the British citizen Tom Hurndall, both killed by Israeli soldiers, are honored like Palestinians who died, and similarly Jonathan Pollak and his imprisoned Israeli colleagues are a part of the movement of imprisoned Palestinians.
We will struggle until we achieve freedom, and a just peace.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Robert Baer retired from the Central Intelligence Agency after 20 years in 1997, but he’s still learning about security threats and about the region that was his specialty, the Middle East.
In his current capacity as a journalist, Baer and director Kevin Toolis explore a potent threat to our safety that has been more devastating than nuclear weapons. In their new DVD documentary Car Bomb, Baer persuasively argues that vehicle bombs should hold the title of the deadliest weapon of the 20th century because they have been easy to make but can cause damage that’s comparable to predator drones or landmines. Wars have been won and lost by them. They’ve been around since the infancy of the Automotive Century and, sadly, aren’t going away.
In the film, Baer goes around the globe talking with bomb makers who fought for Israel’s
independence, the Provisional Irish Republican Army as well as various factions throughout the Middle East. He even talks with an American who went to jail for his attack and learned how to make the bomb from Encyclopedia Britannica!
Having served in Lebanon in the 1980s when vehicle bombing was rampant, Baer certainly has a lot of first hand knowledge, but the most remarkable moments in Car Bomb come from when he gets the bombers to openly discuss why and how they did what they did. With his quiet, polite approach, he can get more useful information that Jack Bauer could with yelling and electrocutions.
Baer doesn’t think much of the histrionics of 24, but he’s actually worked with Hollywood to try to get spycraft portrayed correctly. Syriana was based on Baer’s book See No Evil, and George Clooney won an Oscar for playing an agent modeled on Baer. He’s also been a recurring guest on The Colbert Report, using the show’s comic approach to explain real-world intelligence issues.
Contacted by me from his home in Los Angeles, Baer talked about what it’s like to go from being part of the government to covering it as an outsider. Because of his vast experience, it was important to also get his perspective on the recent WikiLeaks dump of state department cables and other recent security issues. While Baer has been a worthy guardian of this nation’s secrets, he’s quite open about what he thinks is necessary to correct our foreign policy mistakes.
In the documentary, you said that you actually made some car bombs when you were working for the CIA.
Yeah, they trained us on how to make these things, but more to show the destructiveness than anything else.
The aftermath of a Lebanese car bombing. 2010 The Disinformation Company, LTD, used by permission.
What is it about car bombs that makes them more deadly than nukes?
They’re so easy to assemble. They’re impossible to detect. Cars are omnipresent. You could just get them to any building in the world. It’s not complicated. It truly is a poor man’s air force. They’re undefeatable as IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) are in Afghanistan. You just can’t defeat them with technology. You can keep missiles from coming into the country with a missile shield, but you can’t do anything about car bombs.
Another aspect that’s scary about them is if you invest hundreds or thousands of dollars in a car bomb, you can inflict billions in damage.
They did this in London in the financial district. If you steal a car, it’s even cheaper. You fill it
with nitrobenzene and a homemade detonator. It isn’t just the billion you would cause in damage, like they did in London, but billions upon billions of money going to defeat these things.
Yes, because it would have cost more to keep an army in Northern Ireland that it would to make those bombs.
There’s no other way to get around with that much explosives except with a car or a truck. The amount of hypothetical damage you could do in a place like the United States is enormous. If you set off one or two of these things in a crowded area, then you’ll have this country putting trillions of more dollars into security and then what happens to the Constitution?
In the film, you’ve pointed out that the average American citizen can’t just walk up to the Capitol any more. There’s a blast wall between the parking lot and the Capitol now.
Nuclear weapons are destructive, but they haven’t been used for terrorism in any sense. In car bombs, they have. If you want to look at the problem of terrorism pragmatically, our biggest problem is the car bomb.
Yes, because Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square car bomber, was not a trained demolitions expert, thank God.
Yeah, he was close. It’s going to be a lot easier to make a car bomb than it would be to get explosives on an airplane. Eventually, we’re going to come around and be able to find a way to be able to detect nitrates on clothes and whatever else. There’s 20 basic elements that go into explosives. We’ll eventually get into that technology and defend airplanes, which will leave the car bomb.
There is a simple solution: Stop using cars. But that’s only simple on the conceptual level.
You can protect the post office or federal buildings, but they just shift targets. You get a civilian target. It’s a potential nightmare in this country.
One of the astonishing aspects of Car Bomb is that you were able to get a lot of people to talk on the record with you for this documentary.
We got the Israelis. We got a lot of people to go on this thing. A lot of that has to do with the producers and the film company.
Were you surprised that some of them were willing to talk? Now that you’re no longer with the agency, you’re a public figure, and anything they say to you could get out.
Yeah, I think a lot of people have considered the car bomb an important part of their history. It changed the course of history in places like Israel. And certainly today with the way Palestinians and Israelis are divided, they felt the story should get out.
You’re fluent in Arabic and Farsi. Do you think you’ve got an edge over other journalists because you can actually speak these languages?
I don’t look at the subject clinically. None of this documentary was scripted. I just won’t do a script. They sit down, and I say, “This is basically what I want to know.” When you’re interviewing suicide bombers or their networks, it’s very important to speak their language. It’s always a good icebreaker.
It’s always harder with a translator, if you don’t trust the translator. You have to wait. They can think too long with their answers. I think it definitely helps, especially when the producer can’t understand you and is cutting. He can say, “No, he gave this answer.” I can deal with people in a chit-chat way. It’s almost like you’re gossiping with them. It was informal. If I reached an obstacle, I didn’t press the question. I started asking other questions, and sometimes I got to get back to it.
I noticed that you used that technique with the fellow who bombed the American facility in the 1970s. You didn’t go in Mike Wallace-style or anything like that. You still got some pretty candid stuff.
You just sit down and talk. There’s no point in being accusatory. He did it. He went to jail for it. What I’m curious about is what was going through his mind.
It reminded me of the column you wrote where you thought more of the torture memos should have been made public. In watching you talk with these folks, it’s striking how your approach gets more useful information than if you had water boarded them or been confrontational.
There’s this guy, Ali Soufan, the FBI agent who’s been really articulate on this issue. He’s just right. You get more out of talking to people. If you go in with questions you think you know the answers too, that’s what happened with the waterboarding. They had all these analysts who were absolutely convinced that they had some very, very valuable Al Qaeda member in their hands, and they kept on waterboarding him them because they wouldn’t give the answers they figured they had, and they just didn’t. And it just turned into a fiasco.
Because I’m a movie critic, I’m curious if you’ve seen the film Fair Game yet.
No, is it good?
I’m mixed on it, but it reminded me of when I read a column by William F. Buckley, Jr. where he criticized the outing of Plame. He said he had been an agent in Mexico, and somebody had outed him and he was lucky that none of his contacts had been exposed. It was one thing to out him, but anybody who came into contact with him was endangered. Is that accurate from your own experience?
Yeah. Once you start to unravel these, it’s very easy to lead to other identities for a government. If you’ve been assigned somewhere, and they realize what you’re doing, they can go back and check cell phone numbers, meetings, surveillance and all this. It makes it considerably easier for a hostile intelligence service to find somebody.
How does it feel to be a journalist after working as an agent?
If I write about the CIA, I’m obligated to my opinion pieces are anything about my time in the CIA. What I argue about with them is they say your thoughts about current events are classified. I find that very odd. I don’t pay much attention to them.
Like the bombing at Khost (the Afghan city where seven agents were killed on December 30, 2009), they wanted to suppress that article (in GQ). I figure now that anything that I do is a journalist, that if I identify a source, where I learned something from someone else, it puts me in a different light. It puts me in a different category of people. Many ex CIA agents are writing about their own careers. Buckley did. There’s a lot of people who did that.
In the research that you and Mr. Toolis did for the documentary, were you surprised that car bombs went all the way back to 1920?
I had no idea the first one was done on Wall Street. A lot of the back filling of the historical information I find fascinating. There are so many things I never paid attention to. I never paid any attention to the Israeli car bombs. I never paid any attention to the mob car bombs. It adds to my education.
Baer with gunmen in El Hinweh camp, south Lebanon. 2010 The Disinformation Company, LTD, used by permission.
Even though you were in Lebanon during the 1980s when this stuff was happening, there still more to learn, obviously.
I think it’s amazing. We’re going into prisons and meeting suicide bombers. It’s an education you’d never get in the CIA. It’s very much a complement doing journalism. There’s also the fact that you’re going through open sources. You’re always referring to them.
You don’t do that in the CIA. You were laser-focused on one problem, on one person. You don’t have time to go back and conceptualize and put it in historical context. I look at this journalism stuff as just a continuation of an incomplete education.
In the recent Financial Times column you wrote, you said that this latest WikiLeaks dump of state department cables was potentially devastating because many negotiations can only be done through back channels. They can’t be conducted through conventional diplomacy. You said that it was essential in dealing with leaders who don’t operate the way western leaders do.
You have to look at the point of view of the state department. They are like a good journalist. They need to protect their sources. The New York Times is not putting its sources on the Net. If they want to talk about openness, why don’t they talk about their sources, their informants, their Deep Throats, and the rest of them?
Because they know better. It undermines their credibility. It ruins them as a newspaper. It’s the same with the state department. Someone says, “Look at how cynical the diplomats are.” Well, no shit. Are we just discovering that? Diplomacy has always been like that, going back to Rome and before.
On the other hand, I’ve a love reading the stuff on WikiLeaks about the fact that the Chinese know so little about North Korea. I find that illuminating because when I was in the CIA, the Chinese weren’t talking about North Korea at all. And they’re sort of guessing what is happening in Pyongyang. As a journalist, I find that absolutely fascinating, or King Abdullah complaining about Iran. It’s completely useful.
On the other hand, if I had my other hat on and I were a diplomat, you know, the next ambassador to Germany — what German is going to talk to our ambassador or political counselor about the internal workings of the government? This guy (Helmut Metzner, an aide to German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle) just lost his job today (for providing information to the U.S. embassy).
And this guy (Dmitry) Firtosh (a natural gas tycoon) in Ukraine, we always sort of knew he was dealing with the mob, but, in fact he went to the American embassy and told the ambassador. The message to Ukrainians is don’t ever go into the American embassy ever again. What this all leads to is this intellectual isolation. Because now if the only thing we know about the world is what we read on the CNN site, then we as diplomats are really lost. I haven’t seen a lot of this on the net, but the people who deal with the human rights groups are an invaluable source of information on totalitarian governments because they can put you in the picture right away. But now, they’ve been exposed.
The Pentagon Papers made perfect sense to me because it was internal deliberations about getting into Vietnam. It just showed the hypocrisy of the government and the internal debate. It doesn’t really damage are national security. I think it helps your national security because we now appear to be an open society.
I don’t have any problems with James Risen’s story on warrantless wiretaps because that’s not sources and methods. It’s purely a legal issue. The White House is bypassing FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) warrants, which is a matter of illegality. It doesn’t mean listening to more phones or fewer phones. It doesn’t mean anything in terms of the opposition. It’s just that they were cutting corners on the law. I think that that’s a righteous leak. But if you start naming sources, or you start getting into the National Security Agency or the codes for nuclear bombs, you get into all sorts of problems.
It’s like leaking a police investigation, where you’re putting out in the news how far the police are. The criminals can change course. Or a grand jury hearing, you can’t leak of that out.
In one of your columns, you pointed out that some of the data in the leaks is garbage. In one memo you cited, Osama Bin Laden was having a weekly public meeting in Pakistan, which is just about impossible.
That was total bullshit. What scares me is that was the military’s stuff (instead of the CIA’s). That anyone would put that on paper I find that astounding, or that Mullah Omar was deciding where to put bombs. I found that stuff fascinating because it confirmed my suspicion that the level of our intelligence in Afghanistan is pretty poor.
He’s not anywhere driving out in the open. He’s very much caught up in a cave, or dead, or in some government compound, or whatever. But he’s not going to meetings about placing IEDs. It’s just not happening. I would like to say that I should be the one who decides what goes out in public or what’s dangerous, or you, or Tom Friedman, or somebody else. The problem the governments faces is that you can’t let private citizens decide what’s classified and what’s not.
What you really need in all of this is an effective Congress that will simply look at a problem, a scandal, and will look at our foreign policy, write a report, have it cleared with the right agency and have it reach the public that way. And then meet out punishments or recommendations to remove people. Or you have to have effective IGs (Inspector Generals) or ombudsmen to deal with this stuff. You really have to get a competent Congress, and we don’t have one. It’s very much a dilemma.
I would very much like to see internal memos from Goldman Sachs made it public. I think that affects Americans more than what we’re doing in Germany or Chechnya or all these other cables that have come out. I’d like to know precisely how cynical was Goldman Sachs during the financial crisis and leading up to it. I go back and forth on freedom of the press. There is a nice balance somewhere there, but on the cynicism of these exchanges and why don’t Americans do this sort of stuff, all I can say is that this stuff really hurt the state department or any government official who works overseas. It’s already hard are to get someone to meet you as an American.
Ultimately WikiLeaks is going to help academia and help us understand where were coming from. And if you look at the stuff intelligently, with the stuff about the Saudis funding Al Qaeda, did you see a name in there? Diplomats are working on rumor, too, just like everybody else. That gave me an uneasy feeling. You could misuse that. “Well, maybe there are a couple of Saudis funding Al Qaeda.” Is it a lot? Does it matter?
I think more money is coming into Al Qaeda from fuel contracts in Pakistan than from Saudi Arabia, but we’ve just decided to ignore that. Every truck that goes across (the border) gives thousands of dollars to the Taliban and maybe Al Qaeda. I don’t know. We’re essentially paying for both sides of the war. Congress has said this. But it’s like amnesia. Everyone’s focused on this one cable, which may be wrong. The state department, they’re living behind fortresses, too.
I’ve read portions of your book, Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude. You wrote that before King Abdullah assumed the throne in Saudi Arabia. How have things changed since you wrote the book in 2003?
His arrival has been like night and day. The Atlantic did a cover piece on that book. I didn’t really like it because it made a prediction, and predicting anything in the Middle East is bad.
Two things happened: You’ve got King Abdullah, and he’s very good. And he’s got Muhammad bin Nayef, son of the interior minister (his official title is assistant interior minister for security affairs). The two of them have really turned Saudi Arabia around.
The other thing that has turned things around is the price of oil. They have all the money in the world to pay off commissions, payoff tribes that had been unhappy when the price of oil was $10.00 a barrel. The Saudis have bought themselves time.
In both Sleeping with the Devil and Car Bomb, you point out that the petroleum dependency is a major security issue.
I still think it is. The fact is if you look at WikiLeaks and the comments on the king of Bahrain, the Crown Prince of Kuwait and with King Abdullah. From what has come down to us, the security situation
is not happy in the Gulf. They truly look at Iran as a menace. I wrote a book about this, but nobody paid attention.
I’m not saying (Iran) is a menace, but they look at it as a menace. And that’s much more important because it keeps the gulf Arabs on the brink with some kind of conflict with Iran, either in Iraq or Lebanon or just in the Gulf itself. The fact is it sits on the world’s oil reserves. It’s just there. If you get that and a tight oil market — $500 a barrel for oil? It’s possible. Who knows?
Here’s the thing, if you look at things pessimistically, you always sounds smarter. If you go around saying the world’s going to be fine, they look at you and say, “That guy’s an idiot.” It’s a good built-in mechanism.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

