Ward on Words

The first decade of the new millennium is the "lost decade" for America, the one where we lost a surplus, gained a massive deficit, declared two wars with no intention of funding them, rounded up the usual suspects in those wars and set them to rot without charges in Gitmo for an undetermined amount of time, and threw in some VP-sanctioned torture as an add-on to the new millennial approach to national security. It was a decade that began with all the drama of the hanging chad, a hotly contested presidential election teetering on the decision of Florida voters, a state led by the brother of one of the presidential candidates. We finally came to decide the next president of the United States based on the opinions of the nine justices of the US Supreme Court. The brother of the Florida governor won. When it comes to allegations of rigging a presidential election, the Daleys of Chicago have got nothing of the Bushes of America. The transition of power happened peacefull...

Jon Stewart's take on the absence of three CEOs from an important meeting with the President of the United States... The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c Clusterf#@k to the Poor House - Flight Delay www.thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis Apparently, phoning it in was the best way for these top-notch bankers, mired in fog, to touch base with Obama... It's a bitch when weather gets in the way of a personal meeting with the president.

New job requires a daily commute on the Metra. Went to buy my monthly pass and discovered a notice posted on the ticket window informing all patrons that credit cards will be accepted at the train stations in the spring of 2010. It's cash or check until then... Ten years into the new millennium, credit cards will FINALLY be accepted at Chicago's metra train system. Nice way to reinforce the antiquated nature of this mode of transport...

...for all 30 members of its management team. Nice press release includes few pertinent details. Would love to know if this means the 30,000+ employees not affected by this plan now get bigger bonuses. After all, Goldman's $17 billion bonus stash needs to be distributed to the many thousands of deserving employees, right? In the press release, Lloyd Blankfein offers up this quotable nugget: "The measures that we are announcing today reflect the compensation principles that we articulated at our shareholders' meeting in May. We believe our compensation policies are the strongest in our industry and ensure that compensation accurately reflects the firm's performance and incentivizes behavior that is in the public’s and our shareholders’ best interests. "In addition, by subjecting our compensation principles and executive compensation to a shareholder advisory vote, we are further strengthening our dialogue with shareholders on the important issue of compe...

Bank of America is set to pay back $45 billion it owes TARP. Funny how the need to free the company from CEO pay restrictions provided motivation for such an action... For more, here's Felix Salmon's report . And here's what the WSJ has to say .

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, a day filled with symbols of our great American mythology. Our founders, the European settlers, yearned for a new life free from the restrictions of Europe, so they got on those rickety boats and crossed an ocean to reach an unknown land. The Pilgrims, in their quest for religious freedom, sought Nirvana far from home. The place they landed on was harsh, unforgiving, a landscape that required skill and knowledge in order to survive. And instrumental to their survival, according to the American mythology, were the inhabitants of the "New World." As we all know, the Pilgrims shared a harvest feast with the Wampanoag Indians in 1621. The modern American Thanksgiving dinner not only gives us the opportunity to give thanks for our blessings, but commemorates the cooperation between Native Americans and foreign born visitors who sought new life in a new world. Of course, cooperation turned into warfare not long after. Another component of America...

In a year that has seen unemployment spike to its highest levels in decades and government debt reach record levels, Goldman Sachs is on track to pay out its highest employee bonuses ever in the firm's history. All part of "God's work," Lloyd Blankfein suggested in a recent interview with the London Times. Here's the intro from that story: "Number 85 Broad Street, a dull, rust-coloured office block in lower Manhattan, doesn’t look like a place to stop and stare, and that’s just the way the people who work there like it. The men and women who arrive in the watery dawn sunshine, dressed in Wall Street black, clutching black briefcases and BlackBerrys, are very, very private. They walk quickly from their black Lincoln town cars to the lobby, past, well, nothing, really. There’s no name plate on the building, no sign on the front desk and the armed policeman stationed outside isn’t saying who works there. There’s a good reason for the secrecy. Number 85 ...

Yes I quibble with Eliot, whose most famous poem, The Wasteland , began with the most famous disparagement of the month of April. November is the cruelest month in the calendar, bringing with it dead skies, the hint of winter and two of the most vivid memorials to our war dead... Veterans Day and the anniversary of Lincoln's Gettysburg address. On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the day we now know as Veteran's Day, we honor those who sacrificed their lives for the sake of the greater ideal of honor, courage and country. And on November 19th, 1863, Abraham Lincoln uttered less than 300 words in one of the most famous speeches ever given to honor those who died for their country. Let us always remember that neither Veteran's Day nor Lincoln's famous speech would have happened were it not for the incredible sacrifices of our soldiers. I will show you fear in a handful of dust... said Eliot in The Wasteland, a poem both famous and obscure of me...

