No Need to Read Sarah Palin

by Dollars and Sense

Rudolph Delson over at The Awl has read it for you, in a real-time blog reading this weekend, with fabulous comments from The Awl's witty subscribers.

My favorite bit from Saturday's posts: Delson compares the cover of Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius ("The Memoir that Began the Decade") with the covor of Palin's over-hyped memoir, Going Rogue ("The Memoir that Ended the Decade").





Here's what he has to say:

So. What we have here on the dust jacket of the last best-selling memoir of the decade is a photograph of Sarah Palin.

She is wearing a red zipper jacket (of some unknowable fabric blend) and a tri-color flag pin (from some unknowable metal alloy). She is gazing left and beaming brightly (and something bright is beaming back at her, illuminating her face with a soft and unnatural glow). The photographer must have been crouching when this photograph was snapped, must have been aiming the camera upward at Palin, because the horizon behind Palin is low in the frame, which makes Palin seem to tower down from blue and optimistic heavens. The effect is worshipful.

Or, the effect is mock-worshipful: The last memoir to feature this much gaudy red fabric, this many maudlin blue clouds, was A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

And so, before even opening the book, I am wondering whether Palin is being lampooned. HarperCollins, her publisher, is headquartered at 10 East 53rd Street, New York, New York. This means that the editors and designers and publicists who have spent the last dozen Monday mornings ushering Going Rogue into print have also spent the last dozen Saturdays walking the variegated streets of Brooklyn and shopping the encyclopedic stores of Manhattan, have spent the last dozen Sundays reading only pertinent magazines and eating only well-researched meals. In other words? In other words, these people at HarperCollins—even the dullest of them—are not unsophisticated. They are versed in the national semiotics, are familiar with the elements of portraiture. They know that this photo of Palin is mocking. They know this photo will make half the world recoil, or snort. And yet no one at HarperCollins stopped Sarah Palin from being made a laughingstock by her own dust jacket.

And here is one of the witty Awl commenters had to say:

So you;'re saying the decade began with a self-indulgent half-true memoir by a character with a victim complex put upon by a society that doesn't understand him while he self-consciously manipulates a cult following and that it ended with a self-indulgent half-true memoir by a character with a victim complex put upon by a society that doesn't understand her while she self-consciously manipulates a cult following?

Read the full live blogging session (which continued today).

For less snarky coverage of Palin, check out Frank Rich's column in today's New York Times. But I found The Awl more entertaining.

Ok--so this post has nothing to do with economics. So here is my economics observation: Last Wednesday, D&S had a fundraiser in New York City, at the Graduate Center for Worker Education of Brooklyn College. The speakers (who were both fantastic) were Saru Jayaraman, co-director of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (www.rocunited.org), which organizes immigrant restaurant workers, and Michael Zweig, professor of Economics at SUNY Stonybrook, director of the Center for Study of Working Class Life.

I didn't want to bring down the level of discourse in the discussion period by asking about Palin, but I was tempted to ask Mike Zweig what he thought about Palin's taking on, as part of her efforts to present herself as an ordinary person, the mantle of the working class. She emphasizes in the book (I've read) that she and Todd have worked blue-collar jobs, and have been union members. That the kinds of policies she advocates are uniformly bad for workers and (especially) union-members doesn't seem to matter.

But this observation is much blander than what you will find at The Awl or in Frank Rich's column--I encourage you to check them out.

—CS

Labels: Dave Eggers, Frank Rich, Rudolph Delson, Sarah Palin

 

Please consider donating to Dollars & Sense and/or subscribing to the magazine (both print and e-subscriptions now available!).
11/22/2009 08:06:00 PM 0 comments

 

The Yes Men and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce

by Dollars and Sense

Some of us are going to the Yes Men's new movie, The Yes Men Change the World, tomorrow night. The Yes Men themselves will be there, as will our pal Marilyn Frankenstein, radical math professor, who wrote a study guide for the movie. You can watch the official trailer for the movie here.

If you haven't heard of the Yes Men, they are anti-corporate pranksters who have been described as "Borat meets Michael Moore." One of their more recent pranks involved a press release claiming to be from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce announcing that the business-friendly group had reversed its position on tough climate-change legislation. In his column in Sunday's New York Times, Frank Rich compared the prank favorably to the "balloon boy" prank that got so much media attention.

Find the fake Chamber of Commerce press release here; here's Politico's report on the hoax:

In a dramatic shift, the Chamber of Commerce announced Monday that it is throwing its support behind climate change legislation making its way through the U.S. Senate.

Only it didn't.

An email press release announcing the change is a hoax, say Chamber officials.

Several media organizations fell for it.

A CNBC anchor interrupted herself mid-sentence Monday morning to announce that the network had "breaking news," then cut away to reporter Hampton Pearson, who read from the fake press release.

Pearson quickly followed up with a second report saying the "so-called bulletin" was an "absolute hoax." Smelling a rat, CNBC's Larry Kudlow demanded to know whether the White House had been involved.

In a story posted Monday morning, Reuters declared: "The Chamber of Commerce said on Monday it will no longer opposes climate change legislation, but wants the bill to include a carbon tax."

Reuters updated the story to acknowledge the hoax, but it was too late: The Washington Post and the New York Times had already posted the fake story on their Web sites.

"Reuters has an obligation to its clients to publish news and information that could move financial markets, and this story had the potential to do that," said a Thomson Reuters spokesperson. "Once we had confirmed the release was a hoax, we immediately issued a correction, and in keeping with Reuters policy, the story was subsequently withdrawn and an advisory sent to readers."