This year was marked by turmoil at home and abroad, including a deepening financial crisis that continues to leave millions jobless and homeless, as well as ongoing and expanding wars. But despite the setbacks and disappointments, here is a list of victories to be thankful for, starting with three inspirational women.
1. On November 13, Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest. In 1990 her party, the National League for Democracy, won the elections but the military junta refused to let them take power. Instead, Suu Kyi was kept under house arrest for almost 15 of the last 21 years. Her release brings great joy and hope to millions of people in Burma and supporters of democracy worldwide.
2. Dilma Rousseff was elected president of Brazil and takes power on January 1. Dubbed by the media “the most powerful woman in the world,” Rousseff was tortured and jailed for three years for opposing Brazil’s military dictatorship. She later became chief of staff for the popular outgoing president and former metalworker, Lula da Silva, whose policies of growth with equity have helped pull millions of Brazilians out of poverty. While some worry about Rousseff’s commitment to the environment (she was also Lula’s Energy Minister), the fact that a progressive woman from the Labor Party will rule a powerhouse like Brazil is cause for celebration.
3. Elizabeth Warren became “consumer czar.” After the financial meltdown in 2008, Warren was appointed chairwoman of the five-member Congressional Oversight Panel created to investigate the banking bailout and oversee TARP. She won tremendous public support by sharply criticizing the banks and calling for greater transparency and accountability. Warren advocated for a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to protect borrowers from abuses in mortgages, credit cards and other consumer loans. On September 17 President Obama named her special adviser by to oversee the development of this new bureau.
4. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Chinese literary critic and professor Liu Xiaobo. Liu, a critic of China’s one party state, was sentenced to 11 years in prison for drafting a petition calling for free speech and open elections. The Chinese government usually escapes rebuke for its oppressive practices because the country is such an economic superpower. But according to Amnesty International, some 500,000 Chinese prisoners are in detention without charge or trial. Harassment, surveillance, house arrest, and imprisonment of human rights defenders are on the rise, as is Internet and media censorship. Repression continues for Falun Gong practitioners and minority groups, including Tibetans, Uighurs and Mongolians. The Nobel Prize for Liu Xiaobo has helped expose China’s dirty secrets.
5. Speaking of exposing secrets, WikiLeaks has sent shock waves around the world by exposing the inner machinations of U.S. foreign policy. After a decade of illegal wars, lack of accountability, government secrecy and embedded journalists, WikiLeaks has given the public a much-needed look at the way the U.S. government continues — under President Obama — to cajole, bribe and strong arm other nations into supporting U.S. policies. We look forward to more revelations in 2011 and we hope more people will step forward to defend WikiLeaks and suspected whistleblower Bradley Manning!
6. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was repealed. The LGBT community has been fighting to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell since it was first introduced as a compromise measure by President Clinton in 1993. In an historic Senate vote on December 18 the policy was repealed and then signed by President Obama on December 22. While some find it hard to celebrate the ability of more people to now fight in U.S. wars, let’s remember that this victory will help the gay community win upcoming, more important struggles for marriage rights and equality in the workplace.
7. U.S. troop levels in Iraq declined dramatically. While President Obama has presided over a disastrous surge of troops in Afghanistan, he does seem to be holding to his promise of ending the U.S. military presence in Iraq. The number of U.S. troops has declined from some 144,000 in January 2009 to roughly 50,000 today. The remaining troops are supposed to leave the country by the end of 2011. The U.S. invasion of Iraq, based on lies and resulting in the death and displacement of millions of Iraqis, is one of the most shameful episodes in our history. The sooner it ends, the better.
8. The health care bill passed. No, it was not a single payer bill and it didn’t even have a public option, disappointing many of its original supporters. But the bill does extend health coverage to over 30 million Americans who would have otherwise been uninsured; it stops private insurance companies from rejecting people for preexisting conditions; and it allows children to remain covered by their parents’ insurance until the age of 26. Taken as a whole, it represents a progressive shift in U.S. social policy, which is why it is being so viciously attacked by the right. And from the left, the fight for a single payer system, especially on the state level, is far from over!
9. The Senate ratified the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) between the U.S. and Russia. The New START provides modest reductions in the number of deployed strategic nuclear weapons, and includes monitoring and verification procedures. Unfortunately, to get Republican support the U.S. commitment to disarmament is countered by a new commitment to spend $180 billion over 10 years to “modernize” U.S. weapons and delivery systems. But not passing the treaty would have been disastrous. The new treaty will undoubtedly improve U.S.-Russia relations and will hopefully move us closer to the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons.
10. In a little noticed automobile obituary, the last Hummer rolled off the production line on May 24 — a casualty of higher gas prices, the economic crunch and a shift in consumer preferences. The cool cars of today are no longer monstrous gas guzzlers but hybrid and electric cars. There are 28 hybrid models already on the market today. At least 12 plug-in electric cars are planned for 2011, kicking off a wave of new green vehicles.
And a few extras for good cheer:
1. At the White House Tribal Nations Conference on December 15, President Obama announced that the United States would support the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The statement is significant because the United States was one of only four countries that voted against the declaration when the UN General Assembly adopted it in 2007, and the last of those four to have reversed its former opposition.
2. In a policy reversal after the BP oil disaster, the Obama administration announced that it will not allow offshore oil drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico or off the Atlantic coast for at least seven more years. Meanwhile, offshore wind power is taking off from Maine to Georgia.
3. Foreign private security contractors were banned by the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan. Blackwater founder Eric Prince — hounded by lawsuits and bad press — felt compelled to sell the company and move out of the country.
4. Thanks to California’s Proposition 19, also known as the Regulate, Control & Tax Cannabis Act, the debate on failed Marijuana Prohibition has arrived! Despite not passing, 4 million people voted to control and tax marijuana, with endorsements coming from new allies from the SEIU to the NAACP to law enforcement groups.
5. The government-supported student loan program was dramatically restructured, eliminating private banks and thereby ensuring that more money goes directly into the hands of low-income students.
I could keep the list going. It’s an important reminder, as we go into what will be a very difficult new year, that people on all continents continue to struggle for a more peaceful, just, sustainable world. And as long as people keep organizing and mobilizing, there will be victories to celebrate.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