Schmuck! That's if you're like most Americans and have seen the value of your retirement fund dip alarmingly with the collapse of the economy. Shoulda been a "top executive!" According to the WSJ , their pensions have risen an average of 19 percent in 2009 - with more than 200 excecs seeing a 50 percent increase in their pension... Also news in the WSJ, the private sector shed more than 200,000 jobs in October and big bonuses are back for Wall Street bankers ... The yin and yang of life in America.

Ayn Rand is all the rage these days (and unbeknownst to me, has apparently been all the rage in certain circles since her career as an author began), with current interest jacked up thanks to the publication of Anne Heller's biography of Rand . In catching up with my reading this weekend, I noticed Newsweek had a review of Rand cleverly called "Atlas Hugged." As I read it, I found myself irritated by some of the thoughts of the reviewer, who found The Fountainhead "a stunning evocation of the individual and what he can achieve when unhindered by government or society." The reviewer pulls a quote from The Fountainhead to support the assertion, a claim by Roark: "I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need... I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to ...

Walmart is getting into the death market. As in caskets and urns used for cremains. When planning a funeral, I suppose it's good to know that there are bargains to be had... Here's a link to the AP story , if you want more details. It's got a great lead: "The world's largest retailer wants to keep its customers even after they die."

…Cannot stand. Thus spoke Abraham Lincoln in an address to Illinois Republicans that he gave in 1858, two years prior to his assumption to the presidency. In his mind, the nation could no longer live half-slave, half-free. Shortly after Lincoln became president, the Civil War began, a terrible and bloody war waged to determine whether we’d live all slave or all free. We know the outcome of that war. Slavery ended with the Emancipation Proclamation. Today, this American house is again extremely divided... between the over-leveraged and the over-compensated. On the one hand, much of our house exists in chaos. Highest unemployment in decades (a rate that doesn't even include those who've given up the search for a job.) Hundreds of thousands of jobs lost each month. Consumer side of the financial system in a shambles. Still loaded with toxic assets. Still crumbling from the weight of consumer loans that consumers can no longer afford. Because as we’ve seen this y...

Richard J. Daley, the father, was known as "the kingmaker." As mayor and as head of Cook County Democratic Central Committee, he controlled the votes of one of the largest block of Democratic votes. Thus, back in the old days, when powerful Kennedys were plentiful, all Democrats seeking the highest political office in the land came to see Chicago's mayor, Richard J. Daley, the man from Bridgeport, hizzoner, the boss. The men who would be president would come to see to see this man who rose to prominence from very humble beginnings. Richard M. Daley, the son, is not a kingmaker. There's no one in America who thinks Daley is the reason Obama was elected president last year. The vast blocks of city voters have been chopped up, segmented into smaller chunks, often powered-up by single issues like abortion. In the third largest city in America, Daley is instead the king, ruling virtually unopposed in all areas. He came to power after a turbulent decade of non-...

He came to the swamplands of the Potomac swathed in a cloud of scandal. He's been ignored since the day he arrived at his new job. And today, my senator, Roland Burris, has me humming a little Janis Joplin right now (lyrics by the talented Kris Kristofferson)... "Freedom's just another word, for nothing left to lose And nothing's all that [Roddy] left me, yah." Yes, Roland Burris rolled into Washington with a a whole lotta nothing in his back pocket. He'd been handed the senate seat by a man charged with trying to sell it, Rod Blagojevich, the Kipling-quoting ex-gov of Illinois – and allegedly a future "Celebrity Apprentice" contestant. (Can one be The Donald's apprentice from behind bars? Because the ex-gov's someday going to stand trial on corruption charges and sometimes such things end up with a jail term....) So Roland Burris came to DC as a lame duck senator, with just two years left in the term Obama left when he became ...

What a strange world we live in. Rare film footage of the young girl whose diary became one of the most moving pieces of Holocaust literature has gone "viral." I find myself undeniably moved by the fact that the brief glimpse we have of Anne Frank in motion was shot to memorialize the wedding of a neighbor. Love and life amid the gathering storm clouds. The world depicted in that video seems unbearably normal. And yet all hell was about to break loose. Some links: NY Times story on the clip The Anne Frank Museum (If you ever have a chance to climb the steep stairs up to the secret annex, it's an experience I highly recommend.) From Anne's diary: "Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart."

