The Social Network’s Women Aren’t Prizes, They’re Props - The Daily Beast

Amplify’d from www.thedailybeast.com

By the time Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher’s The Social Network opened Friday, smitten reviewers and pundits had already proclaimed the film as the second coming of Citizen Kane, extolling Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, director Fincher, and writer Sorkin as modern prophets. This movie, we’ve been told, not only reflects its era, but will shape it.

Amid the frenzy, Stephen Colbert asked what few had observed: What about “the ladies in the film”? In his interview with Sorkin on Sept. 30, Colbert mentioned Erica, Zuckerberg’s “super smart” (ex-)girlfriend, played by Rooney Mara, then said, mischievously: “The other ladies in the movie don’t have as much to say, because they’re high or drunk or [bleep]ing some guys in the bathroom. Why are there no other women of any substance in the movie?”

“That’s a fair question,” Sorkin replied, pointing out the “one other woman,” the young lawyer played by Rashida Jones. “The other women are prizes, basically,” Sorkin said, later adding: “The women in this particular story who are prizes, it really doesn’t speak to the entire female population of Harvard, this is just the people who are populating this story.”

It’s hard not to enjoy The Social Network. It is an impressive film: crisp, beautiful, kinetic, with humor as dark as its lighting.

But Colbert was right. Women in the movie—apart from the lawyer and Erica, who sets the stage and disappears—are less prizes than they are props, buxom extras literally bussed in to fill the roles of doting groupies, vengeful sluts, or dumpy, feminist killjoys. They are foils for the male characters, who in turn are cruel or indifferent to them. (In a somewhat ironic turn of events, former Harvard President Larry Summers is perhaps the only man in the movie portrayed both as solicitous and respectful of a woman’s opinion.)

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Going to the Bar, Pistol in Pocket, Is Legal in 4 States - NYTimes.com

These idiots have seen too many movies. In what reality does having someone liquored up and carrying a piece EVER sound like a good idea?

Amplify’d from www.nytimes.com

NASHVILLE — Happy-hour beers were going for $5 at Past Perfect, a cavernous bar just off this city’s strip of honky-tonks and tourist shops when Adam Ringenberg walked in with a loaded 9-millimeter pistol in the front pocket of his gray slacks.

Mr. Ringenberg, a technology consultant, is one of the state’s nearly 300,000 handgun permit holders who have recently seen their rights greatly expanded by a new law — one of the nation’s first — that allows them to carry loaded firearms into bars and restaurants that serve alcohol.

“If someone’s sticking a gun in my face, I’m not relying on their charity to keep me alive,” said Mr. Ringenberg, 30, who said he carries the gun for personal protection when he is not at work.

Gun rights advocates like Mr. Ringenberg may applaud the new law, but many customers, waiters and restaurateurs here are dismayed by the decision.

“That’s not cool in my book,” Art Andersen, 44, said as he nursed a Coors Light at Sam’s Sports Bar and Grill near Vanderbilt University. “It opens the door to trouble. It’s giving you the right to be Wyatt Earp.”

Tennessee is one of four states, along with Arizona, Georgia and Virginia, that recently enacted laws explicitly allowing loaded guns in bars. (Eighteen other states allow weapons in restaurants that serve alcohol.) The new measures in Tennessee and the three other states come after two landmark Supreme Court rulings that citizens have an individual right — not just in connection with a well-regulated militia — to keep a loaded handgun for home defense.

Experts say these laws represent the latest wave in the country’s gun debate, as the gun lobby seeks, state by state, to expand the realm of guns in everyday life.

The rulings, which overturned handgun bans in Washington and Chicago, have strengthened the stance of gun rights advocates nationwide. More than 250 lawsuits now challenge various gun laws, and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, a Republican, called for guns to be made legal on campuses after a shooting last week at the University of Texas, Austin, arguing that armed bystanders might have stopped the gunman.

