Huffington sleep challenge

Arianna Huffington has invited women to join her sleep challenge. The concern is that many women (and there's no compelling reason to limit this endeavor to women) are sleep deprived. Huffington's challenge is for each of the participants to get a full night's sleep every night for the next month--it's a "sleep boot camp." The benefits for those who succeed are substantial:

Work decisions, relationship challenges, any life situation that requires you to know your own mind -- they all require the judgment, problem-solving and creativity that only a rested brain is capable of and are all handled best when you bring to them the creativity and judgment that are enhanced by sleep. "Everything you do, you'll do better with a good night's sleep," says Dr. [Michael Breus , Ph.D., author of Beauty Sleep: Look Younger, Lose Weight, and Feel Great Through Better Sleep.] Yet women who constantly push themselves to get by on less never know what that "peak performance" feels like.

Seventeen hours of sustained wakefulness leads to a decrease in performance equivalent to a blood alcohol level of 0.05% (two glasses of wine). Sleeping can thus be a matter of life and death. "Driver fatigue, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, causes over 100,000 accidents and 1500 deaths each year. " Being well-rested also assists with weight loss, which could benefit the majority of Americans. How much sleep does an adult need? It varies. For most adults, it's between 7-9 hours per night. WebMD suggests this test: "if you feel drowsy during the day, even during boring activities, you haven't had enough sleep." The National Sleep Foundation offers this strategy to avoid the temptation of staying up:

Most importantly, make sleep a priority. You must schedule sleep like any other daily activity, so put it on your "to-do list" and cross it off every night. But don’t make it the thing you do only after everything else is done – stop doing other things so you get the sleep you need.

I know two men who have rarely slept more than 4 hours per night and both of them seem to operate a a high level during the day. This makes me jealous, of course, because while they are happily awake, I am "wasting" my life away in bed. Both of these two men claim that their father's also only needed 4 hours of sleep, which suggests that they were blessed with good genes, whereas I got the standard set that requires 7 or 8 hours of sleep per night. If only I could sleep 4 hours per night instead of 7 (and if I could operate at a high level on that amount), that would add up to the equivalent of an extra (365 x 4 = 182) 8-hour work days every year. Imagine the additional things I could get done! Even cutting one hour off the sleep that I seem to need for optimum performance would "get" me that equivalent of an extra 45 8-hour work days each year. No wonder it's so tempting to stay up too late each night . . . An extended sleep camp of an entire month is a good idea because research shows that we carry a "sleep debt" that can't be resolved with one or two good nights sleep. That sleep debt seems to carry over for about two weeks, according to William Dement, author of The Promise of Sleep. I'm going to accept Huffington's invitation to join her sleep challenge (even though I'm not a woman). I want to see what it's like to feel super-charged during the day. I tend to stay up too long in order to read one more article or write one more post. And most of my late-night reading or writing is done using the Internet, which is highly engaging thanks to the ability to surf from site to site at one's whim. This constant change of scene is difficult to turn off--producers of television shows and commercials know this very well. Therefore, part of my plan will be to get away from the computer before it gets to be late night. I've never fallen asleep at the computer, though I have often fallen asleep while reading a book in bed--I usually wake up much later with the book still on top of me! Reading in bed is much safer (and I think that I absorb the material better when I'm reading real paper--plus I'm a prolific author of marginalia). What would you pay for a drug that super-charged you; made you smarter, healthier, gave you increased attention, better reaction times and made you all-around happier? Ten dollars per day would be a bargain, but it's all free for anyone with the discipline to wind up the day on time and turn out the lights.

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Strange bedfellows fight for reform of Wall Street

Huffpo's Ryan Grim brings us up to speed on a broad coalition that is revving up to reform Wall Street:

On Thursday evening, a roomful of people more accustomed to fighting each other met to unite against a common enemy: Wall Street. The forces that are gathering against the bankers include energy companies, airlines, truckers, farmers and other end users of derivatives, along with unions, consumer advocates and a host of progressive organizations.

