As dealers have slid down the ratings spectrum in recent years, options the industry gave away for free when in better health have become painfully relevant, forcing banks to confront the latest in a long line of post-crisis pricing challenges – the replacement valuation adjustment (RVA). It may be a challenge too far.
“They’re horrible,” says the head of rates trading at one large European bank. “We have no idea how to price them or manage the risk associated with them. All I know is that if we get downgraded to a certain point and our counterparties choose to exercise the option, we are going to lose a lot of money.”
The question is how much. The options, known as downgrade triggers, allow a client to terminate a trade when a counterparty hits a certain rating level and also force that party to pay for a replacement – but banks have no way of knowing how much a new dealer might charge to enter into the trade. As a rule of thumb, one trader that has replaced other banks says a downgraded dealer might be gouged for up to 10% of a trade’s net present value.
This, of course, is the law of the jungle – and traders generally do not cry about that. What makes downgrade triggers different is the systemic risk they could present in markets where they are common, and where trading is concentrated in the hands of a small number of rtls – parts of the inflation swap market, for example. Dealers and clients alike worry the downgrade of a large player in this space, and subsequent mass termination of contracts, could overwhelm the market’s ability to replace the risk.
In this scenario, traders warn the 10% rule of thumb goes out of the window – losses could be many times larger than expected. Sweeping downgrades for dealers as a whole could have a similar effect – forcing affected banks to pay their stronger peers to take on trades at a time when nobody wants to trade at all.
As a result, dealers are doing two things they would normally walk over hot coals to avoid – some are turning away business, and others are calling on regulators for help.
“If regulators are serious about systemic risk, then they should seriously look at not allowing these triggers to exist,” says one head of interest rate structuring at a European bank in London. “Calculating an RVA number will be meaningless as any number computed will be too low and wrong. There is not a lot you can do about it, especially in one-way or closed markets. It is much better to just forbid portfolio rating triggers in derivatives contracts – especially in dynamic portfolios – as they are a blunt source of systemic risk.”
Tim Blake, head of fixed-income department portfolio management at Credit Suisse in New York, says the bank no longer writes new business containing downgrade triggers. “We made the decision that we wanted to stay away from that kind of business. The risks can be unacceptable,” he says. And Credit Suisse is not alone. One other, smaller European dealer says it has the same policy, while at least three other banks claim to have imposed strict limits on the number of swaps they will accept with downgrade triggers.
The second issue is that most dealers believe there is a strong correlation between the risk of a bank’s own downgrade and the downgrade of the rest of the Street. A counterparty may be less likely to exercise the trigger if dealer ratings are all slipping, but if it does so the bank will be paying for a replacement trade in stressed conditions, which is likely to significantly inflate the bid-offer spread.
On uncollateralised trades, dealers fear the replacement cost would be even bigger. The pool of willing counterparties for these swaps has shrunk since the crisis, because of the higher funding and capital charges involved, and this could be exacerbated in the event of widespread downgrades. For collateralised trades, modelling is harder still because each bank quoting will do so on the basis of its own credit support annex – the industry standard document governing bilateral collateral posting, which determines what discount rate should be used.
Finally, RVA should take into account the possibility that the new trade will also incorporate a downgrade trigger and that quoting banks may want to insulate themselves by charging an RVA premium, and that this premium needs to reflect the same fact, and so on, in a dizzying, never-ending cascade of downgrades and replacement charges, each of which would be determined by the same incalculable risks that are contained in the first.
The bottom line is that termination costs can be high, but there is no way of confidently putting a number on them – RVA resides in the land of informed guesses, ballpark figures and back-of-the-envelope calculations. It’s not the kind of thing a dealer is generally happy to quote to a client or explain to a risk manager.
“On a trade with a mark-to-market value of, say, $100 million, a general rule is that firms will take you for $5 million–10 million, just because they can. And we’ve seen this done. We have replaced people, it’s an opportunity to profit,” says one derivatives trader at a European bank.
It can be more painful than that, too. Peter Shapiro, managing director at independent swap adviser Swap Financial, which advises governments, government agencies and non-profit organisations, says he has advised on close-outs in which local US government entities were holding heavily out-of-the-money swaps and the banks were paying to step in as replacements often quoted at steep discounts.
All these issues are magnified in illiquid, concentrated markets – and a number of traders point to the long-dated, LDI-driven inflation swap market in the UK as a prime example. The market is dominated by five or six players, they say, and triggers are a common feature of these trades – so, if one of the bigger houses is downgraded, all hell could break loose.
“Rating triggers are, by their nature, wrong-way risk and are hard to quantify. But even more problematic is when these triggers are being used in a space where the underlying product flow is systemic. All banks will be same way round and a trigger will then catapult the bid-offer to unknown but most likely extreme levels – even more so when liquidity and capacity is also a constraint. Inflation and exotics markets are exposed to this kind of risk. We think this is a source of systemic risk. It is being used and pushed by pension funds and we are trying to dissuade the community from relying on these triggers,” says Guido Hebert, global head of rates structuring at HSBC in London.
The UK inflation swap market is intensely competitive, with bid-offer spreads typically between 2 and 4 basis points, traders say. But in stressed market conditions, the spreads can get as wide as 10bp, according to a trader at a large LDI manager. For a ￡10 billion inflation swap portfolio with an average maturity of 20 years and a ￡20 million sensitivity to a 1bp change in inflation – known as IE01 – this means paying the full bid-offer spread (5bp from mid-market) would result in a cost of ￡100 million.
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Monday, September 2, 2013
Mental Health Stigma
Four years ago this month I returned from Iraq, which was sort of my last big mission as a military psychologist before "becoming a civilian." As a psychologist I was interested in trauma and suicide long before my deployment, but there's something very different about listening to a Soldier tell the story of his buddy's death while he's still lying in a hospital bed having fragments of metal removed from his leg as compared to hearing the same story in your clinic in the U.S. two years after the fact. It was also in Iraq that I first stood over the body of someone who had died by suicide, feeling a mixture of helplessness, grief and anger; an experience that had, for me as a suicidologist, been merely an intellectualized concept. Four years ago, psychiatric disorders and suicide became personal to me.
Suicide is the fatal outcome of psychological injury. I should stress, however, that not all psychological injuries sustained by military personnel and veterans occur during deployments. For many of the service members and veterans I've worked with, the psychological injuries occurred during childhood at the hands of an abusive or demeaning parent; for others it was sustained within the context of a recent breakup or a financial crisis. Indeed, more than half of service members who die by suicide never deployed or saw combat. The good news is that we have very effective treatments for the full range of psychological injuries that lead to suicide. The bad news is that very few service members or veterans will receive them.
Clinic-based mental health services have been expanded dramatically for service members and veterans over the past decade across both the public and private sectors. Mental health treatment is arguably more accessible and affordable for service members and veterans now more than ever, due in large part to community mental health professionals and agencies offering free or significantly reduced-cost services. Although admirable, these efforts are not enough, and too many psychological injuries remain untreated.
One of the primary problems is that the expansion of mental health services has largely occurred in traditional, clinic-based settings that are unlikely to be accessed by most service members and veterans due to pervasive mental health stigma. Only a very small proportion of real time Location system who die by suicide (16%) visited a mental health care professional within the month preceding their deaths. Despite our decades-long battle with mental health stigma among service members and veterans, we have yet to see much success, primarily because we have failed to consider the issue of mental health treatment and stigma from within the context of the military culture. In the military, we value strength, mental toughness, elitism and self-sufficiency, but the culture of mental health is deficiency-oriented and values emotional vulnerability, which contradicts the core identity of many service members and veterans. We mental health professionals need to adopt a multicultural approach to working with service members and veterans, and to change how we deliver our services to better fit with military cultural norms, instead of asking service members and veterans to abandon their identities and conform to our standards.
