hunter of justice

Wednesday night in DC: Economic inequality, the downturn, and impact on the lgbt community

On Wednesday night, the Williams Institute is offering a CLE program on issues related to the current economy and its impact on LGBT people.  The event will begin with the CLE at 5:30 pm at the Finnish Embassy, at 3301 Mass Ave, followed by a reception. Speakers will include Lee Badgett, an economist who is the Research Director at Williams; Joseph Kapp, financial planner with Lincoln Financial Advisors; Diane Fuchs, partner at Womble, Carlyle Sandridge & Rice; and yours truly. It's a great way to satisfy your CLE requirements.  Tickets available here.

Davos not a place to meet girls

Let's hope that the about-to-be new Prime Minister of Iceland, the world's first openly gay head of state, is not looking forward to the World Economic Forum as one of the perks of the  job. From The Guardian, which gets cred for noticing:

Why are there so few women at Davos – and why do the organisers seem so unconcerned? An organisation that is supposed to draw from all the world's talent overlooks half of it.

 Flicking through the fat white book that lists everyone here, I counted only two female names in the first 50 – and the first of those is HH Princess Inaara, the Begum Aga Khan. No doubt talented, active in excellent philanthropic work – but hardly typical.

For the most part, this conference is a sea of middle-aged men in ties. Many sessions only involve male speakers. This afternoon's debate on development, chaired by Barbara Stocking of Oxfam, may be a Davos first, with an all-female panel.

The excuse, of course, is that Davos represents the world as it is. If most governments and businesses are run by men, then that it is not the fault of the World Economic Forum. But an organisation whose motto is "committed to improving the state of the world" should do better than that.

At a small dinner in an out of the way hotel last night, it took Africa to make a stand. A discussion of the "unknown Africa" (think growth and good government, not war) not only had two women speakers out of four, but one of them was a prime minister, Luisa Dias Diogo, who has run Mozambique since February 2004.

Gender and economic policy

From the Columbia's Gender and Sexuality Law blog, Katherine Franke on gender issues in the policy responses to the economic crisis:

The hard work we need to do RIGHT NOW is make it clear to the Obama Administration that a serious commitment to gender equality requires that they tie the funding of road construction, school rebuilding, development of green technologies - and even the financial services industry - to non-discrimination on the basis of sex and race, but also to data collection and reporting on who is getting the money. Who owns the companies that get stimulus funding, who gets hired by those companies,and what work they're doing.

Read the entire post here.

Sign of the times

The Dollar Store cuts its prices

Tonight on PBS: Emma Coleman Jordan deconstructs the bail-out

Tonight on Bill Moyers Journal, at 9 pm ET, my colleague Emma Coleman Jordan will be featured in a segment on "deconstructing the bailout."  Emma is a pre-eminent scholar on the intersection of law with economic and class issues, and has been doing a series of posts on this topic at blackprof.com.  If you're out partying tonight and miss the show, you can watch the webcast.

Til recession do us part

Belinda Luscombe in Time

Recession and divorce, it is said, go together like carriage and horse. Those who labor in Splitsville have several explanations for why that might be. There's the lawyer theory, that money provides the soft fatty tissue that insulates the marital skeleton; once it's cut back and people get a good look at the guts of their relationship, they want out. And there's the marriage-counselor theory, that couples who were never quite on the same page in the checkbook finally get pushed off the ledger by endless bickering over their dwindling resources. And the therapist theory, that financial worries cause stress, stress can cause depression, and depression is a total connubial buzz kill.
 

"Recessions tend to raise divorce rates," says Nobel laureate and University of Chicago Graduate School of Business economist Gary Becker. "But you won't see a pandemic." Census Bureau figures show that over the past 2 1/2 decades, recessions have had only minor effects on divorce rates, which have been slowly waning since the early '80s after 20 years of steadily rising. Those trajectories have been influenced more by the rise of the women's movement and women's earning power, lower fertility and changes in divorce laws than by dour Dows. The only recorded spike in divorces in the past 75 years came right after World War II.

