That's What She Said.

WHILE CITIGROUP BURNED, BOB RUBIN JUST WANTED TO BE CUDDLED…

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 15:55:03 -0400

I also remember teasingly inquiring as to whether he’d flown in on a Citigroup jet again. (He’d called me from one in December.) “It’s one of the perks,” he replied a bit sheepishly.

Things were much more relaxed by the time I walked him back to the Ritz - which was along the way to my South Beach condo. When we passed a homeless man along the way he made a bit of a show of opening up his fat leather billfold and producing a dollar — “There but for the grace of God…” he remarked melodramatically — and I gave him a lot of heat for that, because who exactly did he think he was kidding? I said give the man a job. Heck, you’re the head of a bank! But when we reached the hotel entrance, the tension returned. He got this funny look on his face, and asked:

“Do you want to go upstairs and…cuddle?”

me: god this debate is making me so insane

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 12:15:26 -0400

me: god this debate is making me so insane
pressler: which one
me: about goldman
pressler: which one
I am so over it
me: well, it's just shitty because no one seems to get that the SEC has been like systematically barred from enforcing any laws at all for the last 5 years
so it is like, you know, when a few kids die of alcohol poisoning at a "party school" and then suddenly the cops start citing
Goldman is just the first bar they raided
it may not be the most egregious
like, i remember at Penn.
Goldman would be Smokey Joe's, and Citigroup would be this place down at 44th and spruce called Murph's that let me in as a pre-frosh with an asian girl's ID
Raiding Goldman "sends a message" better that you're gonna start actually enforcing the law.
Get the message, stupid public!

Greed & Fear & Mostly Loathing On Wall Street

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 12:57:00 -0500

My dispatch from a Wall Street Tea Party can be found on AOL Daily Finance or, if you prefer the unedited version — and GUESS WHO DOES — it’s after the jump.

People in The City deeply resent the way they’ve all been associated with the actions of the (as they see it) relatively small number of people involved in the shenanigans which led to the credit crunch. Most of them don’t trade asset-backed securities or work for the off-balance-sheet subsidiaries, and they don’t see why they are the target of such generalized anger and recrimination. There is truth in that, but there is also a failure to admit that this was a cultural issue, not just the result of a set of specific actions. In fact, the bankers have been careful not to show just how much they’ve minded being the target of such generalized opprobrium.

John Lanchester, from the 2010 book I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay

Yeah, not over here they haven’t. All shenanigans may be global these days, but if there is one arena in which American bankers have held truer to modern capitalism’s supposed esteem for “transparency” than their international counterparts, it is in reacting to the generalized contempt of an underemployed, debt-enslaved citizenry for whom the one small (Pyhrric yes, but still somehow invigorating) victory in this age of insecurity is finally feeling secure in the fact that our financial troubles aren’t entirely our own doing, that they were in fact in large part the deliberate design of the same rapacious industry that siphons $35 from our checking accounts for every inadvertent $1.18 overdraft and so forth.

God knows why they care what we think, with their record-breaking earnings keeping them in record-breaking bonuses — maybe a temporary curtailment in their NetJets privileges has dampened the mood? — but they do, and deeply, so deeply that certain members of our nation’s financial oligarchy repeatedly have since the panic’s initial terrors waned seemed congenitally incapable of concealing the fact they are outraged over all this outrage directed at them. There was Jake DeSantis, the AIG Financial Products trader who resigned from his job in the New York Times op-ed page with an angry letter chastising his boss for having the audacity to ask him to repay part of the hard-earned seven-figure retention bonus he’d earned for his year working at the firm that singlehandedly sucked $183 billion out of taxpayers. There was Skip McGee, the Lehman Brothers banker who in the midst of that firm’s trillion dollar bankruptcy snagged a yearly retention bonus more than ten or twenty times that of DeSantis by agreeing to stay on with the Lehman broker-dealer unit’s new owner Barclays Capital, and who months letter penned an apoplectic five-page letter to his son’s school demanding that an English teacher be fired for an alleged comment on the subject of Wall Street “sleazeballs” during a classroom discussion about the catastrophe. (The teacher kept her job, but the principal was fired last week.)

