What the Libor and ISDAfix scandals reveal about manipulation of the global economy by banks:
“All of these stories collectively pointed to the same thing: These banks, which already possess enormous power just by virtue of their financial holdings – in the United States, the top six banks, many of them the same names you see on the Libor and ISDAfix panels, own assets equivalent to 60 percent of the nation’s GDP – are beginning to realize the awesome possibilities for increased profit and political might that would come with colluding instead of competing. Moreover, it’s increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system.”
A profile of California Gov. Jerry Brown, who just turned 75 and is ready to address the state’s problems:
“Unemployment in California is still higher than the national average and the state has billions of dollars of unfunded pension liabilities. He says there are some public workers in the state who can retire at 50 ‘and I think they’re going to live until they’re 100. So we have to pay for them for 50 years and they only work for 30 … how’s that going to work?’ He has other projects – ‘big ideas’, such as changing the distribution of new tax money to schools to help children who may not speak English as a first language, and developing a bullet train in the face of considerable opposition and a rising price tag. ‘You can’t be a great country without a big idea and without being able to have faith that the people who come after you will continue,’ he says, emphatically. ‘Otherwise it’s just shifting sands.'”
A Navy intelligence analyst reports a rape and finds herself ostracized. She’s not the only one, and the U.S. military still has not taken serious steps to address a culture that condones sex abuse:
“The scandal of rape in the U.S. Armed Forces, across all of its uniformed services, has become inescapable. Last year saw the military’s biggest sex-abuse scandal in a decade, when an investigation at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio revealed that 32 basic-training instructors preyed on at least 59 recruits. In Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Army Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sinclair is currently facing court-martial for sex-crimes charges, including forcible sodomy, for alleged misconduct against five women. In October, an Air Force technical sergeant filed an administrative complaint describing a work environment of comprehensive harassment – in which all women are ‘bitches’; and claimed that during a routine meeting in a commander’s office, she was instructed to take off her blouse and ‘relax’ – edged with menace and punctuated by violent assaults. In December, a Department of Defense report revealed that rape is rampant at the nation’s military academies, where 12 percent of female cadets experienced ‘unwanted sexual contact.’ And an explosive series of federal lawsuits filed against top DOD brass on behalf of 59 service members (including Rebecca Blumer) allege that the leadership has done nothing to stop the cycle of rape and impunity – and that by failing to condemn sexual assault, the military has created a predators’ playground.”
A 10-year-old boy suffers abuse growing up and murders his sleeping father, a member of the National Socialist Movement. What led to the killing, and did the system fail him?
“Inside the police station, Joseph sits in the interrogation room with a blanket on his lap and a McDonald’s meal on the table. Krista strokes his hand as Detective Hopewell interviews him. Joseph tells Hopewell that he was ‘tired’ of his dad hitting him and his mom. ‘I didn’t want to do it,’ Joseph tells Hopewell. ‘It’s just that he hurts us.’
“He says his dad is cheating on his mother and he’s afraid if there would be a divorce, he would have to live with his father. ‘That really scared me,’ Joseph says. He tells Hopewell that Jeffrey threated to kill the family. ‘He hates everybody, even my baby sister. When someone says that about someone I really care about, I get really mad.’ Every day, Joseph says, he and his father ‘are hating each other more and more.’
“Joseph tells Hopewell that the night of the killing he woke up in his bedroom — ‘crazy in my thoughts. I think that if I shoot him then maybe he wouldn’t be able to hurt us… I started thinking I should end this father-son thing.'”
“Right wing blogs erupted, with some writers tickled by Carlson’s sense of humor and others earnestly saluting his courage and daring in service to ‘the cause’ for his willingness to sit in close quarters with us—radical leftists and enemies of the state. But others took a grimmer view: ‘Don’t do it, Tucker,’ they pled. ‘This will legitimize and humanize two of America’s greatest traitors.’
“Carlson got a congratulatory letter from the IHC that offered ten potential dates for dinner and noted that ‘all auction items were donated to the IHC [which] makes no warranties or representations with respect to any item or service sold’ and that ‘views and opinions expressed by individuals attending the dinner do not reflect those of the Illinois Humanities Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, or the Illinois General Assembly.’ I imagined the exhausted scrivener bent over his table copying that carefully crafted, litigation-proof language—does it go far enough?
A classic story of a Red Sox baseball legend, by Richard Ben Cramer, who died January 7:
“It was forty-five years ago, when achievements with a bat first brought him to the nation’s notice, that Ted Williams began work on his defense. He wanted fame, and wanted it with a pure, hot eagerness that would have been embarrassing in a smaller man. But he could not stand celebrity. This is a bitch of a line to draw in America’s dust.
