Yesterday, I bemoaned the fact that I was unable to successfully become a member of the Friends of Charles Darwin, an organization with virtually no membership requirements.
I’m happy to announce that I have been accepted, and should soon be on the offical rolls. Seems that the site was inundated with applicants who read this post at Pharyngula (just as I did).
I encourage all to join the club, so long as you have opposable thumbs. I’m glad I did. Now I get to put the letters FCD after my name.
This morning’s Times has an interesting article (Side Deals in a Gray Area) about a new trend among the financial criminal class:
While regulators have focused on the buying of options or stocks on leaks about deals before they become public, there is another, more subtle way that big investors can trade while possessing information that the market does not have.
And it is — for now at least — all perfectly legal.
This little-known leeway comes in the form of “big-boy letters†— letters between buyers and sellers that say, in essence, “We are all big boys here, so let’s not sue each other.â€
In the instance covered in detail by the Times, it worked like this. Criminal A, in possession of information to the effect that securities it owned were about to tank, sold them to Criminal B. A and B signed a big boy letter, thereby supposedly and magically insulating A from civil liabiilty for its criminal behavior. Criminal B immediately flipped the tainted securities to Sucker Z (not mentioning the existence of the big-boy letter), which is now suing both A and B, now that the securities in question are worthless.
Now, according to some experts in the field these “big boy” letters are perfectly fine. To the unlettered among us, including this small town lawyer, the very fact that the big boy letter exists is an indication that at least one side to the transaction is acting on the basis of insider information. Who can doubt that Criminal B was aware that Criminal A knew that the value of its securities would soon go down. Who can doubt that there was a meeting of the minds between them that they could both benefit financially if Criminal A laundered its insider information through the allegedly ignorant B? Who can doubt that B would likely not have purchased the securities without the additional information telegraphed by A’s desire to have a big-boy letter in the first place.
It will be interesting to see if our regulatory system and judiciary have been brought so low that they would give their imprimatur to this sort of thing. That’s a close call of course-the Bush administration has a reflexive inclination to favor the cause of corruption, even when the dispute is between two members of its financial base, as is the case here, Sucker Z being a Texas hedge fund.
via Firedoglake, a song by Margo Guryan, a 60s singer/songwriter that I never heard of before.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7soN6HNU3Y[/youtube]
I’ve always agreed with Grouch Marx about joining clubs. As Groucho said:
I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member
This has always seemed like a sound rule of thumb to me, but today I thought I would make an exception, and join the Friends of Charles Darwin.
Why? Well, why not? I fit the bill:
Affirmative on the first requirement, and as to the second, I hereby declare that Charlie is my Darwin.
Moreover, “It’s free, and entitles you to put the letters FCD after your name”. What could be better?
So I decided to abandon my principles and join, only to find that the Friends refused to have me as a member! Apparently, I am that lowest of life forms: Spam. Every time I enter the secret code, designed to catch spam, I’m told I entered the code wrong.
Maybe I failed some evolutionary test.
Why do Democrats do stuff like this?
Former President Jimmy Carter said Monday his remarks were “careless or misinterpreted” when he said the Bush administration has been the “worst in history” for its impact around the world.
Speaking on NBC’s “Today,” Carter appeared to retreat from a statement he made to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for a Saturday story in which he said: “I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history.”
Carter said Monday that when he made the comment, he was responding to a question comparing the Bush administration’s foreign policy to that of Richard Nixon.
“And I think Richard Nixon had a very good and productive foreign policy and my remarks were maybe careless or misinterpreted. But I wasn’t comparing the overall administration, and I was certainly not talking personally about any president,” Carter said.
I woud dearly love it if some reporter asked the obvious follow up: If George Bush isn’t the worst, who was?
Mainly to add a little color, a picture of one of my wife’s orchids, which she’s brought outside for the summer.
The headline story in this morning’s Day (Predatory Lending Shatters Dreams Of Dozens Of First-Time Home Buyers) about a local lending scam is a good piece of journalism. Not only did the Day expose an egregious swindle, but it got the AG’s office to investigate, and hopefully, put an end the careers of some of these folks.
I’ve heard rumblings about this for some time, and I was peripherally involved, both as a minor source and as an in attorney, in that I’ve sued all but two of the individuals named in the article for lending related CUTPA violations. Of the two exceptions, one was the lawyer for someone I did sue.
The last case I had involved almost the whole cast of characters, but I never tumbled to the scam being pulled on the buyers, since my clients were sellers. My clients were cheated too, but in a different way than the buyers, and their losses were far less than those suffered by the buyers. I had another case involving buyers years ago, involving exactly the same modus operandi, but only one of the persons named in the article.
I’ve sued one of these people three times, and I’ve come to conclude, partly as a result of those experiences, that there are some people who literally can’t tell right from wrong. Such people are more common than you might think. If you tell them something is wrong, and they shouldn’t do it, they may listen and do as they’re told. But without someone else to act as a surrogate conscience, they are adrift without a moral compass. Those who suffer from this problem, as is the case here, may engage in behaviors in which the potential rewards don’t justify the risk.
The Day’s reporter deserves an award for this one. I know she’s been working on it for months. Here’s hoping she gets one, and that the AG goes after these folks aggressively.
Thursday I wrote about my fear that I could not reliably recognize irony. Today I learn that I can’t recognize satire, or, even worse, that I confuse sincerity for satire. When I read this post at Hullabaloo I figured that the letter allegedly written by Tim Russert must be satire. Could anyone seriously write a paragraph like this:
I have not honked my car horn since September 11 as a gesture of respect to all of [the 9/11 responders]. 9/11 also gave me a whole new insight into my Dad and why he left school in the 10th grade to enlist after Pearl Harbor. I wrote a book affirming his life. It changed my life and my relationship with my father—and my son—forever. We now share openly the love and respect and pride we have in each other. A day doesn’t go by when other sons and daughters want to share stories of their dad with me. Now that’s a journey I never expected, but one which is so meaningful—perhaps even more important than my “career.â€
No doubt you’ve guessed that this was, in fact, really written by Tim Russert. The man who rules the Sunday talk shows thinks that he is somehow honoring the 9/11 dead by not honking his horn. That’s his car horn of course – he never tires of honking his own. The rest of the inspiring column is just as weirdly maudlin.
I don’t think I can be blamed for thinking Digby made this letter up. Had Russert not written it, it would have been an inspired piece of satire.
My wife attended a meeting with the Joe Courtney campaign today. It’s an unfortunate fact of life that the next campaign starts the day after election day. Here’s Joe with John Hollay, who works in his Norwich office.
John doesn’t know how lucky he is. My wife and I have known him since he was three, when he went to nursery school with our son. We looked in vain for a picture from back then, but we couldn’t find one. Had we done so I would have figured out some way to work it in.
Here’s another pic of John, Liz Duarte, and John Murphy.
Update: Edited to correct misidentification.