Still, I had heard of no plan for any sort of public up-close-and-personal plutocrat-on-plutocrat spectacle to give voice to the inchoate Green Counterrevolution; no Millionaire’s March offering group catharsis to the angry white wealthy, until Tuesday, Janary 4:12 EST, when I received a mass email subject headed WALL STREET STRIKES BACK AT WHITE HOUSE from one Jennifer Jacobs of Schwartz Communications, writing on behalf of someone named THOMAS BELESIS OF SAVE WALL STREET.ORG, which billed itself as A NEW NON PARTISAN ORGANIZATION THAT IS DEDICATED TO BRINGING THE PRIDE BACK INTO WALL STREET — which it humbly reminded readers is AN ECONOMIC ENGINE FOR THE CITY OF NEW YORK AND THE UNITED STATES. The email promised the presence of HUNDREDS OF BROKERS AND TRADERS and FINANCIAL LEADERS THROUGHOUT THE REGION at an indoor rally to be held the following afternoon on the 23rd floor of 14 Wall Street, finally SPEAKING OUT ABOUT THE RECENT COMMENTS OF PRESIDENT OBAMA.

*

Befitting such a rare opportunity to hear firsthand the pent-up grievances of plutocrats, we arrived on time at 12:30 p.m. After explaining semi-politely to the downstairs security guards that the Lost Decade of Press had left press passes in short supply we were allowed upstairs to the offices of John Thomas Financial, where an initially polite receptionist marveled something along the lines of “Wow, everyone is coming to this thing…” before ushering us through a maze of hallways, past numerous artistic renderings (both sculpture and paintings) of the Charging Bull, a large wall-mounted aquarium and four or five secured entrances into the Trading Floor, a sprawling 42,000-square foot affair containing the promised hundreds of traders and brokers — and what appeared to be quite a few female relatives and/or girlfriends brandishing digital cameras — as well something I had never seen before, a soda machine stocked exclusively with Red Bull. What I did not see were any identifiable “financial leaders” barring former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who appeared to be holding the attention of at least some of the room with his comeback appearance on the trading floor’s numerous plasma screen projectors of CNBC, which was broadcasting the latest round of Oversight Committee inquiries into the interminable AIG scam.

It was not hard to divert attention away from the hearings, and not only because the legislators’ line of questioning seemed to have lost considerable focus since the inquiry into whether Paulson’s old deputy Neel Kashkari was or was not a “chump.” There was a amped-up, listless energy about the place, like the last week of high school if there were magnet schools for physical education, that pulsed through the room as if to dare all wandering eyes not to feast on the landscape. The dress code generally brought to mind the sort of attire the cast of Jersey Shore might wear to a casting call for The Apprentice: iridescent three-piece numbers buckling slightly to contain the musculature of the boys, “tight” and occasionally ruffled for the few girls in attendance. One fellow’s forehead was badly sunburned, and I was not reminded until much later that the existence of tropical locales and air travel might serve as an alibi; where tans are as mandatory as they appeared to be at John Thomas Financial one can be forgiven for dozing off under the sun lamp on occasion. Mood: grinning shit-eatingly.

In the middle of all this, before a microphone stand and flanked by fifteen or twenty other men, stood Thomas Belesis. Whatever role physical appearance played in the brand John Thomas Financial was hoping to convey — and it seemed from all indications fairly central — Belesis appeared its platonic ideal, the entourage conspiring with his relatively limited stature to project the image of a man who warranted bodyguards. In addition to the good dozen-and-a-half television cameramen assembled, several (bronze-complected) women were dutifully aiming hand-held cameras at him. Someone finally figured out how to turn off the CNBC, and there was silence.

What followed were two speeches of profligate inanity. Belesis referenced the Declaration of Independence, although I believe he referred to the “constitution” in doing so, and then possibly compared the humble beginnings of the nation with the humble beginnings of John Thomas Financial. Then, to raucous applause, Belesis introduced an attractive, tanned, silver-haired man named Bruce Blakeman, who was evidently some sort of would-be politician, although this was anything but evident during most of his speech. In fact, it is hard to say exactly was evident from his speech, other than the fact that he disapproved of President Obama and he wasn’t alone, although he was certainly rare, in the sense that as critics of the president he was clearly capable of making Sarah Palin sound erudite, and I sincerely wish that were an exaggeration. Because if Bruce Blakeman had even so much as flirted with coherence, a casual constituent might have extrapolated from the single titular “fact” to which he made liberal and repeated reference — that the financial services industry contributes a “disproportionate” twenty percent of New York state tax revenue — that Bruce Blakeman’s understanding of the meaning of “proportion” might be radically different from the norm. And that it would be only logical to argue, in a world in which Bruce Blakeman’s definition of what was “proportionate” were the accepted standard, the government ought to fund its wars and schools and police departments and toxic asset relief regimens the way ATM machines do, by collecting flat annual fees from every man, woman and child regardless of income, wealth, age or employment status. Covering the government’s projected expenditures for the fiscal year 2010 would cost an estimated $21,000 a head, a sum which when multiplied by the median New York household size of 2.61 exceeds the state’s median household income by about $1,370, or an effective median tax rate of 107%. Such a policy would seem at least as difficult to endorse as it would be to enforce.