After she won her Oscar in 1998 for Shakespeare in Love, Gwyneth Paltrow slowed down her career and focused on her personal life. Her father, Bruce Paltrow, passed away, she married Coldplay singer Chris Martin and the couple had two children.
Barring a few minor roles here and there, Paltrow returned to work in the Iron Man franchise, but the film’s focus was on Robert Downey Jr., with Paltrow only needing to report to set three times a week for shooting.
Now the actress is reclaiming the spotlight with the music-filled drama Country Strong. Paltrow plays Kelly Canter, a country music star who leaves rehab before she is “rehabbed’ to begin a comeback tour staged by her husband James (Tim McGraw).
Their relationship is severely broken for numerous reasons — her addiction, the loss of an unborn child to name a few. But it gets further complicated by the two opening acts that join the tour — Beau Hutton (Garrett Hedlund) who also happens to be her sponsor, and Chiles Stanton (Leighton Meester), James’ new protg who threatens Kelly’s career and possibly her marriage.
Not that Kelly herself is clean in the love department. In rehab she falls for Beau and once on tour, vacillates between him and James. She’s also hyper aware of how close Chiles is sidling up to James or how much the audience adores the new girl in down, which creates an All About Eve dynamic.
Paltrow easily delivers the best performance of her adult life, playing a woman who has many demons to battle. The strength to keep it together threatens to fall apart constantly, yet it never once veers into melodrama. (While researching her character, Paltrow even sought out help from Downey Jr. in understanding an addict’s self-destructive behavior.)
The acting performance aside, the surprising part is seeing Paltrow belt out tunes, play the guitar and strut on stage as if she was born and raised in the heartland. Those familiar with the actress’ filmography know she can sing, as witnessed previously in films like Duets and Infamous. But in recent years she’s been more known for the unsolicited advice she gives on her GOOP website or appearing in the front row at fashion shows with detached coolness. Seeing her getting on some country flair is downright refreshing.
In one of the film’s most touching moments, Paltrow grants a young boy his dream of meeting Kelly Canter through the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Kelly visits him in his classroom at school and ends up having a dance with him.
Paltrow’s handling of the little lad (played by Gabe Sipos, who is in real life a cancer survivor) is a joy to watch. Her face lights up in his presence. It’s a look that that’s impossible to fake – no matter how many Academy Awards you’ve won — because only someone with children could possibly glow like that. Paltrow’s motherly instincts are in high gear here and she’s never looked more beautiful than in that moment.
Director Shana Feste’s strength is weaving in each of the four main characters with one another. Kelly adores Beau, but has been with James to long and has too much history with him to ever leave. Beau eventually begins to fall for Chiles, but her ambitions make her feel the need to sidle up to James.
Despite this being Paltrow’s film, Feste gives Hedlund and Meester plenty of moments to shine — and both take full advantage of that.
Hedlund, best known as the star of the 2004 film Friday Night Lights, delivers a star-making turn in the film. He’s at once handsome, rugged and manly yet possesses an innocence and vulnerability. It’s a 180 degree turn from his stiff performance in the current Tron: Legacy where he bears not even an ounce of charisma or on-screen presence. Country Strong signals Hedlund’s arrival as a leading man and if anyone will get any sort of career mileage from this movie, Hedlund is the one.
Meester, meanwhile, is perfectly cast as Chiles, a former beauty pageant queen who longs for a music career, but has fears and issues of her own. Meester brings both a sense of humor and sympathy to the character.
Though she’s best known as rich girl Blair Waldorf on the CW series Gossip Girl and for her pop singing on a few top 40 songs, her work in Country Strong gives Meester much credibility as a feature film actress.
McGraw, ostensibly cast to lend some country realism, does not sing at all in the film, which is one of the reasons he was attracted to the role. (He does, however, duet with Paltrow on the film’s soundtrack. They sing “Me and Tennessee,” a song written by Chris Martin.) Though James appears to only care about Kelly’s career, McGraw plays adds in some moments of tenderness during those few times James is able to look past all the hurt and pain that’s accumulated over the years.
Feste’s script has some weak links, most notably having Kelly carry around a little baby bird that she found in the forest at the rehab facility. Its obviously meant to symbolize the baby she lost, but that comes across as silly and cheesy rather than effective.
Several plot points are a little too convenient as well. Beau works at the rehab and happens to be an aspiring singer? And gets the opportunity to tour with the biggest country singer around? Really? And with all his aspirations, he’d rather perform in a tiny little bar than for large crowds? Yeah right.
Despite those minor infractions, the actors give 150%, making Country Strong an extremely enjoyable film.

Follow Zorianna Kit on Twitter:
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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

