Ward on Words

It seems we have come a long way since the conversation about the "pube on the coke can" that we all heard about during the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. And there seems to be (at least for now) less outrage expressed about Sonia Sotomayor than that which erupted over the Bork nomination for SCOTUS way back in the Reagan era. And though I confess I haven't read obsessively about Obama's pick for the US Supreme Court, I haven't heard the word "abortion" bandied about much over the nominee. No, the buzz that's racing through the blogosphere about Sonia Sotomayor, Obama's first nominee for the Supreme Court, is focused on a single word. Empathy. Though the Republicans have not yet made it known if they're going to "bork" Sotomayer's nomination, we should be heartened, I guess, that much of the chatter swirling about the nomination of Sonia Sotomayer concerns the quality of her "empa...

"Despite the vast outpouring of commentary and outrage over the financial crisis, one of its most fundamental causes has received surprisingly little attention. I refer to the perverse incentives built into the compensation plans of many financial firms, incentives that encourage excessive risk-taking with OPM -- Other People's Money." That's how Alan Blinder's article in today's Wall Street Journal opens - by calling the Wall Street method of compensating its employees "perverse." Is the world coming to an end? Am I dreaming? A smack-down of Wall Street salaries in the WSJ seems too good to be true. Not clear if we are nearing Armageddon, but I'm definitely not dreaming. The WSJ is running an article attacking the compensation plans of the financial community. Now THIS is change we need! And Blinder isn't just talking about the highly publicized federally-funded bonuses granted to AIG and Merrill Lynch. He's talking about how...

Since learning of the massive bonuses earned by the Wall Street execs who drove their firms (and the economy) off a cliff last fall, I've been wondering a lot about what happened to the English language to render a "bonus" something granted to a highly paid executive - no matter what. I had always thought (and had always experienced) a bonus to be a reward for superior performance. Not, as we've seen this year, something expected in return for running a business into the ground and taking the nation's economy down with it. So I was thrilled to read an essay by Jon Danielsson and Con Keating on Vox explaining just how the bonus culture took over the financial community. Once upon a time in finance, according to Danielsson & Keating, bonuses were rewards for success. That changed when the financial partnerships that once were the norm in finance were replaced by limited liability corporations: "Partnerships have disappeared over time, and the p...

As an institution, the Catholic Church is a strong and forceful advocate for life. Thus, abortion is morally reprehensible. Birth control is wrong. The death penalty is murder. As the protesters made clear when President Obama was speaking at the very Catholic University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana last week, life is what matters. Unless you are child in the protection of a Catholic orphanage or reform school in Ireland. Then your life is worth very little, in the eyes of the church. Last week, an Irish commission into the abuse of children by Catholic clerics released a report documenting the horrors inflicted by priests and nuns on children. Rapes. Scaldings. Beatings. Molestations. It seems that Dick Cheney's advocacy of waterboarding pales in comparison to the tortures inflicted by the religious on defenseless children. And the Catholic Church's torture of children went on for decades. The report covers the abuse that occurred from 1930 to...

Ahhh, Chicago. Broad shouldered, broken nosed, belligerent. Filled with a thirst for confrontation. Mancow Muller , the nationally syndicated deejay based in Chicago, epitomizes the belligerent version of Chicago masculinity. Today, he underwent waterboarding during his "free speech radio network" program, thinking he'd prove all the experts wrong - he was going to show that it was not torture at all. It took less than ten seconds and not quite a gallon of water to make him think otherwise. Though he hated to say it, it was "way worse" than he thought it would be. According to Mancow, waterboarding was "absolutely torture." Click here to see a video of Mancow's encounter with torture for yourself. Enjoy the long weekend. Memorial Day, the day of remembrance for all those who've died in the nation's service, is on Monday.

Dick Cheney wants transparency. Finally, after eight years claiming executive privilege to prevent the release of key information, Dick Cheney wants full disclosure of certain memos surrounding the use of torture. He's calling for such openness as a way to help President Obama make the right choices for defending our country. As Dick Cheney himself says , "...whatever choices [President Obama] makes concerning the defense of this country, those choices should not be based on slogans and campaign rhetoric, but on a truthful telling of history." Which is why Dick Cheney yesterday gave a speech to the American Enterprise Institute, an organization devoted to strengthening the foundations of freedom, so that he could truthfully share with us the history of the world as he sees it. Of course, the AEI is the perfect place for Dick Cheney to have given this speech - if you look at their website, they proudly share their belief that the "competition of ideas is ...

