Matt Bors has a great cartoon, and this first frame is a sample.
The rest is a fictional forecast of the future, but is certainly an accurate portrayal of how Republicans see A Handmaiden’s Tale as a blue print for the future.
Month: February 2012
Sergey Aleynikov Freed
You may recall that he was convicted under the Economic Espionage Act for downloading some high frequency trading software from Goldman Sachs, where he worked.
Apparently, the judge in the trial completely bought into the prosecutions expansion of the law, intended to prosecute people for selling military secrets to the Chinese, to this case, and the appellate court came down hard on the judge. They did not just remand this back to the lower court, they ordered the lower court to enter a judgement of acquittal.
Felix Salmon explains why whole case was such an outrage:
The secrets at defense contractors, of course, are secret for reasons of national security. The secrets at investment banks and hedge funds, by contrast, are secret purely for reasons of profit: they reckon that if they have some clever algorithm which nobody else has, then that makes it easier for them to profit from it. Which is why it was always a stretch for the government to use the EEA to prosecute Aleynikov — indeed, it is why it was always a stretch for Aleynikov to be criminally prosecuted at all. Goldman could have brought a civil case against him, but instead they got their wholly-owned subsidiary, the U.S. government, to come down on him so hard that he ended up with an eight-year sentence. Violent felons frequently get less.
The forthcoming decision from the Second Circuit is likely to be a doozy; I’m told that the judges shredded the prosecutors during the oral hearing. And certainly their decision to enter a judgment of acquittal, rather than any kind of retrial, is a strong indication that they handed down this order with extreme prejudice against prosecutorial overreach.
(emphasis mine)
This has been a lose-lose for the Vampire Squid. They looked like bullies, they brought a lot of attention to the bit of front-running that is high frequency trading, and they have now lost the case.
That being said, I don’t expect Goldman, or the prosecutors, to give up just yet.
Background here.
Too True
It’s why we love the little furry sociopaths.
I Have So Been on the Converse of This
I’ve so lived thisWell, this seems a lot like my high school days.
Fabulous!!!!!!!
The Maryland House has just approved gay marriage in Maryland:
A bill that would legalize same-sex marriage squeaked through the House of Delegates Friday night with one more vote than the minimum needed for passage, putting Maryland on the cusp of being the eighth state to allow such unions.
Cheers erupted when the gavel dropped on the final 72-67 tally. Within minutes, Gov. Martin O’Malley, a Democrat who sponsored the bill, walked from his second-floor office to the door of the House chamber, embraced House Speaker Michael E. Busch and said, “Good job, man.”
“We are a good people. We all want the same things for our kids,” O’Malley said. Then he extended credit to delegates and activists, many of whom had been skeptical about his commitment to the issue. “These guys did it,” he said.
The measure now goes to the Senate, which passed a similar bill last year and is expected do so again. The chamber will likely take up the measure next week.
Should the bill pass in both chambers, activists on both sides believe it would be petitioned to referendum in November. If voters approve the measure, the earliest a gay couple would be able to wed is January 2013, when the law would go into effect.
The victory is significant for O’Malley, who threw the weight of his office behind the measure after a similar bill fell a few votes short in the House last year. The governor had been working the halls of the House office building at all hours to persuade wavering delegates.
In national terms, the Maryland vote caps a week in which proponents of same-sex marriage have scored significant victories with the signing of a similar law in Washington state and the Legislature’s approval of a marriage bill in New Jersey, though Gov. Chris Christie vetoed it Friday.
This is very good news, because it passed the state Senate last year, so it looks like it will make it to the Governor’s desk.
One weird bit: One of the people that we have to thank for this is Dick Cheney:
By far the biggest boost came in the morning when Republican Del. Wade Kach, who was considered a sure-fire no vote, threw his support behind O’Malley’s bill. Kach had voted against the bill two days earlier in committee.
The Baltimore County delegate said he reached his decision after mulling the testimony he’d heard during a nearly 11-hour hearing on the bill last week and watching how same-sex couples supported one another. “I thought to myself, if my constituents were here, they’d have a different perspective on the issue,” Kach said. “I’m sure of it.”
He also became the target of a last-minute lobby effort, and said his voice mail was full of messages from important people, including Mehlman, Bloomberg and an offer to talk with former Vice President Dick Cheney, whom Kach regards as a “great man.” All three are recognized for their support of gay rights issues.