From my perspective as a mental health professional, an even bigger tragedy is the realization that when service members and veterans do overcome mental health stigma and access care, they are still unlikely to receive the best treatments available. This is not a DOD or a VA problem; this is a problem of our mental health care system as a whole in the US, which continues to perpetuate the myth that all psychological treatments are equally effective, and that any treatment is better than no treatment. What we actually know, however, based on decades of research, is that trauma victims who receive prolonged exposure (PE) or cognitive processing therapy (CPT) for PTSD are three to four times more likely to experience full remission from PTSD. These better outcomes occur regardless of the trauma, whether rape, violent assault or combat. Early findings further suggest that PE and CPT reduce suicidal ideation among military personnel with PTSD. And just within the past month, preliminary data presented at the American Psychological Association's annual convention indicate that brief cognitive behavioral therapy (BCBT) for suicidal military personnel contributes to a 50% reduction in suicide attempts and significant reductions in PTSD symptoms as compared to traditional mental health care approaches. In short, some treatments work better than others, and are more effective at helping service members and veterans.
For many of us, the service members and veterans who are suffering from these psychological injuries are family members and friends. And some of them are dying from their injuries. Improved access to mental health care without improved quality of care will do little to prevent suicide among service members and veterans. As mental health professionals we must therefore commit ourselves individually and collectively to learning and using these better treatments that we know can help service members and veterans live lives that are worth living. It's okay for us to change.
But what I've learned along the way is that a joint honours student needs double the passion, patience and perseverance required to study a single honours degree.One of the first hurdles you have to overcome is logistics. Working with two academic departments can result in clashing deadlines, twice the staff to get to know and double the feedback sessions.
Rafe Hallett, director of induction in history at the University of Leeds, says: "The first six months of study can be a struggle, as the joint honours student adapts to the demands of two communities and two discourses of knowledge."They can sometimes feel stuck in limbo between two 'homes' and feel envious of the apparent simplicity of single honours students' timetables, contexts and communities."
Hayley Reid, a classics and English student from the University of Leeds, found dividing her time and attention between two schools was more trouble than it was worth: "It was one of the biggest mistakes I've made at university."Reid feels she doesn't properly belong to either of her departments: "I've chosen to focus more on the English side of things, but my parent school is classics. I feel like I'm floating in some sort of subject limbo where I'm neither an English student nor a classics student."
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Suicide is the fatal outcome of psychological injury. I should stress, however, that not all psychological injuries sustained by military personnel and veterans occur during deployments. For many of the service members and veterans I've worked with, the psychological injuries occurred during childhood at the hands of an abusive or demeaning parent; for others it was sustained within the context of a recent breakup or a financial crisis. Indeed, more than half of service members who die by suicide never deployed or saw combat. The good news is that we have very effective treatments for the full range of psychological injuries that lead to suicide. The bad news is that very few service members or veterans will receive them.
Clinic-based mental health services have been expanded dramatically for service members and veterans over the past decade across both the public and private sectors. Mental health treatment is arguably more accessible and affordable for service members and veterans now more than ever, due in large part to community mental health professionals and agencies offering free or significantly reduced-cost services. Although admirable, these efforts are not enough, and too many psychological injuries remain untreated.
One of the primary problems is that the expansion of mental health services has largely occurred in traditional, clinic-based settings that are unlikely to be accessed by most service members and veterans due to pervasive mental health stigma. Only a very small proportion of real time Location system who die by suicide (16%) visited a mental health care professional within the month preceding their deaths. Despite our decades-long battle with mental health stigma among service members and veterans, we have yet to see much success, primarily because we have failed to consider the issue of mental health treatment and stigma from within the context of the military culture. In the military, we value strength, mental toughness, elitism and self-sufficiency, but the culture of mental health is deficiency-oriented and values emotional vulnerability, which contradicts the core identity of many service members and veterans. We mental health professionals need to adopt a multicultural approach to working with service members and veterans, and to change how we deliver our services to better fit with military cultural norms, instead of asking service members and veterans to abandon their identities and conform to our standards.
From my perspective as a mental health professional, an even bigger tragedy is the realization that when service members and veterans do overcome mental health stigma and access care, they are still unlikely to receive the best treatments available. This is not a DOD or a VA problem; this is a problem of our mental health care system as a whole in the US, which continues to perpetuate the myth that all psychological treatments are equally effective, and that any treatment is better than no treatment. What we actually know, however, based on decades of research, is that trauma victims who receive prolonged exposure (PE) or cognitive processing therapy (CPT) for PTSD are three to four times more likely to experience full remission from PTSD. These better outcomes occur regardless of the trauma, whether rape, violent assault or combat. Early findings further suggest that PE and CPT reduce suicidal ideation among military personnel with PTSD. And just within the past month, preliminary data presented at the American Psychological Association's annual convention indicate that brief cognitive behavioral therapy (BCBT) for suicidal military personnel contributes to a 50% reduction in suicide attempts and significant reductions in PTSD symptoms as compared to traditional mental health care approaches. In short, some treatments work better than others, and are more effective at helping service members and veterans.
For many of us, the service members and veterans who are suffering from these psychological injuries are family members and friends. And some of them are dying from their injuries. Improved access to mental health care without improved quality of care will do little to prevent suicide among service members and veterans. As mental health professionals we must therefore commit ourselves individually and collectively to learning and using these better treatments that we know can help service members and veterans live lives that are worth living. It's okay for us to change.
But what I've learned along the way is that a joint honours student needs double the passion, patience and perseverance required to study a single honours degree.One of the first hurdles you have to overcome is logistics. Working with two academic departments can result in clashing deadlines, twice the staff to get to know and double the feedback sessions.
Rafe Hallett, director of induction in history at the University of Leeds, says: "The first six months of study can be a struggle, as the joint honours student adapts to the demands of two communities and two discourses of knowledge."They can sometimes feel stuck in limbo between two 'homes' and feel envious of the apparent simplicity of single honours students' timetables, contexts and communities."
Hayley Reid, a classics and English student from the University of Leeds, found dividing her time and attention between two schools was more trouble than it was worth: "It was one of the biggest mistakes I've made at university."Reid feels she doesn't properly belong to either of her departments: "I've chosen to focus more on the English side of things, but my parent school is classics. I feel like I'm floating in some sort of subject limbo where I'm neither an English student nor a classics student."
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Wednesday, August 28, 2013
Exploring Google Glass through eyes of early users
To get a sense of the advantages and drawbacks of the device, The Associated Press spoke to three Glass owners who have been using the device since late spring: Sarah Hill, a former TV broadcaster and current military veterans advocate; David Levy, a hiking enthusiast and small business owner; and Deborah Lee, a stay-at-home mom.
Glass is designed to work like a smartphone that's worn like a pair of glasses. Although it looks like a prop from a science fiction movie, the device is capturing imaginations beyond the realm of nerds.
The trio's favorite feature, by far, is the hands-free camera that shoots photos and video through voice commands. (Images can also be captured by pressing a small button along the top of the right frame of Glass.) They also liked being able to connect to the Internet simply by tapping on the right frame of Glass to turn it on and then swiping along the same side to scroll through a menu. That menu allows them to do such things as get directions on Google's map or find a piece of information through Google's search engine. The information is shown on a thumbnail-sized transparent screen attached just above the right eye to stay out of a user's field of vision.
Among the biggest shortcomings they cited was Glass' short battery life, especially if a lot of video is being taken. Although Google says Glass should last for an entire day on a single battery charge for the typical user, Hill said there were times when she ran out of power after 90 minutes to two hours during periods when she was recording a lot of video.
Glass' speaker, which relies on a bone conduction technology, also is inadequate, according to the testers the AP interviewed. They said the speaker, which transmits sound through the skull to allow for ambient noise, can be difficult to hear in any environment other than a quiet room.
"If you are out in the street or anywhere else where there is any noise, it's impossible to hear," Lee said. "That has been challenging because there is no way to adjust it. If you could adjust the real time Location system, I think it would solve a lot of problems."
Hill, 42, a resident of Columbia, Mo., became a Glass evangelist shortly after she picked up the device at Google's New York offices in late May. As the AP watched her get fitted with Glass though a video feed on Google's Hangout chat service, Hill quickly began to rave about her ability to take hands-free pictures and fetch information from the Web simply by asking the device to get it. "This is like having the Internet in your eye socket," Hill said. "But it's less intrusive than I thought it would be. I can totally see how this would still let you still be in the moment with the people around you."