But whatever, all of which is just a rather verbose way of saying that it was unmitigated idiocy, not policy, that Bruce Blakeman was purveying here. When the floor was opened to ten minutes of questions, it became clear that this had not served as a deterrent to seeking to replace Kristen Gillibrand in the United States Senate seat, but it did prevent him from articulating many objections to her voting record. Would he have voted for TARP? He wouldn’t say. Health care reform, Sotomayor, Bernanke? He was not asked. “I can tell you one thing I wouldn’t have voted for,” he did say, finally, referring of course to the American Recovery And Reinvestment act of 2009, because “it didn’t work.” And how had he arrived at this conclusion?

“Because I’ve been traveling around talkin’ to people from Buffalo to Rochester,” he answered, and then, to raucous applause and laughter from the audience: “And they ain’t stimulated!”

—
I broke for the bathroom shortly after the formal question and answer session concluded, and found the women’s bathroom equipped with a curling iron, a straightening iron, a tube of Oscar Blandi dry shampoo, a bottle of mouthwash and small plastic cups, Victoria’s Secret body sprays and lotions in an array of scents including “Pure Seduction” and “Secret Charm”, but alas nothing in the way of menstrual supplies, not to imply that I was seeking any. If the male to female ratio seemed as favorable to the fairer sex as it seemed among the staff of John Thomas Financial, it also seemed the fairer sex was not taking any chances.

When I returned to the trading floor I found Belesis and some of his minions still surrounded by questioners. Dutifully I walked over and did what I could to restrain myself from entering the conversation. To no avail.

“Sir, you keep speaking of Wall Street in terms of being an ‘engine’ of the economy. But isn’t it more like the plumbing of the economy? I mean, do you really want Wall Street to be bigger and more powerful? What does it actually create?”

At which point one of Belesis’ more sober-looking charges, a fellow by the name of Wayne S. Kaufman, CMT, whose business card identified him as John Thomas Financial’s Chief Market Analyst, interceded.

“Well you know, the economist Robert Schiller, he recently wrote of the earthquake in Haiti, that if they’d had a better financial system they’d be in much better shape…”

“If Haiti had a functioning government they’d be in much better shape! If they had decent highways and a reliable power grid… if they any infrastructure at all they’d be in infinitely better shape! If free markets are so virtuous why did they fail to recognize that they could have gotten some great PR by doing a better job in Haiti? Did the free markets simply discount the likelihood of such a 25-sigma event…”

A slightly more rational member of the media interjected.

“What specifically do you want from the Obama Administration?”

“Well, when Obama uses terms like ‘fat cats’…”

This was not the first time the phrase “fat cats” had been invoked to stand as the supposed apotheosis of the administration’s supposedly gratuitously inflammatory epithets clearly aimed at stoking class warfare. I cannot claim to comprehend the magnitude of the terms supposed offensiveness to their ears; I can only say that I saw an episode of Jersey Shore in which a stranger at a bar (not mendaciously) accused Snooki of being “fat” and in doing so nearly touched off a Peloponnesian War and it was something like that.

“We’re not opposed to all regulation, we just want to elevate the debate to a higher intellectual level, and away from unwarranted populist invectives like ‘fat cats’…”

“Sir,” I said. “I don’t know if you have read Too Big To Fail, but there is a very interesting passage at the beginning where it is noted that Dick Fuld’s salary as the CEO of Lehman Brothers in 2006 was ten thousand times his starting salary as a bond trader at Lehman Brothers in the late sixties. If over the course of a generation, within Wall Street itself, forgetting the rest of the country and the economy and all the other industries, the gap between the wealthy and the rest of us has become so huge, well, how much would Dick Fuld have to have paid himself to merit the term ‘fat cat’ to you? The real unemployment rate is eighteen percent, how high does it have to go for the supposedly populist rage to become warranted, in your eyes?”