Continue ReadingStrange bedfellows fight for reform of Wall Street

Newly released AIG emails further impugn Tim Geithner

What would you think about the Federal Reserve Bank of New York telling AIG to intentionally withheld from public scrutiny that AIG was paying 100 cents on the dollar for credit default swaps at the same time that AIG was crying for a bailout from the public, thereby hiding from the public that the public was functionally bailing out Goldman Sachs and other large banks? What would you think about the fact that Tim Geithner headed the New York Federal Reserve when this was going on? Eliot Spitzer, William K. Black and Frank Partnoy sum up the issue:

Today, a Bloomberg story revealed that under Timothy Geithner's leadership, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York told AIG to withhold details from the public about its payments to banks during the crisis. This information was discovered when emails between the company and the Fed were requested by representative Darrell Issa, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Who owns AIG? The taxpayers own 80% of it. Therefore, AIG should release the emails. Who can and should make this decision?
The taxpayer's stake in AIG is held by the A.I.G. Credit Facility Trust, whose three trustees are Jill M. Considine, a former chairman of the Depository Trust Company and a former director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; Chester B. Feldberg, a former New York Fed official who was chairman of Barclays Americas from 2000 to 2008; and Douglas L. Foshee, chief executive of the El Paso Corporation and chairman of the Houston branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. We call on these three officials (interestingly all former Fed officials) to immediately release the documents we request. The value of these documents, if it were ever in doubt, was certainly proved by today's revelations. Release the emails.
See also, this earlier post on a NYT op-ed by Spitzer, Black and Partnoy.

Continue ReadingNewly released AIG emails further impugn Tim Geithner

Report thousands of crimes? Go to prison. Commit thousands of crimes? No problem.

Check out this incredible display of hypocrisy vividly demonstrating the raw power of money. It's a story about Bradley Birkenfeld published at DemocracyNow by Amy Goodman. Birkenfeld was a banker for the Swiss giant UBS. In 2007, he "blew the whistle on the biggest tax evasion scheme in US history." He is preparing to head to prison tomorrow to begin serving a forty-month federal sentence. The written record is clear that Birkenfeld provided inside information to the U.S. Senate, to the IRS and the Justice Department demonstrating that more than 19,000 Americans have been hiding vast amounts of financial assets in secret UBS Swiss accounts. None of these tax cheats--they have all cheated the U.S. government out of substantial tax revenue--is spending any time in jail. Who are these tax cheats who hid more than $20 billion from the U.S. government in secret Swiss accounts? Their names have not been disclosed according to Stephen Kohn, Birkenfeld's attorney:

[T]hey’re all very rich people, very powerful people. They could be judges. They could be senators. They’re all rich. They’re all probably very powerful in their local communities. How guilty were they? . . . Every year they checked a box that was a lie on their tax form that permitted them to hide millions and millions in assets. Each time they checked that box, they committed a felony. So if they were doing it for fifteen, twenty years, these are large felonies.
But wasn't there a possibility that these wealthy American tax cheats could have gotten caught without Birkenfeld's efforts? After all, weren't these rich tax cheats receiving bank statements from an big overseas bank? Nope. That "problem" was taken care of by a special arrangement between the bank and each of its tax cheat customers. According to Stephen Kohn:
They also had this thing called “mail hold.” The Swiss bank would never send them a letter, so no one could ever track it down. It was personal between that millionaire cheater and the bank. And all of their mail would be held in a secret vault. So when they traveled to Switzerland, they could sit and open all their mail, all their receipts, all their statements, and then shred them when they were done looking at them. In other words, the bank was actively facilitating the fraud, but each client was actively engaged. And these were not small frauds. These were major frauds by millionaires and billionaires. And right now, the American people don’t know who they were. Think of that. Fourteen thousand multimillionaires and, we know, billionaires had illegal accounts for years. They hold positions of authority in the United States. And the Justice Department has essentially given cover to every single one of them.
But wait! Why is Birkenfeld going to prison? Well, U.S. authorities have accused him of helping his own billionaire client hide assets--a man named Igor Olenicoff. Olenicoff ended up getting probation while Birkenfeld is going to spend four years in the slammer. All of this goes to show you that there are some mighty powerful unwritten laws here in the United States. We are a country of two versions of justice, one for the rich and another for the poor. What kind of justice do the poor get? Consider another example: 750,000 people are arrested for possession of marijuana every year, the equivalent to the entire population of South Dakota. At the same time, large monied pharmaceutical companies crank out expensive drugs that mimic virtually every street drug out there, perfectly legally and in many cases financed by the U.S. Medicare system. Yes, there are two versions of justice here in the U.S. It reminds me of that famous quote by Anatole France:
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
Anyone, rich or poor, who wants to cheat the U.S. government by stashing their possessions in an overseas bank account is welcome to do so. But if you cheat the government out of food stamps, God help you. Anyone who wants to produce mind-altering medication by starting their own pharmaceutical company is allowed to do so under the law. But if you grow marijuana at home, you'll face the full weight of the law.

Continue ReadingReport thousands of crimes? Go to prison. Commit thousands of crimes? No problem.