We’ve reviewed the funniest TV comedies of the year. We’ve recapped the year’s best political comedy web videos. Now, just for fun, here are my favorite videos posted on Gotcha Media in 2010. They may not be the most universally loved or appreciated, but when I look back, these are the videos that made me laugh the most this year. Please feel free to post your own favorites in the comments below.
MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON
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7 Sites You Should Be Wasting Time On Right Now (PICTURES)
The Funniest Late Night Sketches Of 2010 (VIDEO)
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16 Over-the-Top WWII Propaganda Posters
The Top 5 Funniest Political Comedy Videos of 2010
The 10 Funniest Signs From December (PHOTOS)
Jenny Slate didn’t seem like she was going to have the best 2010. After kicking off her first season on Saturday Night Live late last year by dropping the f-bomb heard around the internet, she never quite got into the groove she deserved. She had one solid recurring character (the always funny Tina-Tina Chaneuse) and a particularly scandalous sketch with Alec Baldwin, but over the summer she was let go. Jenny won in the end by making something more original than SNL ever could, lending her voice and stellar improv skills to Dean Fleischer-Camp’s stop-motion animated “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On”. Add on top of that her stint on Bored to Death and her continued web series “Bestie X Bestie” with comedy partner Gabe Liedman, and it turns out she didn’t have such a bad year after all.
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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The fate of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae will be center stage in January when the Obama administration makes its required Congressional recommendations about what to do about the two companies. The stakes for homeowners and the economy couldn’t be higher as the next Congressional session will determine if the U.S. has a private mortgage market or if, by controlling housing finance, government bureaucrats will be able to direct where Americans live and how much they pay for housing.
While the administration is trying to figure out how much is too much government intervention in the housing finance markets, it doesn’t seem to be concerned with the underlying problems that shut down virtually all new issue volume in the private mortgage securities markets. As a result, administration proposals are doomed to fail until it acknowledges that radical mortgage finance reform is a prerequisite for the U.S. to break its dependency on Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Reform is needed to induce investors to buy newly issued non-government guaranteed mortgage backed securities.
According to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, since 2006 new issue volume of private mortgage backed securities has dropped by more than 98% and in November came to an almost complete halt. In its place, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae and the FHA are providing liquidity for most mortgages originated in the United States. When banks and other government insured depositories are included in calculations, the market share of mortgages that are directly or indirectly financed by the Federal government is virtually 100%.
The reason the private mortgage finance market died is that investors no longer trust Wall Street to originate, underwrite, package or service mortgages. Instead, investors are staging a buyer’s strike and fleeing to the relative safety of government guaranteed mortgage securities. It doesn’t matter what the underlying credit quality of mortgage pools are, investors just aren’t buying.
It shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that investors don’t want to buy what Wall Street is peddling. Over the last four years losses in mortgage backed bonds almost took down the global economy.
But even with what has been reported since 2007, the news from the mortgage backed bond industry keeps on getting worse.
According to many industry experts, including the Congressional Oversight Panel, many private label mortgage backed bonds have a fatal defect. Of course, Wall Street disagrees and claims that the problem is a mere technicality and not very important. The “insignificant” defect that Wall Street is downplaying is that many mortgage backed bonds may not be backed by mortgages.
The last sentence was not a typo or a mistake of fact.
There is a serious chance that the issuers of many mortgage backed bonds lack ownership of the mortgages that are supposed to back their bonds. This dirty little defect has paralyzed the private mortgage finance markets and is a primary reason that new issuance of even private mortgage securities made up of loans to “A” quality borrowers and low loan to values has ceased. And, the problem seems to be ignored by the administration and regulators.
The defect occurred because it was too much of a paper work burden for Wall Street mortgage professionals to make 100% certain that they actually legally transferred mortgages to trusts that issued mortgage backed bonds. Instead of doing what generations of mortgage professionals had done before, the current generation of Wall Street geniuses decided to cut a few corners in the spirit of cost saving innovation.
Cutting corners when transferring mortgages to bond issuers isn’t a good idea. If mortgages aren’t transferred as expected, then mortgage backed bonds are close to worthless because they aren’t actually backed by anything.
But it gets worse; flawed bonds are worth less than $0 to investors. Because of Wall Street’s paper work errors, investors took what they thought were legitimate Federal and state tax deductions and paid taxes based upon the expected attributes of their investments. But, it turns out that they may not have been entitled to their tax benefits and as a result may face costly retroactive tax bills including interest and penalties.
The paper work problems in the mortgage finance and securities in industry are well known and well documented. The Congressional Oversight Panel’s November 16, 2010 report titled Examining the Consequences of Mortgage Irregularities for Financial Stability and Foreclosure Mitigation provides an authoritative summary of the problem even though it reads like a cheap pulp fiction novel.
The Congressional Oversight Panel raises questions about the financial integrity of hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgage backed bonds and identifies a spillover effect on ordinary people who may be “unable to know with any certainty whether they can safely buy or sell a home.” Even this week’s report of continued falling home prices was predictable given fundamental title issues raised by the Congressional panel.
The Congressional Oversight Panel report concludes that “[t]he American financial system is in a precarious place” because of the private label mortgage securities issue.
While few experts believe that the economic nuclear winter profiled in the Congressional Oversight Panel report will actually happen, most experts agree that it is a more than remote possibility that “shoddy executed paperwork” will be a costly problem for investors and homeowners.
For its January Congressional recommendations to have any meaning, the administration needs to fix the private label mortgage backed securities problem and recognize that investors will continue to stay away from the market unless they are 100% certain that Wall Street abuses and errors won’t reoccur.
The American public has a big stake in the administration’s policy initiatives. Home price stability requires a vibrant and sound mortgage finance industry. Investors need to feel confident in the basic integrity of the bonds that they purchase. And, Wall Street decision makers that either made bad decisions or failed to supervise their subordinates need to be held accountable.
Without reform, protection and accountability, the administration’s proposals will be stillborn and the U.S. will continue to be almost totally dependent upon the Federal government for housing finance. Maybe this time around Congress and the Administration will use common sense in their policy initiatives but I just don’t plan on holding my breath waiting.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Any talk of redeeming acts in public life tends to focus on individuals. Character and career are the arcs of this familiar story line, punched up by celebrity and smudged, perhaps, by cynicism. So unaccustomed are reporters and players in national politics to an act of collective redemption that it may pass unheralded amid the hoopla and scorekeeping of winners and losers.
What transpired this month in Washington, D.C., with repeal of the ban on openly gay and lesbian members of the military is nothing less than shared, institutional redemption. It rekindles faith in federal governance. And it holds out hope that coalition and bipartisan pressure will push long-delayed imperatives like immigration reform to passage.
The year-end victory to nix “don’t ask, don’t tell” reaffirms the effectiveness of the President who pledged the policy’s elimination. It also reminds Americans that Congress can rise above the gridlock threatened by a rump group of conservatives to answer the call of conscience and common sense.
Republicans who take over the House in January should not spoil the aftermath by lashing out at gays or immigrants. Some in their ranks threaten policy swipes against marriage equality in the District of Columbia or the constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship for babies born on U.S. soil. Meant to appease base instincts and base voters, such moves do little more than solidify an image of spiteful intolerance in the minds of recession-weary Americans.
By contrast, repeal is the kind of solution voters expect from Capitol Hill. Mounting evidence of the needless pain and wasted talent, and dollars, inflicted by the policy took 17 years to muster the bipartisan majorities needed to end it. Direct casualties of “don’t ask, don’t tell” topped 13,000. Meanwhile the talking points for undoing it evolved from social justice to concern about corrosion of group morale and personal integrity and undermining core functions and the war effort.
Major Forces for Change
This shift in tone, led by opponents of the ban, marked a major expansion of the repeal coalition. Retired general Colin Powell came out against the modified ban last February, seven years to the week following his U.N. speech justifying invasion and regime change in Iraq–and 17 years to the month after announcing resistance to a bid by a prior Democratic president, Bill Clinton, to lift the ban.
Powell’s public change of heart–citing “acceptance of gays and lesbians in society”–reinforced anti-ban comments by Obama’s holdover Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Mike Mullen, a successor to Powell as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Hawks on Capitol Hill took to echoing these voices. Soon vultures were circling over a dying policy. Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut Independent, co-authored the stand-alone Senate repeal bill with Susan Collins, the Maine Republican. Their legislation won a wider-than-expected 65-to-31 vote of approval by their colleagues on December 18th. Four days later, with relief and exhilaration adding to the quality of a joyous family reunion, President Obama signed the repeal bill into law at a pre-holiday ceremony at the White House.
How, Not If
Credit for charting the bipartisan flight path to passage belongs to two under-appreciated heroes. Michigan senator Carl Levin, chair of the Armed Services committee, tenaciously opposed the ban. When repeal seemed to run into bureaucratic roadblocks in the spring, triggering anguish and impatience among allies, Levin gained assurances from Secretary Gates that lifting the ban was a question of “how, not if.”
In the House, Iraq war veteran and Representative Patrick Murphy (D-Pa.) made good on Nancy Pelosi’s promise to do away with “don’t ask, don’t tell” within the year. Murphy’s passionate advocacy for the ban’s demise stands as a lasting profile in courage all the more for the tinge of sacrifice attending his quest. Some Republicans resented his leadership on the issue, and he narrowly lost reelection Nov. 2 in his swing district on Philadelphia’s outskirts.
Moral and Fiscal Costs
The emergence of military, Republican, and veteran support for a key piece of LGBT-rights legislation made some longtime activists and repeal supporters feel like a parallel universe was taking shape around them. No one savored the fading of old divisions and the closing of ranks in support of repeal more than service members and military families shattered by “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
For 17 years, interviewing those touched by the ban revealed tales of cruelty and compelled duplicity that defy all estimates of cost, moral and fiscal–and the terms of the policy itself. These include male trainees hounded by renegade crewmates and wayward instructors, through interrogation, imprisonment, and breakdown, to declare their sexual orientation. All too common were travails of women in uniform, lesbian-baited to the point of assault, only to be blamed for their own harassment and expulsion.
And there was the pair of female and male same-sex couples, each with at least one partner in the forces, who maintained adjoining apartments so that they could pretend to live as cohabiting heterosexuals upon investigation or surprise inspection.
That such ingenuity and denial became the price of continued service throughout two entire administrations and seven Congresses (6 of them under Republican control) is a lasting scourge that belies our notions of national progress. It also mocks the founding principles we teach our youngest to recite in the Pledge of Allegiance: that America stands for “liberty and justice for all.”
At the same time, repeal of the manifestly unfair and hurtful law speaks to the capacity of the democratic process to reform and self-correct. It also testifies, as Powell said, to the change in Americans’ hearts and minds that LGBT activists and allies have achieved.
Demise of a Double Standard
Turning back the clock 17 years, pundits at the time of the law’s codification said that “don’t ask, don’t tell” reflected a begrudging toleration of gay people’s existence, not honest acceptance, that went far beyond the military. As one friend with a lesbian sibling told me at the time, “No inquiries and no openness is the status quo in my family regarding my sister.” She admitted, “It’s not fair, I know. But you’d have a hard time selling us on anything closer than that to a truly even playing field.”
Double standards cast a long shadow. If there is are any lessons Americans, gay and non-gay alike, took away from the spate of bullying-related suicides by gay or questioning youth in 2010, it may be that sadism is not innocent and that it can be fatal. The spectrum of bullying begins with acceptance of double standards.
To the extent that institutions formalize and defend such standards, they enable abuse of a stigmatized group. Insofar as repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” ends a double standard, it will discourage sadistic behavior, in and beyond military bases and households, reaching throughout America and our presence overseas.
I know service members who have returned from combat duty whose public reaction to repeal is “so what.” They mimic the 70 percent of troops who indicate in this year’s Pentagon-sponsored survey that elimination of “don’t ask, don’t tell” presents no problem to them.
I also know senior personnel who exult in the policy’s repeal. “This thing made people believe that they had to reject peers simply because they might be gay or lesbian,” one officer told me. “Worse yet, it made people who were gay or lesbian reject an unchangeable part of themselves. Tell me how that helps my unit be the best it can be, in any way.”
Federal Goals Reflect State-Based Gains
Winning repeal augurs well for other long-delayed gay-rights measures. These include a federal law barring workplace bias based on sexual orientation and gender identity, a protection so fundamental that most Americans already believe it to be law, as it is in numerous states and localities, including D.C.
It also means repealing the repressive law known as the Defense of Marriage Act, which holds same-sex unions unfit for any federal recognition and effectively quarantines such marriages within the fair-minded states that honor them.
The same strategy of escalating legal pressure through carefully selected court cases to overcome legislative inertia that contributed to repeal will pay dividends on non-discrimination and marriage equality.
Indeed, the state-based fights over these related struggles may well have informed and inspired the persistence of repeal proponents in Congress.
Lieberman hails from Connecticut, one of the six jurisdictions in the nation where LGBT families have secured full marriage equality.
Collins, representing Maine, claimed her Senate seat in 1996, one year after a vigorous homegrown gay-rights coalition won a statewide vote to keep the door open for other protections, gained incrementally in the past 14 years.
Michiganders, whom Levin serves as senior senator, have witnessed a bruising city-by-city battle over basic nondiscrimination coverage so divisive that it shows signs of fracturing the Republican Party.
And Pennsylvania, which Murphy represented for two terms, saw LBGT activists and allies succeed in thwarting a move by antigay conservatives to place an amendment limiting marriage before voters. The strategic win fueled hope that pro-active gay-rights measures might soon gain traction, and passage, in the commonwealth.
Speaking Solidarity
As a social movement, LGBT people have leveraged the metaphor of the closet to convey the personal obligation and political power of coming out. In struggling for equality under law, the movement has borrowed the language of labor and civil-rights quests to great effect.
Emulation is not only the sincerest form of flattery. For social movements, it is a signal that the effort has matured and captured the imagination of a broader audience. Just as repeal won passage, immigration-reform proponents saw their fight to gain a path for citizenship for undocumented students and service members founder with Senate blockage of the DREAM Act. Some of the students pushing the bill bravely stepped out of the shadows and risked deportation by speaking about its firsthand urgency. Fueling their determination, and certainty in ultimate triumph, is the command to come out and thereby overcome legal barriers from gay icon Harvey Milk.
Even when their native tongues and accents differ, those on the front lines of America’s freedom movements are more fluent than ever in a common language of conscience and a shared vocabulary of fairness. For a president whose reelection prospects benefited from his repeal success, it is a language he knows well. He redeems his leadership each time he speaks it. For a Congress afflicted by infighting and intransigence, it is a language they sometimes barely seem to hear. But they redeem the people’s trust in the republic each time they heed it.