With this I had officially passed the point of Too Irritating To Humor. “Okay,” Wayne Kaufman CMT said. “We’re done.”

I did not necessarily disagree, although it had been my limited experience with institutions like John Thomas Financial that the task of entering terms like “John Thomas Financial” into the assorted search engines and databases with which the industry’s dread regulators keep tabs on men like Blakeman and Belesis might stave off my own task’s completion for a day or a weekend or so.

—
John Thomas Financial was founded in 2008 by Anastasios a.k.a. Thomas a.k.a. “Tommy” Belesis, who prior to the rally had most prominently been featured in the media for supposedly dispensing financial advice to Duchess Sarah Ferguson and receiving the 2009 Bronx GOP Man of the Year award, a distinction for which former mayor Rudolph Giuliani filmed a video in which he said among other things that

Tom embodies the spirit of the American dream — the New York dream. The son of immigrants, Tom rose from humble beginnings to become a great success on Wall Street…

This is what it means to be a great success on Wall Street:

In June 2008 Belesis was deposed in New York state supreme court on the subject of his involvement with a company called the InterOil Corporation, a former Enron subsidiary with a claim to a massive pool of natural gas off the coast of Papua New Guinea, a relatively fecund history of associating with share price manipulators and, by the beginning of 2008, a major cash squeeze coming on. Belesis testified that he had essentially orchestrated a deal by which InterOil managed to raise $95 million through a private a convertible debt offering in which Belesis and some of his associates would eventually net nearly $6 million in various fees. Four days after the deal was signed, Wayne Kaufman appeared on CNBC to call InterOil his “favorite stock.” The company’s shares proceeded to jump above the strike price above $32.50 a share, forcing a conversion of the bonds to shares less than a month after the appearance. (Within months shares had plunged below $10 a share, although they have since rebounded impressively.)

Prior to founding John Thomas Financial, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority lists seven firms at which Belesis plied his trades: Joseph Gunnar & Co., Harrison Securities, S.W. Bach & Company, Ladenberg Capital Management and First Asset Management Inc., ATB Holding Company and Gaines Berland, at least six of which have been subjected to sundry boiler room type probes over the course of Belesis’s career, which began in 1996 at First Asset Securities, then known as Lew Lieberbaum & Co.

Lew Lieberbaum is probably the best-known of Belesis’ former employers, owing mainly to a 1997 federal suit brought against it by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in which various female employees testified to having been subjected to a work environment only slightly more degrading than what one might expect of the average Cambodian brothel.

The complaint is no longer available online, so it is hard to say what role if any Anastasios P. “Tommy” Belesis played in perpetuating what the 50-page complaint termed the “daily torrent and virtual hailstorm of sexual harassment” unleashed by the trading floor upon its female staffers. But one does not go to work for a company where lesbian strippers are a regular fixture on the trading floor, where one such stripper was asked to remove her labia ring so that the male employees might petition female employees to sniff it, where ostensible brokers are charged with mopping up the mixture of whipped cream and bodily fluids resulting from the chief financial officer’s midday frolic with his secretary, where the refusal of a female employee to indulge in such an encounter with a male superior is grounds for termination, where women’s breasts are regularly groped by men merely seeking to wipe the food off their hands, where one junior partner makes a habit of picking his nose before ramming his snot-smeared finger into the sandwiches of females brokers, where these and other uncomfortable behaviors are abetted by widespread cocaine use, because one is pursuing the American Dream. One goes to work for a company like the one formerly known as Lew Liberbaum & Co. because if one is not a total douchebag already he is ready to become one.

From the look of his FINRA profile I would venture that Anastasios “Tommy” Belesis falls into the former category. Investors have accused him of churning, fraud, excessive trading, breach of contract and sundry other violations; regulators have ordered him to repay more than a million dollars to investors. In 2005 he was fired from S.W. Bach for misrepresenting his identity to a customer. As someone called BerkshireBull wrote on the Registered Rep message boards in response to another user’s query about interviewing with John Thomas Financial, “never trust a man with two first names.” Even if, as the John Thomas Financial website promises would-be trainees, “we utilize the finest institution for the upmost learning.”