The liberating aspects of Glass came into sharper focus for Hill as she took a cab to the airport for her flight back to Missouri. During the taxi ride, she began a video call on Google Hangout with people living in Austria, the United Kingdom and St. Louis. As the cab was preparing to drop her off at the curb, Hill was about to end the call so she could carry her baggage.
"That's when it hit me that, 'Holy cow, I don't have to cut the call off,'" Hill recalled. "I could continue talking because I didn't have to hold a phone. So I carried on a conversation through the airport and people were staring at me like, 'What is that thing on your face?'"
Hill became accustomed to the double takes and quizzical looks as she wore Glass to community gatherings, restaurants and shopping excursions. The encounters usually led to her offering others to try on Glass, and most were impressed with their glimpses at the technology, Hill said.
"When you have these glasses on, it's like it helps you see the future," Hill said. "It helps you see what's possible."Hill, a former news anchor and reporter for KOMU-TV in Columbia, Mo., believes Glass is destined to transform broadcast journalism by empowering reporters to capture compelling images at scenes without the need for cumbersome equipment. She likens it to having a satellite TV truck that only weighs 1.5 ounces. Glass also would make it easier for reporters to field questions from viewers through the Twitter app or through direct texts.
Hill has already used Glass to provide a tour of the World War II memorial in Washington, D.C., for veterans gathered in St. Louis by Veterans United, where Hill now works as the group's chief storyteller. The veterans were too old or ill to make the journey themselves, so Hill gave them a close-up look through a video feed transmitted through Glass in June.
Lee, a New York City resident, has been relying on Glass mostly to capture precious moments with her 9-month-old daughter, Maddie. Her favorite moment came when she photographed some of her daughter's first giggles a couple months ago. Lee, 34, told Glass to take the pictures as she as tickled and kissed her daughter's tummy.
"Obviously, you can't do that with a phone in your hand, so I am totally loving Glass," Lee said. "It has really been great."Glass also allowed Lee to set up live video sessions with her parents in Oregon so they could see Maddie eat her first solid food just as she saw it. She also took pictures of her raising Maddie airborne that wouldn't have been feasible with a camera requiring hands-on operation. "I am capturing all these tiny moments that are really exciting with a baby," Lee said.
Unlike Hill's experience in Missouri, hardly anyone in New York gives her a second look when she wears Glass in Central Park or around her neighborhood."I thought more people would stop me in the street or something like that, but that hasn't really happened," Lee said.
Levy, 39, rarely wears his Glass around his hometown of Boulder, Colo., because he doesn't want to stand out from the crowd. Just two days after Levy picked up the device in New York, he recalls seeing someone else wearing the device at the airport. "My initial reaction was, 'What a jerk,'" Levy said. "There was a little bit of ostentatiousness about it, as if he were flaunting it. I am a low-key guy who doesn't like a lot of attention. I have an iPhone that does a lot of things that I might otherwise make Glass do if I didn't want to make a spectacle of it."
Read the full products at www.ecived.com/en/!
Glass is designed to work like a smartphone that's worn like a pair of glasses. Although it looks like a prop from a science fiction movie, the device is capturing imaginations beyond the realm of nerds.
The trio's favorite feature, by far, is the hands-free camera that shoots photos and video through voice commands. (Images can also be captured by pressing a small button along the top of the right frame of Glass.) They also liked being able to connect to the Internet simply by tapping on the right frame of Glass to turn it on and then swiping along the same side to scroll through a menu. That menu allows them to do such things as get directions on Google's map or find a piece of information through Google's search engine. The information is shown on a thumbnail-sized transparent screen attached just above the right eye to stay out of a user's field of vision.
Among the biggest shortcomings they cited was Glass' short battery life, especially if a lot of video is being taken. Although Google says Glass should last for an entire day on a single battery charge for the typical user, Hill said there were times when she ran out of power after 90 minutes to two hours during periods when she was recording a lot of video.
Glass' speaker, which relies on a bone conduction technology, also is inadequate, according to the testers the AP interviewed. They said the speaker, which transmits sound through the skull to allow for ambient noise, can be difficult to hear in any environment other than a quiet room.
"If you are out in the street or anywhere else where there is any noise, it's impossible to hear," Lee said. "That has been challenging because there is no way to adjust it. If you could adjust the real time Location system, I think it would solve a lot of problems."
Hill, 42, a resident of Columbia, Mo., became a Glass evangelist shortly after she picked up the device at Google's New York offices in late May. As the AP watched her get fitted with Glass though a video feed on Google's Hangout chat service, Hill quickly began to rave about her ability to take hands-free pictures and fetch information from the Web simply by asking the device to get it. "This is like having the Internet in your eye socket," Hill said. "But it's less intrusive than I thought it would be. I can totally see how this would still let you still be in the moment with the people around you."
The liberating aspects of Glass came into sharper focus for Hill as she took a cab to the airport for her flight back to Missouri. During the taxi ride, she began a video call on Google Hangout with people living in Austria, the United Kingdom and St. Louis. As the cab was preparing to drop her off at the curb, Hill was about to end the call so she could carry her baggage.
"That's when it hit me that, 'Holy cow, I don't have to cut the call off,'" Hill recalled. "I could continue talking because I didn't have to hold a phone. So I carried on a conversation through the airport and people were staring at me like, 'What is that thing on your face?'"
Hill became accustomed to the double takes and quizzical looks as she wore Glass to community gatherings, restaurants and shopping excursions. The encounters usually led to her offering others to try on Glass, and most were impressed with their glimpses at the technology, Hill said.
"When you have these glasses on, it's like it helps you see the future," Hill said. "It helps you see what's possible."Hill, a former news anchor and reporter for KOMU-TV in Columbia, Mo., believes Glass is destined to transform broadcast journalism by empowering reporters to capture compelling images at scenes without the need for cumbersome equipment. She likens it to having a satellite TV truck that only weighs 1.5 ounces. Glass also would make it easier for reporters to field questions from viewers through the Twitter app or through direct texts.
Hill has already used Glass to provide a tour of the World War II memorial in Washington, D.C., for veterans gathered in St. Louis by Veterans United, where Hill now works as the group's chief storyteller. The veterans were too old or ill to make the journey themselves, so Hill gave them a close-up look through a video feed transmitted through Glass in June.
Lee, a New York City resident, has been relying on Glass mostly to capture precious moments with her 9-month-old daughter, Maddie. Her favorite moment came when she photographed some of her daughter's first giggles a couple months ago. Lee, 34, told Glass to take the pictures as she as tickled and kissed her daughter's tummy.
"Obviously, you can't do that with a phone in your hand, so I am totally loving Glass," Lee said. "It has really been great."Glass also allowed Lee to set up live video sessions with her parents in Oregon so they could see Maddie eat her first solid food just as she saw it. She also took pictures of her raising Maddie airborne that wouldn't have been feasible with a camera requiring hands-on operation. "I am capturing all these tiny moments that are really exciting with a baby," Lee said.
Unlike Hill's experience in Missouri, hardly anyone in New York gives her a second look when she wears Glass in Central Park or around her neighborhood."I thought more people would stop me in the street or something like that, but that hasn't really happened," Lee said.
Levy, 39, rarely wears his Glass around his hometown of Boulder, Colo., because he doesn't want to stand out from the crowd. Just two days after Levy picked up the device in New York, he recalls seeing someone else wearing the device at the airport. "My initial reaction was, 'What a jerk,'" Levy said. "There was a little bit of ostentatiousness about it, as if he were flaunting it. I am a low-key guy who doesn't like a lot of attention. I have an iPhone that does a lot of things that I might otherwise make Glass do if I didn't want to make a spectacle of it."
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Is MLK dream reality?