“Ted was never the kind to quail. In this epic battle, as in the million smaller face-offs that are his history, his instinct called for exertion, for a show of force that would shut those bastards up. That was always his method as he fought opposing pitchers, and fielders who bunched up on him, eight on one half of the field; as he fought off the few fans who booed him and thousands who thought he ought to love them, too; as he fought through, alas, three marriages; as he fought to a bloody standoff a Boston press that covered, with comment, his every sneeze and snort. He meant to dominate, and to an amazing extent, he did. But he came to know, better than most men, the value of his time. So over the years, Ted Williams learned to avoid annoyance. Now in his seventh decade, he had girded his penchants for privacy and ease with a bristle of dos and don’ts that defeat casual intrusion. He is a hard man to meet.”
A call for feminists to not forget their labor roots:
“While we debate the travails of some of the world’s most privileged women, most women are up against the wall. According to the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, women make up just under half of the national workforce, but about 60 percent of the minimum-wage workforce and 73 percent of tipped workers. In the New York area, a full 95 percent of domestic workers are female. Female-dominated sectors such as retail sales, food service, and home health care are some of the fastest-growing fields in the new economy, and even in those fields, women earn less; women in the restaurant industry earn 83 cents to a man’s dollar.
“This is where most women spend their time, not atop the Googleplex. This is where feminists should be spending their time, too.”
Colonel James S. Ketchum oversaw years of research into new methods of chemical warfare—which included testing on U.S. soldiers:
“Today, Ketchum is eighty-one years old, and the facility where he worked, Edgewood Arsenal, is a crumbling assemblage of buildings attached to a military proving ground on the Chesapeake Bay. The arsenal’s records are boxed and dusting over in the National Archives. Military doctors who helped conduct the experiments have long since moved on, or passed away, and the soldiers who served as their test subjects—in all, nearly five thousand of them—are scattered throughout the country, if they are still alive. Within the Army, and in the world of medical research, the secret clinical trials are a faint memory. But for some of the surviving test subjects, and for the doctors who tested them, what happened at Edgewood remains deeply unresolved. Were the human experiments there a Dachau-like horror, or were they sound and necessary science? As veterans of the tests have come forward, their unanswered questions have slowly gathered into a kind of historical undertow, and Ketchum, more than anyone else, has been caught in its pull. In 2006, he self-published a memoir, ‘Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten,’ which defended the research. Next year, a class-action lawsuit brought against the federal government by former test subjects will go to trial, and Ketchum is expected to be the star witness.
“The lawsuit’s argument is in line with broader criticisms of Edgewood: that, whether out of military urgency or scientific dabbling, the Army recklessly endangered the lives of its soldiers—naïve men, mostly, who were deceived or pressured into submitting to the risky experiments. The drugs under review ranged from tear gas and LSD to highly lethal nerve agents, like VX, a substance developed at Edgewood and, later, sought by Saddam Hussein. Ketchum’s specialty was a family of molecules that block a key neurotransmitter, causing delirium. The drugs were known mainly by Army codes, with their true formulas classified. The soldiers were never told what they were given, or what the specific effects might be, and the Army made no effort to track how they did afterward. Edgewood’s most extreme critics raise the spectre of mass injury—a hidden American tragedy.”
This week, we have a Longreads Member Exclusive recommended by one of our members, Boston Review Web Editor David V. Johnson. His pick is Richard White‘s ”Deconstructing Mare Island: Reconnaissance in the Ruins,” published in Boom: A Journal of California. Here’s an intro from David:
Eureka! Boom: A Journal of California launched in the Spring of 2011. The quality of writing and artwork has been absolutely superb. There are so many articles I could recommend, including one by the aforementioned Solnit, but I was especially captivated recently by ‘Deconstructing Mare Island: Reconnaissance in the Ruins,’ a piece on the Carquinez Strait by American West historian and MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant recipient Richard White. Before reading the story, I had experienced the Strait exactly the way White says most Californians do: by driving over it. Little did I know that in that body of water and its environs you can trace the rise and fall of California and the nation.
This week, we have a Longreads Member Exclusive recommended by one of our members, Boston Review Web Editor David V. Johnson. His pick is Richard White’s “Deconstructing Mare Island: Reconnaissance in the Ruins,” published in Boom: A Journal of California. Here’s an intro from David:
“Eureka! Boom: A Journal of California launched in the Spring of 2011. The quality of writing and artwork has been absolutely superb. There are so many articles I could recommend, including one by the aforementioned Solnit, but I was especially captivated recently by ‘Deconstructing Mare Island: Reconnaissance in the Ruins,’ a piece on the Carquinez Strait by American West historian and MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant recipient Richard White. Before reading the story, I had experienced the Strait exactly the way White says most Californians do: by driving over it. Little did I know that in that body of water and its environs you can trace the rise and fall of California and the nation.”
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