The new laws have also brought to light the status of 20 other states — New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts among them — that do not address the question, appearing by default to allow those with permits to carry guns into establishments that serve alcohol, according to the Legal Community Against Violence, a nonprofit group that promotes gun control and tracks state gun laws. Read more at www.nytimes.com

 

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Surveillance, America’s Pastime By Stephan Salisbury

Amplify’d from www.tomdispatch.com

The dried blood on the concrete floor is there for all to see, a stain forever marking the spot on a Memphis motel balcony where Martin Luther King, Jr. lay mortally wounded by a sniper’s bullet.

It is a stark and ghostly image speaking to the sharp pain of absence. King is gone. His aides are gone. Only the stain remains. What now?

That image is, of course, a photograph taken by Ernest C. Withers, Memphis born and bred, and known as the photographer of the civil rights movement.  He was there at the Lorraine Motel, as he had been at so many other critical places, recording iconic images of those tumultuous years.

In addition to photographing moments large and small in the struggle for black civil rights in the South, Withers had another job. He was an informer for the FBI, passing along information on the doings of King, Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, Ben Hooks, and other leaders of the movement. He reported on meetings he attended as a photographer, welcomed in by those he knew so intimately. He passed along photos of events and gatherings to his handler, Special Agent William H. Lawrence of the FBI’s Memphis office. He named names and sketched out plans.

In an exhaustive recent report, the Memphis Commercial Appeal detailed Withers’s undercover activities, provoking a pained and complex response from the many who knew him and were involved in the civil rights movement.  His family simply refuses to believe that the paper’s report could be accurate. On the other hand, Andrew Young, with King during those last moments, accepts Withers’s career as an informant, saying it just doesn’t bother him.  Civil rights leaders, including King, viewed Withers as crucial to the movement’s struggle to portray itself accurately in Jet, Ebony, and other black journals. In that Withers was successful -- and the rest, Young suggests, doesn’t matter.  Besides, he told the Commercial Appeal, they had nothing to hide.  “I don't think Dr. King would have minded him making a little money on the side.”

Activist and comedian Dick Gregory, hearing Young’s comments, turned on his old comrade. “We are talking about a guy hired by the FBI to destroy us and the fact that Andy could say that means there must be a deep hatred down inside of him,” he said. “If he feels that way about King only God knows what he feels about the rest of us.”

This is the way it is with informers, so useful to reckless law enforcement authorities and employed by the tens of thousands as the secret shock troops of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Surveillance has multiple uses, not the least of which is to sow mistrust, which in turn eats at the cohesion of families, social and political movements, and ultimately the fabric of community itself.

D’Army Bailey, a former Memphis judge and target of FBI surveillance in the 1960s, told the Memphis Commercial Appeal that the use of informers in everyday life ruptured fundamental civic bonds, fomenting deep suspicion and mistrust. “It's something you would expect in the most ruthless totalitarian regimes.  Once that trust is shattered that doesn't go away.”

Earl Caldwell, a former New York Times reporter and now a professor of journalism at the Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communications at Hampton University, pointed out that the black community in the South in the 1960s granted a special trust to black journalists. Indeed, some of those journalists took out an ad in black newspapers in February 1970 pledging not to spy or inform or betray that trust.

“If all that we've been told through these documents that have been released, if that’s true, then it puts a... very, very, very heavy, heavy mark not just on [Withers] and his work but on the trust that the black journalists made many years ago with the black community,” Caldwell said. Read more at www.tomdispatch.com

 

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Paladino Took Government Tax Break By Pledging To Deliver Jobs, But Instead Pocketed The Money

Amplify’d from thinkprogress.org

A Daily News probe found Paladino’s companies netted $3 million in tax breaks through a program called the Empire Zones – while producing a grand total of 25 new jobs.

To justify tax breaks in one instance, he sold a dozen vacant lots he owned to himself and claimed hundreds of thousands of dollars in “real property investments.” Seven years later, these “investments” remain what they were – vacant lots.

