Matt Taibbi asks: “Why isn’t Wall Street in jail?”

At DemocracyNow, Matt Taibbi discusses why, on Wall Street, Nobody goes to jail."

Every single former investigator or current investigator that I talked to said the same thing: Madoff went to jail because the wrong people suffered. You know, it was famous actors. It was, you know, the glitterati in New York. If these were teachers and firemen and all the usual suspects—you know, look at the—we have a million people in foreclosure in this country right now, and a lot of them are there because of predatory lending and because of this fraud scheme, but there are no criminal prosecutions. I think that’s the reality now, is that we don’t see anybody being criminally targeted unless their victims were powerful people themselves. We have two-and-a-half million people in jail this country, you know, more than a million who are in jail for nonviolent crimes. And yet, we couldn’t find a single person on Wall Street to do even a day in jail for losing 40 percent of the world’s wealth in a criminal fraud scheme? And that tells you that we have—this goes beyond the cliché that rich people have better lawyers and they have an advantage. This is a step beyond that. This is a situation where the system is completely corrupted, and it’s true regulatory capture. The SEC and the Justice Department are essentially subsidiaries of Wall Street.

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We Are Not Parts

I’ll admit up front that I’m shooting from the hip here. There are many aspects to what is happening in Wisconsin right now with parallels to several past instances in the country in the fight over workers’ rights, unions, and moneyed interests, but I frankly don’t have the time to research them all right now and get something up before it all comes to a head. Isn’t it interesting, though, that we are collectively cheering what is happening in the Middle East right now and something similar is happening right here and people don’t seem to be paying attention to what’s at stake? I grant you, it’s a stretch. But on principles, not so much. We’re talking about who has the right to speak to power and over what. The protesters in Madison aren’t having their internet access and phone service pulled and it’s doubtful the military will be called in, but on the other hand the Wisconsin state police are being asked to go get the now-labeled Wisconsin 14 and bring them back to the state capitol to vote on something that is clearly a stripping of the right of petition and assembly. So this can become very quickly a constitutional issue and that’s scary, because right now the Supreme Court has been decidedly against workers’ rights. Governor Scott is at least being clear. I’ll give him credit, he’s not ducking questions about what he’s trying to do. Wisconsin, like many states, has a budget crisis. He’s already gotten concessions from the unions, a lot of money. The unions have not balked at doing their civic duty in terms of agreeing to pay cuts, freezes on raises, and some concessions on benefits to help the state meet its budgetary responsibilities. But he’s going further and asking that all these unions be stripped of their collective bargaining abilities in order to make sure they never again demand something from the state that the legislature or the governor believes they don’t deserve. In other words, Governor Scott doesn’t ever want to have to sit down and ask them for concessions ever again—he wants to be able to just take what he wants. [More . . . ]

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Republicans Poised to Reap Huge Gains Because of Illegal Aliens Counted in the 2010 Census

In one of the most ironic twists of the political fates of the Century, the Republican Party stands to gain additional seats in the U.S. House of Representatives because the law apparently requires the Census Bureau to count illegal aliens. Those numbers are to be included in the final count which determines the allocation of the nation’s 435 US House of Representatives seats in the U.S. Congress, the allocation of Electors to the Electoral College and the allocation of federal tax dollars to the various states. The 435 U.S. House of Representatives districts will all be re-drawn in the next year or so as a result of the 2010 census results. Texas and Florida will gain four new seats, Arizona two. New York and Pennsylvania will be the big losers. Missouri will lose one seat. The new lines and districts will remain in place until the next decennial census in 2020. The recently completed Census data includes the numbers of illegal aliens in US, estimated at 10.8 million, down by over a million since the Bush administration left office. The average population of US House districts is around 700,000. You are invited to do the math if you have any doubts. States with largest numbers of illegal aliens have shown the largest growth in population and will get larger numbers of US House seats, including Texas, Arizona and Florida. [More . . . ]

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On the value of friendship

In the Wilson Quarterly, Daniel Akst writes about the importance of friendship and the fact that modern distractions are seducing Americans into failing to appreciate or maintain valuable friendships. He defines friendship as "a state of strong mutual affection in which sex or kinship isn't primary." What are the important things that friends do?

It's available to everyone, offering concord and even intimacy without aspiring to be all-consuming. Friends do things for us that hardly anybody else can, yet ask nothing more than friendship in return (though this can be a steep price if we take friendship as seriously as we should).
Here are the disturbing statistics. Half of American adults are unmarried and more than a quarter live alone. A recent survey shows that Americans had one third fewer friends than we did two decades earlier. "A quarter of us had no such confidants at all." None of this is surprising given that so many of us find ourselves rushing around working so that we can afford things we don't really need. Akst also cites to the work of Barbara Ehrenreich, who suggest that we fail to develop friendships like we used to because it takes too much of an investment. She blames the "cult of conspicuous busyness" which we pursue to attain "status and perverse comfort even as it alienates us from one another." Stir in children, spouses and our all too willingness to move in search of jobs that pay more, and we have a social environment that is downright hostile to friendships. None of this is mitigated by the 130 "friends" that the average Facebook user has. What are we doing in search of this mutual affection in the absence of friends? We have lots of talk therapists, of course. As Akst notes, Americans also own immense numbers of non-human pets, and these seem to be serving as substitutes for friends. Akst has written a thoughtful piece on friendship in which he stirs in psychology, sociology, philosophy and this conclusion:
[Friendship is] one of life's highest pleasures… It's time for us to ease up on friending, re-think our downgrade of ex-lovers to "just" friends, and resist moving far away from everyone we know barely because it rains less elsewhere.

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Effective people

I think that this useful article is misnamed. It's called "10 ways you know you're with smart people," but I don't think of people as "smart" unless they are hard-working, they have kind hearts and they know how to work well with those around them. I've repeatedly learned over the years to simply being "smart" doesn't cut it. Ever. Further, I don't think that the items in the list ways to necessarily know you're with "smart" people. What it does seem to be is a good collection of some of the important characteristics of highly functional people. I haven't always worked with highly functional people, but I've noticed the characteristics of the article's list in the people I currently work with (I'm fortunate to work with a highly regarded law firm in St. Louis). Every day is an exciting and rewarding (sometimes exhausting) experience, and we have a lot to show for our efforts. But very little of this could have happened simply by having "smart" people around. It takes much more to have a functional workplace. Many people are "smart" in the sense that they know a lot of things, but this article contains a list of some of the important things that "smart" people do in order to truly get the job done. Some of the main things they do is to keep their focus, think innovatively, be ready to risk failure and work hard to draw the best performances out of each other. For those of you who are in highly functional workplaces, I suspect that you see many of these sorts of things in your co-workers too.

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