But you know, I’ll take it.
That being said, there are still enough bigots in Maryland to put this on the ballot, and it’s probably gonna be close.
In Honor of Black History Month
I present to you what must be the best former slave snark ever:
Dayton, Ohio,
August 7, 1865
To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee
Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.
I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, “Them colored people were slaves” down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.
As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams’s Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.
In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.
Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.
From your old servant,
Jourdon Anderson.
For a man of his background, this is impressively fierce eloquence.
H/t Americablog.
Least Shocking News of the Day
San Francisco County has conducted an audit of 400 foreclosures, and found a morass of fraud and corruption:
An audit by San Francisco county officials of about 400 recent foreclosures there determined that almost all involved either legal violations or suspicious documentation, according to a report released Wednesday.
Anecdotal evidence indicating foreclosure abuse has been plentiful since the mortgage boom turned to bust in 2008. But the detailed and comprehensive nature of the San Francisco findings suggest how pervasive foreclosure irregularities may be across the nation.
The improprieties range from the basic — a failure to warn borrowers that they were in default on their loans as required by law — to the arcane. For example, transfers of many loans in the foreclosure files were made by entities that had no right to assign them and institutions took back properties in auctions even though they had not proved ownership.
Commissioned by Phil Ting, the San Francisco assessor-recorder, the report examined files of properties subject to foreclosure sales in the county from January 2009 to November 2011. About 84 percent of the files contained what appear to be clear violations of law, it said, and fully two-thirds had at least four violations or irregularities.
Kathleen Engel, a professor at Suffolk University Law School in Boston said: “If there were any lingering doubts about whether the problems with loan documents in foreclosures were isolated, this study puts the question to rest.”
The report comes just days after the $26 billion settlement over foreclosure improprieties between five major banks and 49 state attorneys general, including California’s. Among other things, that settlement requires participating banks to reduce mortgage amounts outstanding on a wide array of loans and provide $1.5 billion in reparations for borrowers who were improperly removed from their homes.
(Emphasis mine)
And the settlement is going to let these guys off for about 2 grand a pop.
My Heart Bleeds Borscht
Bummer of a birth mark, Scott
It looks like prosecutors in Wisconsin are closing the noose on corruption by now Governor Scott Walker during his tenure as Milwaukee County executive:
A recall from his position as Wisconsin’s governor could ultimately be the least of Gov. Scott Walker’s worry, if a criminal complaint quietly moving forward in the Badger State court system continues on its current trajectory. At the moment, Walker seems to be at the bottom of a mountain where an avalanche is just beginning to roll.
A 51-page criminal complaint [PDF] (the “Rindfleisch complaint”), which formally charges Kelly M. Rindfleisch with four felony counts of misconduct in public office, contains factual allegations which implicate a number of individuals, listed as “interested parties,” including WI’s controversial Republican Governor, in a wide-reaching criminal conspiracy to misuse public employees and resources for partisan political gain.
…………
The factual body of the Rindfleisch complaint suggests that prosecutors are painstakingly examining evidence that may well place Walker at the center of a criminal conspiracy to illegally utilize employees within the Milwaukee County Executive Office to engage in fundraising and campaign activities on behalf of the Friends of Scott Walker and others during office hours at the expense of Milwaukee taxpayers.
Each violation of the relevant WI criminal statutes at issue in the matter carries with it a potential imprisonment of up to 3.5 years. As that case moves forward apace, Walker could lose a great deal more than simply his hold on the governor’s office. His very freedom may prove to be at stake as well…
I don’t expect an indictment of Walker before the recall vote, but this is another well-deserved nail in the coffin for his political career.
H/t Kenneth Quinnell.
Virginia Republicans Are Aliens
I don’t mean foreigners, I mean malevolent creatures from another world.
Think about it. The only time you hear about involuntary probes, it is because of alien abductions.
Virginia republicans want to mandate involuntary vaginal probes for women:
Inserting something into the vagina of an unwilling woman is a violation in every sense of the word. But not to a majority of Virginia’s Senate.
This week, the Senate passed a bill, largely along party lines, that would require a woman seeking an abortion to undergo an ultrasound and wait as long as a day for the procedure.
