Dan Loeb Shouted Down (sort of.....)

ok people, i'm back after a long - read 'default from the inception of this blog' - hiatus.  here's what's been on my mind.  it's a little disjointed, and feels like the start of something that i'd like to write more of later, so for the moment bear with me:

lately, the CII (council of institutional investors http://www.cii.org/) - private/public pension plans, retirement funds, etc - gathered for its annual meeting in DC to discuss all things pension-ey:  corporate governance, due diligence (translation: is my investment manager bernie madoff?) managing & meeting liabilities (translation: how the fucking hell will we pay for the retirement benefits of, well, everyone) and of course, everyone's favorite, achieving higher returns on investments which, thanks to wild underfunding, the 2008 financial crisis and a shit ton of marketing by the alternative asset management industry, have been increasingly heaped in private equity and hedge funds. 

among the many luminaries of this year's speaker faculty was dan loeb, founder and billionaire CEO of third point capital - a hedge fund.  Taibbi recently wrote about the sick audacity of loeb, an opponent of defined benefit pension plans, who had intended to speak to the CII in order to raise money from the very pension funds/retirement plans whose fundamental design and utility he was gunning to shred. 

just FYI, a defined pension fund plan is one that returns a portion of one's income during retirement, rather than simply returning private savings plus earnings on investments from a private account, such as a 401K.  us social security is the most recognizable example, followed by CalPERS (california public employee retirement system), CalSTRS (california state teachers retirement system) and other PERS.

facing organized questioning on his policy stance from numerous pension fund officers, loeb dropped out of the program.

it's a delightful little headline, and who knows - loeb might have had interesting things to say about the industry and he might have also been inclined to address the outrageous under performance of most (not all) hedge funds since 2007 - but the fact remains that there is something rotten in the state of alternative investment hype. 

some basic background on hedge funds  - broadly defined as 'giant pool of money with official permission to gamble on a broadly approved collection of financial instruments.'  to make money, hedge funds place bets and charge a two-tiered fee for their efforts: two percent on net assets under management and 20% performance on all investments  - the infamous 2 & 20. 


loeb, along with many of his fellow hedge fund moguls and private equity cousins, solicit pension fund money while simultaneously lobbying for the deeper evisceration of public finances.  an end to defined benefit plans and a broader conversion to investment-based (defined-contribution) plans.  lucrative for investment managers, and probably neatly profitable for people living well above a teacher's salary. 

now, if it were the case (as it sometimes is) that pension funds were earning FAR MORE on their alternative investments (pe/hf) than the rest of their portfolios, then we'd be in an even deeper quagmire.  MORE ON THIS IN A LATER POST.  but as it is, MOST hedge funds have utterly failed to outperform the S&P 500 and practically every other stock index.  meaning, pension funds can earn more money investing in stocks picked, at random, from the wall street journal, than by investing in most 2 & 20 hedge fund schemes. 

and yet, managers like loeb lobby to undermine the retirement security of public workers on one hand, while raking in fees on their investments with the other - often without delivering on promises of competitive returns. 





broad view to be developed in future posts:  public finance was whipped by a whirlwind financial crisis, brought about by institutions patently too large to fail or to police (another post!).  Facing a retiring baby generation of baby boomers and bleeding capital to fraud (another post - read LIBOR, etc), catastrophic incompetence and amoral profiteering (read 2008) and a shrinking tax base, they are encouraged to stake their survival on investments with the very institutions that lobby hardest against the regulation and public infrastructure that preserve and provide retirement capital.

let's not even get into the private equity & jobs question (ANOTHER POST!)

Gun Control: a reminder that, in the Senate, 1 person=1 vote does not apply

I was just reading the NY Times Article about how gun control never had a chance, and it got me thinking about how the elephant in the room - that American Citizens are not equally represented in the Senate - was not mentioned once.  I don't fault author Jennifer Steinhauer for leaving out this fact.  After all, what is to be done? But still, I thought it was worth taking a closer look to see if unequal representation of voters in the senate is, in part, to blame for this enormous legislative failure.

 Near the beginning of the article, author Jennifer Steinhauer quotes President Obama citing a now widely-publicized statistic: that 90% of Americans support more gun control legislation. How is it that the senate can't pass legislation that's supported by over 90% of Americans, Obama asked.

Steinhauer's answer is, "the [same] reason Democrats have avoided gun control fights for years: combination of the political anxiety of vulnerable Democrats from conservative states, deep-seated Republican resistance and the enduring clout of the National Rifle Association."