But the trend lines could change, Becker says, depending on the depth of this recession, striking as it does squarely at people's homes. With the financial baggage that many matrimonial vessels are hauling, it's not yet clear whether more spouses will jump ship or start bailing. ...

Steven Eisman helps dissolve the unions of mostly wealthy clients in Nassau County, N.Y. In the traditional thinking about the recession-led split, non--wage earners "who were willing to stay in a less-than-perfect relationship become less willing once the credit cards are taken away," he says. But recently some lawyers have noticed that as stock prices have plunged, they've gotten inquiries from business owners and investors looking to unhitch now, with the idea that being poorer on paper will work to their advantage when dividing assets.

"In most states, the value of a business is part of the matrimonial pot of money that has to be divided up. Often, assets are set at the time of separation," says Neil Stein, partner at Stein & Glazer in Philadelphia. "I've had several clients come to me recently and say, 'I've wanted to get divorced for years but didn't want to give up half of my business. Now that my business is not worth anything, wouldn't it be a good time to do it?'" Conversely, some nonearning spouses of the very wealthy are also trying to game the nuptial market, attempting to lock in a higher rate in case the economy travels further south.

"I guess we had it coming": intelligence agency sees sun setting on American empire

From The Guardian, another example of reporting that somehow never seems to appear in the American press:

The U.S. National Intelligence Council has warned that the world is entering an increasingly unstable and unpredictable period in which the advance of western-style democracy is no longer assured, and some states are in danger of being "taken over and run by criminal networks".

Looking ahead to 2025, the NIC (which coordinates analysis from all the US intelligence agencies), foresees a fragmented world, where conflict over scarce resources is on the rise, poorly contained by "ramshackle" international institutions, while nuclear proliferation, particularly in the Middle East, and even nuclear conflict grow more likely.

"Global Trends 2025: A World Transformed" warns that the spread of western democratic capitalism cannot be taken for granted, as it was by George Bush and America's neoconservatives.

"No single outcome seems preordained: the Western model of economic liberalism, democracy and secularism, for example, which many assumed to be inevitable, may lose its lustre – at least in the medium term," the report warns.

It adds: "Today wealth is moving not just from West to East but is concentrating more under state control," giving the examples of China and Russia. "In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, the state's role in the economy may be gaining more appeal throughout the world."

At the same time, the US will become "less dominant" in the world – no longer the unrivalled superpower it has been since the end of the Cold War, but a "first among equals" in a more fluid and evenly balanced world, making the unilateralism of the Bush era no longer tenable....

In an unusually graphic illustration of a possible future, the report presents an imaginary "presidential diary entry" from October 1, 2020, that recounts a devastating hurricane, fuelled by global warming, hitting New York in the middle of the UN's annual general assembly.

"I guess we had it coming, but it was a rude shock," the unnamed president writes. "Some of the scenes were like the stuff from the World War II newsreels, only this time it was not Europe but Manhattan. Those images of the US aircraft carriers and transport ships evacuating thousands in the wake of the flooding still stick in my mind."

As he flies off for an improvised UN reception on board an aircraft carrier, the imaginary future president admits: "The cumulation of disasters, permafrost melting, lower agricultural yields, growing health problems, and the like are taking a terrible toll, much greater than we anticipated 20 years ago."...

ABA survey on impact of recession

The ABA is conducting a survey on the impact of the recession on lawyers and the legal profession.  It's quick, easy, aonymous, and you'll see the results in the January issue of the ABA Journal.  Go here to take it.

Even sex hits hard times

The Nation

By JoAnn Wypijewski

...Act I. Scene I. Before. Ed Hayes, New York attorney and man about town, has long gauged the stock market's temperature by a High-End Girlfriend Index and High-End Stripper Index. "When times are really good, guys spend fortunes at strip clubs: $2,000, $5,000... You got a 20-something-year-old, he just got a $3 million bonus, he might spend $20,000 in one night. This guy in a club once says to me, 'Listen Eddie, whatever I spend it's cheaper than the divorce.'" Likewise, a courtesan's time, even if it cost $10,000 a month, was a bargain next to the package for courting the young, fashionable girlfriend: the lease on a car, the $2 million Lower East Side condo, the dinners and baubles and $1,265/night weekend getaways at the Mandarin Oriental....