His Empire Zone investments consisted mostly of renovating his own buildings – $19 million worth. He completed no new construction and brought no new businesses in any of his Empire Zone projects.

Instead, the Paladino companies such as the Ellicott Group mostly generate income through six big office buildings that collect millions of dollars in rent. Read more at thinkprogress.org

 

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Painless Way to Achieve Huge Energy Savings: Stop Wasting Food

Amplify’d from www.sciencedaily.com

ScienceDaily (Oct. 2, 2010) — Scientists have identified a way that the United States could immediately save the energy equivalent of about 350 million barrels of oil a year — without spending a penny or putting a ding in the quality of life: Just stop wasting food.

Their study, reported in ACS' semi-monthly journal Environmental Science & Technology, found that it takes the equivalent of about 1.4 billion barrels of oil to produce, package, prepare, preserve and distribute a year's worth of food in the United States.

Michael Webber and Amanda Cuéllar note that food contains energy and requires energy to produce, process, and transport. Estimates indicate that between 8 and 16 percent of energy consumption in the United States went toward food production in 2007. Despite this large energy investment, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that people in the U.S. waste about 27 percent of their food. The scientists realized that the waste might represent a largely unrecognized opportunity to conserve energy and help control global warming.

Their analysis of wasted food and the energy needed to ready it for consumption concluded that the U.S. wasted about 2030 trillion BTU of energy in 2007, or the equivalent of about 350 million barrels of oil. That represents about 2 percent of annual energy consumption in the U.S.

"Consequently, the energy embedded in wasted food represents a substantial target for decreasing energy consumption in the U.S.," the article notes. "The wasted energy calculated here is a conservative estimate both because the food waste data are incomplete and outdated and the energy consumption data for food service and sales are incomplete." Read more at www.sciencedaily.com

 

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Chapter closes on vilified US bank bailout

Amplify’d from www.alternet.org

Handing over 700 billion dollars of taxpayer money to Wall Street bankers who caused the global economic crisis was never going to be popular.

And so it proved for the much maligned Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, which will begin its slow wind-down on Sunday.

Two years to the day after it was enacted, the always controversial bailout has a mixed legacy of financial success and political derision.

As far as costs go, TARP has been an unmitigated success story.

The program -- introduced to prop up rapidly failing financial markets -- is now projected to cost the government less than 50 billion dollars, a bargain considering the economic growth that could have been lost.

Pending a decent sale of the government's stakes in Citigroup, AIG and General Motors, the US taxpayer may realistically make a gross profit.

It was not always so. In the early days of the massive program even government-appointed TARP watchdog Neil Barofsky said the program would "almost certainly" result in a loss for the taxpayer.

Despite the reduced price tag, TARP's political legacy has been as toxic as the dodgy mortgage investments that made it necessary.

Most of the 74 Senators, and 263 House representatives who eventually voted for the bill have spent the last two years distancing themselves from it.

Republicans have also spent 24 months trying to tie it to President Barack Obama's administration and Democrats have tried to remind voters it was actually signed by his predecessor George W. Bush.

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Chloe Sevigny: the interview

Amplify’d from www.guardian.co.uk

Chloë Sevigny's laugh is deep and honking, like a seal drunk on punch. Once I've heard it, I'm slightly preoccupied with the thought of hearing it again. First laugh: at the image of the "right man" eventually falling into her lap, "Like: 'Whoops!'" Second laugh: the thought of asking sex advice from her mother, Janine. Third: remembering Jay McInerney following her round Manhattan like a smell, researching the seven-page New Yorker profile of Sevigny, then 19, where he wrote that she was "the coolest girl in the world", the phrase that was, in turn, to follow her round for the rest of her life.