Follow Hans Johnson on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/HansPJohnson

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

In retrospect, Black Swan is a simpler, more obvious, and more telegraphed movie than it first seems. The heroine dying at the end of the movie is really no surprise, after all — it’s not only a classic and tragic Hollywood ending, but it’s an ending that mirrors Swan Lake, the Tchaikovsky ballet that anchors the movie, and the theme winding through countless mythological tales.
Yet there’s something particularly propulsive about Black Swan’s depiction of a ballerina’s slide into an all-consuming anxiety. It’s a movie in which the heroine oscillates between hallucination and reality, ending with one final lucid moment in which she makes a declaration that her final dance, and indeed her final offering to the world, is “perfect.”
A lot of it, of course, has to do with Natalie Portman courting an Oscar with her embodiment of Nina Sayers. While the movie has its big, viscerally-felt moments, much of what makes Portman so effective in the role is her attention to the more subtle aspects of Nina’s descent.
In her facial expressions and in the way she carries herself, she’s able to convey the wearing duality of Nina’s life — one on hand, she’s aware that she is aging, that she is slipping into the age in which she will no longer be able to dance; on the other hand, she still lives a kept life, a child’s life, in which her mother keeps her on a strict schedule of eating, sleeping, and ultimately living.
Excellent performances by Winona Ryder and Barbara Hershey underscore this duality — Ryder plays Beth MacIntyre, the ballerina whose seemingly forced retirement opens the door for Nina, and Hershey plays the overbearing mother (who, like Beth, also danced and no longer does), who controls Nina’s life inside the cramped apartment they share, and haunts it when she’s out in the world. Without these two women present in the movie, living embodiments to remind that a career in ballet is particularly finite, it’s not nearly as powerful.
When I saw the movie a few weeks ago, I was struck with how shaken up the audience was upon leaving the theater. A pair of clichs immediately came to mind for me — the air sucked out of the room, a punch to the gut — but the feeling was nonetheless disarming and, frankly, a little refreshing, given how it’s the rare movie these days that fulfills the latent promise of true emotional experience.
Yet I think the audience’s attachment to Nina, and the dismay in her premature death, isn’t exclusively why the movie as exquisitely harrowing as it is. Seeds of that are planted when Nina transforms from diligent student to, in her being tapped for a star role, celebrity.
Nina has ambition to be the Swan Queen, and a consciousness of the attention that will come with it. Nina’s mother expresses, as Nina makes the uneasy transition to celebrity, that it’s too big a role. Nina, wanting to dance the role, must wear an uneasy crown of being watched, being known, being scrutinized with a higher degree of standards, and that’s where her anxiety escalates.
In this current landscape of TMZ and Perez and all the others who feed on gossip, celebrity in 2010 means the sensation of always being watched. For Nina, her celebrity starts in earnest on a staircase at a party announcing Beth’s retirement and Nina’s ascendancy early in the movie — a scene in which it’s clear that Nina is unnerved by the eyes upon her.
The eyes are a returning trope in the movie — eyes on her under red lights in the druggy nightclub scene, eyes in the scene where her mother’s portraits strangely come to life and bear down upon Nina, eyes of the horrified theatergoers during Act 1 of the first and last Swan Lake performance in which Nina falls and the feeling of failure is palpable, and perhaps most poignantly, Nina’s eyes meeting the row of posters outside the performance hall, her own face in multiples, with eyes reflecting a calm since lost, that she won’t gain back until her final moments.
Most of us, of course, will never know life as a celebrity. We like to assume, even as we see celebrities subsumed by the anxiety of celebrity that Portman depicts so skillfully in the movie, that money provides a suitable buffer to combat the pressures of fame, and the Lindsey Lohans and Britney Spears of the world are how they are because of internal weakness rather than external pressure.
But Black Swan shows how consciousness of celebrity, and consciousness of being watched, can affect even those like Nina, whose life was about discipline and determination and achieving perfection alone in front of a mirror, well before it was about being watched. Certainly, Black Swan is not the first movie to explore the ravages of fame, but in this era in which the eyes on celebrities come more easily and more insistently than ever, it’s poignant and perhaps even revelatory.

Follow Phil West on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/philwest

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The American writer and composer Paul Bowles-born in Queens, New York– would be 100 years old tomorrow. In our age of instant fame, it is useful to think about an artist who was famous for not being in the limelight. In his time, the cult of personality was taking hold, and would worsen in the days of Warhol, auguring the era of the “superstar.” (Although after seeing the current show of his screen work at MoMA, Warhol managed to make a formidable art of “stardom,” as both celebration of the self and ironic take on it.) Old-fashioned, gentlemanly, and romantically pure, Paul Bowles shunned post-war American culture.
In the 1950′s with the advent of television a new invention, the talk show, provided extraordinary access to the widest audience then imaginable. Bowles retreated to Tangier, Morocco-first visited in 1931 at the suggestion of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas– where he lived modestly in an apartment that had the look of a spare place in Greenwich Village. In fact, when Bowles was famous as a composer of incidental music for the plays of Tennessee Williams and Lillian Hellman on Broadway, and wrote music reviews for the Herald Tribune under the editorship of fellow composer Virgil Thomson, he and his wife, the writer Jane Bowles, lived for a time on 10th Street, between 5th and 6th. He also shared a house in Brooklyn Heights with W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee. The Chelsea Hotel was also home, for a while.”The writer doesn’t exist,” Bowles, handsome as a matinee idol, famously exclaimed. What mattered is the work. His autobiography, Without Stopping (1972), was famously dubbed “Without Telling” by fellow novelist William Burroughs. A who’s who of the 20th century, the book features anecdotes of friendship and collaboration with Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, Ned Rorem, and Salvador Dali.
Even after this illustrious and glamorous early career as composer, Bowles became famous as a writer, perhaps following the example of his wife’s most celebrated work, a novella published in 1943 called Two Serious Ladies (now available in a handsome edition, see www.sortof.com). His first novel, The Sheltering Sky (1949) became a film in 1989, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and starring Debra Winger and John Malkovich. Three other novels would follow: Let it Come Down (1952), The Spider’s House (1955), and Up Above the World (1966). A collection of his travel writings has been reissued, Travels: Collected Writings, 1950-1993, (see www.sortof.com). A master of the short story, his Collected Stories 1939-1974 (Black Sparrow) remains a favorite. Readers fascinated by a westerner’s take on life in a Muslim culture will do well to read such stories as “A Distant Episode,” “Pages from Cold Point,” “The Time of Friendship,” and the fable, “The Hyena.” The story, “You Are Not I” was made into a film by Sara Driver in the early 1980′s. Thought lost, a print was found in Bowles’s apartment and then taken to his driver’s house and stored. Recently discovered and restored, the film of “You Are Not I” is a brilliant evocation of this writer’s unique sensibility. In addition, Bowles’ literary career includes translations of the Moroccan writers and storytellers, Larbi Layachi, Mohamed Choukri, Mohammed Mrabet, and Ahmed Yacoubi. For updates on all things Bowles including centennial celebrations, see www.paulbowles.org.
This post also appears on Gossip Central.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

