David Brook’s The Follower Problem:

The old adversary culture of the intellectuals has turned into a mass adversarial cynicism. The common assumption is that elites are always hiding something. Public servants are in it for themselves. Those people at the top are nowhere near as smart or as wonderful as pure and all-knowing Me.

[…]

In his memoir, “At Ease,” Eisenhower delivered the following advice: “Always try to associate yourself with and learn as much as you can from those who know more than you do, who do better than you, who see more clearly than you.” Ike slowly mastered the art of leadership by becoming a superb apprentice.

[…]

To have good leaders you have to have good followers — able to recognize just authority, admire it, be grateful for it and emulate it. Those skills are required for good monument building, too.

From Atrios via Bloomberg on elite CEO Jamie Dimon’s leadership:

Dimon treated the CIO differently from other JPMorgan departments, exempting it from the rigorous scrutiny he applied to risk management in the investment bank, according to two people who have worked at the highest executive levels of the firm and have direct knowledge of the matter. When some of his most senior advisers, including the heads of the investment bank, raised concerns about the lack of transparency and quality of internal controls in the CIO, Dimon brushed them off, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions were private.

From the WSJ on elite CEO and Politician Jon Corzine:

A bankruptcy trustee blamed former MF Global Holdings Ltd. MFGLQ -6.06% Chief Executive Jon S. Corzine for events leading to the financial firm’s collapse, saying he may pursue legal claims against the former financier for ramping up risks and failing to safeguard money belonging to customers.

James Giddens, the trustee trying to recover money for the company’s U.S. brokerage unit, said in a 275-page report Monday that he may pursue claims of “breach of fiduciary duty and negligence” against Mr. Corzine and other officials at the firm for revving up the firm’s risk-taking appetite without improving controls needed to keep customer funds safe. He cited Mr. Corzine’s giant trading bets and failure to put systems in place to prevent improper transfers of customer money.

source: MF Global Autopsy Flags Risks by Corzine – WSJ.com.

Mind you, David Brooks wants us to follow these people and to trust them, implicitly. These guys had impeccable reputations, and they ended up doing some seriously stupid things. Is it because they are stupid? No. Is it because I think they know less about banking than I do? No. It’s because they were reckless gamblers and gamblers chase.

Leadership is about having some respect and empathy for people you lead and Brooks seems to ignore that requirement of the whole leader/follower thing.

Here’s Curt Schilling on his video game company 38 Studios in happier times:

Curt Schilling, March 2012, on Hannity: touting his Job creativeness.

Some choice quotes:
“…government gone right…”
“…And as someone — now spent five years in a private sector with my own capital my own skin in the game.
I understand at over at a much.– fundamental level.
How our economy works and doesn’t work in in and so every every dollar — income that I have that is potentially taxed away.
It is a dollar can put in my company to create jobs — my my my entire companies around job in the regional lender then you hire a gladly be — right I yeah absolutely I mean and these are high wage jobs…” – Curt Schilling, Former Small Business Owner

Come to find out some small business owners quite often don’t know sh*t about their business:

38 Studios relocated to Rhode Island in 2010 in exchange for $75 million in guaranteed loans, and, earlier this year, put out its first game, “Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning,” to positive reviews. But things fell apart after the company missed a $1.1 million payment to the state on May 1. The payment was eventually made, but the company was then unable to meet payroll, and Schilling asked the state for more money. Gov. Lincoln Chafee came out publicly against the idea, saying at a press conference that “there’s no more easy money,” and that 38 Studios should seek private money to stay in business. On May 24, 38 Studios laid off all its employees.

Actually most don’t. Here are the failure rates for small business in years 1 through ten:

1. 85
2. 70
3. 62
4. 55
5. 50
6. 47
7. 44
8. 41
9. 38
10. 35

Schilling went out of business. He’s not an idiot or dumb for going out of business. Most small business owners fail early. He may have made the mistake of borrowing too much from the government, but that’s on him and Rhodes Island!

In addition here’s the thing about a lot of those small businesses that succeed, they may not be in it to maximize profits:

What economic theory says is that workers maximize utility and therefore employers who want to get workers to do something that’s unusually dangerous or unusually unpleasant will have to pay a premium. A small business operator is in the same situation. She’s balancing income against other lifestyle factors, including the hours put in on the job, the pleasantness of the work, the sense of self-esteem that comes from having something to do, possibly a sentimental attachment to a particular location or certain employees. What economic theory says is that a profit maximizing small business person has to be someone with a very unusual utility function.

Where profit maximization enters into the picture is precisely with the widely held large business.

So can we stop pretending that every time we talk about business, every small business owners opinion is supreme?