When he boarded a Greyhound bus on his way to Princeton University, Glennon Threatt promised himself he'd never come back here. As a young black man, he saw no chance to fulfill his dreams in a city burdened by the ghosts of its segregated past.Helen Shores Lee left Birmingham years earlier, making the same pledge not to return. A daughter of a prominent civil rights lawyer, she wanted to escape a city tarnished by Jim Crow laws — the "white" and "colored" fountains, the segregated bus seating, the daily indignities she rebelled against as a child.
Both changed their minds. They returned from their self-imposed exile and built successful careers — he as an assistant federal public defender, she as a judge — in a Birmingham transformed by a revolution a half century ago.This week, as the nation marks the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech, there may be no better place than Birmingham to measure the progress that followed the civil rights leader's historic call for racial and economic equality.
This city, after all, is hallowed ground in civil rights history. It was here where children marching for equal rights were jailed, where protesters were attacked by snarling police dogs and battered by high-pressure fire hoses. And it was here where four little girls in their Sunday finest were killed when dynamite planted by Ku Klux Klan members ripped through their church in an unspeakable act of evil.
That was the Birmingham of the past. The city that King condemned for its "ugly record of Hands free access." The city where he wrote his impassioned "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," declaring the "moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws." The city where the movement came together, found its voice and set the stage for landmark civil rights legislation.
The Birmingham of the present is a far different place. The airport is named after a fearless civil rights champion, the late Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth. The city's website features a 'Fifty Years Forward' campaign, forthrightly displaying photos of shameful events in 1963. There are black judges and professors in places where segregation once reigned. And black mayors have occupied City Hall since 1979, in part because many white residents migrated to the suburbs, a familiar pattern in urban America.
So has King's dream of equality been realized here and has Birmingham moved beyond its troubled past?For many, the answer is yes, the city has changed in ways that once seemed unthinkable — and yet, there's also a sense Birmingham still has a long way to go.The legal and social barriers that barred black people from schools and jobs fell long ago, but economic disparity persists.
Blacks and whites work together and dine side by side in restaurants during the day, but usually don't mingle after 5 p.m.Racial slurs are rare, but suspicions and tensions remain."I don't think any of us would deny that there have been significant changes in Birmingham," Shores Lee says. King would be proud, she adds, but "he would say there's a lot more work to be done. I think he would tell us our task is not finished."
Amid the flowers and soothing fountain in Kelly Ingram Park, there are stark reminders of the ugly clashes. It was in this area, now known as the Civil Rights District, where the scenes of police brutality were captured in photos and TV footage that helped galvanize public opinion around the nation on behalf of demonstrators.
Today, the park has statues commemorating King and other leaders. There's a sculpture of a young protester, his arms stretched back, as a policeman grabs him with one hand and holds a lunging German shepherd in the other. (An Associated Press photographer had captured a similar image.) There are other sculptures of water cannons, more dogs, and a boy and a girl standing impassively with the words "I Ain't Afraid of your Jail" at the base.
To those who grew up here, these works are not just artistic renderings but reminders of the bravery of friends and neighbors."It's kind of like being in the movie 'The Sixth Sense' — everywhere you go you see ghosts," Threatt says of the statues. "It's probably like a person who served in World War II going back to Normandy. It's a place where something very, very real, very poignant happened to people that you knew."
Threatt was just 7 when King announced his vision of a colorblind society before hundreds of thousands of people gathered on the Washington Mall. Not long afterward, Threatt was one of three black gifted students enrolled in a white elementary school. He was spat on, beat up, called the N-word.
"I like him," he says. "I don't think he's a racist. He was a kid caught up in a social situation like I was. .... You've got to get over that in order to survive in the South. ... Otherwise you just wallow in self-pity and hatred and you don't move forward."
Threatt graduated from Princeton, then Howard University Law School, worked in Denver and Washington, D.C., but returned to Birmingham in 1997. Both he and the city had changed, he says, with Birmingham becoming more progressive. He joined an established law firm — something that would have been unimaginable 50 years earlier.
Threatt had been inspired, in part, to be a lawyer by Arthur Shores, a Sunday school teacher at his church and a pioneering civil rights attorney who fought to desegregate the University of Alabama. Shores' home was bombed twice in 1963, two weeks apart. His neighborhood was nicknamed "Dynamite Hill" for the series of bombings intended to intimidate blacks.
Shores' daughter, Helen, grew up resisting the segregation laws, once drinking from a "white" fountain — a defiant act that resulted in a whipping when she got home. At 12, she aimed a Colt .45 at some white men driving by her family's house, spewing racial obscenities. Her father, she says, slapped her arm, the bullet discharged into the air and he quickly grabbed the gun.
She left Birmingham for 13 years, returned in 1971, later switched careers and in 2003 became a judge, only to confront lingering remnants of racism.In her early years on the bench, she recalls, a few lawyers pointedly refused to stand as is custom when a judge enters a courtroom. And, she says, she occasionally sees lawyers who are disrespectful of their minority clients.
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Both changed their minds. They returned from their self-imposed exile and built successful careers — he as an assistant federal public defender, she as a judge — in a Birmingham transformed by a revolution a half century ago.This week, as the nation marks the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech, there may be no better place than Birmingham to measure the progress that followed the civil rights leader's historic call for racial and economic equality.
This city, after all, is hallowed ground in civil rights history. It was here where children marching for equal rights were jailed, where protesters were attacked by snarling police dogs and battered by high-pressure fire hoses. And it was here where four little girls in their Sunday finest were killed when dynamite planted by Ku Klux Klan members ripped through their church in an unspeakable act of evil.
That was the Birmingham of the past. The city that King condemned for its "ugly record of Hands free access." The city where he wrote his impassioned "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," declaring the "moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws." The city where the movement came together, found its voice and set the stage for landmark civil rights legislation.
The Birmingham of the present is a far different place. The airport is named after a fearless civil rights champion, the late Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth. The city's website features a 'Fifty Years Forward' campaign, forthrightly displaying photos of shameful events in 1963. There are black judges and professors in places where segregation once reigned. And black mayors have occupied City Hall since 1979, in part because many white residents migrated to the suburbs, a familiar pattern in urban America.
So has King's dream of equality been realized here and has Birmingham moved beyond its troubled past?For many, the answer is yes, the city has changed in ways that once seemed unthinkable — and yet, there's also a sense Birmingham still has a long way to go.The legal and social barriers that barred black people from schools and jobs fell long ago, but economic disparity persists.
Blacks and whites work together and dine side by side in restaurants during the day, but usually don't mingle after 5 p.m.Racial slurs are rare, but suspicions and tensions remain."I don't think any of us would deny that there have been significant changes in Birmingham," Shores Lee says. King would be proud, she adds, but "he would say there's a lot more work to be done. I think he would tell us our task is not finished."
Amid the flowers and soothing fountain in Kelly Ingram Park, there are stark reminders of the ugly clashes. It was in this area, now known as the Civil Rights District, where the scenes of police brutality were captured in photos and TV footage that helped galvanize public opinion around the nation on behalf of demonstrators.
Today, the park has statues commemorating King and other leaders. There's a sculpture of a young protester, his arms stretched back, as a policeman grabs him with one hand and holds a lunging German shepherd in the other. (An Associated Press photographer had captured a similar image.) There are other sculptures of water cannons, more dogs, and a boy and a girl standing impassively with the words "I Ain't Afraid of your Jail" at the base.
To those who grew up here, these works are not just artistic renderings but reminders of the bravery of friends and neighbors."It's kind of like being in the movie 'The Sixth Sense' — everywhere you go you see ghosts," Threatt says of the statues. "It's probably like a person who served in World War II going back to Normandy. It's a place where something very, very real, very poignant happened to people that you knew."
Threatt was just 7 when King announced his vision of a colorblind society before hundreds of thousands of people gathered on the Washington Mall. Not long afterward, Threatt was one of three black gifted students enrolled in a white elementary school. He was spat on, beat up, called the N-word.
"I like him," he says. "I don't think he's a racist. He was a kid caught up in a social situation like I was. .... You've got to get over that in order to survive in the South. ... Otherwise you just wallow in self-pity and hatred and you don't move forward."