The Yes Men, a left-leaning activist group that often impersonates officials from organizations they oppose, took responsibility for the hoax.

Andy Bichlbaum--an alias the activist uses for Yes Men demonstrations--told POLITICO that his group is targeting the Chamber for what he considers "retrograde" positions on climate change.

"Clearly, there is a question of who is hoaxing who," Bichlbaum said. "I think the Chamber is hoaxing the American public at this point."

Bichlbaum said that activists will continue targeting the organization. Bichlbaum said the Yes Men got help with their prank from members of the AVAAZ Action Factory, an activist group, and BeyondTalk.net, an environmental website.

AVAAZ has not returned calls for comment. But a post on the group's Web site said it had plans to "make this the worst Monday ever for the anti-climate PR machine at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "

Labels: Frank Rich, The Yes Men, U.S. Chamber of Commerce

 

Please consider donating to Dollars & Sense and/or subscribing to the magazine (both print and e-subscriptions now available!).
10/27/2009 11:18:00 AM 0 comments

 

Frank Rich on Larry Summers

by Dollars and Sense

A follow-up on the last post (about Harvard money managers lost $11bn): Frank Rich's column in Sunday's New York Times made a nice connection between recent revelations of Larry Summers' $5.2 million hedge fund earnings in 2008 and the fact that Summers, while president of Harvard, chided Cornel West for making a hip-hop album and supposedly thereby neglecting his professorly duties. It turns out that Summers did some real moonlighting while president of Harvard, consulting for the hedge fund Taconic Capital Advisors:

On the same Friday that the Labor Department reported the latest jobless numbers, the White House released (in the evening, after the network news) some other telling figures on the financial disclosure forms of its top officials. From those we learned more about how much the bubble's culture permeated this administration.

We discovered, for instance, that Lawrence Summers, the president's chief economic adviser, made $5.2 million in 2008 from a hedge fund, D. E. Shaw, for a one-day-a-week job. He also earned $2.7 million in speaking fees from the likes of Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. Those institutions are not merely the beneficiaries of taxpayers' bailouts since the crash. They also benefited during the boom from government favors: the Wall Street deregulation that both Summers and Robert Rubin, his mentor and predecessor as Treasury secretary, championed in the Clinton administration. This dynamic duo's innovative gift to their country was banks "too big to fail."

Some spoilsports raise the conflict-of-interest question about Summers: Can he be a fair broker of the bailout when he so recently received lavish compensation from some of its present and, no doubt, future players? This question can be answered only when every transaction in the new "public-private investment plan" to buy the banks' toxic assets is made transparent. We need verification that this deal is not, as the economist Joseph Stiglitz has warned, a Rube Goldberg contraption contrived to facilitate "huge transfers of wealth to the financial markets" from taxpayers.

But perhaps I've become numb to the perennial and bipartisan revolving-door incestuousness of Washington and Wall Street. I was less shocked by the White House's disclosure of Summers's recent paydays than by a bit of reporting that appeared deep down in the Times follow-up article on that initial news. The reporter Louise Story wrote that Summers had done consulting work for another hedge fund, Taconic Capital Advisors, from 2004 to 2006, while still president of Harvard.

That the highly paid leader of arguably America's most esteemed educational institution (disclosure: I went there) would simultaneously freelance as a hedge-fund guy might stand as a symbol for the values of our time. At the start of his stormy and short-lived presidency, Summers picked a fight with Cornel West for allegedly neglecting his professorial duties by taking on such extracurricular tasks as cutting a spoken-word CD. Yet Summers saw no conflict with moonlighting in the money racket while running the entire university. The students didn't even get a CD for his efforts—and Harvard's deflated endowment, now in a daunting liquidity crisis, didn't exactly benefit either.

Summers's dual portfolio in Cambridge has already led to one potential intermingling of private business and public policy in his new White House post. He tried—and, mercifully, failed—to install the co-founder of Taconic in the job of running the TARP bailouts. But again, Summers's potential conflicts of interest seem less telling than the conflict of values that his Harvard double-résumé exemplifies.

In the bubble decade, making money as an end in itself boomed as a calling among students at elite universities like Harvard, siphoning off gifted undergraduates who might otherwise have been scientists, teachers, doctors, entrepreneurs, artists or inventors. The Harvard Crimson reported that in the class of 2007, 58 percent of the men and 43 percent of the women entering the work force took jobs in the finance and consulting industries. The figures were similar everywhere, from Duke to the University of Pennsylvania. Dan Rather, on his HDNet television program in December, reported that at Penn this was even true of "over half the students who graduated with engineering degrees—not a field commonly associated with Wall Street."

Clearly the last person to serve as an inspiring role model for alternative values would have been Summers. But in her first baccalaureate address last June, his successor as Harvard president, Drew Gilpin Faust, stepped into that moral vacuum, zeroing in on the huge number of students heading into finance, consulting and investment banking. "Find work you love," she implored the class of 2008. The "most remunerative" job choice "may not be the most meaningful and the most satisfying."

Read the whole column; hat-tip to TM.

Labels: financial crisis, Frank Rich, Harvard University, Lawrence Summers, Wall Street

 

Please consider donating to Dollars & Sense and/or subscribing to the magazine (both print and e-subscriptions now available!).
4/14/2009 09:41:00 AM 0 comments