We are all too familiar with the incredible devastation that the foreclosure crisis as inflicted across America: homeowners left destitute, communities destroyed, businesses ruined.
Included in the collatoral damage is the near-demise of a long-held national ideal, a belief that for many decades has given Americans a shared purpose and aspiration — the American Dream of homeownership as a path to financial stability.
Now on life-support, the ambition of owning a home has been roundly trashed and blamed for everything from rampant greed to the downfall of the economy. Liar’s loans, subprime lending, mortgage-backed securities, an economy in shambles. Much of the finger-pointing was leveled at low-income families, who dared to dream that owning a home would secure their futures.
Here at Habitat for Humanity – New York City, the New York City affiliate of Habitat for Humanity International, the dream is alive. We firmly believe that low-income, hard-working New York City families — the people who staff our nursing homes and hospitals, drive our buses and cabs, help our teachers, serve us at stores and restaurants and keep our city running smoothly — can become responsible, successful homeowners.
There are reams of studies to support affordable homeownership, reports that show that owning a home can be a successful path out of poverty, increase a family’s health, improve children’s school performance and stabilize neighborhoods.
But rather than subject you to dry statistics and academic reports, I’d like to introduce you to a Habitat-NYC family, who will tell you in their own words how their Habitat home was not only life-changing — but also life-saving.
Since 2003, Candace George and her five children have lived in a healthy, green and affordable Habitat-NYC home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, which they helped build alongside hundreds of volunteers. Candace recently met Arianna Huffington, who was enthralled with the family’s story. I know you will be, too.
Please meet them, listen to their story — and join us in keeping the American Dream of homeownership alive! Meet the George family.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Earlier this week, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell slammed the NFL for its decision to move the Eagles-Vikings game from Sunday night to Tuesday night because of expected blizzard-like conditions. Some fans even poked fun at the controversy during the Vikings’ 24-14 win last night. Now that the game is over, was there any substance to this debate?
No snow? No reason not to play: “Unbelievably, the game was canceled Sunday morning before one flake of snow had fallen, based on forecasts of a significant snowstorm,” says Gov. Ed Rendell in The Washington Times. And “the city had less than six inches” just before kickoff. “Canceling a game because of that amount of snow is unthinkable. Vince Lombardi must have been rolling over in his grave.” The NFL was trying to protect its fans from the threat of terrible weather conditions. “Have we all become wimps?”
Pushing off the game was the right move: Even if Rendell is correct, “it was a wussy thing for him to say,” says Mike Hendricks in the Kansas City Star. Those “who smirk and complain about the weaklings all around them usually have it pretty easy” themselves. That’s why Rendell’s assertion is wrong. He doesn’t know what it’s really like to deal with the recession. After all, “the last couple of years have been a reminder of how tough Americans can be.” Thankfully for him, Rendell doesn’t live in that America.
It was the Eagles’ decision, not the NFL’s: Our sources say that the Eagles “instigated and pushed aggressively the postponement,” says NBC Sports’ Mike Florio. The NFL “relented to the previously unthinkable notion of scuttling a game because of the threat of snow.” The Eagles reportedly “wanted to avoid the rash of demands for refunds” had the game been played on Sunday night, which “probably was the right” decision. So it’s only fair to approach this postponement on the “merits and not with spin.” Let’s “move on.”

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Like so many other Americans who’ve turned to entrepreneuship, I decided to start a home business and start selling the pique assiette mosaic art I’d been designing as a hobby. The first move was to load up on supplies — getting more plates on eBay, colored grout, tile cement and gloves from Home Depot — as my plan was to include planters, candlestick holders and lamps, later adding cremation urns. Everyone had advice:
“You need a state tax I.D. number,” — my husband.
“I need a web site,” — me.
“A good logo is critical,” — a friend who claims to be a branding expert.
“No one cares about a logo,” — a friend who’s not in the branding business.
“You owe $50 for unpaid New York sales tax,” — the New York state sales tax collector.
“I haven’t launched my site yet,” — me.
“Once you register a business, you’re required to file a report,” — them.
“Your pictures are terrible. Hire a professional photographer,” — my son.
“Do you know about online press releases?” — a friend who disappeared after offering to come over and mentor me.
“Can you recommend a press agent?” — me to my cousin, who works at one of the largest PR firms.
“I don’t know the kind of press agent you need,” – my cousin in an email.
“Get a Fed-Ex account,” — my husband/advisor.
“You have to bring your account number with you,” — the Fed-Ex agent.
“And you need to tape the sides and corners of the box,” — the same Fed-Ex agent.
“My friends ADORE the vase you made,” — a client.
“That makes it all worthwhile,” — me.
“My hairdresser found that Google ad words helped attract the right customers,” — a friend with nice hair.
Yesterday, after scolding Fed-Ex for taking 13 days to deliver a vase,” I brainstormed with Kitty at Google ad words to come up with the right words so that those searching for personalized mosaic gifts would be directed to www.sybilsage.com. She tried to explain that I’d pay only for hits. Though I don’t entirely get how it works, it’s clear that getting hits is the new being hit on.
This morning I shot photos of my newest items with the camera whose instructions I’ve yet to read, setting up photo lights that may or may not be tungsten, and edited the photos with a program whose icons make no sense to anyone over 30. Even so, I somehow resize the photos and make them appear as if they’ve been shot against a black background.
For two years I’ve been frantic and frazzled, waiting for a celebrity to appear on TV to tell me which meds I should be taking. Lewis Black?
There’s not enough time to learn what I need to know so, instead, I’m forging ahead without any knowledge. That’s the way I approached marriage and parenting; my hope is this will turn out as well.

Follow Sybil Adelman Sage on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/Sybil Sage

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Victoria Reitano is a 2010 graduate and frequent contributor to UniversityChic.com.
How many times throughout your lifetime have you been asked “what do you want to be when you grow up?” At first your response was fanciful – cowboy, actor, singer, and the like. But then as you grew older and neared adulthood, it became a more of a concrete certainty (environmental law, chemical engineer, doctor, etc.).
Unfortunately, with the current recession still in effect as we lurch towards 2011, your career choices have become less concrete and more of a fuzzy gray area. Of the many U.S. population segments, young adults between the ages of 20-24 face some of the toughest job prospects coming out of college right now. With an 18.2 percent unemployment rate, diminished wages and benefits, and entry-level positions that have been expanded to include middle management responsibilities (due to corporate downsizing), it’s not exactly shocking to learn that me and many of my classmates are questioning our current career trajectories.
Too many graduates (myself included) have long fed into the notion that your first position out of college will be exactly the right fit and lead you down a logical career progression that ultimately results in your “dream job.” But the reality is, we should be adapting our expectations and looking at our first job (if we can even find one to begin with) as merely a stepping stone that offers up the ability to build valuable skills and capital in the interim.
In May, two weeks shy of graduation and my twenty-second birthday, I thought I found my dream job. I accepted a position as an editor for a major online news source, packed up my belongings, and moved to a new city to start my life as working adult.
Within weeks I soon discovered MY dream did not include 50-hour work weeks, low pay, major stress, and limited benefits. I was exhausted, discouraged, and extremely disillusioned. I was all for paying my dues, but at what cost? Was this what I ultimately saw myself doing for the rest of my life?
It was only after I put my job in the right perspective that I came to recognize that it held value in the fact that it afforded me numerous contacts that could lead me to a position that was more in sync with MY idea of success – not the one that had been dictated to me by my school and society as whole.
I didn’t view myself as a quitter, more so a realist who had taken advantage of an opportunity that was presented to me, worked hard to prove myself, and ultimately discovered there was no shame in switching gears and finding something that was better fit for me both personally and financially. It wasn’t really about following a set career path – it was about finding the right job RIGHT NOW.
My experiences with my first job taught me that the goals you set need to be yours and yours alone. Look inside yourself for answers, and don’t focus so much on what you see yourself doing ten years down the road, but rather what you can accomplish in the present. If you need money to pay off your school loans, take the position that pays the most. If you want to relocate, go where the jobs are – not where it’s most convenient.
Dream jobs are exactly that – dreams – they won’t necessarily be where you end up in life, but will most likely help shape your career in the long run. Take every single job experience for what it is – an experience. There is no shame in going off the path, just in assuming the right path will automatically find you once you graduate.
– By Victoria Reitano

Follow Christie Garton on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/@UniversityChic