Today, May 21 2009, we had the unprecedented experience of having two very powerful Americans talk very publicly about their views on the use of torture in keeping America safe. Think about it. At this moment in our history, with the economy in the toilet and our troops deployed in two wars, we're talking about whether or not the United States should continue to torture prisoners of war. We talked about whether we should waterboard enemy combatants. Throw men against the wall in an effort to make them talk. Use state-sanctioned torture to protect the interests of America. President Obama spoke today on the subject of national security at the National Archives. This is where the U.S. Constitution lives. Where the original Declaration of Independence can be found. This is home for the documents that outlined the attempts of a new country to govern in a new way - democratically. Our president spoke at that place on this day to inform the nation of the reasons why w...

There's been much discussion of the value and impact of the recent bank stress tests. Saturday Night Live offers its interpretation: I give that skit an A for effort....

Royal Dutch Shell shareholders are not happy. Here's what NY Times Dealbook blog is reporting: "Shareholders, angered by lofty executive pay in a time of dwindling earnings, turned their wrath on Royal Dutch Shell on Tuesday, voting against compensation packages for senior management, The New York Times’s Julia Werdigier reports from London." The vote is not binding. But it represents a significant change in the usual rubber stamp shareholders have given in the past to these compensation packages. Perhaps the rabble is coming around to understand that the investment in executives has shown poor returns in recent months. And perhaps the executives will take note of the rabble's rage. But knowing how dear and how beloved the compensation packages are to top execs, I'll bet they get what they want, rabble be damned. Some links below if you want to read more... NY Times dealbook blog post Shell's investor center My 6, 2009 letter from Sir P...

With Rod Blagojevich, former governor of Illinois, tied up in his trial for corruption, there remains a spot open on the NBC reality TV show "I'm a Celebrity... Get me Out of Here." And according to the Chicago Tribune , Rod's wife, Potty-Mouth Patty, is the celebrity NBC wants to fill the spot. So let's take a look at Patty's celebrity status for a minute.... *She's famous for being married to the crook who tried to sell an US senate seat to the highest bidder. *She's famous for her extensive vocabulary in swear words, caught on tape and released to the world via the federal investigation into her husband's corruption. *She's a tiny bit famous for being the daughter of a Chicago alderman, with all the baggage that comes with such a title. You know what? I am sick of these types of celebrities. Sign her up and ship her out! Let her have her fun clawing her way back to Illinois as part of this TV show....

The head spins trying to take it all in. The numbers. The spreads. The math. The odds. The payout. No it's not the odds of the filly winning the Belmont Stakes. It's a discussion of PPIP, the US government's private-public investment plan to unload the toxic assets from the balance books of the banks. Apparently the private organizations will do well under the plan. The public gets fleeced. At least according to Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs, in a post that I found on Vox. Here's his take on PPIP: "Specifically, the FDIC is lending money at a low interest rate and on a non-recourse basis even though the FDIC is likely to experience a massive default on its loans to the investment funds. The FDIC subsidy shows up as a bid price for the toxic assets that is far above $360 billion. In essence, the FDIC is transferring hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer wealth to the banks." And the reason Americans aren't marching ...

Stumbled across a frightening story in the Financial Times (sad when terror can be found in the pages of a financial rag, but these are those kind of days!) A couple of weeks ago, when writing in FT about the fed's Public-Private Investment Program, Lucien Bebchuk asked this question: "Should banks with large amounts of troubled assets be allowed to participate as managers or investors in funds set up under the US’s public-private investment programme?" I'm astonished that such a question is even being asked. Apparently, it is not merely rhetorical. According to Bebchuck, "media reports indicate that some such banks are considering participating in funds established under the administration’s programme." I've learned lately that Wall Street is an alternative universe, a place where bonuses are not rewards for successful behavior, but legal obligations bankrupt firms must honor no matter what. A place where great brains thought it would pr...

Last fall, the US Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, came to Congress and said that if we did not lay out a massive "tarp" to catch the financial industry from its freefall, there would be no more US economy on Monday. Congress listened. The money was fed to the banks. Since October, they've received a very fluffy financial cushion from the feds, a cushion that seems backed by a "fluffy forever!" promise from the US government. In the Chicago Tribune today, we get a glimpse into what life is like when people who are not bankers find themselves in an financial freefall as a result of the terrible economy. Here's how the Trib's story begins: "This is how fast it can happen: One day Patrick Robbins was a sportswear buyer at Mark Shale earning $110,000 a year. The next day he was laid off, with no severance. Within a week, the family was on Medicaid and had applied for food stamps. Soon his mother-in-law was bringing over toilet paper and...