Now 35, she was 20 when she first acted on screen, playing a 14-year-old with Aids in Larry Clark's controversial 1995 film Kids – think Skins crossed with Rita, Sue and Bob Too!, but watched through a dirty car window. She was lovely in it, luminous and wide-eyed, already a face on the New York "scene", a model who'd appeared in videos for Sonic Youth and the Lemonheads since moving at 18 from the suburbs of Connecticut, a place called Darien. "Aryan Darien," Sevigny likes to call it, where everyone was white, where it was frowned upon to sell a house to Jews, and where nothing ever happened. When she goes home to see her mother (her father died of cancer in 1996), she says it makes her melancholy. "There are so many memories there for me," she explains, her voice, like her laugh, deep and odd. "So many memories. I know every rock, every tree. I always feel… despondent when I arrive, like the place has an aura of sadness." Read more at www.guardian.co.uk

 

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For Female Marines, Tea Comes With Bullets

Amplify’d from www.nytimes.com

MARJA, Afghanistan — They expected tea, not firefights.

But the three female Marines and their patrol were shot at late on a recent day, when a burst of Kalashnikov rifle fire came from a nearby compound. The group hit the ground, crawled into a ditch and aimed its guns across the fields of cotton and corn.

In their sights they could see the source of the blast: an Afghan man who had shot aimlessly from behind a mud wall, shielded by a half-dozen children. The women held their fire with the rest of the patrol so as not to hit a child, waited for the all-clear, then headed back to the base, survivors of yet another encounter with the enemy.

“You still get that same feeling, like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m getting shot at,’ ” said Lance Cpl. Stephanie Robertson, 20, speaking of the firefights that have become part of her life in Marja. “But you know what to do. You’re not, like, comfortable, because you’re just — ” She stopped, searching for how to describe her response to experiences that for many would be terrifying. “It’s like muscle memory.”

Six months ago, Lance Corporal Robertson arrived in Afghanistan with 39 other female Marines from Camp Pendleton, Calif., as part of an unusual experiment of the American military: sending full-time “female engagement teams” out with all-male infantry patrols in Helmand Province to try to win over the rural Afghan women who are culturally off limits to outside men.

As new faces in an American counterinsurgency campaign, the female Marines, who volunteered for the job, were to meet with Pashtun women over tea in their homes, assess their need for aid, gather intelligence, and help open schools and clinics.

They have done that and more, and as their seven-month deployment in southern Afghanistan nears an end their “tea as a weapon” mission has been judged a success. But the Marines, who have been closer to combat than most other women in the war, have also had to use real weapons in a tougher fight than many expected.

Here in Marja — which, seven months after a major offensive against the Taliban, is improving but remains one of the most dangerous places in Afghanistan — the female Marines have daily skirted the Pentagon rules restricting women in combat. They have shot back in firefights and ambushes, been hit by homemade bombs and lived on bases hit by mortar attacks. Read more at www.nytimes.com

 

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Las Vegas Faces Its Deepest Slide Since the 1940s

Amplify’d from www.nytimes.com

LAS VEGAS — There are many cities across the country that are beginning to see the first glimpses of the end of the recession.

This is not one of them.

The nation’s gambling capital is staggering under a confluence of economic forces that has sent Las Vegas into what officials describe as its deepest economic rut since casinos first began rising in the desert here in the 1940s.

Even as city leaders remain hopeful that gambling revenues will rebound with the nation’s economy, experts project that it will not be enough to make up for an even deeper realignment that has taken place in the course of this recession: the collapse of the construction industry, which was the other economic pillar of the city and the state.

Unemployment in Nevada is now 14.4 percent, the highest in the nation and a stark contrast to the 3.8 percent unemployment rate here just 10 years ago; in Las Vegas, it is 14.7 percent.

August was the 44th consecutive month in which Nevada led the nation in housing foreclosures.

Mayor Oscar B. Goodman said in a recent interview that he was “very bullish on our future,” offering as evidence the packed airplanes he encountered both ways on a recent trip east to appear on “The Colbert Report.”