Because there is always another nickname, another Delaware corporation, another offshore bank account, another P.O. box registered in the name of another penny stock going to a hundred to dump on another sucker born every minute with guys like Tom Belesis. These are the guys who falsified the documents qualifying $7-an-hour strawberry pickers for McMansion option-ARMs, and their ubiquity in the American economy is the more mundane consequence of its epic failure to seriously police the financial markets. Perhaps what gets lost when we focus our ire on the TBTF fatcat class is how many of the meatheads on the front lines of our financial frauds could never hope to set foot in a Goldman Sachs training class. But they’re an indispensable piece of the conspiracy, too, because their money is just as good as Goldman’s at buying candidates like Bruce Blakeman, and their voices are even louder when they rail against big government and fill campaign coffers in hopes of dismantling the laws that might protect their victims because they truly believe the only mistake is getting caught, the same way they think that whipping out one’s penis is the upmost in hilarity, because they are detestable children with a throbbing surplus of misappropriated self-esteem. They have already proven that they will destroy the country if you let them, and the only thing you can trust them for is that they’ll happily do it again and host a pep rally afterward to celebrate.

Page 139 of Last Man Standing. And no I am not saying that I...

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:36:50 -0500

Page 139 of Last Man Standing. And no I am not saying that I believe in the existence of a “meritocracy” or any of that nonsense. I am just saying that a big reason late capitalism is so terrible is that it is so stupid. The Will To Whatevs probably could have saved a couple billion taxpayer dollars if someone with power in finance believed in reading.

Yeah yeah yeah, “genius” fails, but basic literacy...

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:23:00 -0500

Yeah yeah yeah, “genius” fails, but basic literacy can’t hurt right? (Although: someone stick some Galbraith in that Gulfstream.) (From page 166 of TBTF.)

skybarn: via www.paulwesterberg.com Paul Westerberg and a...

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:14:51 -0400

skybarn:

via www.paulwesterberg.com

Paul Westerberg and a Yankees fan.

YOU LOSE

So I started this other blog on this thing called True/Slant

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:03:14 -0400

Yes, I am officially that unemployed. I probably wouldn’t be driven to such a measure if I could figure out how to fucking “jump” a post on Tumblr. But also Matt Taibbi is over there, as it appears are many of the people with whom I once got paid to work at TIME and various other lofty media establishments. And there’s a guy who calls his blog “The Undersharer,” what the fuck. Please help me stick it to that guy’s traffic. That’s all for now.

blakeley: Text from my brother… DISCUSTING!!!!

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 02:45:10 -0400

blakeley:

Text from my brother…

DISCUSTING!!!!

For those of you on Twitter...

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 12:19:00 -0400

skybarn:

brooklynmutt:

apsies:

kaytee:shorterexcerpts:

Change your twitter settings to say you are in the Tehran timezone, and change your location to Tehran.

Iranian censors are filtering by these settings to find dissidents, by doing this you can make things a bit more difficult for them.

done!

hello, what is wrong with these so-called “dissidents” that their twitter settings say “Tehran”??? Don’t they fucking live in Iran? A better idea would be if we all started Twittering in Farsi. I mean duh.

ABORT

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 19:02:01 -0400

Andrew Sullivan has been one of the most vocal advocates of a moderate, nuanced “appreciation of the shades-of-gray” approach to abortion policy, but he maybe should have hired a girl intern to screen those dubious “Personal Choice” first-person abortion stories he has been posting on his blog because I am pretty sure these ones are fake.

On that awesome book review written by that one guy's ex-girlfriend

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 19:56:00 -0400

skybarn:

craptheblog:
I still think the review should never have been published. It opens the door—especially because so many people think it’s so great—for Ad Hominem attacks on every novel, movie and restaurant review. Is there anyone less objective then an ex? What do I care if the ex of a writer is conflicted about the novel? It’s a distraction and it’s irrelevant.

Hey, Skybarn, you wouldn’t happen to be a dude, would you? If some editor had gotten Carl Bernstein to review I Feel Bad About My Neck in the grand tradition of Nelson Algren’s hit piece on Simone de Beauvoir in Harper’s… well that guy would probably be an asshole, but I’d like, totally click.

Crap Email Critical Readings

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 19:08:15 -0400

Crap Email From A Dude is back! And now on our brand-new Tumblr I am writing literary critiques of my favorites, starting with yesterday’s in which a lawyer emailed his ex-girlfriend’s co-worker after ten months of silence to find out how she was doing — and invite him to for a bout of “prowling/scamming/trollop hunting.”

