Because Of Course They Did: Wall Street Psychopaths Sue Federal Government for Bailing Them Out

In two separate cases, the government now stands accused of overstepping its authority when it took extraordinary measures to prevent a financial meltdown in the fall of 2008. The Wall Street figures who are suing say their property was seized without compensation, in violation of the Constitution. One case was brought by Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, the legendary former chief executive of AIG who built it into the world’s largest insurer. Filing the other case is a group of hedge funds that bought Fannie and Freddie stock for pennies per share after the companies were put in government conservatorship.

So begins a June 7 Washington Post article by Steven Pearlstein detailing a pair of lawsuits currently wending their way through the federal courts, in which Wall Street players and hedge funds are suing the federal government for bailing them out back in 2008, when they nearly detonated the world economy, a near extinction-level economic event from which the majority of regular folks are still recovering.

More than anything, I’m reminded of a character from one of my favorite movies, Bernie Bernbaum from the Coen Brothers’ gangster-movie masterpiece Miller’s Crossing. For those unfamiliar with the movie in question, Bernie is a minor bookie and grifter who, for reasons too complicated to get into here, finds himself in possession of some inside information about fights fixed by local gang-lords, and sells it to enough people it ruins the fix, leading said gang-lords to order his execution. In one of the greatest scenes in American cinema, the story’s hero, tasked with killing Bernie, shows mercy and lets him get away. “Somebody gives me an angle and I play it. It’s just my nature,” Bernie says. Later he shows back up to blackmail our hero. “You didn’t see the angle you gave me,” he says, echoing his earlier plea.

Now, I’m not qualified to speak to the merits of these cases (I’ll leave that to Pearlstein and his expert sources). But that’s not really what I’m about here. I don’t think I, or most folks I know, would find it surprising that some crazy high-priced lawyer might come up with some legal theory convincing enough to take this all the way to the Supreme Court (which I both expect, given the amounts of money involved, and fear, given the SCOTUS’ recent track record. But again, I’m not here to talk about the legal merits).

No, what I want to talk about is the mind-set behind lawsuits like this, because I think it provides a helpful illustration of the kind of behavior our current social and economic arrangements privilege and incentivize. Continue reading “Because Of Course They Did: Wall Street Psychopaths Sue Federal Government for Bailing Them Out” →

Why I Wouldn’t Kill Hitler with My Time Machine

So, it’s a pretty classic thought experiment: If you had a time machine, would you go back and kill Hitler before he had a chance to start WWII?

Thanks to my daily internet divagations, I found myself revisiting this classic hypothetical today, and, given my brain’s penchant for the road less traveled (and for giving concrete answers to rhetorical questions), I found myself answering the question with a pretty definitive ‘no,’ though for practical rather than the usual moral or ethical reasons. I offer my rationale below, not as any sort of definitive answer, but as food for thought for hungry thinkers.

It goes like this: Continue reading “Why I Wouldn’t Kill Hitler with My Time Machine” →

On the Conflation of Shouldn’t with Can’t

For the perpetually outraged, criticism is often conflated with persecution. It’s a neat trick, but a dishonest one, a kind of rhetorical jujitsu that makes abusers over into victims, justifying further abuse. You see it a lot in discussions of political correctness and the First Amendment, which some people (mostly, in my experience, cisgendered white men; OMMV) seem to take as a license to be an asshole without the possibility of repercussions. In fact it’s often a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, with the criticism (taken as persecution) after the fact justifying the being an asshole to people in the first place.

And here’s the thing: You do have that right. You CAN be an asshole. You just shouldn’t. You don’t HAVE to be polite and respectful to others. But you should. And when you aren’t, you should not expect others to be polite and respectful to you, or care what you have to say. It’s really that simple. Political Correctness is simply, for the most part, being respectful to other people on their own terms, just as you would like them to be respectful to you, on yours. It is a recognition of the inherent equality of human beings, whatever their demographics might be.

There seem to be a lot of people these days who are feeling under attack because people not like them (women, POCs, the non-cisgendered) are demanding to be treated with the respect and privilege they themselves take for granted. They take it as a zero-sum game, a hierarchy in which if someone gains, someone else must lose, and since it isn’t them gaining, it must be them losing.

But the only thing they’re losing is the right to be an asshole to others without repercussions, really. And again, you can still be an asshole. Nobody’s starting pogroms or making laws that says you can’t treat people different from you like shit. It’s just that you shouldn’t (you never should have), and if you do, people have the right to call you on it. If you don’t want that to happen, don’t be an asshole. Better yet, take a moment to ask yourself just why you feel the need to treat others like shit in the first place.

Slowly but surely, human civilization is progressing towards a place where everyone can enjoy the respect and opportunity that’s been historically reserved for the folks at the top of the pecking order. And that’s a good thing. For everybody. Because when everyone has the opportunity to live their life to the fullest and to reach their fullest potential, we all do better.

An Open Letter to the Democratic Party

A week ago a handful of too-big-to-fail Wall Street banks threatened to withhold campaign donations from Senate Democrats in response to the efforts of Senators like Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown to rein them in. The move was petty, vindictive, even cowardly, leaked as it was on background, the threat as much symbolic as actual, though its implications rang clear enough: Stop messing with us, or we’ll cut you off.

I’m here to urge the DSCC, and the Democratic Party in general, to take them up on it.

I know, it’s probably foolish to expect a political party to turn money down, especially in the age of Citizens United. But it’s not only the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing, too. Continue reading “An Open Letter to the Democratic Party” →

I Read Only Books by Women For a Year: Here’s What Happened

I read a lot of great books, is the short answer.

So, a few days ago writer K Tempest Bradford published this article, in which she challenged readers to stop reading white, straight, cisgendered male authors for one year. Sadly (and predictably), certain corners of the internet exploded in rage at the notion (she has assembled a lovely collection of rage-tweets here, if you enjoy that sort of thing). I won’t reprise their objections, which savvy interneteers will likely be able to intuit themselves, nor pass judgement on any validity those objections may or may not have. But it so happens that I recently spent the better part of a year doing something very similar to Ms Bradford’s challenge. From roughly November 2013 until late last year, I read only books by women(*), many of them women of color, others not cisgendered (two of the new favorite writers whose work I discovered are married).

I did so for my own reasons, both personal and (for lack of a better term) professional. On a personal level it was simply the realization that the vast majority of the books on my overstuffed shelves were by men. I fought it for a long time, that realization. I mean, these were great books, each easily defensible on the merits. I have, if I may say, damned fine taste in literature, and reading material in general. Ask any of my friends. I’ve been an obsessive reader since kindergarten, the kind of person who never goes anywhere without a book and hasn’t since he could carry one. But looked at en masse, the unconscious bias in my collection was (and is) painfully clear (in my defense, I actually am a cisgendered white male).

When I was younger, the notion of placing any kind of limitation on my reading material for a whole year would have seemed preposterous. Now comfortably ensconced in middle age, it didn’t seem like that big a deal. It wasn’t like I was going to run out of good books to read, and while it might mean holding off on some things in my to-be-read stack, it’s hardly without precedent for a book to be in that stack for years before I get around to reading it. Really all I had to do was rearrange the order, though of course I used it as an excuse to go book-shopping, which is one of my favorite things to do.

The timing that November seemed propitious. I’d started writing Continue reading “I Read Only Books by Women For a Year: Here’s What Happened” →