From ABC News Texas Honor Student With Two Jobs Jailed for Missing Too Much School:

In addition to working at Elliot’s wedding-planning venue, Tran works full-time at a dry cleaners. She has been supporting an older brother and a younger sister since her parents separated and her mother relocated out of state, Elliot said. Her father often works too late to come home, so she sometimes lives with Elliot’s daughter.Tran, 17, had already been warned not to miss any more time at her Houston-area school, but when Judge Lanny Moriarty heard she’d skipped again, he sent her to jail for 24 hours Wednesday, according to KHOU 11 News.

[…]

When those close to Tran suggested she switch to home schooling, Tran refused because she wanted to be named among the top-10 students in her class just like her brother, Elliot said.

Judge Moriarty told KHOU 11 News that he intended to make an example of Tran.

“If you let one run loose, what are you going to do with the rest of them? Let them go, too?” Moriarty asked the TV station.

Who the hell is this judge?

And this extreme case shows the ridiculous standard thought process of this judge. So what if Tran was not an honors student and was just trying to take care of her family? Would he jail this hypothetical non A+ Tran too? He basically is saying “Yes”, because she was “running loose” in Moriarty’s mind. This shows you how often incarceration is seen as some kind of tough love that should be used for kids in place of any kind of case work or really say coming up with some sort of discretionary solution.

So what will happen now? Extreme home makeover/Secret Millionaire type philanthropy and Kony 2012 parachute advocacy will be deployed instead of solving a real issue. To a degree this has already happened as the charges have been dropped after the (justified) nationalization of this story.

But Judge Moriarty (yes he’s Republican) is still a judge who decides truancy cases and can’t tell the difference between say a person running loose and a young student with a shitty home situation, but remarkable work ethic, a big heart, an intelligent mind and loyalty to her family. Jail doesn’t teach anything except how to go to jail. She’s an honors student taking Advanced Placement courses, so she plays Rosa Parks to some other probably unknown Claudette Colvins of principled truancy (is that even a thing) you don’t need detention or incarceration for this, but what if this is a teen parent or the kid is in vocational school? Would this even be a story? Would Judge Moriarty be applauded?

Please RT/Repost. That is all.

Whoever released unauthorized images of Ronald Poppo’s half eaten face did an extremely exploitative, unethical and awful thing. If they are in law enforcement or health care they should be fired and held accountable. These pictures aren’t ours and it must be extremely painful for his family to not only lose their loved one years ago but to be reminded of this by his gruesome hospital photos being splashed across TV and computer screens everywhere.

In addition, his attacker Rudy Eugene was not a zombie. Maybe calling him a zombie is some way that the rest of us can pretend that mental illness, drug abuse and indigence is something that won’t happen to us or people around us, a kind of denial by ridicule, but we don’t do ourselves any favors to live that fantasy.

I am so thankful that Joe Walsh has donates some of his time dedicated to representing the good people of Illinois District 8 to explain to me all the ways Jesse Jackson has tried to enslave Blacks, Latinos and really all other Americans.

Just in case you were wondering: His opponent is Lt. Colonel Tammy Duckworth. She’s a veteran of the Iraq War, a former Assistant Secretary of Veteran Affairs a fierce advocate for veterans and a Democrat.

Zimmerman’s bond bail has been revoked. Must report to jail in 2 days. This whole thing gets more awful and muddled each week.

30K American jobs scratched.

Roman Romulo, deputy majority leader of the Philippine House of Representatives, bragged to the Manila Standard Today earlier this month that the Philippines “has secured its place as the world’s fastest-growing outsourcing hub.” Romulo pointed out that BofA is the last of the “big four” US banks to move their business-support network to his island nation, where the average family makes $4,700 a year.

source: 3 Years After Taxpayer Bailout, Bank of America Ships Jobs Overseas | Mother Jones.

An important part of this whole deal is that the Philippines doesn’t have all these crazy “regulations” as in there are no data privacy laws for call centers:

US banks already are operating call centers in the Philippines, “despite the fact that they haven’t actually passed this rudimentary legislation,” says Shane Larson, legislative director for the Communication Workers of America (CWA), which represents 150,000 American call center workers. The Indian government is ahead of the Philippines in passing data privacy laws, notes the union, but those laws specifically exempt the call center industry. And that could lead to problems: In a 2005 survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers, 85 percent of the Indian outsourcing companies that responded said they had experienced information security breaches in the previous year.

So for those of you who worked for Bank of America: kick rocks. For those of you who bank with Bank Of America: make sure you regularly check that no one in the Philippines is trying to open a credit card in your name.