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

A recent WSJ article on banks in trouble focused on the fact that many of these banks were TARP recipients: QED, TARP was bad and the bailouts didn’t work. While state bashing is nothing new in the pages of the WSJ, it’s worth remembering what the bailouts were actually designed to do: stop the global payments system freezing up. It was not designed to bailout some community lender in the West who got in over their heads in commercial real estate. It is also worth putting these prospective failures in perspective. The median size of these banks was $439 million. Compare that to the balance sheet of Bank of America and the combined $4.2 billion tied up in these banks is a drop in the bucket. Moreover, while 98 failing banks seem a lot, we should remember that between 1985 and 1992 2109 banks failed, so let’s not get too excited about this most recent spate of casualties.
So why the focused attention on these relatively normal events? Perhaps the answer lies in the continuing campaign played so deftly by the banks and their allies to turn the largest ever private sector failure into a public sector failure, thereby getting themselves off the hook for the mess that they made. To take just two examples, the minority report of the Financial Crisis Commission blamed Fannie and Freddie for the crisis, despite the fact that the crisis hit over 20 countries and yet only one of them has Fannie and Freddie. Similarly, the global banking crisis has been turned into a crisis of profligate sovereigns, sidestepping the fact that the debt bloating states’ balance sheets are bailout costs and lost revenues, not runaway social programs. Mere facts, it seems, can’t compete with a good ideology. However, the WSJ may be more right than they know. The bailouts may not ultimately work, but for an entirely different set of reasons.
To see why it’s worth having a look at two pieces, one by John Cassidy in the New Yorker Magazine and one by Andy Haldane at the Bank of England. Taken together, they suggest that all may not be well going forward, despite the billions of dollars thrown at the banks: on a fundamental level, their business model may have run out of juice.
Cassidy’s November New Yorker piece asks, “What Good is Wall Street?” If it significantly adds to capital formation, then the argument for compensation orders of magnitude beyond other sectors is somewhat justified. The problem lies in showing this, since doing so rests upon a series of counterfactuals that are hard to prove. For example, the existence of a $400 billion swaps market doesn’t mean that its absence would result in lower GDP growth. It does however mean lots of fees for those who arrange the swaps.
Looking at the link between what banks do and capital formation, Cassidy notes that the part of Morgan Stanley that does link borrowers to savers and raise capital, traditional investment banking, delivered a mere 15 percent of 2009 revenues. For Citibank “about eighty cents of every dollar in revenues came from buying and selling securities, while just 14 cents on every dollar came from raising capital for companies.” As such, the claim that these institutions are doing “God’s work,” AKA capital formation, seems to skate on rather thin ice.
Andy Haldane, executive director of Financial Stability at the Bank of England, similarly set out to measure the contribution of the financial sector to growth. Is it a productivity miracle or a statistical mirage? Haldane concludes that it’s a mirage, but what is of most interest is how he dissects the underlying business model of investment banking, which enables us to see Cassidy’s numbers in a different light.
First of all, you give up on customers and develop counterparties. That is, you fatten your trading book, and to do that you need lots of different products to trade, hence the growth of complex and opaque securities. Second, you use said securities and the firm’s balance sheet to develop massive amounts of leverage so that even if the margins on each trade are thin, with enough volume you can earn a lot of cash. Finally, you ‘cover’ all this by writing deep out of the money options that give you a near risk free income stream: until it doesn’t.
This is how banks actually make their money, until 2007, when it all went wrong. This raises two problems going forward. First of all, the revenues generated by this model are contingent upon some raw material going into the system as an input that one can profit from as the asset increases in value. Over the past twenty years those raw materials were equities and then real estate and then (briefly) commodities. The latter markets were too small and fragmented to pump this system, hence the 2006-7 boom and bust, and the former two and now either held up by massive amounts of free liquidity (equities) or are underwater (real estate). As such, it’s not clear that these engines of profitability can be effectively restarted.
This is a worry since the bailouts were based upon two complimentary definitions of what this was a crisis of. For the Americans this was a crisis of liquidity. That is, the engine was sound; it’s just run out of oil (credit crunch) and with enough liquidity it will spontaneously restart (limited stimulus etc.) For the British, the engine blew a cylinder and it had to be rebuilt (12.5 percent of GDP as bank recapitalization), and with enough oil (liquidity) it will restart.
But what if the raw material to feed these engines is no longer available? Then the business model as a whole may be in much more trouble than we think. Add to this the impending foreclosure mess really coming home in 2011-12 and the revenues may simply not be there anymore.
TARP and associated programs worked. They saved the global payments system. That is what they were supposed to do. They were not supposed to save small-cap banks from their own investment decisions. They were also not designed to save a business model that may have run its evolutionary course.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

“Why don’t you turn those beautiful mosaic pieces you make into a business?” a friend suggested after hearing that my husband and I had been wiped out. She was referring to mosaic vases and picture frames I’d enjoyed designing, often giving them as gifts for a wedding, new baby or housewarming.
This did seem like the obvious choice since nobody was inviting me to return to writing for television, which had been my career. The first move was to load up on supplies — getting more plates on eBay, colored grout, tile cement and gloves from Home Depot — as my plan was to include planters, candlestick holders and lamps, later adding cremation urns. Everyone had advice:
“You need a state tax I.D. number,” — my husband.
“I need a web site,” — me.
“A good logo is critical,” — a friend who claims to be a branding expert.
“No one cares about a logo,” — a friend who’s not in the branding business.
“You owe $50 for unpaid New York sales tax,” — the New York state sales tax collector.
“I haven’t launched my site yet,” — me.
“Once you register a business, you’re required to file a report,” — them.
“Your pictures are terrible. Hire a professional photographer,” — my son.
“Do you know about online press releases?” — a friend who disappeared after offering to come over and mentor me.
“Can you recommend a press agent?” — me to my cousin, who works at one of the largest PR firms.
“I don’t know the kind of press agent you need,” – my cousin in an email.
“Get a Fed-Ex account,” — my husband/advisor.
“You have to bring your account number with you,” — the Fed-Ex agent.
“And you need to tape the sides and corners of the box,” — the same Fed-Ex agent.
“My friends ADORE the vase you made,” — a client.
“That makes it all worthwhile,” — me.
“My hairdresser found that Google ad words helped attract the right customers,” — a friend with nice hair.
Yesterday, after scolding Fed-Ex for taking 13 days to deliver a vase,” I brainstormed with Kitty at Google ad words to come up with the right words so that those searching for personalized mosaic gifts would be directed to www.sybilsage.com. She tried to explain that I’d pay only for hits. Though I don’t entirely get how it works, it’s clear that getting hits is the new being hit on.
This morning I shot photos of my newest items with the camera whose instructions I’ve yet to read, setting up photo lights that may or may not be tungsten, and edited the photos with a program whose icons make no sense to anyone over 30. Even so, I somehow resize the photos and make them appear as if they’ve been shot against a black background.
For two years I’ve been frantic and frazzled, waiting for a celebrity to appear on TV to tell me which meds I should be taking. Lewis Black?
There’s not enough time to learn what I need to know so, instead, I’m forging ahead without any knowledge. That’s the way I approached marriage and parenting; my hope is this will turn out as well.

Follow Sybil Adelman Sage on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/Sybil Sage

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

I enjoy spending hours cooking in the kitchen. Doing the prep work soothes my frazzled nerves. Watching a dish slowly come together as the various ingredients combine their flavors calms me down.
Being in the kitchen is a great escape from a contentious world. Pulling together appetizers, a salad, main dish, and a couple of desserts, gives me a lot of pleasure. Good food promotes good conversation and well-prepared dishes tell our friends that we care about them.
I like to have the meal completed before everyone arrives, but sometimes, like this New Year’s Eve, I know I’ll still be cooking. The best solution is a colorful cocktail that refreshes and entertains while I’m finishing dinner.
Because there are edible pieces of fruit at the bottom, including a spoon means the cocktail is a drink and an appetizer all in one.
Tropical Rum Cocktail
Cocktails, like pets, need to be named. I’d appreciate any and all suggestions.
Yield: 4
Time: 10 minutes
Ingredients
1 cup white rum
2 Fuyu persimmons, ripe, slightly soft, finely chopped
1 cup fresh orange juice, sweet
1/4 cup fresh lime juice
4 tablespoons powdered sugar
16 ice cubes
Method
Pour the white rum into a pitcher, add the powdered sugar, and stir well to dissolve. Add the finely chopped persimmons, orange and lime juice, and stir well to combine.
Put 4 ice cubes and a spoon into each glass, pour in the drink, making certain that the persimmon pieces are divided equally and serve.
Variations
Top with a fresh sprig of mint
Adjust the proportion of orange and lime juice, to taste
- By David Latt
Substitute finely chopped mango, strawberries, kiwi, or fresh passion fruit for persimmons