At first glance Jared’s Crap Email to Tom, the co-worker of his former lover Maggie, is a somewhat generic — albeit rather distinctively stilted — example of the “subtle temperature taker,” which is to say, the studiously non-confrontational attempt to gauge the amenability of a former paramour to renewing sexual relations, a once-rich genre that has been glutted with mediocrities as the emergence of applications like Facebook, G-chat and Twitter has all but eliminated the barriers to “re-entry,” if you will, with regard to casual communication with one’s exes.

But awkwardness is merely a smokescreen meant to distract the casual reader from an aesthetic brilliance laid bare in Jared’s opening line:

Read the entire wayyyy overthought “essay” at CrapEmailFromADude.com!

"actually, i was joking recently that i was never taken advantage of, sexually, in a partying atmosphere because i never got anywhere near passing out, because i'd be so coked out of my mind, and was hyper aware of everything. so, really, coke prevents date rape."

Fri, 29 May 2009 13:20:27 -0400

hell of a drug.

Rape Meme

Fri, 29 May 2009 12:48:00 -0400

I finally bothered addressing my haters on the Double X but I know the purists among you will want to read the unabridged version:

Linda Hirshman is a celebrated author, lawyer and philosophy professor. Lizz Winstead is a comedian and political satirist who co-founded the infallible Daily Show. I am a financial journalist who a few years ago was driven by financial necessity into the Hobbsean field of stay-at-home punditry known as professional blogging. That someone with my resume would be capable of (almost completely inadvertently) capturing the interest of individuals fitting the first two descriptions is one of the few perks of submitting oneself to the draining, malodorous conditions of my industry. I should be totally stoked to have gotten myself into a flame war with two persons of such distinction. And in any other case, over any other issue, I am sure I would be. But that’s just the issue: what the hell is the issue?

If there ever was an underlying philosophical debate to this feud it has certainly been lost over the course of its convoluted history, which began last June, when Hirshman wrote a column for the Washington Post Outlook section bemoaning support of Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton among white women of my generation. The Post website commissioned me to author a rebuttal to Hirshman’s screed. The gist of her argument was that my generation had “somewhat ignobly” abandoned the feminist politics of self-interest in favor of policies more interested in serving humanity. I suggested this might be because we care about people other than our partners in demography, she mocked me for the “blogger’s disease” of emoting, but by October she was praising Obama for taking up “the daunting task of explaining to Americans why they should once again care for one another.” If there was any substance to this debate, Hirshman has already conceded the victory to “The Great Political Theorist Maureen Tkacik.”

But internet wars are nothing if not severely substance-resistant, and “events” as I have thus far recounted them comprise a tiny fraction of the millions of page views and tens of thousands of inflammatory comments this war would generate when Winstead read my column, as any substance averse internet addict may know.

Now, I do not know how exactly I wound up agreeing to appear on Thinking and Drinking, a small New York comedy production hosted by Winstead under the rubric of something aptly called “Shoot The Messenger Productions.” The thing was mostly coordinated by my friend and Jezebel colleague Tracie Egan, who is also named in Hirshman’s indictment of Jezebel and had been invited to the show by one of Winstead’s producers, who professed to be a daily reader of the site. The producer told us she and Winstead felt Jezebel represented a new class of emerging media outlets that “got it,” and wanted to interview us about sex, pop culture and politics; Tracie said the latter was my beat and the two of us agreed to handle the show together. All I know is that the Hirshman rebuttal seemed to be my only piece of writing Winstead had read, and by the time she brought it up a much bigger and less coherent battle was well underway.

Here’s what happened: I showed up skittish after a day at the blog, was handed two beers and instructed to get drunk; imbibed them while watching a political comedy show and waiting anxiously for Tracie to arrive; before long we were onstage joking about sex. Winstead asked Tracie if she believed abortion was an ideal form of contraception; Tracie said the pullout method was a lot less painful; Winstead offered that she’d had a sufficient number of abortions to be warrant the pet name “Terminator 3” and reminisced about a more promiscuous era during which she offered sex to men as a quid pro quo for their assistance moving boxes in the morning; I told a charming story about my mother assuming my toothbrush was a vibrator; suddenly Winstead wanted to know how we balanced our “sexual freedom” with the fact that “it’s not always safe to just have a free, 100% total sexual life.” Then I offered, god knows why, that during a more promiscuous era I had in fact gone home with a guy when I’d been locked out of my house and fallen victim to date rape; Winstead refilled our wine cups a few more times and demanded to know why I hadn’t reported the incident to police, and in a clumsy and drink-addled and characteristically idiotic attempt to inject humor back into the conversation, I replied that I’d had “better things to do, like drinking more,” a comment that Winstead would highlight in a furious post on her Huffington Post blog the following week.