Threatt graduated from Princeton, then Howard University Law School, worked in Denver and Washington, D.C., but returned to Birmingham in 1997. Both he and the city had changed, he says, with Birmingham becoming more progressive. He joined an established law firm — something that would have been unimaginable 50 years earlier.
Threatt had been inspired, in part, to be a lawyer by Arthur Shores, a Sunday school teacher at his church and a pioneering civil rights attorney who fought to desegregate the University of Alabama. Shores' home was bombed twice in 1963, two weeks apart. His neighborhood was nicknamed "Dynamite Hill" for the series of bombings intended to intimidate blacks.
Shores' daughter, Helen, grew up resisting the segregation laws, once drinking from a "white" fountain — a defiant act that resulted in a whipping when she got home. At 12, she aimed a Colt .45 at some white men driving by her family's house, spewing racial obscenities. Her father, she says, slapped her arm, the bullet discharged into the air and he quickly grabbed the gun.
She left Birmingham for 13 years, returned in 1971, later switched careers and in 2003 became a judge, only to confront lingering remnants of racism.In her early years on the bench, she recalls, a few lawyers pointedly refused to stand as is custom when a judge enters a courtroom. And, she says, she occasionally sees lawyers who are disrespectful of their minority clients.
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Monday, August 26, 2013
Navalny shakes up Moscow mayor campaign
A motley gaggle of hipsters, mothers with children and two babushkas with hair dyed bright red gather to listen to something they haven't heard in over a decade: a stump speech for Moscow mayor.Alexei Navalny, an anti-corruption blogger who has become the best known face of Russia's protest movement, is trying to take his following offline and into the street, waging a traditional campaign of hand-shaking and leaflet drives to win voters outside his base of the young and web-savvy.
Navalny has little hope of defeating incumbent Sergei Sobyanin _ but polls show his star is rising. And if he gets a big chunk of the real time Location system, the Kremlin will face pressure to show leniency over his five-year prison sentence, and the grassroots protest movement that fizzled out after Vladimir Putin's return to the presidency last year may gain new wind.
Sobyanin, meanwhile, is playing the regal incumbent: Throughout the campaign, the Kremlin-backed politician has been all but invisible, allowing the constant drone of jackhammers or whiff of fresh paint that are signs of a Moscow makeover to remind voters of who's in charge _ and who can pull the purse-strings.
Navalny is the one who has been soaking up attention, and generating buzz. On a recent August day, the opposition leader stood on stage in a sprawling Moscow park dotted with enormous space shuttles and other scraps of Soviet-era glory, and attempted to connect with an audience he rarely reaches through Twitter: the feared and revered babushka contingency."We know that (in Soviet times) our oil money was spent on enormous factories, industry, railroads, roads, science, health care, rockets," he boomed, riffing on a nostalgia felt by many older Russians, who saw their hopes dashed and savings depleted under post-Soviet political reforms.
"But can you name a single major business that's been built in this country in the past 10 years? I can't!"The old ladies sitting in the first row chuckled and shook their heads.On Sunday, police briefly detained Navalny after he left the stage of a campaign event, and released him a short time later. The detention was part of a series of public signals to Navalny, who was given a verbal warning about various alleged campaign violations by the Moscow electoral committee last week.
Polling data on the race is spotty and inconsistent, but the trends are clear: The number of Muscovites ready to vote for Navalny on Sept. 8 has breached 10 percent and may even be moving toward 20 percent. Meanwhile, Sobyanin's ratings _ while still above the 50 percent that would allow him to avoid a run-off _ are slipping by the week. There are four other party-backed candidates in the race, none projected to snag more than 5 percent.
Alexei Grazhdankin, deputy director of the independent Levada polling center, said that Sobyanin's voter base was clearly no longer growing, and that there's now a small chance there will be a second round.Last month, Navalny was sentenced to five years in prison on embezzlement charges, but was released the day after his conviction in what many have described as an effort to legitimize the mayoral race and ensure that Sobyanin _ who was appointed as mayor and is seen as a possible successor to Putin _ is regarded as an elected politician with widespread support.
Such legitimacy is considered important because Putin's forces are at their weakest in his seat of power: Moscow. When Putin won back the presidency last year, after ruling for a term in the lesser role of prime minister, he won only 47 percent of the capital's rtls, compared to 64 percent nationwide. That may also be a reason why, although there's no doubt that Sobyanin is the Kremlin's man, he is running as an independent and has avoided public appearances with the president.
Masha Lipman at the Carnegie Endowment in Moscow said that Navalny had already achieved something: cast doubt over the inevitability of Putin's power."One of his greatest achievements is ... adding an element of risk and uncertainty," she said. "Putin built a political system in this country that is risk averse, it's a political monopoly."
Rather than the issues _ immigration, traffic, high cost of living _ it's a contrast in political style that lies at the heart of the mayoral campaign. In the Levada Center poll, 48 percent of respondents said they would vote for a mayor with "experience," whereas 47 percent said that personal qualities, such as "openness and determination," were crucial.
Navalny, a sharp-tongued 37-year-old lawyer, has plenty of the latter. He has waged an intensive campaign with nearly $1.5 million in funds raised online, meeting with hundreds of voters every day and mobilizing enthusiastic young volunteers to help hand out leaflets in the street and on the metro.
His team has also unleashed a flurry of new online projects. From a GPS mapping system that shows how many supporters live in each apartment block to an application that helps users spread pro-Navalny information on Russia's biggest social networks, the campaign has been keen to lock down his natural base of young voters, many of whom often don't make it to the polls.
"Currently the polls are assuming that those who haven't yet figured out who to vote for will vote the same way as those who have," Leonid Volkov, Navalny's campaign manager, told The Associated Press. "The fight is for the 30 percent of voters who haven't decided yet."Andrei Tvertnev, an unemployed 25-year-old former soldier who was lingering in the crowd around Navalny, is one of those yet to make up his mind.
Tvertnev wasn't keen on Sobyanin, saying that the changes he's brought to the city "could have been done much faster." At the same time, he remained skeptical about Navalny."Do I vote for a bureaucrat who made some changes, or a different person who promises even more changes?" he asked. "I think I'll only make up my mind on the day of the elections."
Sobyanin, who made his name as the governor of the oil-rich Siberian province of Tyumen, makes up for his lack of charisma and enthusiasm with what talks in Russian politics: experience, access and the money that comes with it.Despite his almost invisible candidacy, Sobyanin is genuinely well-liked for the changes he's brought to Moscow. He has poured a yearly budget of approximately $54 billion into the city's parks and cultural institutions, although other promises to tackle traffic and parking have been lagging or limited in scope.
As if to shore up his reputation as a fixer-upper, the city, which usually hits a sleepy summer lull in August, has been converted into an enormous construction site _ with sidewalks torn up and facades repainted."There's little doubt that before elections, the government becomes very affectionate and thoughtful," Levada's Grazhdankin said about the city's makeover.
While Sobyanin, who was appointed to the mayor's office, is eager to prove himself as a legitimately elected politician, the tactics used against Navalny _ from accusations that he receives foreign funding abroad to refusals by media outlets to play his campaign ads _ show that he still sees Navalny as a threat.
Even if Navalny's eventual vote tally is relatively low, he may end up having an outsized impact on the Russian political scene."If he gets 10 to 12 percent, they can say, look at your opposition leader, he was only able to get this tiny fraction of the vote," said Lipman. "But those people who are investing their emotions, time and money into this campaign, that experience won't go away."
Oleg Bogomolov, a 42-year-old human resources manager who was at Navalny's headquarters to volunteer for the first time, said he didn't truly believe Navalny could win."But I think the more people who know about him, the greater his chances of being set free," he said. "If they put him behind bars again (after the election), there will be even more people in the streets."
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/!
Navalny has little hope of defeating incumbent Sergei Sobyanin _ but polls show his star is rising. And if he gets a big chunk of the real time Location system, the Kremlin will face pressure to show leniency over his five-year prison sentence, and the grassroots protest movement that fizzled out after Vladimir Putin's return to the presidency last year may gain new wind.