But, he added: “Our daily room rate average is not what it was. Our hotel room rates are bargains now. People aren’t spending on gambling as they have in the past. Ordinarily Las Vegas was the last to go into a recession and the first to come out. This one is different. As soon as they feel secure in their financial position, then Las Vegas will come back stronger than ever.” Read more at www.nytimes.com

 

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Democrats playing on opponents' words

Duh. Welcome to politics, n00b.

Amplify’d from www.latimes.com

Reporting from Washington — In Kentucky, a candidate is accused of being soft on drug abuse. In Delaware, it appears it was evolution the candidate was soft on. In Florida, a House race is resurrecting debate over a 97-year-old amendment to the Constitution.

This in an election that was supposed to be all about the economy and jobs.

But in contests across the country, Republican candidates — particularly those aligned with the "tea party" movement — are finding themselves knocked off topic as they try to explain and revise a barrage of prior statements.

An odd assortment of issues, including witchcraft and the president's religion, have proved distracting as candidates head into the heated final stretch of the general election campaign.

But it's not merely a case of media nitpicking or YouTube moments. In some cases, the side issues have begun to affect races.

The situation is in large part a result of a Democratic strategy aimed at changing the conversation from voters' frustration with Democratic leaders in Washington to a portrayal of tea party Republicans as extremist. The tactic was one of the few available to Democrats saddled with a national political climate decidedly turned against them and a stubbornly slow economic recovery.

The diversion tactics seem to be working better in some races than others. However, rarely has a set of candidates given opponents so much to work with.Read more at www.latimes.com

 

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'IT CHANGES WHO WE ARE'

Amplify’d from www.washingtonpost.com

The doctor begins with an apology because the questions are rudimentary, almost insultingly so. But Robert Warren, fresh off the battlefield in Afghanistan and a surgeon's table, doesn't seem to mind.

Yes, he knows how old he is: 20. He knows his Army rank: specialist. He knows that it's Thursday, that it's June, that the year is 1020. Quickly, he corrects the small stumble: "It's 2010." He knows that his wife is Brittanie, that she's due with their first child any day now, and that they "got married two to three weeks before I went to that country."

Stumble No. 2: "That country."

David Williamson doesn't let it slide. "Which country?"

"Whatever country it was that I got blown up in," Warren says.

In a conference room at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, he purses his lips, and as he searches for the word "Afghanistan," he slides his hand over the left side of his head, which is cratered, like an apple with a bite taken out of it.

"Crap, I can't remember," he says finally.

Warren has trouble remembering a lot of things. Which isn't surprising, considering that several pieces of shrapnel tore through his skull after insurgents outside Kandahar blew up his truck with a rocket-propelled grenade in May. One piece came to rest in the center of Warren's brain - two millimeters from his carotid artery - where it remains, suspended like a piece of fruit in a gelatin mold, too dangerous to extract. Read more at www.washingtonpost.com

 

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U.S. to Issue Terrorism Alert for Travel to Europe

Amplify’d from www.nytimes.com

The State Department plans to issue an alert on Sunday urging Americans traveling to Europe to be vigilant about possible terrorist attacks, an American official said Saturday.

The decision to caution travelers comes as counterterrorism officials in Europe and the United States are assessing intelligence about possible plots originating in Pakistan and North Africa aimed at Britain, France and Germany.

A travel alert would merely urge extra caution during a specific time and would not discourage Americans from visiting Europe. The official, who did not want to be identified speaking about internal government deliberations, said a stronger “travel warning” that might advise Americans not to visit Europe was not under consideration.

American intelligence officials said last week that they were pursuing reports of possible attacks against European cities, including information from a German citizen of Afghan origin captured in Afghanistan in July. The German, said to be named Ahmed Sidiqi, 36, from Hamburg, had traveled to the Waziristan region of Pakistan and received firearms and explosives training, a senior European official told The New York Times.