From there my statements would go on to scandalize pundits right and left, professional and troll. On the PBS program “To The Contrary”, the Heritage Foundation’s Genevieve Wood would concur with Women’s Campaign Forum president Ilana Goldman’s assessment that my performance “reflect[ed] badly on women as a class.” Subdued but never vanquished by such competing memes as the collapse of the global financial system and the historic election of Hirshman’s care advocate in chief, the conflict would flare up again in December, when New York magazine would use it to peg a trend piece on women and drinking in a passage Leonard Lopate would repeat in horror on his eponymous radio show later that month.

But it was Hirshman who bravely courted charges of “overness” when she carried this meme into the current year, nearly to its first anniversary, in honor of the debut of the website Double X.

I turned on my computer one morning last summer, and there was a YouTube clip of two women, manifestly drunk, discussing why one of them could not be bothered to call the police when she was raped.

Fucking this again??, I thought, and pondered finally defending myself on a blog or something. I had not bothered to formally defend myself regarding the issue — and yeah, drinking was among the activities that seemed more worthwhile — beyond placing an irritated call to Lopate in December. What, I asked him, did you think I meant when I said that? Did it strike you as serious?

“It sounded awful to me, I gotta tell you Moe,” he said. “It said to me I’m willing to put myself in a dangerous situation again.”

Oh Jesus, but okay. I offered him a few contextual details: it was uttered during a comedy show. Called Thinking & Drinking. In response to a disarmingly serious (and I have been told inappropriate, but whatever) question. Concerning something that had happened ten years earlier. To a younger, former self I get to joke about now because I am old enough to have trustworthy sex partners to whom to turn when I lose my keys.

The New York writer offered that she felt the comment had been “tongue-in-cheek.” Suddenly Lopate got it. “It was in the same kind of spirit that when people used to ask me when I was a smoker if I knew about cancer, and I would say, ‘please don’t make me nervous, I’m going to need another cigarette,’ and I thought that was witty at the time,” he said. Exactly!

“Now I think I was being an idiot, but that’s a whole other matter.”

“People make short-term decisions all the time that counteract their long-term interests!” I said, eyeing the pack of Parliaments on my coffee table longingly. “I mean, that is just life.”

Next caller.

Which is, of course, part of the answer to Hirshman’s (rhetorical?) question: “How can women supposedly acting freely and powerfully keep turning up tales of vulnerability — repulsive sexual partners, pregnancy, STDs, even rape?” Yes, drinking is fun, and sex feels better without a condom. I can come up with some pretty good evolutionary biology-based explanations as to why these things are true, but human biology never seems to quite keep pace with the aspirations of its civilization. Our long-term and short-term desires are locked in permanent conflict with one another, and then you die.

Which brings me to the bigger obvious explanation for why supposedly free women persist in being vulnerable all the time, which can also be summarized by a popular beachwear slogan known as “shit happens.”

In truth I didn’t report my date rapist for a whole slew of reasons other than the opportunity cost of all the lost boozing hours. Because I remembered events only well enough to find them more insulting than traumatizing. Because I chewed him out in the morning and told everyone I knew and thought that would be more productive. And after I chewed him out and things calmed down he asked me about my job at the local newspaper, where at the time I covered murders and drug busts and violent, non-date rapes committed by sociopathic serial rapists who preyed on crack addicted hookers whose mangled bodies eventually turned up in state parks. Which was another thing I was busy with that summer, logging enough in various outposts of the Philadelphia criminal justice system to know much better than my date rapist the odds that such a case would hold up in a 20-mile radius of a grand jury: zero.

I could have said that to Winstead, and added that there are probably more productive ways to shame douchebag fratboys than volunteering to testify in court about something rather unmemorable that happened while you were passed out drunk, because fundamentally I felt then and still feel that the problem of douchebags cannot be solved in courtrooms. The problem of douchebags is that they are so divorced from the reality of the world outside their frat houses that they lack any conception whatsoever of what sort of shit is really happening. I did not believe the problem with my date rapist was something you would find in the DSM because it seemed to be fundamentally less a deliberate act but a sin of omission, a disregard of the lives or desires of anyone but himself that happened one drunk night to enable him to tell himself, “Nah, she’s just saying no.” So I told him about this housewife I knew who ministered to junkies in the worst slums of the citiy, and how American drug policy is so totally fucked up it is willing to pay three or four times the cost of rehab to incarcerate addicts and petty drug criminals when white collar fraudsters like Michael Milken had campus buildings named after them, etc. etc.. And I lit up a cigarette and he told me not to smoke because his father had had lung cancer.