That makes sense, especially when you look at the number of democratic senators who represents states which voted against President Obama in the 2012 election.  But there is a big piece that's missing: U.S. Voters are not equally represented in the senate. Each state, regardless of population size, has 2 senators.  That means that the state with the smallest population, Wyoming (which has .18% of the country's population) has the same number of senators as the state with largest population, California (which has 11.91% of the country's population) each receive 2 senators.  Therefore, the person living in Wyoming's vote "matters" 66 times more than the person in California's vote. Another way to think about this unequal distribution is that less than 20% of the country's population elects 50% of the U.S. Senators.

So how did this weighted vote system affect gun control?

There were 21 states in which both senators from that state voted "No" on the legislation. The states that those Senators hail from contain, cumulatively, 33.08% of the U.S. population, based on the 2010 Census.   And those 21 states control 41% of the Senate vote (because they each have two senators: 21x2=42). So, that's not that bad, right?  33% of the population controlling 41% of the vote.  It's not totally equal, but it's nothing to write home crying about.  However, when Texas, the country's second most populous state (which contains 8.04% of the U.S. population), is removed from the analysis, the numbers are a bit more disturbing.  Then, there are 20 states with the cumulative population of 25.04% and 40% of the senate votes. 25% of the population controlling 40% of the vote.  And, because of the modern use of the filibuster, all you need in the senate to keep a bill from passing is 41%.  They only need one more vote.  And they had it.

That's why something that 90% of the U.S. population approves of didn't pass the Senate.  Because those 90% are not all equally represented.  25% of the U.S. population has the ability to control the Senate.  

That makes no damn sense.

Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/18/us/politics/despite-tearful-pleas-no-real-chance.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&hp
 http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=113&session=1&vote=00103#state
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_population

Revelation:

You put the contact solution in the contact case BEFORE you take out your contacts. That way, you can still see the squirting contact solution and correctly aim it in to the case. I wish I'd figured that out 8 years ago. I would have saved a lot of contact solution and a lot of time cleaning up crusty dried solution remnants from the bathroom counter.

I used to watch my mom put the contact solution in first and I thought she was such a weirdo. I finally understand, Mom. I finally understand.

Space pug

for my fellow spacemen:
#1)


#2: (and more importantly)

I need to learn how to use commas.

I used to know.  I swear to god.

First step is admitting you have a problem.

like sentence fragments

Internet round-up

Hey y'all -

I haven't forgotten about my promised posts on crutches, but the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that I don't have that much to say.  Still, I try to spit it out in the next few days. 

But first, the interwebs roundups of things that caught my eye this week:

Best headline ever: "Deval Patrick bears all at photo opp"

Monument made the front page of Jezebel.  Way to stalk my shit, Jezebel.  Even though I really had nothing to do with this high school thing because I graduated a bajillion years ago.  I wish we had this when I went to high school.  On the other hand, they also have security cameras, which is weird.  Nowadays, there would be no skipping out on study hall and playing my guitar that I left in the hall by the band room. On the other hand, I guess I wouldn't need to skip out to do that.  As long as I'm one of the 6 kids who gets selected to do this superspecial program. Everyone else is fucked.  (Also, Sophie!!! Who does she look like, guys?  Yup, they're siblings.)

Finally, Joss Whedon is making a movie adaptation of "Much Ado About Nothing."  I want to be excited, because both of those things, individually, are awesome, but I'm not convinced they're going to work together.  The trailer is kind of meh. 

And that is all the important news from this week! 

My friend Lee sent me an e-mail today which said nothing except "A gay, black politician was lynched in Mississippi, the KKK is at Oberlin, Chavez is dead, and sequestration is a bitch."

Clearly he has his news priorities all wrong.  At least that's what I'm going to keep telling myself as I die a little bit inside.

Life on Crutches

So, I’m on crutches.  Poor Sam and Will (and countless others) have heard me complain about this to no end.  But now I can write about it!  I started writing and have so much to say that I’m going to make it a series.  

So, part 1: CRUTCHES AND ACCESSIBILITY

Being on crutches has gotten me thinking a lot about ableism and how fucking hard everything is when you’re not completely able-bodied.  I realize that it’s the shittiest to be like “OHAI DISABLED PEOPLE I NOW UNDERSTAND YOUR PLIGHT AND CAN THEREFORE SPEAK FOR YOU” because I don’t and I can’t.  After all, I don’t know how long I will have a leg brace and be on crutches, but it is nearly impossible that it will be more than 8 weeks.  
(UPDATE: I saw the doctor today and I can start putting weight on it and don’t have to wear the leg brace anymore.  So this will be even shorter than I thought)

Just to be clear: I can not, IN ANY WAY, speak for folks with long-term disabilities.  I shouldn't need personal experiences that of just a fraction of something to be made more aware of it.  But I did. Through my experience, I have realized how incredibly inaccessible lots of places are.  Even when they are supposedly “accessible.”  