Mr. Sidiqi described plans for attacks by small armed groups in European cities, the official said. Other officials have said such attacks might be modeled on the 2008 assault in Mumbai. Those attacks, attributed to a radical Islamic group based in Pakistan, killed at least 173 people. Read more at www.nytimes.com

 

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Thousands of liberals rally in US

Amplify’d from english.aljazeera.net

Thousands of people have gathered in Washington DC for a rally to promote labour and civil rights, and to show support for the Democratic party's agenda.

The demonstration, which brought together hundreds of mostly-liberal and progressive groups on Saturday, was held on the National Mall - the same site as a rally held by conservative Tea Party activists last month.

Billed as "One Nation Working Together", organisers said the event was to draw attention to civil rights issues, economic policies and education reforms.

Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO - the country's largest federation of trade unions - urged the gathered crowd to "promise that you'll make your voices heard, for good jobs and justice and education today and on election day".

A spokeswoman for the organisers estimated attendance at between 175,000 and 200,000 people, stretched from the Lincoln Memorial to the end of the National Mall's Reflecting Pool. Read more at english.aljazeera.net

 

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Racially Tinged Conservative Attack Ad Warns About Congressman’s Ties To Arab-Americans

Amplify’d from thinkprogress.org

Rep. Nick Rahall (D-WV) is in a tough reelection fight against Spike Maynard, a formerly Democratic judge who switched parties this year to challenge Rahall as a Republican. Maynard’s bid — the first credible challenge to Rahall in years — has strong backing from national Republicans, including an endorsement from former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and support from the National Republican Congressional Committee’s Young Guns program (despite the fact that Maynard is in his 60s).

Maynard has also received support from outside conservative groups, like the West Virginia Conservative Fund. The group’s new ad makes a fairly apparent attempt to appeal to bigots, fear mongering about Rahall’s work doing outreach to Arab-Americans during President Obama 2008 campaign:

Unfortunately, this is not the first racial ad of the race. A recent spot run by Maynard’s campaign itself attacks Rahall’s vote for the stimulus package by stating that the program gave tax breaks to Chinese companies, and thus Rahall cares more about creating jobs for Chinese people than Americans. “It’s on our jeans. Even on children’s toys — ‘Made in China,’” the ad’s narrator warns ominously. “With skyrocketing unemployment, only a politician who’s been in Washington for 34 years would vote to help foreign companies making Chinese windmills.” The ad was so ugly, and its claims so baseless, that lawyers from Rahall’s campaign asked TV stations running the ads to take them down. Read more at thinkprogress.org

 

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Some 3,000 Millionaires Claim Jobless Benefits, IRS Data Show

Amplify’d from www.bloomberg.com

After the economy slipped into recession in 2008, millions of Americans received unemployment benefits to make ends meet -- including almost 3,000 millionaires.

According to U.S. Internal Revenue Service data, 2,840 households reporting at least $1 million in income on their tax returns that year also collected a total of $18.6 million in jobless aid. They included 806 taxpayers with incomes over $2 million and 17 with incomes in excess of $10 million. In all, multimillionaires reported receiving $5.2 million in jobless benefits.

Those numbers are a minuscule fraction of the 9.5 million taxpayers who reported receiving $43.7 billion from jobless benefits in 2008, up from 7.6 million recipients reporting $29.4 billion in benefits in 2007. Still, economists said they are surprised so many people with seven-figure incomes claimed benefits.

“It’s a larger number than I would have expected,” said Alan Viard, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington research organization. “But, people at any income level can lose their jobs.” Read more at www.bloomberg.com

 

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Obscene Tax Break Survives Again

Amplify’d from www.rollingstone.com

Once again a key piece of news has passed virtually without comment.