For all those who truly, madly, deeply love the notion that rational minds move the invisible hand – this one's for you... If Tom Delay (is he wearing heels a la Ginger Rogers?!) dancing the cha cha to "Wild Thing" on Dancing with the Stars isn't enough to erase all dreams of rationality in America, then dream on baby! Or better yet - show me those rational threads that bind the fabric of America together... Here's the Bloomberg TV report on the event...

In the year since the crash, Goldman Sachs has been very busy, as you would expect of the financial giant. The company has paid back its TARP loan (with interest!) and, after some haggling , paid the full amount the fed wanted for its warrants (good citizenship!) And it's been very clear that it never needed the $12 bil that it got from AIG via the feds. Apparently, according to Gary Cohn, Goldman president, Goldman didn't need any of the extraordinary financial interventions it received in the last year. He's quoted in a NY Times story last August: "'We did not have a near-death experience,' said Gary D. Cohn, Goldman’s president. The government saved the financial industry as a whole, but it did not save Goldman Sachs, he said." And Goldman has also stated publicly that it has not changed the way it does business, and in fact, has profited hugely by the current business climate , the climate that seems quite chilly and foreboding to so man...

Over at Rortybomb , Mike Konzal and Jeffrey Friedman have engaged in a lively discussion on the role of regulation in the failure of the financial sector. Jeffrey Friedman is the editor of Critical Review , and a contributor to the Causes of the Crisis blog (a great resource for people like me who are seeking out various perspectives in an attempt to understand why the economy tanked so terribly.) Jeffrey believes the crisis is the result of regulation - specifically, no-recourse laws that many states had on the books that enabled consumers to walk away from mortgages they had no interest in paying back, and the Recourse Rule, which rated MBSs favorably, thus were more attractive to bankers. Since I'm not a banker or economist, I'll let Jeffrey explain the Recourse Rule : "Under the Recourse Rule, an AA- or AAA-rated asset-backed security, such as a mortgage-backed bond, received a 20-percent risk weight, compared to a zero risk weight for cash and a 50-percent r...

The most provocative line in last week's Newsweek is not the inflammatory headline that graced the cover, " the case for killing granny ." No, the most provocative line in the magazine comes on page 47 of the print edition, early in a story about Jamie Dimon , our post-millennial American hero, the man who somehow had the strength, courage and conviction to "eschew the siren call of investing in risky mortgage securities." (That's what passes for heroic these days in America - god bless us everyone...) The line I found most astonishing was this: "The only remaining question was whether it would be Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs to fail next." How's that for a bit of revisionist history?! Goldman Sachs on the verge of failure - at least according to those liberals over at Newsweek. That's trash talking there - language far more inflammatory than that bit about killing granny. Because Goldman, as we know, is the gold standard ...

Thanks to the recession, the Hyatt hotels in Boston have experienced a significant drop in revenues - 21 percent. The corporation's response to such challenging times? According to this story , they fired their housekeeping staff - approximately 100 people. In their place, Hyatt brought in 100 housekeepers who agreed to work for half ($8.00/hour vs. $15/hour) of what the fired employees had gotten. And no benefits. The fired workers had been getting health insurance through Hyatt. Here's how Hyatt characterized the move: "'As part of an ongoing drive to address challenging economic conditions, the Hyatt hotels of Boston have restructured their housekeeping services,’ according to a statement from the hotel. 'Regrettably, the restructuring included staff reductions.'" Bringing in employees to replace the ones you've fired is not a "staff reduction." It's a transformation of the workplace. It's letting go of people, so...

All I can say after reading the story in this month's GQ written by Matt Latimer, Republican speechwriter for George Bush is: no wonder we're swirling around in the toilet today. Some quotes from Latimer's story below... Matt learns about the impending crash... "Chris had just come from a secret meeting in the Oval Office, and without so much as a hello he announced: 'Well, the economy is about to completely collapse.' "'You mean the stock market?' I asked. "'No, I mean the entire U.S. economy,' he replied. As in, capitalism. As in, hide your money in your mattress. The secretary of the treasury, Hank Paulson, had sketched out a dire scenario. And Chris said we’d have to write a speech for the president announcing his 'bold' plan to deal with the crisis. (The president loved the word bold .) We had to reassure the American people that everything was going to be okay. As it turned out, Secretary Paulson had a pla...