I didn’t really think of this before. Last time I went through a job search, the call center was overseas. So basically I was giving over a bunch of information to someone who has no penalty for accessing my private info.

I’ve never been in handcuffs in my life. There were a few times in high school I was less than well behaved. Luckily I didn’t go to a school where they felt the best way to discipline me was to enroll me into Intro to Incarceration:

…we can’t even stop handcuffing kids to stuff if they get out of hand:

JACKSON, Mississippi (AP) — Public schools in Jackson, Mississippi, will no longer handcuff students to poles or other objects and will train staff at its alternative school on better methods of discipline.

source: Progress! – First Draft.

And I do mean luckily. I fear being handcuffed and thrown in a cruiser. For anything. I simply don’t want to be arrested. It just isn’t something I expect to happen. I bet these kids expect that they can be handcuffed for anything. They are literally training kids to be o.k. with incarcerated. As Atrios points out, Jackson, MS is 80% black.

I loved riding my bike and running and walking places as a kid. My feet and my bike were my tickets to personal freedom between dusk and dawn during the summer time. So this is kind of awful to me:

Principal Stuart Byrne says the ban is safety-driven. “Obviously bike riding is healthy,” Byrne says. “Never on earth is our thought that bike riding isn’t good—but traffic here has increased tremendously in 18 years.” In 1995, in an attempt to calm the hectic entrance and exit hours, Byrne hired an off-duty policeman to direct traffic. “It was a bright, sunny Friday afternoon,” he says of one memorable day during the officer’s first week at work. “The buses were just starting to roll—and I can still hear the screeching tires. Five minutes later he came inside, whiter than that sheet of paper. He said he’d almost gotten it both ways.” Byrne cancelled the experiment; eventually the school got a crosswalk, but there’s no sidewalk, nor any traffic light other than a flashing School Zone warning. Even kids who live directly across the street from school are required to get there every day by either bus or car.

“I don’t think Stu Byrne’s initial [concern] was the safety of our kids,” says Janette Marino. “If it were, they would have put in a traffic light when the school was originally built—and kids wouldn’t have to be on a bus for 40 minutes.” Janette points to studies (performed by the National Resources Defense Council, Coalition for Clean Air, and University of California at Berkeley) that show diesel-exhaust levels inside some school buses are more than eight times higher than the average content of the air outside—and, as children’s lungs are more susceptible to toxins, the report surmises that ailments such as cancer, bronchitis, emphysema, and asthma can ensue. Still, parents who then conclude that the safest course is to drive a child to school should be aware that, while 85 children under age 16 were killed while cycling in the United States in 2009 (the year the Marinos caused a ruckus), more than 15 times as many—1,314—kids under age 15 died in motor-vehicle crashes.

source: Why Johnny Can’t Ride.

Kids should be able to ride bikes and walk to school. Especially if they live across the street from school.

So, what you have is an intersection where traffic has gotten bad and the principal and community won’t insist on safety standards during school hours to allow children to use a safer and healthier mode of transportation (walking and or biking). See something wrong here? We keep asking kids to bend towards negative developments in society (people needing to drive so fast past a school while probably yapping on a cell phone it is thought not to be safe at the school) or establishing rules and designing traffic to preserve healthy (physically and culturally) lifestyles for kids attending a school.

They could request that authorities set up a police patrol speed trap near the school once a month, boost ticket rates with school zones.

They could maybe try and have the buses and cars sue a different entrance than cyclists and walkers.

But they shouldn’t tell kids and their families not to bike or walk to school. Car culture can not be the end all be all of our travel value system.

Lanny Davis reps for Booker’s needless and counterproductive defense of Bain Capital. Again, Booker is not a bad dude or awful guy, just had a really bad moment in presidential campaign “surrogacy”.

Asked about Bain’s closure of a Kansas City steel plant that the company acquired in 1993 when Romney was Bain’s CEO, Romney last week told a conservative radio host that it wasn’t his problem: “Their problem, of course, is that the steel factory closed down two years after I left Bain Capital. I was no longer there. So that’s hardly something which is on my watch,” he said.

source: Obama: Romney’s Bain Capital tenure is fair game, president’s job is not maximizing profits – The Washington Post.

So if a job was created after Romney left Bain, he gets no credit, by his own admission.

See Zerlina Maxwell: In defense of S.E. Cupp.

Through Andrew Sullivan’s blog, some contrarion nonsense from Will Wilkinson…

08:44 AM

A new study by economists Phillip Levine and Melissa Kearney suggests that income inequality is a major cause of teenage pregnancy.

