The Obama Project@WindonWater.net

From The Atlantic’s politics page:

Honestly – it made me chuckle. I remain one of the people who really thinks that President Obama is an amazing President, doing stuff that we’ve not seen before, against overwhelming odds. But – I’m not sure I needed him to repair my car.

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QT

I posted about Naw Ruz at WindOnWater.net – that it is the one time in the year when even Baha’is in Iran celebrate the same holidays as their Muslim neighbors.

Here’s the president:

QT

FiveThirtyEight: Why AIG Paid the “Bonuses”.

When I’m in over my head in understanding an issue – Nate Silver OFTEN comes to the rescue.  This AIG thing has been bugging me, both the “populist” (read: media-induced) rage and the political responses from practically everyone, have been incomprehensible given the facts, and bloggers who seem to say “there’s nothing wrong with the AIG bonuses” seem to be somewhere on another planet.  But Nate at fivethirtyeight.com has at last dug up sufficient information to explain the problem and propose a rational way forward.

Key quotes:

The employees in AIG’s Financial Products division (AIGFP) were compensated heavily — perhaps almost exclusively — via incentive-based compensation. That is, the employees got a profit share — a rather generous 30 percent share — of the earnings their division made by trading credit default options (CDOs) and related assets.

In the fourth quarter of 2007, the market for CDOs went completely to hell…

This must have posed something of a problem for the employees in the Financial Products division, since their compensation relied on these trades being profitable. So AIG struck a deal with these employees. It guaranteed them, for 2008 and 2009, the same level of incentive-based compensation that they received in 2007 (except for senior executives, who took a 25 percent haircut), regardless of how the division actually performed. The only requirements were that the employees couldn’t quit and couldn’t be fired for cause (a much stricter standard than the usual conditions of at-will employment.)

That’s the background – but here’s the kicker:

If, as at most hedge funds, the employees are buying in with their own capital and bearing a lot of the downside risk, that is one thing. At a publicly-traded company, however, those employees are taking profits out of the shareholders’ hands. And at a publicly-traded company that happens to be owned by the taxpayers, they’re taking money out of the taxpayers’ hands.

Yeah.  When we talk about regulation – it seems appropriate to me to talk about compensation policies as well. Commissioned based pay for publicly-traded or owned companies ought to include structures that force an employee to stay put for at least six months during a downturn, and ought to have some salaried pay that sustains those employees in the meantime.   Salaries at reasonable rates, as opposed to six and seven figure “bonuses” for non-performance…

QT

I received this in my inbox today as part of a subscription to daily snippets from the Baha’i Writings. I found this particularly thought provoking and hopeful:

Together with the crumbling of barriers separating peoples, our age is witnessing the dissolution of the once insuperable wall that the past assumed would forever separate the life of Heaven from the life of Earth. The scriptures of all religions have always taught the believer to see in service to others not only a moral duty, but an avenue for the soul’s own approach to God. Today, the progressive restructuring of society gives this familiar teaching new dimensions of meaning. As the age-old promise of a world animated by principles of justice slowly takes on the character of a realistic goal, meeting the needs of the soul and those of society will increasingly be seen as reciprocal aspects of a mature spiritual life.

The Universal House of Justice, Message To the World’s Religious Leaders (Haifa: Baha’i World Centre, 2002) p. 5 Para 21. E-text from Ocean Library, http//:www.bahai-education.org

Moor

Andrew Sullivan writes:

Maybe this is adulthood finally arriving a little late: the knowledge that everything is flawed and you just need to get on with it. But a church perpetrating the rape and abuse of children through the power of its moral authority is not a flaw; it’s a self-refutation. A movement betraying its core principles in office and then parading as a parody of purists is a form of anti-conservatism as I understand it. And a democratic country using torture to procure intelligence it can use to justify more torture, and prosecuting a war that never ends against an enemy that can never surrender: this, whatever else it is, is not America as its founders saw it. Again, it is a kind of self-refutation.

Where to go? What to do?

Like Andrew, I’ve been in a shifting place within my own spirit for years. My earliest such shift came when I was 19 years old, and realized that neither all the churching in the world, nor all the political consciousness in the world prevented my parents from becoming drug addicts. Again, years later, and after converting, perhaps with aggressive defiance, to Islam, I found my world shook up when two African Nationalists I’d known and loved as family while in college divorced. People can talk about how divorce is something kids adapt to, and in some respects this must be true – my parents divorced when I was young and while it was a painful time for me – by the time I was a teenager, I was accustomed to my parents divorced status, and very good friends with my stepmother. And yet, when these two people – not family, just friends, divorced, my confidence in the ability of marriage to survive at all was shook in a way that has had lasting repercussions.

And of course, 9/11, and the realization that even in the most enlightened practice of Islam, my rights as a woman were highly suspect, shook me at core on the subject of Islam. I limped along with the faith, arguing vigorously that the perversions of Islam as witnessed in so many news articles were not the true face of Islam. I believe that till today. But my hold on Islam became more tenuous than I ever realized, until I discovered the Baha’i Faith.

Unlike perhaps anyone that I know, I find myself willing to journey. Joseph Campbell talks about the Hero’s journey – there is always some calamitous affair that sets the hero on his or her journey. The boat capsizes. The tornado uproots the house. Etc. And the hero, thus unsettled, sets out. There is always a homecoming – but first, the journey.

If it be of any comfort to Andrew – I think blogging is like a journey. May we all journey successfully, and arrive home again, safely.

QT

http://www.politico.com/politico44/perm/0309/obama_i_rarely_read_blogs_70410d8b-b283-4f6e-b74f-51982c34306d.html

Key quote:

And part of the reason we don’t spend a lot of time looking at blogs is because if you haven’t looked at it very carefully then you may be under the impression that somehow there’s a clean answer one way or another – well, you just nationalize all the banks, or you just leave them alone and they’ll be fine, or this or that or the other.

That reflects well something I just said…

This is long overdue. Thank you, Judge Robertson!

QT
More on Barack Obama
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

This post gets the cleverest sneak in of “Obama” award. Well done.

And yes, I concur. I had the biggest school-girl crush on Michael Jackson back when I was 16 – that was when Thriller was out. After that my ardor cooled a bit… and by the time I was an adult, with a child, no less, and Michael Jackson had ceased looking like anything recognizable, I thought I’d turned my back on him forever.

Then “You Rock My World” happened. Age of the internet and all – I saw the video online… and that old familiar pang came back. I couldn’t believe it! The man is just … bizarre! Who could like him, much less love him! Blech! Except that by the time he started dancing, I was wishing I had the talent to be the lady on the other end.

I hope we get some good youtube videos of the tour…

QT
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Today, Christopher Hayes, speaking on Keith Olbermann’s Countdown, suggested that conservatives consume media in a “hall of mirrors.” The analogy is wonderful – but Chris Hayes mistakenly assumes that the “hall of mirrors” is only a conservative phenomenon.

With the decline of the daily newspaper, the continued corporatization of media (television, radio, print) and the explosion of partisan, mutually-exclusive blogospheres point to an increasingly dangerous trend for our nation.

I don’t have any wise insights or solutions – I only have an increasingly troubled spirit – our news is tainted and gathering information enough to make informed decisions is becoming MORE difficult, even in the information age – because our information is tainted with partisanship.

The Fast of ‘Ala has begun – and in keeping with the fast and the spirit of my faith, I’m going to look to abstain from politics for these Holy Days. 19 days, including today, and I will have no partisan opinions to share…. my observations will be non-partisan, and as much as possible, apolitical. I hope at the end of the Fast the fog of competing information clouds begin to lift.