While the entire nation argues over nonsense like the WTC Mosque, Rick Sanchez, and, yes, blue-red culture war stuff like the Tea Party, congress yesterday quietly took a knee on the “carried interest” tax question. In doing so they decided not to take a vote on changes already approved by both houses that would scale back perhaps the most preposterous tax break in the entire federal code, one that leaves hedge-fund gazillionaires like Stevie Cohen and John Paulson paying less than half the top tax rate paid by most middle and upper-middle class Americans.

The carried interest tax break is a classic example of how in America constituencies with the means and the bureaucratic endurance to get what they want slowly hack away at the government over time, carving out exemptions to their civic responsibilities while ordinary people suck the proverbial egg. A 100% or 200% tax break for hedge fund and private equity billionaires is not the sort of thing that one passes instantly, by standing up in front of big campaign crowds and urging on a mob; it takes a long time and a lot of behind-the-scenes baby steps.

Once upon a time, we didn’t make very many distinctions about taxable income. Whether you made your money driving trucks or buying and selling stocks, you made what you made and you paid the rate outlined in your bracket. Then a movement coalesced behind the idea that the government should give a tax break to those persons who made their money investing, because after all investment creates jobs (readers will note here my desperate attempt to avoid mentioning yet again the influence of Ayn Rand on these modern economic policies). At various times in our history, this resulted in, among other things, a tax break for income earned on capital gains, i.e. the money you make when you buy something (i.e. stocks) and then sell it later for a profit.

Hedge fund managers are not investing their own money. They are not, usually, using their own capital to create jobs. Mostly what they do is nibble the proverbial golden crumbs off of other peoples’ pies. Their particular role in society is to make rich people richer, a noble aim to be sure, but not one that in any way even theoretically incentivizes wealthy people to invest in businesses more or create more jobs.

There is absolutely no logical or ideological justification – not even the wildest, craziest reed-end of a hint of a justification – for a hedge fund manager paying half the tax rate of a trucker or a teacher or a doctor. The only thing the carried interest tax break accomplished was that it provided an incentive for people to work as hedge fund managers. This was purely and absolutely a handout to big campaign contributors. It’s so preposterous and indefensible that it’s not uncommon to see even Wall Street people admitting that it goes too far (see here for example).

Naturally this became a campaign issue in 2008. McCain, of course, supported keeping the carried interest exemption. Obama promised to end it. And indeed, toward the tail of his second legislative season, the Democrats took up the issue on the Hill.

What followed was an absolutely typical death of an obvious reform. The House took up the issue first, and even in the House version, the “reform” was to tax 75% of carried interest as ordinary income. Again, there’s no reason not to make this 100%, but this is the Democratic Party’s idea of tough bargaining/starting out with a high hand. The measure passed, then went to the Senate, where Max Baucus got hold of it and softened the bill so that now only 65% of carried interest would be taxed as income. To translate, again, this now would mean that only 65% of John Paulson’s billions would be taxed as income, while the rest would be taxed at 15%. It’s important to note that this change would not affect hedge fund or private equity guys who invested their own money; no matter what, that would still be considered capital gains and would be taxed at 15%.

The measure passed in the Senate, and for the rest of the summer lobbying groups hounded both chambers for carve-outs. Venture capitalists and real estate partnership managers came knocking for exemptions. The lobbying heat got turned up… and who can say for sure whether it worked or not, but we do know what happened in the end. Congress adjourned yesterday without voting on the final deal, meaning that it can’t be taken up again until after election day, when the congress will most likely be turned back over the Republicans. At which point there will be no way the carried interest exemption will ever get rolled back.

The Dems could of course vote it through during the lame-duck session, but they won’t. Read more at www.rollingstone.com

 

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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in Hayden Lake, Idaho

Amplify’d from motherjones.com

Moscow, Idaho—Okay, a confession: We never actually saw the site of the former Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake. We got really bad directions and drove around for a while looking for it, but we had to be in Moscow at a decent hour, so we kept on going. Sorry. Basically, though, the story is this: For about three decades northern Idaho was the notorious base of operations for the Aryan Nations, who'd turned to Hayden Lake because of its isolation and general absence of non-whites. By day they'd attend services at their shrine to Adolf Hitler,* or conduct exercises at their 20-acre wooded compound outside town; by night, they'd unwind to pagan death metal. Once a year, white supremacists from around the world would converge upon Hayden Lake (population 494) for a big conference.