Here’s just a few things:

1) “accessible” entrances or ramps or whatever are almost always the least direct line between where you are and where you are trying to go.  For instance, the handicap accessible entrance is on the opposite side of the building where I intern when I walk (crutch?) from from the train station.  And I work in a very large building.  So basically, to get to the handicap entrance I would need to walk around to the other side of a city block.  Or I can go up several flights of stairs.  At least I can do that.  If I were in a wheelchair, I don’t know what I would do.  Did I mention that city block is all uphill?

2) The new green line trains (that’s when I know that I’m at least a little bit of a native bostonian.  I think they must have replaced these about 10 years ago) are considered handicap accessible.  However, when going inbound, to tap your metro card to pay, you need to go up several stairs.  Therefore, I end up not paying for my tolls, because I’m too terrified to try to get up the stairs and pay on a moving train, especially when I’m afraid that I’ll lose my seat.  (I found out the hard way that I am not very good at standing up on the moving train).  So I end up sitting there, feeling like I’m cheating the MBTA and afraid that they’re going to arrest me.  There is an alternative available to me at my train station (although not all t above-ground rain stations, as I discovered a couple of days ago): I can show up at the train station early enough and tap my card to get a one-trip pass printed out for me.  That way, I will have paid before I even get on the train.  But what does that require?  More walking.  And what am I supposed to do if the train arrives just as I’m getting there?  Should I wait for the next one?


3) lots of doors, especially doors that lead outside, are really heavy, and half of the handicap buttons that I have pushed don’t work.  This includes the door to the bathroom at work.

4) People offer me help or say something to acknowledge the shittiness of my situation, and it is always with the best intentions. But it wears me down because I hear it all day.r  I don’t want people to be sorry for me, or constantly be drawing attention to the things that are hard for me.  I already know they’re hard. I find myself changing what I do in order to make people less nervous and less likely to offer help.  For example, I hesitate to take the 15 stairs up from the train station on the way home (a lot of my inconveniences revolve around my commute to work, but that’s mainly because it’s the only time I leave the house) instead of walking an additional 300 meters to go up a long ramp because it makes people nervous. Basically, everywhere I go, people are constantly asking me if I’m okay.  And I get tired of putting on a happy face (we could get into why I feel the need to put on a happy face, but that’s another blog for another day).

5) people don’t offer help when I really need it. For example, I need a damn seat on the train.  But people rarely get up for me.  I generally stand there looking scared and then someone (almost always a woman, I’ve noticed) says “Would you like to sit down?”  And I have to say “YES,” therefore showing that I am dependent on them. I am dependent on other people’s kindness.  And it’s true that there’s a little sticker that says that  there is a seat that  people are supposed to get up for handicapped folks (when ASKED - see problem of ).  But there is almost always a woman with a baby in that seat.  And I’m not about to move a woman with a baby.  Lord forbid, what if we have more than ONE person on the train at a time who has some kind of disability and needs a seat.  The MBTA is not prepared for that level of chaos.  

6) Everyone looks at me.  Everyone.  Just for a second, but they do.
 
Let me be clear: each of these things, individually, is not that bad.  But all together they add up to what I can best call the ableism version of microaggressions: little things that in isolation are manageable, but cumulative make up so many individual moments of my daily life that I end up feeling exhausted and having no fight left.

If this is even the tiniest TASTE of what people with real, permanent disabilities experience, things need to change.  And I feel like such an asshole -  SUCH. AN. ASSHOLE. - for not realizing that until now. 

in case you guys hadn't read this already, it's Taibbi's second installment on our new SEC chief, re-touching on her possible collusion with then-SEC head Paul Berger and Enforcement Head Linda Thomsen to effectively wreck the insider trading investigation of MOrgan Stanley then-CEO JOhn Mack.

Investigating SEC agent Gary Aguirre's criminal case is swapped out by SEC officials for a cheap civil penalty, Aguirre is fired for frivolously creating the hassle (he sued successfully for wrongful termination) and Berger lands a cushy job at D&P.

White observes that Berger's inclination to aggressiveness might have harmed his viability in the private sector, that they performed extensive due diligence to screen any for any backlash that might accompany his hire. 