The ultrasound requirement may evoke images of the abdominal sonograms standard in most pregnancies, fuzzy black and white pictures conjured by a wand passed across a woman’s stomach.
But those ultrasounds are ordinarily done fairly late in pregnancy. In the beginning, particularly the first weeks, an abdominal ultrasound may not be sensitive enough to detect anything.
That’s why doctors in many cases use a transvaginal ultrasound. In plainspeak, they insert a condom-covered probe into a woman’s vagina to obtain an image.
In order to satisfy the goals of the legislation – which includes a requirement that a doctor determine the gestational age of the pregnancy- a transvaginal ultrasound may be the only reliable course.
The bill, among the most invasive ever passed in Virginia, is the result of frustration by lawmakers opposed to abortion. Unsuccessful in making abortion illegal and unwilling to be frank about their goals, they have tried by technicality and obfuscation to make it harder for a woman to terminate a pregnancy.
Every so often, I hold the delusion that Republicans cannot get any more contemptible.
They always manage to disabuse me of this.
Do Not Piss Jon Off
Liz Trotta at Fox said that female soldiers getting raped have it coming to them.
Jon Stewart begs to differ.
It’s subtle, but this is the first time that I’ve ever seen him truly enraged.
It’s a Start
But only a start.
The FCC has placed further restrictions on robo-calling:
Those aggravating automated telemarketing calls will be interrupting your dinner a lot less often.
After receiving thousands of complaints from consumers, the Federal Communications Commission clamped down Wednesday on unwanted robo-calling by approving sweeping changes to its telemarketing rules for wireline and mobile phones.
Even with the national Do Not Call Registry in effect — the initial effort to block those pesky calls — telemarketers have found ways around the rules. But the FCC’s latest effort is “closing a loophole,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center.
“This is an important step forward to make it easier for consumers to take advantage of the Do Not Call list,” Rotenberg said about the FCC’s changes. “These are additional safeguards to provide consumers greater protection.”
Telemarketing calls have a bigger effect on mobile phones, he noted, because those calls can eat up the minutes in consumers’ wireless plans.
Under the new FCC rules, telemarketers are required to obtain written consent, which can be in the form of an online approval, before placing autodialed or prerecorded calls to a consumer.
Telemarketers also must provide an automated opt-out mechanism during each robo-call so that consumers can immediately tell the telemarketer to stop calling.
The FCC also eliminated the “established business relationship” exception, which had allowed robo-calls to be placed to the land-line home phones of consumers with “prior or existing” associations with companies represented by telemarketers.
And the agency strictly limited the number of abandoned or so-called dead-air calls — in which consumers answer their phones and hear nothing — that telemarketers can make within each calling campaign.
The exemptions are still more than I would like to see, the exemption for non-oprofits, allows them to contract out to for-profit telemarketing firms, for example, but it’s a positive development.
Here is an American Hero
Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis, a 17 year Army veteran who almost certainly won’t make it retirement, because he wrote a report saying that senior military officials are lying about Afghanistan:
Earlier this week, the New York Times’ Scott Shane published a bombshell piece about Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis, a 17-year Army veteran recently returned from a second tour in Afghanistan. According to the Times, the 48-year-old Davis had written an 84-page unclassified report, as well as a classified report, offering his assessment of the decade-long war. That assessment is essentially that the war has been a disaster and the military’s top brass has not leveled with the American public about just how badly it’s been going. “How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding?” Davis boldly asks in an article summarizing his views in The Armed Forces Journal.
Davis last month submitted the unclassified report –titled “Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leader’s Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort” – for an internal Army review. Such a report could then be released to the public. However, according to U.S. military officials familiar with the situation, the Pentagon is refusing to do so. Rolling Stone has now obtained a full copy of the 84-page unclassified version, which has been making the rounds within the U.S. government, including the White House. We’ve decided to publish it in full; it’s well worth reading for yourself. It is, in my estimation, one of the most significant documents published by an active-duty officer in the past ten years.
Here is the report’s damning opening lines: “Senior ranking U.S. military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the U.S. Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable. This deception has damaged America’s credibility among both our allies and enemies, severely limiting our ability to reach a political solution to the war in Afghanistan.” Davis goes on to explain that everything in the report is “open source” – i.e., unclassified – information. According to Davis, the classified report, which he legally submitted to Congress, is even more devastating. “If the public had access to these classified reports they would see the dramatic gulf between what is often said in public by our senior leaders and what is actually true behind the scenes,” Davis writes. “It would be illegal for me to discuss, use, or cite classified material in an open venue and thus I will not do so; I am no WikiLeaks guy Part II.”