Such was the situation before panic set in at the top. In the intimate economy, sex has always been the least of it, particularly at the levels of mad wealth, where transaction costs take a different form. Average townhouse: $17 million. Baby: $50,000. One-day Yelling Center evaluation of the child's bad behavior: $4,250. ... In the web of exchange relations, perhaps the only person who fully grasped the extreme privilege and vulnerability of her situation was that relative rarity, the high-end call girl who had hustled her way up from the cheap brothels and champagne bars, and whose survival has always depended on a careful calibration of spreading her risk.

Scene II. The phone stopped ringing. Sandra was the new girl with the agency in July, when she was getting twenty calls a night for phone sex, while established workers got fifty. Most callers wanted her "co-ed" character--blond, petite, barely legal. Some wanted her mature lady. About five times a month someone called for her "ebony" character. Sandra is 35, creole--black to white men, unless she tints her hair red and wears green contacts to bring out her Latin features, as she sometimes does to get a gig dancing in a club. Since the crash, her twenty callers have dwindled to six; the other girls' to twenty. ...The day the bailout passed she got fifteen calls.

"Unchecked left-wing ascendancy" on the horizon

There is a remarkable text in today's Wall Street Journal: a single editorial that essentially pushes the panic button for corporate America.

The prospect, more than anything, of "a filibuster-proof Senate, or very close to it," has them virtually hysterical. The result is an editorial that provides an extraordinary window into the demons that haunt economic royalists. Consider these warnings:

* "Though we doubt most Americans realize it, this [a large Democratic majority in both houses of Congress plus a Dem in the White House] would be one of the most profound political and ideological shifts in U.S. history." [If only!]

* "the U.S. [may be] entering a period of unchecked left-wing ascendancy"

* "A strongly Democratic Congress is now likely to lay the final flagstones on the path to government-run health insurance from cradle to grave." [Double if only!]

* Lifting the cap on income subject to Medicare and Social Security payroll taxes "would convert what was meant to be a pension insurance program into an overt income redistribution program." [Actually, it would restore it as a covert income redistribution program, which is what those anti-business pinko's in the 1930s secretly intended, a point made many times by this esteemed editorial board.]

* "A tax-and-regulation scheme in the name of climate change is a top left-wing priority."

* "One early effort [in Congress] would be national, election-day voter registration."

* "The anti-antiterror lobby would be rewarded with the closing of Guantanamo and military commissions, which probably means trying terrorists in civilian courts."

There's much more, beyond this sample, in the WSJ's catalog of what the economic right wing is hyperventilating about. Not a single "wedge issue" is mentioned; these guys couldn't give a rat's ass about abortion or gay rights one way or another. It's all about money -- theirs, and how they can hang on to every last ounce of private wealth and corporate power.

Old Europe set to ri$e again

Yes, this blog is primarily about legal and cultural, not economic, issues. But given that we are in the midst of a global financial meltdown, I'm posting on that too. Here's commentary that you don't see in the U.S. press:

Times of London

Reliance on the US will never be the same
Anatole Kaletsky

It is pure guesswork whether last night’s European measures will create stability or trigger a further rout in financial markets when they open this morning. But two things are fairly clear about this surprisingly strong and cohesive package. First, while short-term stock market reactions are unpredictable, there can be reasonable confidence about the package’s economic impact — it will avert a catastrophic economic collapse or long-term depression. Secondly, the ability of European governments to launch their own financial rescue without waiting for US leadership represents a fundamental shift in global economic relations.