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

While much condemnation has rightly been expressed toward Arizona’s anti-immigrant law, SB 1070, a less-reported and potentially more insidious measure is set to take effect on January 1, 2011. This new law, which was passed by the conservative state legislature at the behest of then-school superintendent (and now attorney general-elect) Tom Horne, is designated as HB 2281 and is colloquially referred to as a measure to ban ethnic studies programs in the state. As with SB 1070, the implications of this law are problematic, wide-ranging, and decidedly hate-filled.
Whereas SB 1070 focused primarily on the ostensible control of bodies, HB 2281 is predominantly about controlling minds. In this sense, it is the software counterpart of Arizona’s race-based politicking, paired with the hardware embodied in SB 1070′s “show us your papers” logic of “attrition through enforcement” that has already resulted in tens of thousands of people leaving the state. With HB 2281, the intention is not so much to expel or harass as it is to inculcate a deep-seated second-class status by denying people the right to explore their own histories and cultures. It is, in effect, about the eradication of ethnic identity among young people in the state’s already-floundering school system which now ranks near the bottom in the nation.
There’s a word for what Arizona is attempting to do here: ethnocide. It is similar to genocide in its scope, but it reflects the notion that it is an ethnic and/or cultural identity under assault more so than physical bodies themselves. By imposing a curriculum that forbids the exploration of divergent cultures while propping up the dominant one, there’s another process at work here, what we might call ethnonormativity. This takes the teachings of one culture — the colonizer’s — and makes it the standard version of history while literally banning other accounts, turning the master narrative into the “normal” one and further denigrating marginalized perspectives. America’s racialized past abounds with such examples of oppressed people being denied their languages, histories, and cultures, including through enforced indoctrination in school systems.
As if to add insult to injury, HB 2281 barely makes a pretense to hide any of this in its language and intended scope. A close reading of the law lays bare some of the more stark and disconcerting aspects of its potential application in a state where Hispanic students fill nearly half the seats in the public schools (the domain to which HB 2281 will apply). In particular, there are three primary aspects of the law that merit further investigation as contributing factors to the ongoing erasure of ethnic identities and the further marginalization of people of color in Arizona.
First, there is the perverse Declaration of Policy preamble, in which the legislature expresses its intention that pupils “should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals” and likewise “not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people.” The irony here is palpable, since SB 1070 precisely singles out “races or classes of people” in its coded language requiring police to demand legal papers from anyone who is deemed “reasonably suspicious” of being undocumented — which in the southwest obviously correlates with skin color and ethnic origin. Moreover, HB 2281 itself was aimed specifically at abolishing the Raza Studies program in Tucson (as well as all ethnic studies programs statewide), which translates literally to “race” as noted in the working definition adopted by the program at San Francisco State University:
In this sense, we come to perceive the aim of banning ethnic studies as an attempt to single out the histories and cultures of certain people based expressly on race and class. While the Arizona legislature states its intention to prevent resentment and hatred of others, the new law fosters precisely that, and in denying people their histories further encourages self-hatred as well. Indeed, people kept from knowing where they come from have a difficult time knowing where they are going, creating a self-fulfilling downward spiral that is common where people are categorized and labeled as “other” and/or “lesser” vis–vis the dominant norm. As such, we see that HB 2281 actually violates its own provisions by promoting that which it claims to eliminate.
The second critical aspect concerns the law’s main prohibitions against any education programs that (1) “promote the overthrow of the United States government,” (2) “promote resentment toward a race or class of people,” (3) “are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group,” and (4) “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” The problems here are manifest, starting with the reflexively implicit link to terrorism contained in the first provision — as if to say that ethnic solidarity is somehow akin to attempting to overthrow the government. The third provision is even more problematic in its potential implications, since a plausible argument can be made that the entire mainstream public education curriculum is precisely designed for pupils of a particular ethnic group – namely the dominant, white, Eurocentric group that defines its history and worldview as the “normal” or “standard” ones against which subaltern perspectives are to be judged as deviant and, under HB 2281, banned.
The fourth provision does double duty in prioritizing individualism over group-centric processes, reflecting another deeply-rooted cultural bias and projecting it back as the norm. The libertarian and individualistic foundations of Western culture are viewed as iconic in Arizona, and it is no coincidence that the more communitarian impulses of Raza peoples are denigrated as politically dangerous and pedagogically bereft. Again, the worldview of the oppressor is normalized in its rugged individualism, and attempts to break down any movement toward solidarity and unified action among people of the disfavored class. This also expresses contemptuous judgment toward solidarity-based movements grown in the Western world, including the rise of union organizing, anti-globalization and anti-war activism, and the mobilizations of people against totalitarianism in the Eastern bloc nations. What the Arizona legislature completely fails to grasp is that individual identity arises out of cultural consciousness — in other words, that it is ethnic solidarity in itself that provides people with the grounding necessary to know who they are as individuals.
Finally, HB 2281 contains an exemption for teaching students about episodes such as the Holocaust, genocides, and “the historical oppression of a particular group of people based on ethnicity, race, or class.” In essence, combined with the provisions noted above, this means that students of a particular group can be taught about their history of subjugation but not about their spirit of solidarity; they can focus on their decimation but not their emancipation. This sinister portion of the bill strives to reinforce pain at the expense of pride, encouraging young people to internalize the oppression delivered by the dominant culture and make it part of their self-consciousness as “other” in a world whose norms are built on the inherent superiority of the master class. Thus, the law seeks not only to prevent the teaching of histories and values that might empower marginalized people, but further endorses the transmission of destructive episodes and ideologies that can only serve to increase the group’s collective disempowerment.
In all of these ways, HB 2281 is a potent example of legislative bigotry and open persecution of people based on factors such as race and class. As with SB 1070, HB 2281 is also self-violating in that it promotes precisely what it claims to prohibit, namely ethnic chauvinism and “resentment toward a race or class of people.” Both of these laws — as well as similar ones in the offing being considered by the Arizona legislature — are entirely counterproductive and manifestly unjust. Confronting similar patterns of legislated intolerance and the widespread attempt to reduce a category of people to second-class status based primarily on ethnic origin, Martin Luther King, Jr. famously wrote in his landmark essay Letter from a Birmingham Jail, following the teachings of St. Augustine, that “an unjust law is no law at all.” King further reminds us that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” calling upon us to recognize the interlinked nature of destinies and, indeed, the inherent solidarity of our struggles, and further counsels that in this effort “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
Carrying the logic further, King articulates a framework for resistance that applies as much in Arizona today as it did in the South during the Jim Crow era:
By denying marginalized peoples their own stories and understandings, HB 2281 likewise denies the “conquerors” the capacity to come to terms with the full implications of history, thus literally enabling the perpetuation of a state of “denial” that inhibits the development of necessary processes of atonement, accountability, and reconciliation. As with laws associated with segregationist and tyrannical regimes throughout history, HB 2281 and SB 1070 are inherently unjust, and hence are “no laws at all.” They must be disobeyed, not out of spite or hatred, but more so to uplift the oppressors and the oppressed alike, as Paulo Freire has suggested. In this sense, solidarity transcends its narrow bounds, and the struggle itself is our finest education.

This Blogger’s Books from
Lost in Space: The Criminalization, Globalization, and Urban Ecology of Homelessness
by Randall Amster
Building Cultures of Peace: Transdisciplinary Voices of Hope and Action
by Elavie Ndura-Ouedraogo

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One of my most cherished memories was when I realized I could read. I remember sitting on the couch in our living room with a book in my lap. I remember sounding out the word, “know” as “ka-now.” My mom was listening to me read out loud and asked me to stop and point to the word. As my finger pointed to the word, my mom explained that the “k” was silent and the word was pronounced as “no.”
Somewhere for some inexplicable reason, the lightbulb went off. From that moment onward, I became a voracious reader. I wanted to read everything, from street signs to cereal boxes, reading was as vital to me as breathing.
I was one of those kids whose hand always eagerly shot up when any of my teachers asked for someone to read out loud. If we went row to row, I would count the paragraphs to see if my paragraph was going to be good and long or if I was going to be stuck with a few meager sentences.
That love of reading, something that I hold very dear all these years later, I soon came to realize was not shared by all. As a teacher, I’ve had students flat out tell me that they hate to read. Of course, my job as their teacher is to help them develop a love for reading by finding out what they are interested in and matching those interests with books they could find in the library.
Many of my students had convinced themselves they didn’t like to read because their reading skills were several levels below grade level. For many of these students declaring that they hated reading was easier to express than the embarrassment of being a struggling reader. As a teacher, I had a classroom library that kids could choose books from on their own accord. Books were usually borrowed on the honor system and if a book wasn’t returned, I just figured that it was because it found a good home with a child who wanted it.
For the past two years, the Vallejo Education Association has partnered with the Solano Friends of the Library in our new “Helping Hands” program. VEA provides school supplies and books generously donated by the John F. Kennedy Library for almost 2,000 of our kids. The kids clamor excitedly around the tables laden with books, talking to their parents about their choices. For many us, this excitement about a book and reading is the reason we do this. We understand that giving the gift of a book is for some the start of a family library.
For me, it is imperative to get books into the hands of kids. Kids who have access to print materials can improve their reading performance and will have better attitudes towards reading according to research done by Learning Point Associates through a study commissioned by Reading Is Fundamental (RIF).
RIF is an essential program to give all kids access to quality reading material. RIF has partnered with First Book, which seeks to get books into the hands of kids all over the country. Over 500,000 books have been given to programs that serve kids in need during this holiday season. For over forty years, RIF has been instrumental in bringing books into many communities because they understand that book ownership and lending programs are critical in battling illiteracy.
Unfortunately funding for RIF always seems to be in jeopardy, but more so as the economy makes a very slow recovery. RIF received a reprieve of sorts by a resolution that passed in the House & the Senate which allows for temporary funding through March 4, 2011. However, all of this can change once the new members of Congress are seated. Look at the following statistics:
61 percent of low-income families in the U.S have no books in their homes.
80 percent of preschool and after-school programs serving low-income populations have no age-appropriate books for their children.
45 percent of children ages 3-5 are not read to daily. Children whose parents read to them become better readers and do better in school.
27 percent of public school fourth graders score below basic levels on reading exams. Increasing access to print material is the most successful way to improve the reading achievement of low-income children.
21 percent of U.S. adults with below-basic reading skills are unemployed.
$500 billion is the annual cost to the U.S. economy of children growing up poor — a result of eventually lower productivity and earnings, higher crime rates, and health costs.
Funding for RIF needs to continue. It is why I encourage everyone reading this article to write your representative in Congress and urge them to continue funding RIF.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com