Sobyanin, meanwhile, is playing the regal incumbent: Throughout the campaign, the Kremlin-backed politician has been all but invisible, allowing the constant drone of jackhammers or whiff of fresh paint that are signs of a Moscow makeover to remind voters of who's in charge _ and who can pull the purse-strings.
Navalny is the one who has been soaking up attention, and generating buzz. On a recent August day, the opposition leader stood on stage in a sprawling Moscow park dotted with enormous space shuttles and other scraps of Soviet-era glory, and attempted to connect with an audience he rarely reaches through Twitter: the feared and revered babushka contingency."We know that (in Soviet times) our oil money was spent on enormous factories, industry, railroads, roads, science, health care, rockets," he boomed, riffing on a nostalgia felt by many older Russians, who saw their hopes dashed and savings depleted under post-Soviet political reforms.
"But can you name a single major business that's been built in this country in the past 10 years? I can't!"The old ladies sitting in the first row chuckled and shook their heads.On Sunday, police briefly detained Navalny after he left the stage of a campaign event, and released him a short time later. The detention was part of a series of public signals to Navalny, who was given a verbal warning about various alleged campaign violations by the Moscow electoral committee last week.
Polling data on the race is spotty and inconsistent, but the trends are clear: The number of Muscovites ready to vote for Navalny on Sept. 8 has breached 10 percent and may even be moving toward 20 percent. Meanwhile, Sobyanin's ratings _ while still above the 50 percent that would allow him to avoid a run-off _ are slipping by the week. There are four other party-backed candidates in the race, none projected to snag more than 5 percent.
Alexei Grazhdankin, deputy director of the independent Levada polling center, said that Sobyanin's voter base was clearly no longer growing, and that there's now a small chance there will be a second round.Last month, Navalny was sentenced to five years in prison on embezzlement charges, but was released the day after his conviction in what many have described as an effort to legitimize the mayoral race and ensure that Sobyanin _ who was appointed as mayor and is seen as a possible successor to Putin _ is regarded as an elected politician with widespread support.
Such legitimacy is considered important because Putin's forces are at their weakest in his seat of power: Moscow. When Putin won back the presidency last year, after ruling for a term in the lesser role of prime minister, he won only 47 percent of the capital's rtls, compared to 64 percent nationwide. That may also be a reason why, although there's no doubt that Sobyanin is the Kremlin's man, he is running as an independent and has avoided public appearances with the president.
Masha Lipman at the Carnegie Endowment in Moscow said that Navalny had already achieved something: cast doubt over the inevitability of Putin's power."One of his greatest achievements is ... adding an element of risk and uncertainty," she said. "Putin built a political system in this country that is risk averse, it's a political monopoly."
Rather than the issues _ immigration, traffic, high cost of living _ it's a contrast in political style that lies at the heart of the mayoral campaign. In the Levada Center poll, 48 percent of respondents said they would vote for a mayor with "experience," whereas 47 percent said that personal qualities, such as "openness and determination," were crucial.
Navalny, a sharp-tongued 37-year-old lawyer, has plenty of the latter. He has waged an intensive campaign with nearly $1.5 million in funds raised online, meeting with hundreds of voters every day and mobilizing enthusiastic young volunteers to help hand out leaflets in the street and on the metro.
His team has also unleashed a flurry of new online projects. From a GPS mapping system that shows how many supporters live in each apartment block to an application that helps users spread pro-Navalny information on Russia's biggest social networks, the campaign has been keen to lock down his natural base of young voters, many of whom often don't make it to the polls.
"Currently the polls are assuming that those who haven't yet figured out who to vote for will vote the same way as those who have," Leonid Volkov, Navalny's campaign manager, told The Associated Press. "The fight is for the 30 percent of voters who haven't decided yet."Andrei Tvertnev, an unemployed 25-year-old former soldier who was lingering in the crowd around Navalny, is one of those yet to make up his mind.
Tvertnev wasn't keen on Sobyanin, saying that the changes he's brought to the city "could have been done much faster." At the same time, he remained skeptical about Navalny."Do I vote for a bureaucrat who made some changes, or a different person who promises even more changes?" he asked. "I think I'll only make up my mind on the day of the elections."
Sobyanin, who made his name as the governor of the oil-rich Siberian province of Tyumen, makes up for his lack of charisma and enthusiasm with what talks in Russian politics: experience, access and the money that comes with it.Despite his almost invisible candidacy, Sobyanin is genuinely well-liked for the changes he's brought to Moscow. He has poured a yearly budget of approximately $54 billion into the city's parks and cultural institutions, although other promises to tackle traffic and parking have been lagging or limited in scope.
As if to shore up his reputation as a fixer-upper, the city, which usually hits a sleepy summer lull in August, has been converted into an enormous construction site _ with sidewalks torn up and facades repainted."There's little doubt that before elections, the government becomes very affectionate and thoughtful," Levada's Grazhdankin said about the city's makeover.
While Sobyanin, who was appointed to the mayor's office, is eager to prove himself as a legitimately elected politician, the tactics used against Navalny _ from accusations that he receives foreign funding abroad to refusals by media outlets to play his campaign ads _ show that he still sees Navalny as a threat.
Even if Navalny's eventual vote tally is relatively low, he may end up having an outsized impact on the Russian political scene."If he gets 10 to 12 percent, they can say, look at your opposition leader, he was only able to get this tiny fraction of the vote," said Lipman. "But those people who are investing their emotions, time and money into this campaign, that experience won't go away."
Oleg Bogomolov, a 42-year-old human resources manager who was at Navalny's headquarters to volunteer for the first time, said he didn't truly believe Navalny could win."But I think the more people who know about him, the greater his chances of being set free," he said. "If they put him behind bars again (after the election), there will be even more people in the streets."
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/!
In Seminars Meant To Teach Investing Wisdom
A lawsuit filed Saturday by New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman alleges that Donald Trump defrauded more than 5,000 people of $40 million, handed over for what was supposed to be the opportunity to learn Trump’s real estate investment magic at his for-profit training program, Trump University. The suit also names The Trump Entrepreneur Institute—previously known as Trump University LLC—and Michael Sexton, former president of the institution.
Beginning in 2005, Trump University offered a program that began with a free introductory 90-minute presentation promising to teach the secrets that helped build his real estate empire. This was, according to the suit, no more than a lengthy promotion for a three-day, $1,500 seminar. The three-day program, in turn, was used to plug “elite” courses that cost anywhere from $10,000 to $35,000.
Schneiderman takes particular aim at Trump U.’s ads, which featured the mogul’s picture and signature, and some of which appeared as personal letters. Marketing materials frequently referenced the “handpicked instructor” who would impart Trump’s wisdom, but the attorney general maintains that Trump was uninvolved in developing or teaching curriculum, and was not responsible for choosing instructors—by hand or otherwise.
The suit also claims the organization was warned by the New York State Education Department (NYSED) up to eight years ago to stop presenting itself as a university, though Trump representatives George Sorial and Michael Cohen say the organization had no formal communication with the NYSED until 2010. Trump University was issued a cease and indoor Tracking, after which its name was changed to The Trump Entrepreneur Institute. Sorial and Cohen say the program suspended live seminars several weeks later as a result of the developing conflict with Schneiderman’s office.
“Mr. Trump used his celebrity status and personally appeared in commercials making false promises to convince people to spend tens of thousands of dollars they couldn’t afford for lessons they never got,” said Schneiderman, in a statement. “No one, no matter how rich or popular they are, has a right to scam hard working New Yorkers. Anyone who does should expect to be held accountable.”
The suit claims that many students at Trump University—referred to in the complaint as “consumers”—were promised the opportunity to practice actual real estate transactions with access to private funds, personal appearances by Trump himself, and year-long access to “apprenticeship support.” Instead, according to the lawsuit, participants were provided with a list of funding sources culled from a newsstand publication, and many mentors did not respond to contact from students or provided no ongoing guidance at all.
Instead of the chance to shake hands with The Donald, a life-sized cutout of Trump was made available for photos with students, alleges the attorney general’s complaint.