According to the Times story, Davis briefed four members of Congress and a dozen staff members and sent his reports to the Defense Department’s inspector general, and of course spoke to a New York Times reporter; only after all that did he inform his chain of command what he’d been up to. Evidently Davis’s truth-telling campaign has rattled the Pentagon brass, prompting unnamed officials to retaliate by threatening a bogus investigation for “possible security violations,” according to NBC News.
They are going to go after him, and they won’t just try to kick him out, they will try to send him to Leavenworth.
The hyper-aggressive criminalization of whistle-blowing is one of the extra special innovations of the current administration.
The Pedophile Protectors Move the Goal Post
You knew that the be satisfied with nothing but a right to enforce their religious beliefs on the rest of us:
Hours after calling the Obama administration’s contraceptives compromise a “first step,” the Catholic bishops said Friday night they have “two serious objections” to the new policy and will fight its enactment.
First, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said the administration’s plan still includes a “nationwide mandate of insurance coverage of sterilization and contraception, including some abortifacients.”
“This is both unsupported in the law and remains a grave moral concern,” the bishops said in their statement. “We cannot fail to reiterate this, even as so many would focus exclusively on the question of religious liberty.
I am so not shocked by this.
This is why compromise is not an option.
There isn’t one. You either capitulate, or fight.
He Keeps Coming Back, Like a Bad Penny
Yes, it’s Ken Starr, and it looks like he got yet another trumped up investigation, this time of a Jewish Studies professor who isn’t right wing enough for the Clinton era persecutor prosecutor:
It’s unclear what exactly Ellis is on trial for, as neither Baylor nor Ellis would comment on the record about the nature of the charges. (One clue: no criminal charges have been filed against Ellis.) Roger Sanders, Ellis’ lawyer, says Baylor’s lawyers told him the internal process mandates nondisclosure, though Baylor spokesperson Lori Fogleman disputes this, telling RD that the charges can only be released with Ellis’ written permission.
Sanders says the investigation hinges on “bogus allegations.” One can only hope the result will not be another 336-page Starr Report—the $40 million product of the independent counsel’s four-year investigation, for which the beleaguered Monica Lewinsky was interrogated over 20 times. “‘You’re a pervert, Ken Starr,’” Lewinsky’s father once said he’d like to tell the former independent counsel.
In late November Cornel West, feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and other luminaries launched a change.org petition addressed to Starr, which has thus far gathered over 5,000 signatures. The petition asserts that the controversy “looks more and more like a persecution to silence a Jewish voice of dissent.”
“The charges,” reads a petition update, “are about ‘abuse of authority.’…Many of us were contacted several times by institutional lawyers who tried to persuade us to tell them examples of ‘abuse of authority’ he has exercised.”
According to Sanders, the investigation consisted of “sort of announc[ing] to people, ‘Here’s what Marc’s guilty of. Now tell us what you know about him.’” Fogleman claims no knowledge of the investigation’s procedures and declined to recommend officials who could answer questions about it.
The fact that, but for his misconduct in l’affaire Lewinski, he’d probably be on the Supreme Court now, should scare the hell out of us.
Guess What, the Bank Deal is Even Worse Than You Thought
We still have no written agreement, but we the North Carolina AG has released an executive summary, and it strongly implies that the immunity grant is a lot broader than has been implied:
This is the critical part:
The proposed Release contains a broad release of the banks’ conduct related to mortgage loan servicing, foreclosure preparation, and mortgage loan origination services. Claims based on these areas of past conduct by the banks cannot be brought by state attorneys general or banking regulators.
The Release applies only to the named bank parties. It does not extend to third parties who may have provided default or foreclosure services for the banks. Notably, claims against MERSCORP, Inc. or Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. (MERS) are not released
.
This is sufficiently general so that it is hard to be certain, but It certainly reads as if it waives chain of title issues and liability related to the use of MERS. That seems to be confirmed by the fact that made by local recorders for fees are explicitly preserved (one would not think they would need to be preserved unless they might otherwise be assumed to be waived). This is exactly the sort of release we feared would be given in a worst case scenario. The banks have gotten a huge “get out of jail free” card of bupkis.