Spending the last eight years in a bunker seems to have left Dick Cheney giddy with gabbiness after emerging into the bright lights of his post-(vice) presidential life. In fact, he now seems unwilling to yield the spotlight to anyone else - except perhaps to Rush Limbaugh. During his reign as the nation's second in command, he seemed strangely silent, except when he trolled the hallways of the capital looking for votes for torture, money for Halliburton and support for the war in Iraq. In retrospect, it seemed that Cheney spent the best years of his vice-presidency yammering about Iraq's threat to the world... Iraq's connection to Al Qaeda... Iraq's possession of nuclear weapons. He proved highly adept at spinning falsehoods as truth. There was a time, certainly, when much of the nation was convinced we were about to be blown up in an Iraqi-initiated mushroom cloud. So we made the preemptive strike against Iraq to protect ourselves from their massive stockpi...

Just weeks ago, we were heralding the arrival of the green shoots - the recovery, we were told, was blooming alongside of spring. So it seemed a short time ago. Today, while the lilacs bloom all around me (reminding me of Whitman - and of Lincoln), it seems the green shoots of recovery are withering on the vine. With Memorial Day - the official start of summer - still in the not-so-distant future, gas prices in my area have jumped up more than fifty cents in the last week or so. (One imagines what the price of gas will be like in July - and one remembers the impact the price of gas had on consumer spending last summer.) And even before gas prices began to go up, consumers had begun to hang on to their money - according to a story in the Wall Street Journal, the April retail season was not abloom with spending. In fact it was the second month in a row to post declines in retail spending. Here's to hoping that those folks getting the bonuses will start spending like mad...

...Once upon a time there was an old lady, an ancient lady, bent over from age and the cares of the world. And one day, this frail, elderly woman found herself being chased by seven violently angry men. In an effort to escape the violence of the rage-filled men, she bounded up a very steep hill with surprising agility, for one so old and decrepit. The seven angry men chased after the bent, ancient woman because they hated her – enraged because she'd given an apple to their housekeeper, a gift that was perceived by the men to be a terrible threat to the woman who cooked and cleaned for them. So the ancient crone found herself on top of a cliff, fighting for her very life. As she worked to push a boulder down to crush the men and save herself, fate intervened - a bolt of lightening hit the cliff where she stood, toppling the ancient crone off the cliff. Lightening struck; the old lady fell a dreadful fall to her death; the seven angry men rejoiced in her demise. Interesti...

Workers continue to lose jobs! Unemployment rate in the U.S. has risen to 8.9 percent! That's the news out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics today. And yesterday, the Treasury Department rejoiced in their discovery that 19 of the biggest American banks could lose nearly $600 billion by the end of 2010, if the economy worsens! Other good news out of Treasury - ten of these 19 banks are now required to raise billions as a capital cushion! More than half of our biggest banks are teetering on the wire without an appropriate safety net! All this good news leaves me feeling like I'm inhabiting a Terry Gilliam movie. Why do I feel gloom instead of joy when reading these stories? What am I missing? According to the NY Times , the jobs report was "pretty encouraging." Because the loss of 539,000 jobs in April was not nearly as big a slide as we've seen in previous months (699,000 in March, 681,000 in February, 741,000 in January), the green shoot in th...

Dana Milbank's story in today's Washington Post is like a sprig of forsythia - a bright bloom amidst a bleak wintery backdrop of doubt and debt. Milbank starts the story with a rhetorical statement: "Maybe Barack Obama is really The One." And apparently the president ranks among those considered to have god-like qualities because of all the good news we're hearing today: "The economy? Recovering. The markets? Rallying. Swine flu? Abating. Drought? Ending." Such a difference 105 days makes! Just a few months ago, under Bush, the economy was so catastrophically battered that the government had to spend trillions to prop it up. And now, recovery blooms brightly this spring. But is it true? Or have we become caught up in a bubble of irrational exuberance once again? Matthew Richardson and Nouriel Roubini are not nearly as giddy today as Milbank. In fact, they're kind of like a frost waiting to kill the lovely yellow blooms spring...

When listening to NPR yesterday, I heard an interview with Callie Shell, Time's White House photographer, a story that included an interesting comment about Obama's changes to the Oval Office: "When presidents move into the White House, they often put their own mark on the space with photos on the wall and various personal knickknacks. Shell says that Obama hasn't done much to the Oval Office. 'To me, he appeared to go in the first day and just start working,' she says. 'He wants the room to look good and make people feel welcome. And I've heard him say that, 'This is the people's Oval Office.'" So the most powerful man in America made the decision when he took office at a moment of crisis to leave decorating decisions aside for the time being, choosing instead to focus his energy on developing solutions for the myriad problems the nation faces today. The Oval Office, says Callie Shel, remains essentially as it did when Bush was...