Sorial and Cohen insist that Schneiderman’s actions are personally-motivated attacks against Trump, and claim that before the lawsuit was filed, the attorney general “repeatedly” rejected the offer of in-person meetings with Trump, while suggesting through a representative that the matter could be settled out of court.
“98% of Trump University students rated the program ‘excellent,’” claims the site, “while only 4% of New York State registered voters rated Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s performance as “excellent” and Schneiderman thinks he could be the next governor? He must be joking.”
Beyond the belligerent typeface, the site actually makes thousands of pages of handwritten survey responses, apparently from Trump University participants, available in PDF. Remarks in comment form are largely positive, and numerical responses tend to be the highest available scores or blank. Names of participants are redacted.
It is neither my business or concern as to how many sexual partners anyone has at any one time, and I genuinely could not care less how folk organise their relationships. But the co-opting and rebranding of polygamy, so that it loses its nasty association with the oppression of the most disadvantaged women, is as irresponsible as suggesting that because some women chose to enter high-end prostitution as a social experiment, all prostitution is radical and harmless.
Caroline Humphrey, a professor of collaborative anthropology at Cambridge University, has argued in favour of the legalisation of polygamy because, according to a number of women in polygamous marriages in Russia, "half a good man is better than none at all". While polyamory is not the same as traditional polygamy – which has been practised for centuries under a strict code of patriarchy in communities where women and children have few if any rights – the co-opting of the sanitised version will further normalise a practice that is anything but liberating for women in this Hands free access.
There is also the assumption that polyamory is an invention of a set of too-cool-for-school hipsters, who have recently discovered that exclusive couple-type relationships are so last season. However, it was radical feminists in the 1970s onwards that developed the notion of non-monogamy as a way to challenge patriarchal heterosexuality. The definition of polyamory as "ethical non-monogamy" currently doing the rounds sticks in my craw. Non-monogamy was deeply ethical. One could have as many sexual partners as desired but everything was honest and above board, with no one being deceived.
The type of non-monogamy radical feminists developed and practised involved no men. We were all lesbians starting off on a fairly equal playing field. Some of us involved with leftwing politics had previously been witness to or victims of men who had sexual access to as many women as they wanted, while women waited for her one partner to get round to paying her attention. In the meantime, women were pitted against each other while the men played a subtle game of divide and rule, and there were plenty of women to do the washing, childcare and provide emotional and sexual support for these oh-so alternative men.
The women were not necessarily any more sexually liberated than their married, monogamous sisters; in fact they would quite often complain of being treated far worse than a wife. It not only gave men permission to sleep around, but left women experiencing dreadful feelings of anxiety, low self-esteem and lack of confidence.
Elisabeth Sheff, a US-based sociologist who has studied polyamorous families since the mid-1990s, found that "despite the pronounced importance of gender equality to polyamorists", it is not unusual for men to be drawn to it because they believe that it will lead to sex with lots of women. The modern proponents of polyamory tend to ignore gender dynamics as if patriarchy and the sexual inequality that it produces has disappeared. Many also forget that its practice today, unlike polygamy, is the choice of overwhelmingly white, affluent, university educated and privileged folk, with too much time on their hands.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/!
Beginning in 2005, Trump University offered a program that began with a free introductory 90-minute presentation promising to teach the secrets that helped build his real estate empire. This was, according to the suit, no more than a lengthy promotion for a three-day, $1,500 seminar. The three-day program, in turn, was used to plug “elite” courses that cost anywhere from $10,000 to $35,000.
Schneiderman takes particular aim at Trump U.’s ads, which featured the mogul’s picture and signature, and some of which appeared as personal letters. Marketing materials frequently referenced the “handpicked instructor” who would impart Trump’s wisdom, but the attorney general maintains that Trump was uninvolved in developing or teaching curriculum, and was not responsible for choosing instructors—by hand or otherwise.
The suit also claims the organization was warned by the New York State Education Department (NYSED) up to eight years ago to stop presenting itself as a university, though Trump representatives George Sorial and Michael Cohen say the organization had no formal communication with the NYSED until 2010. Trump University was issued a cease and indoor Tracking, after which its name was changed to The Trump Entrepreneur Institute. Sorial and Cohen say the program suspended live seminars several weeks later as a result of the developing conflict with Schneiderman’s office.
“Mr. Trump used his celebrity status and personally appeared in commercials making false promises to convince people to spend tens of thousands of dollars they couldn’t afford for lessons they never got,” said Schneiderman, in a statement. “No one, no matter how rich or popular they are, has a right to scam hard working New Yorkers. Anyone who does should expect to be held accountable.”
The suit claims that many students at Trump University—referred to in the complaint as “consumers”—were promised the opportunity to practice actual real estate transactions with access to private funds, personal appearances by Trump himself, and year-long access to “apprenticeship support.” Instead, according to the lawsuit, participants were provided with a list of funding sources culled from a newsstand publication, and many mentors did not respond to contact from students or provided no ongoing guidance at all.
Instead of the chance to shake hands with The Donald, a life-sized cutout of Trump was made available for photos with students, alleges the attorney general’s complaint.
Sorial and Cohen insist that Schneiderman’s actions are personally-motivated attacks against Trump, and claim that before the lawsuit was filed, the attorney general “repeatedly” rejected the offer of in-person meetings with Trump, while suggesting through a representative that the matter could be settled out of court.
“98% of Trump University students rated the program ‘excellent,’” claims the site, “while only 4% of New York State registered voters rated Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s performance as “excellent” and Schneiderman thinks he could be the next governor? He must be joking.”
Beyond the belligerent typeface, the site actually makes thousands of pages of handwritten survey responses, apparently from Trump University participants, available in PDF. Remarks in comment form are largely positive, and numerical responses tend to be the highest available scores or blank. Names of participants are redacted.
It is neither my business or concern as to how many sexual partners anyone has at any one time, and I genuinely could not care less how folk organise their relationships. But the co-opting and rebranding of polygamy, so that it loses its nasty association with the oppression of the most disadvantaged women, is as irresponsible as suggesting that because some women chose to enter high-end prostitution as a social experiment, all prostitution is radical and harmless.
Caroline Humphrey, a professor of collaborative anthropology at Cambridge University, has argued in favour of the legalisation of polygamy because, according to a number of women in polygamous marriages in Russia, "half a good man is better than none at all". While polyamory is not the same as traditional polygamy – which has been practised for centuries under a strict code of patriarchy in communities where women and children have few if any rights – the co-opting of the sanitised version will further normalise a practice that is anything but liberating for women in this Hands free access.
There is also the assumption that polyamory is an invention of a set of too-cool-for-school hipsters, who have recently discovered that exclusive couple-type relationships are so last season. However, it was radical feminists in the 1970s onwards that developed the notion of non-monogamy as a way to challenge patriarchal heterosexuality. The definition of polyamory as "ethical non-monogamy" currently doing the rounds sticks in my craw. Non-monogamy was deeply ethical. One could have as many sexual partners as desired but everything was honest and above board, with no one being deceived.
The type of non-monogamy radical feminists developed and practised involved no men. We were all lesbians starting off on a fairly equal playing field. Some of us involved with leftwing politics had previously been witness to or victims of men who had sexual access to as many women as they wanted, while women waited for her one partner to get round to paying her attention. In the meantime, women were pitted against each other while the men played a subtle game of divide and rule, and there were plenty of women to do the washing, childcare and provide emotional and sexual support for these oh-so alternative men.
The women were not necessarily any more sexually liberated than their married, monogamous sisters; in fact they would quite often complain of being treated far worse than a wife. It not only gave men permission to sleep around, but left women experiencing dreadful feelings of anxiety, low self-esteem and lack of confidence.
Elisabeth Sheff, a US-based sociologist who has studied polyamorous families since the mid-1990s, found that "despite the pronounced importance of gender equality to polyamorists", it is not unusual for men to be drawn to it because they believe that it will lead to sex with lots of women. The modern proponents of polyamory tend to ignore gender dynamics as if patriarchy and the sexual inequality that it produces has disappeared. Many also forget that its practice today, unlike polygamy, is the choice of overwhelmingly white, affluent, university educated and privileged folk, with too much time on their hands.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/!