It’s gonna get worse.
Every time we get more information it’s gonna get worse.
We are going to discover that this precludes all sorts of remedies for bad acts, and there will be no enforcement mechanisms to prevent future bad faith actions.
It’s gonna be more extend and pretend, so the banksters can get their bonuses, and we get the shaft.
Cyberwar Is the New Profit Center
Seriously, we are seeing yet another hyped up bit of pants-wetting terror in order to create another way for defense contractors to rip the taxpayers off:
In last month’s State of the Union address, President Obama called on Congress to pass “legislation that will secure our country from the growing dangers of cyber threats.” The Hill was way ahead of him, with over 50 cybersecurity bills introduced this Congress. This week, both the House and Senate are moving on their versions of consolidated, comprehensive legislation.
The reason cybersecurity legislation is so pressing, proponents say, is that we face an immediate risk of national disaster.
wired guest column“Today’s cyber criminals have the ability to interrupt life-sustaining services, cause catastrophic economic damage, or severely degrade the networks our defense and intelligence agencies rely on,” Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) said at a hearing last week. “Congress needs to act on comprehensive cybersecurity legislation immediately.”
Yet evidence to sustain such dire warnings is conspicuously absent. In many respects, rhetoric about cyber catastrophe resembles threat inflation we saw in the run-up to the Iraq War. And while Congress’ passing of comprehensive cybersecurity legislation wouldn’t lead to war, it could saddle us with an expensive and overreaching cyber-industrial complex.
Every so called case of a major attack on meat-space infrastructure has turned out to be false, but we’re gonna spend billions on it.
While Joe Nocera is Generally a Waste of Time
I agree with him that the N.C.A.A. is little better than a cartel engaging in human trafficking:
The N.C.A.A. despises sports agents — hates them so much so that it once helped promulgate an anti-agent law. As of January 2010, according to the N.C.A.A.’s Web site, that law had been passed by 40 states. A player who takes an “improper benefit” from a sports agent loses his eligibility. A player who gets drafted out of high school — this happens in baseball as well as hockey — and engages an agent to talk to the pro team that drafted him loses his eligibility. Indeed, the mere act of signing with an agent is enough for a player to lose his eligibility. N.C.A.A. “scandals” involving agents and athletes are almost as common as recruiting scandals.
The N.C.A.A. claims — as it always does — that it is acting to protect its athletes “from exploitation by professional and commercial enterprises.” But this is classic N.C.A.A. Orwellian spin. Its true purpose in preventing athletes from engaging with agents while in college is to exacerbate their exploitation. The professional and commercial enterprise doing the exploiting, of course, is college sports itself.
“It’s all about control,” says Don Jackson, a lawyer who specializes in representing athletes who have run afoul of the N.C.A.A. Teenage athletes with agents are far more likely to make informed decisions about their lives than athletes acting on their own. Instead, athletes have to rely on coaches and athletic administrators, whose primary interest is the school, not the player.
And it’s not just hockey players who have to make important life decisions at a young age. When a baseball player gets drafted out of high school, he has a hard decision to make. Basketball players are usually eligible for the draft after one year of college; football players after three years. Yet N.C.A.A. rules force these athletes to make these major decisions without an agent at their side.
At some point, enterprising lawyer is going to find is going to use RICO, or the tax code, or anti-human trafficking statutes, or some combination of all these and other laws, and these folks will get taken down ……… hard.
Huh, I Don’t Know How I Missed This………
But the Dassault Rafale has won the Indian MMRCA competition, and will be delivering 126 fighters.
It appears that the Rafale largely beat the Typhoon largely on the basis of cost, though the fact that the Rafale is currently more capable in the strike role probably helped, as did what appeared to be a pretty good offset deal.
It’s interesting that the final decision came down to the cheapest of the two most expensive competitors (other competitors, were the MiG-35, Gripen, F-16, and F/A-18).
I still wonder how much of this was driven by a concern that the French were seen as more independent of US foreign policy.