Of course, if you happened to live in Hayden Lake and didn't hate the rest of the planet, this was a really frustrating situation. But it wasn't until 1998 when things finally reached a tipping point. That's when a bunch of Aryans Nations guards opened fire on a mother, Victoria Keenan, and her son, Jason, who had stopped on the side of the road to look for a wallet. The guards—drunk, I should note—hopped in a truck, assault rifles in tow, and followed the Keenans for two miles, spraying the car with bullets until the Keenans swerved into a ditch. Then the guards held them at gunpoint and beat them.

The Southern Poverty Law Center filed suit (pdf) on the Keenans' behalf, and won a $6.3 million judgment in 2000, throwing the Aryan Nations into bankruptcy and forcing them to give up compound**. An Idaho millionaire, Greg Carr, then bought the land and re-gifted it to North Idaho College of Coeur d'Alene, and the college, in turn, decided to turn the property into a "peace park." Read more at motherjones.com

 

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Obama apologizes to Guatemala for US human experiments

Amplify’d from www.alternet.org

President Barack Obama personally apologized to his Guatemalan counterpart for a US-led study conducted in the 1940s, in which hundreds of people in the Latin American state were deliberately infected with sexually-transmitted diseases.

In a phone conversation with Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom, Obama expressed his deep regret for the experiment conducted by US public health researchers in Guatemala between 1946 and 1948, and apologized "to all those affected."

The US president also vowed that all human medical studies conducted today will be held to exacting US and international legal and ethical standards.

"This is shocking, it's tragic, it's reprehensible," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters, adding to apologies and outrage voiced by the president, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and other US officials.

In an impromptu news conference in Guatemala Friday, Colom denounced the study as "a crime against humanity", and said he had learned of the gruesome years-long experiment in the phone call from Clinton.

Clinton had phoned Colom Thursday to express her personal outrage and deep regret over the "reprehensible research."

"What happened all those years ago is a crime against humanity and the government reserves the right to lodge a formal legal complaint over it," Colom said.

But almost immediately, he backed off his tough talk, saying: "We are aware that this is not the policy of the United States... this happened so long ago."

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'Blackwater' gets new US contract

Amplify’d from english.aljazeera.net

Despite US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's campaign promise to no longer award military contracts to Blackwater - the now renamed notorious security contractor - the US state department has recently awarded the company another lucrative contract.

Blackwater was renamed Xe after a string of legal cases against the company in the US and in Iraq.

Wired.com reports that while neither Xe nor Blackwater appear on the list of eight firms hired for the Worldwide Protective Services contract (a group of contracts combined into one), one of the company's fronts, International Development Solutions LLC (IDS) is on the list.

In total, the contract for all eight companies is worth $10bn.

"When I am president I will ask the Joint Chiefs for their help in reducing reliance on armed private military contractors with the goal of ultimately implementing a ban on such contractors," Clinton said during her presidential campaign in 2008.

Indeed, Clinton was the only co-sponsor in the US senate of the Stop Outsourcing Security Act, introduced in 2007.

She used the issue to differentiate herself from her chief rival for the Democratic nomination, Barack Obama, who said that if voted into office, he would not rule out the continued use of military contractors.

But reporter Spencer Ackerman, who wrote the story for Wired.com's Danger Room, says that Clinton only took that stance "in order to gain some traction" during her campaign and that "it was clear that she didn't mean what she said".

Despite working for the Obama administration, where the president himself never ruled out the use of contractors, Clinton, Ackerman said, has options.

"She could stop using any particular contractor if she wanted to," Ackerman said.  Read more at english.aljazeera.net

 

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