Taibbi's theses remain:  SEC and Wall Street are thick with revolving door corruption, and the federal nomination of Mary Jo White has just brought it full circle.

Bring the pain!

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/new-sec-chief-mary-jo-white-thinks-the-government-should-bring-cases-to-a-point-20130130

I mostly forgive One Direction for all previous douchebaggery

(for previous douchebaggery see evidence a and evidence b)
But this video is the best.

It's a great pop song with a ridiculous music video that makes fun of pop videos. And look at their skinny little bodies! D'awww



And I'm not even sorry that 2 out of four of my blog posts have been about One Direction.  HBDGAF. Also, thanks for joining us, Will.

INAUGURAL ENTRY

Spacemen, brethren - I AM AMONG YOU.

more to come following my chat with sam, in tokyo.

If I ever have a daughter, I will tell her all of these things

Check out "10 Things I want my daughter to know before she turns 10" by Lindsey Mead Russell, which I was turned onto via feministing. 

My favorites are #1, 7 and 9:

"1. It is not your job to keep the people you love happy.  Not me, not Daddy, not your brother, not your friends.  I promise, it's not.  The hard truth is that you can't, anyway."

"7. You are not me. We are very alike, but you are your own person, entirely, completely, fully.  I know this, I promise, even when I lose sight of it.  I know that separation from me is one of the fundamental tasks of your adolescence, which I can see glinting over the horizon.  I dread it like ice in my stomach, that space, that distance, that essential cleaving, but I want you to know I know how vital it is.  I'm going to be here, no matter what, Grace.  The red string that ties us together will stretch.  I know it will.  And once the transition is accomplished there will be a new, even better closeness.  I know that too.

9. There is no single person who can be your everything. Be very careful about bestowing this power on any one person.  I suspect you are trying to fill a gnawing loneliness, and if you are you inherited it from me.  That feeling, Woolf's "emptiness about the heart of life," is just part of the deal.  Trying to fill that ache with other people (or with anything else, like food, alcohol, numbing behaviors of a zillion sorts you don't even know of yet) is a lost cause, and nobody will be up to the task.  You will feel let down, and, worse, that loneliness will be there no matter what.  I'm learning to embrace it, to accept it as part of who I am.  I hope to help you do the same.

but it's worth reading the whole thing.

One Direction continues to send worst messages

I was pleasantly surprised when I heard some lyrics from the first few stanzas of One Direction's new single "Little Things" - about (obviously) all the little things that the teen heartthrob loves about his lady friend, even if she doesn't necessarily love them about herself. Her quirks are what make her special!


First, I was excited about:

You've never loved
Your stomach or your thighs,
The dimples in your back at the bottom of your spine
But I'll love them endlessly
(lyrics) 

 Hey, that's kind of body positive!  Girls are allowed to have curves!  He loves your body exactly as it is!

But then ....

You never want
To know how much you weigh
you still love/have to squeeze into your jeans
But you're perfect to me

Because it's somehow endearing for a girl not to know her own weight?  Her weight anxiety is cute!
And then things really took a turn for the worse with this gem:

You'll never love yourself half as much as I love you

Well, that's right out of the abusive boyfriend handbook.  They try to save themselves by saying:
 
 If I let you know I'm here for you
Maybe you'll love yourself like I love you, oh.

but the damage is already done; the message is that the girl will always need her One Direction boy as the source of her self-esteem/self-worth.   The message of this song is an excellent follow-up to One Direction's last hit, "your low self-esteem is attractive"

 Pop songs sending shitty messages isn't anything new, but One Direction is notable in that their two big hits so far send these messages: 1) Ladies, it's attractive when you have low self-esteem, and 2) and because of your low self-esteem, you'll always need me. It's a double-win!

Big business: the real beneficiary of "government handouts"

In case you haven't been following, last week, many fast-food workers in NYC participated in a massive walk-out as part of  "the biggest effort to unionize fast-food workers ever undertaken in the United States"

Fast food restaurants, like other big businesses, pay their workers insufficient wages and taxpayers are supposed to make up the difference.  That isn't fair to the people who work hard at their (seemingly) awful jobs and still need government or non-profit help to make ends meet (something for which they will be shamed by most of society), and it isn't fair to regular taxpayers who, by footing the bill, are essentially lining the pockets of multi-millionaires.

Anyway, I just thought this video and the campaign is a great reminder that, despite all of the shaming that people receiving government support endure, the real beneficiaries of "government handouts" are big businesses.  We, as taxpayers, should be demanding that they pay a living wage.  Which is exactly what these workers are doing.

Sign the petition.