Epic Snark
Barry Ritholtz puts in his application to be head of corporate communications for the Vampire Squid:
To: Hiring Committee, Goldman Sachs
From: Barry Ritholtz
Re: Position, Head of Public Relations, Goldman Sachs
Date: February 13, 2012Gentlemen:
Now that your public relations chief, Lucas van Praag is (finally!) retiring, it is time for the executive committee to seriously rethink the position of PR head. To be blunt, your efforts have not been up to the level of excellence that one would expect from Goldman Sachs. It would be impolite to speak ill of the job done by LVP has done under challenging circumstances, but you gentlemen need to face the facts, and fast. On his watch, the firm’s reputation has suffered, its ability to recruit top talent has been compromised, and its market cap has gotten shellacked.
In short, your PR efforts have performed about as well as the ABACUS 2007-AC1 – the John Paulson created mortgage bundle that cratered. Or, about as well as John Paulson’s fund in 2011, which also cratered (I am seeing a pattern here).
All of which says, you guys have really stunk the joint up.Thus, it is with great pleasure that I toss my hat into the ring for the position of Director of Communications for Goldman Sachs. Not only do I have the requisite skill set to help rehabilitate the image of the 100+ year old firm — media savvy, legal smarts, netizen, with just a dollop of snark — but I believe I can help you move gracefully into the new century.
Just read the rest. It’s da bomb!
So, Now They are Turning Over Rocks at Komen
It turns out that Komen CEO Nancy Brinker has managed to generate 6 figures in reimbursable expenses from the charity while she was working full time for the Bush administration:
She billed her charity for $133,507 in expenses at a time when she had a full-time job elsewhere. Her staff is in turmoil. While her cancer-fighting work is undisputed, her managerial style is not.
Nancy Brinker, a socialite, powerbroker, and former U.S. ambassador to Hungary, has turned Susan G. Komen for the Cure into a cancer-fighting giant over the past three decades. Now, critics say, it may be time for her to go—if she wants to preserve the very charity she built.
The recent crisis over Komen’s decision to de-fund—and then re-fund—Planned Parenthood has put Brinker under intense scrutiny, with observers questioning everything from her management style to her earnings to her spending. “It has all become a diversion. It has itself become cancerous,” says Eve Ellis, a former board member of Komen in New York City. “Nancy has accomplished so much and provides so many millions in research dollars, but the foundation needs to get back to being strong. For that to happen, she needs to step down.”
In interviews with The Daily Beast, a half-dozen former Komen employees who held a range of jobs at the charity in the past five years expressed similar sentiments, saying the foundation has become dominated by its larger-than-life leader. These people strongly acknowledge Brinker’s accomplishments, praising her immense skill at raising funds for lifesaving cancer research. At the same time, they describe her as an imposing figure who flies first class, prefers five-star hotels, and generally exhibits an entitled air, which, they say, is at odds with the organization’s important mission. Employees don’t call her “Nancy,” these people say. They are expected to call her “Ambassador Brinker.”
In the 30 years since she launched the foundation, Brinker has raised some $1.9 billion for cancer research. More than 100,000 volunteers work in a nationwide network of affiliates. It was all Brinker’s vision—she started the charity after her sister, Susan G. Komen, died of breast cancer in her mid-30s.
………
The Daily Beast found that Brinker billed the foundation for $133,507 in expenses from June 2007 to January 2009, according to her filings with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. At the time, she was a full-time federal employee, serving as chief of protocol for the State Department. President Bush nominated her for the position in June 2007 and she held the job until January 2009.
But it gets better:
After Brinker’s term in the State Department ended in 2009, she returned full time to Komen. Her return coincided with a cultural shift within the foundation, former employees say. She was more distant and aloof, these people say. “It was like suddenly she expected someone to carry her purse,” says one person.
…………
At the Komen foundation, management turned over fairly rapidly from 2009 to 2011, at considerable expense to the foundation.
It appears that her stint in the Bush administration may have knocked a screw loose, a not unsurprising development.
It is interesting to see the knives come out. Just as few weeks ago, Komen was synonymous with the fight against breast cancer, and now the dam has burst.
Komen may survive, but Nancy Brinker won’t be at the helm. She’s done, even if she does not realize this yet.
As an aside, at the core of much of movement conservatism is a sense of entitlement, and a sense of entitlement is generally incompatible with a properly functioning charity.
This doesn’t mean that Republicans can’t do good charity work, it just means that their world view renders them more vulnerable to losing sight of their mission.