[…]

Will Wilkinson draws a different lesson:

Perhaps we’ll be less eager to combat teen motherhood now that we understand that it doesn’t much harm the economic prospects of the young women most likely to go in for it. My own reaction to this news is to wonder whether it isn’t cruel to try to discourage relatively poor teen girls from seeking the comforts of motherhood, if motherhood won’t hurt their prospects. If we set aside as ill-founded our paternalistic economic motivations to reduce rates of teen motherhood, only the impulse to discourage the proliferation of those people and/or thatculture seems to remain. I’m not comfortable with that.

A child by definition “harms” economic prospects: they cost money, can’t contribute to the bottom line, and require time previously used to make money. It’s your current economic status that usually determines if it harms your prospects profoundly and permanently or not. You know what’s being worse for your economic prospects than being poor? Being really poor. You know what’s worse for your economic prospects than being really poor? Being really poor with a child. The worst thing about Wilkinson’s article is the last two sentences where he ascribes a mentality of racist or xenophobic paternalism to those who would like to stem or reduce teen pregnancies:

If we set aside as ill-founded our paternalistic economic motivations to reduce rates of teen motherhood, only the impulse to discourage the proliferation of those people and/or that culture seems to remain. I’m not comfortable with that.

Wilkinson also ignores the fact that impoverished single mothers utilize prenatal care less due to lack of access or affordable options, early childhood poor nutrition is also linked to problems later in life and that teenage pregnancy quite often affects three generations of the family: the new teenage mother, the child and the new grandparents.

10:24 AM

Bryce Covert explains why a “quarter of all ‘poverty spells’—falling into poverty for two months or more at a time—begin with the birth of a child”

What Wilkinson wrote isn’t interesting. It’s literally making the: they won’t ever be sh*t because they aren’t sh*t argument so why give a sh*t argument and trying to present it as some kind of egalitarian new way of thinking of impoverished single motherhood. He’s like some sort of Medeival guidance counselor pushing young maids to wed so that they don’t end up a lonely old spinster at 20.

Neither former employees or colleagues support Mitt Romney’s claim to job creation expertise from Bain:

On the other hand, as Randy Johnson astutely observed in our profile, Romney has brought this problem on himself:

“None of what happened in Marion in the 1990s would be very interesting,” Johnson notes, “if Mitt Romney had not built his entire political career on the claim that he’s a job creator.”

We also interviewed Marc Wolpow, a former Romney colleague at Bain, who defended the buyout business as promoting American competitiveness. The main goal at buyout firms, however, is never maximizing employment, Wolpow told us. It’s maximizing returns for investors. “The facts,” Wolpow said, “tend to get lost in the political spin.”

source: Mitt Romney’s Private Equity Nightmare – Businessweek.

From Atrios (Eschaton: The Math):

Can some of the people who rule us sit down and do a few calculations. Look at typical student loan debt at graduation. Look at median first job salaries for college graduates. Typical 10 year earnings profiles of those graduates. Then ask yourselves, how exactly are they supposed to buy homes and save for retirement?

College is one of those things where the college tuition has far outpaced inflation or the actual cost of running the institution. Decades ago you could work the summer and pay for school. How many summers of work for a person in their late teens early twenties to pay for a year of tuition these days? exactly.

Romney:

Those experiences in totality have given me an understanding of how America works and how the economy works. Twenty five years in business, including business with other nations, competing with companies across the world, has given me an understanding of what it is that makes America a good place to grow and add jobs, and why jobs leave America – why businesses decide to locate here, and why they decide to locate somewhere else. What outsourcing causes – what it’s caused by, rather. I understand, for instance, how to read a balance sheet. I happen to believe that having been in the private sector for twenty five years gives me a perspective on how jobs are created – that someone who’s never spent a day in the private sector, like President Obama, simply doesn’t understand.

Source: The Page by Mark Halperin | The Romney Interview – Transcript

Obama:

Well, those of us who’ve spent time in the real world —(laughter) — know that the problem isn’t that the American people aren’t productive enough — you’ve been working harder than ever. The challenge we face right now, and the challenge we’ve faced for over a decade, is that harder work has not led to higher incomes, and bigger profits at the top haven’t led to better jobs.

Source: ‘Those of us who’ve spent time in the real world …’ – POLITICO.com.

I understand, Obama’s a politician. He needs to get a majority of votes (electoral, really) cast to win re-election. So he needs a lot of people to like him. But there’s a bunch of people who believe Barack Obama to be some sort of anathema that emanates from him being a black Muslim, Kenyan, Chicago Gangster politician, effete elite, radical Christian, black panther, socialist, communist, democrat. And that’s called Obama’s Appalachia problem, not America’s prejudice problem.