One of the top stories in the Wall Street Journal this week is "Man vs. God," which asks Karen Armstrong, a religious writer and Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist to answer the same question: "Where does evolution leave God?" Leave aside for a moment the intriguing notion that the WSJ (whose readers tend to worship at the altar of Mammon) ran this story the week we commemorated both 9/11 and the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Let's look at how faith and biology influenced the answers of the two writers... Karen Armstrong starts out with a bang: "Evolution has indeed dealt a blow to the idea of a benign creator, literally conceived. It tells us that there is no Intelligence controlling the cosmos, and that life itself is the result of a blind process of natural selection, in which innumerable species failed to survive. The fossil record reveals a natural history of pain, death and racial extinction, so if there was a divine plan, it was cru...

The recession is "very likely over," Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told us today, exactly one year after Lehman filed for bankruptcy. The recession may be over, but we're still left with an economy that sheds jobs by the hundreds of thousands each month, a bank closure rate that has increased significantly since July, and TBTF financial institutions that are now even bigger one year after the collapse of the financial sector. The end of the recession is not the end of pain . Though the economy is "growing," so, too, is the unemployment rate. In response to Bernanke's cheery update, stocks rose today to its highest finish since October 6th, 2008. And gold likes what Ben has to say ... Additional links below.... Newseek called it weeks before Bernanke did - in its its 8/3/09 issue WSJ declared recession's end on 8/11/09

U.S. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff today overturned the $33 million settlement hammered out between the SEC and BoA over the $3.6 billion in Merrill Lynch bonuses paid to execs just prior to Merrill's merge with BoA. (A deal to pay the bonuses, agreed to in secrecy, without notifying shareholders, allegedly.) In his ruling , the judge concludes the agreement "does not comport with the most elementary notions of justice and morality...." "Morality" - a rarely used word in today's business climate. The judge takes issue with the settlement because it "...proposes that the shareholders who were the victims of the alleged misconduct now pay the penalty for that misconduct." Which, according to Rakoff, makes such a settlement "neither fair, nor reasonable, nor adequate." Apparently he believes the people who allegedly lied to the shareholders about an extremely costly and secret business deal should be left holding the bag... not ...

Two fascinating stories coming out of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) . First, a release issued by CBPP on 9/10/09 has this to say about the state of our economy: "Poverty increased, median household income fell, and the percentage of Americans with employer-based health coverage continued to decline in 2008...." Seems "trickle down" never worked all that well for those on the down-side of the policies. However, there was good news in a release issued by CBPP on 9/9/09 - for the top income earners: "Two-thirds of the nation’s total income gains from 2002 to 2007 flowed to the top 1 percent of U.S. households, and that top 1 percent held a larger share of income in 2007 than at any time since 1928..." Seems Bush/Cheney knew how to enact policies that really rewarded their base - at the expense of everyone else. Links to the releases below.... Poverty Rose, Median Income Declined, and Job-Based Health Insurance Continued to W...

Health care costs are careening out of control - in the last decade, employer-provided premiums have risen 119 percent - four times the rate of inflation and wages, according to the National Coalition on Health Care. The number of uninsured Americans has grown to 46.3 million, an increase attributed to the job losses seen in the last year. Providing and paying for health care in America is seriously flawed these days. Thus, there is a push for reform. The president appears before Congress to outline key goals and provide motivation to affect change in this area. And what happens? Joe Wilson (R-SC) shouts out mid-speech that the president is a liar. It was, according to the NY Times , a rare breach of protocol. If you've got children, you know this kind of screeching happens all the time on the playground. And you know that calling someone a liar is never an appropriate way to solve a problem - especially when the other person isn't lying. At this time of...

On Friday, we began the Labor Day weekend with news that unemployment has increased to 9.7 percent. If you add in the figures for underemployment, the percentage of Americans who are not working as productively as they'd like is now almost 17 percent . As Robert Reich, former US Secretary of Labor, says: "Bottom line: almost one out of six Americans who need a full-time job either can't find one or is working part-time." So on Labor Day, the day we honor the achievements of labor, many of us lit up the barbecue feeling a bit queasy about our future prospects for employment. Today, the work week begins anew (for those of us who are gainfully employed.) And today, we sent our children off to school where they may or may not get to hear a highly controversial speech given by the president of the United States. The president's intention from the start was to "challenge students to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their lea...