Monday, August 19, 2013
A rushed and flawed welfare scheme?
The Indian welfare state is set for a reinvention, as subsidies of all kinds are in the process of being monetised into cash transfers. Aapka paisa, aapke haath (your money in your hands) is the pithy election campaign slogan that is meant to convince the people of the merit of cash transfers, but is the Indian state ready for the switch to cash?
We don't think so. India requires significant additional capability in identifying households and in linking households to bank accounts. Scaling up nationally without building this capability will likely result in failure, and the Indian government should instead look to emulate the successful bottom-up implementation approach of Brazil's Família with gradual scale up from the regional to the national level.
The merit of cash transfers lays in the potential greater efficiency of cash, as compared to in-kind subsidies, in expanding choice and enabling poor households to purchase goods and services that they need. Of course, this increase in economic welfare will only be realised if the cash transfer is equivalent in purchasing power to the subsidy. This is not always the case, as a cash transfer pilot for kerosene in the state of Rajasthan highlights: the cash transferred was insufficient for families to purchase their monthly requirement of kerosene, as the market price indoor Tracking. Therefore, any cash transfer scheme would require that the transfers be indexed to inflation in the local area, which is highly complex.
Transferring cash to households, while seemingly simple, requires significant implementation capabilities. The first step is to identify all potential beneficiary households, which remains incomplete and daunting in India.
India's highly-touted unique ID programme has issued an estimated 280m ID cards over the course of three years, meaning that 800m more cards need to be issued before April 2014, when the cash transfer is set to cover the entire country. Such a vast increase in the rate of issuing cards seems unlikely. Even if all households are able to obtain an ID card, there is no guarantee that the transfer can be targeted accurately to only poor households. Many non-poor households have finagled their way onto government rolls that track the poor, for example, leaving the poor behind.
The next step for the cash transfer to work is to link the national ID to a bank account. In India, this seemingly simple step is a huge challenge, as Indians currently have limited access to financial services. A recent World Bank study estimates bank account penetration across India at 35%, a rate that falls even lower for the poorest households. Moreover, many poor households do not have access to bank branches or ATMs.
Furthermore, in any cash transfer scheme, there will undoubtedly be cases of non-payment, late payment, or inadequate payment to beneficiaries. In these cases, it remains unclear, in the design of India's transfer, how citizens will be able to file grievances and how the government will redress these grievances. A similarly massive Indian social programme, MGNREGA, has seen state governments drag their feet on resolving complaints and fail to curb corruption due to the lack of a grievance redressal mechanism.
Given that India seems inadequately prepared for implementing a cash transfer scheme, does the government's current implementation strategy have mechanisms of learning and adaptation that address these inadequacies? We believe not.
First, the government's strategy involves large scale piloting of cash transfers for selected programmes in 51 districts by 2013, and then scaling up nationwide by 2014. The pilot is set to last only a few months, with no systematic evaluation, and will likely be carried out in districts that have relatively high ID card coverage and bank account penetration. Consequently, the results of the pilot may not be that informative and Hands free access, even if they are, will not be representative of how the programme will work across India.
Second, rushing into a massive cash transfer programme may complicate the government's ability to rectify problems on the fly, both politically and administratively. The Indian government can learn from an alternative implementation strategy adopted in Brazil for the famous cash transfer programme, Bolsa Família.
Bolsa Família grew out of a combination of other transfer programmes that had started at the municipal and state levels and had been operating for several years prior to the launch of Bolsa Família. These sub-national cash transfer programmes were then individually scaled up to the national level, and subsequently consolidated into Bolsa Família. Thus, cash transfers in Brazil started from the bottom and diffused upward and outward, which suggests that kinks in programme administration could be smoothed out at smaller scales and then scaled up. By contrast, India's top-down, rushed approach provides little space for weaknesses to be identified and rectified at the local level so that the most effective modalities of the programme can be scaled nationally.
The Indian government's ambitions of establishing a cash transfer system at the proposed size and scope has the potential to deliver significant welfare gains. However, policymakers should be wary of overambitious implementation targets: in the rush for implementation the government has ignored its current administrative constraints and gone for nationwide scale up which will likely result in failure.
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We don't think so. India requires significant additional capability in identifying households and in linking households to bank accounts. Scaling up nationally without building this capability will likely result in failure, and the Indian government should instead look to emulate the successful bottom-up implementation approach of Brazil's Família with gradual scale up from the regional to the national level.
The merit of cash transfers lays in the potential greater efficiency of cash, as compared to in-kind subsidies, in expanding choice and enabling poor households to purchase goods and services that they need. Of course, this increase in economic welfare will only be realised if the cash transfer is equivalent in purchasing power to the subsidy. This is not always the case, as a cash transfer pilot for kerosene in the state of Rajasthan highlights: the cash transferred was insufficient for families to purchase their monthly requirement of kerosene, as the market price indoor Tracking. Therefore, any cash transfer scheme would require that the transfers be indexed to inflation in the local area, which is highly complex.
Transferring cash to households, while seemingly simple, requires significant implementation capabilities. The first step is to identify all potential beneficiary households, which remains incomplete and daunting in India.
India's highly-touted unique ID programme has issued an estimated 280m ID cards over the course of three years, meaning that 800m more cards need to be issued before April 2014, when the cash transfer is set to cover the entire country. Such a vast increase in the rate of issuing cards seems unlikely. Even if all households are able to obtain an ID card, there is no guarantee that the transfer can be targeted accurately to only poor households. Many non-poor households have finagled their way onto government rolls that track the poor, for example, leaving the poor behind.
The next step for the cash transfer to work is to link the national ID to a bank account. In India, this seemingly simple step is a huge challenge, as Indians currently have limited access to financial services. A recent World Bank study estimates bank account penetration across India at 35%, a rate that falls even lower for the poorest households. Moreover, many poor households do not have access to bank branches or ATMs.
Furthermore, in any cash transfer scheme, there will undoubtedly be cases of non-payment, late payment, or inadequate payment to beneficiaries. In these cases, it remains unclear, in the design of India's transfer, how citizens will be able to file grievances and how the government will redress these grievances. A similarly massive Indian social programme, MGNREGA, has seen state governments drag their feet on resolving complaints and fail to curb corruption due to the lack of a grievance redressal mechanism.
Given that India seems inadequately prepared for implementing a cash transfer scheme, does the government's current implementation strategy have mechanisms of learning and adaptation that address these inadequacies? We believe not.
First, the government's strategy involves large scale piloting of cash transfers for selected programmes in 51 districts by 2013, and then scaling up nationwide by 2014. The pilot is set to last only a few months, with no systematic evaluation, and will likely be carried out in districts that have relatively high ID card coverage and bank account penetration. Consequently, the results of the pilot may not be that informative and Hands free access, even if they are, will not be representative of how the programme will work across India.
Second, rushing into a massive cash transfer programme may complicate the government's ability to rectify problems on the fly, both politically and administratively. The Indian government can learn from an alternative implementation strategy adopted in Brazil for the famous cash transfer programme, Bolsa Família.
Bolsa Família grew out of a combination of other transfer programmes that had started at the municipal and state levels and had been operating for several years prior to the launch of Bolsa Família. These sub-national cash transfer programmes were then individually scaled up to the national level, and subsequently consolidated into Bolsa Família. Thus, cash transfers in Brazil started from the bottom and diffused upward and outward, which suggests that kinks in programme administration could be smoothed out at smaller scales and then scaled up. By contrast, India's top-down, rushed approach provides little space for weaknesses to be identified and rectified at the local level so that the most effective modalities of the programme can be scaled nationally.
The Indian government's ambitions of establishing a cash transfer system at the proposed size and scope has the potential to deliver significant welfare gains. However, policymakers should be wary of overambitious implementation targets: in the rush for implementation the government has ignored its current administrative constraints and gone for nationwide scale up which will likely result in failure.
Read the full products at www.ecived.com/en/!
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