And in retrospect it is funny that he would castigate me for smoking (and on the basis of his father’s having succumbed to a major health hazard that was not exactly some secret, hello Lopate) so soon after “victimizing” me. But my first impulse, and maybe this is a woman thing, was to feel lucky for my own dad’s good health and remember how shit happens to everyone, all the time, and how much worse it could be. I never ended up quitting, though. Maybe Hirshman can get a column out of that.

The latest answer to the age-old "more corrupt? or more just stupid?" conundrum thingy

Fri, 15 May 2009 18:48:25 -0400

Today I’m with stupid so to speak.

(Yes it is a post about a report written by the Inspector General of the SEC but it is also the tale of two MINDBLOWINGLY RETARDED RETARDS with law degrees and better salaries than yours and that will make you feel better about all the neurons you kill off this weekend.)

COME SEE WHAT EZRA KLEIN'S TWITTER IS CALLING "REALLY WORTH READING"

Fri, 08 May 2009 10:42:00 -0400

A small irony at the network concerns the ambitious “I Am CNBC” promotional campaign that has been airing during commercial breaks all winter, for which each of the network’s thirty New York-based personalities filmed a thirty-second, black-and-white spot delivering a brief autobiographical monologue ending in “I am [name]. . . . I am CNBC.” We learn the sweet-faced Squawk Box anchor Becky Quick was an “oil field kid” and a proud Rutgers grad, commodities reporter Sharon Epperson bagged groceries, and Maria Bartiromo was a coat-check girl. We hear about all manner of awards and nominations, die-hard sports-franchise loyalties and harmless eccentricities, and, in the apotheosis of the form, we hear a slightly faster-paced extended riff from the man who is arguably CNBC’s most fearsome reporter:

I am a writer . . . son of an ironworker . . . son of New York . . . Golden Globes prospect . . . a Pulitzer Prize nominee . . . I’m a clothes horse . . . Afraid of heights . . . in love with my wife. . . . I’m a fantastic cook and I can prove it. In college I was a great dishwasher. . . . My mom called me Chucky, but no one else better try it. . . . I brush my teeth at my desk. . . . And if I were to die in the job I would be very honored. I am Charles Gasparino. . . . I am CNBC.

Gasparino taped the spot, and submitted to another hour or so of extended self-revelation for the CNBC.com Web site, on September 15, the day Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, causing a run on a major money market fund that had invested in its bonds that cascaded through the financial system and threatened to tie up the majority of the world’s money supply if not for massive federal intervention. Erin Burnett, the luminous mid-morning anchor who has been perhaps the network’s most visible public face during the crisis, taped her spot that day too. All thirty spots were taped between the fifteenth and the eighteenth of September, arguably the most turbulent four days in the history of finance, and thus one of the stranger allocations of newsroom resources in recent media history.

Well what a fascinating use of government-bankrolled hours for the taxpayers of both countries!!

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 12:44:13 -0400

The UK’s organized crime authority is looking into whether AIG’s request that employees return bonuses amounts to “extortion.” I knew there was a reason I got into blogging. (Yes please add TPM to your RSS blah blah)

"…the eyes of the financial community—which, for all its lunacy, stupidity, avarice, and culpability in the current financial implosion, remains for any Treasury secretary a constituency of paramount importance…"

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 23:59:05 -0400

the challenges of governing a plutocracy

I Heart Steve Liesman

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:50:37 -0400

Also: Michelle Caruso-Cabrera does not understand how CDOs work. She was just all “one mortgage defaults and then suddenly they’re worthless” etc. etc. Gary Parr, can’t you learn this woman something?

And another thing Barney!

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 17:00:44 -0400

Remember how you paid James Brown fifty grand so people would not get crazy and riot in the streets just because everyone was so afraid people would riot in the streets because rioting in the streets was what everyone else was doing? Remember how you didn’t even knew who James Brown was but you paid him off because you thought he might calm people down and counterproductive and irrational mis-directed rage is a big fat hindrance to Getting Shit Done? (Just ask any girl who ever dated an asshole, that Barney was right.)