Let me begin with this second point. Since the creation of the Bretton Woods monetary system in 1944 every global financial initiative of any significance has been devised, led and co-ordinated by the US Government. This US leadership did not mean that America always got its way in financial affairs — nor that US co-ordination always succeeded, as exemplified by the breakdown of Bretton Woods in 1971. But it did mean that international financial initiatives were never attempted until ideas and the leadership came from Washington. The sole exception to this rule in the past 30 years was the creation of the euro; but this was viewed in Washington as an intra-European affair with limited global consequences.

The present global banking crisis has been a very different matter, since it originates in the US itself. Even a few weeks ago a solution without US leadership would have been inconceivable. In the past few days, however, the failure of the Bush Administration to follow through in any concrete way on the $700 billion “Paulson package” that it rammed so painfully through the Congress, has focused attention on Washington’s vacuum of leadership and ideas. Aghast at the dithering incompetence of the US in handling this crisis, European politicians have realised that Henry Paulson, the supposedly brilliant US Treasury Secretary, was an emperor with no clothes. Instead of waiting for US leadership, they had to take responsibility for Europe’s problems. In trying to do this, they have found an unlikely intellectual guide and champion: the British Treasury and Gordon Brown.

Which brings me back to the reasons for cautious optimism about the economic impact of last night’s European measures. Like the British version, this package addresses the two fundamental causes of the present financial crisis: the panic among bank depositors created by Mr Paulson’s disastrous decision to put Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy; and the panic among bank shareholders created by his equally misguided decision to expropriate the shareholders in Fannie Mae.

By effectively guaranteeing all bank deposits in “systemically important” banks, European governments have dealt with the most important threat created by the post-Lehman financial crisis: the risk of an all-out bank run by individual savers and cash-rich companies, which could have triggered the collapse of every leading bank in the world. Moreover, European governments have backed up this primary defence of the bank system with an important secondary measure: a commitment to buy new shares in banks that appear undercapitalised. Assuming this two-stage solution is quickly confirmed through legislation or unambiguous political pronouncements, interbank lending should gradually resume in the coming weeks. That, in turn, should mean credit lines to household and business borrowers remain open, averting the avalanche of bankruptcies that would have become inevitable if the paralysis in financial markets had continued much longer.

In Europe, as in Britain, it is now probably too late to avert a recession, but after last night’s package, a catastrophic depression is much less likely — and Europe’s dependence on US leadership will never be the same again.

How neoliberalism weakened marriage

New Statesman

Peter Wilby

...  Among parents in the higher social classes, ... marriage is alive and well. Further down the ladder, it has declined steeply. Of married women who had children in 2000, 43 per cent had a degree-level qualification, against 24 per cent of cohabiting women and just 10 per cent of single women. According to a survey of young people carried out for the Civitas report ("Second Thoughts on the Family"), nearly a third in social class E say they will never get married, against 10 per cent of ABs....

In the UK, working-class marriage declined not in the 1960s and 1970s, but in the heyday of neoliberalism, under a government that supposedly favoured the traditional family.

Young people believe, according to the survey, that the main reason for marriage is "commitment". But Thatcherism drove the concept of commitment out of working-class lives: the commitment of employers to their workers, of workers to their unions, of skilled men and women to their trades, of citizens to local communities. A whole generation has been taught, in the words of the sociologist Richard Sennett, that "there are no long-term career narratives". Nor are there any long-term narratives for communities, as the fate of village pubs, post offices and small shops vividly illustrates. Is it so surprising that people struggle to establish narrative in their personal lives, too, and that, lacking models of commitment, they are reluctant to commit to spouses and children?...

[N]eoliberal capitalism, alongside globalisation and technological change, has, I fear, removed all kinds of structure from the lives of large sections of the population, and particularly the economic structure that once underpinned marriage and parenthood. Perhaps it was unavoidable and perhaps, as some would say, it is no bad thing.

However, it cannot be blamed on the left.

Sign of the (bad) times

A weekend trip to my hometown, a small southern city, revealed a new feature in the local newspaper:  the Unemployment Diaries, a weekly column written by a local 52-year-old woman who had worked for 15 years at a nearby community college.  She lost her job July 1, and has chronicled her search for a new one. Not a pretty picture.