Month: July 2012

For those of you who don’t follow banking industry news, we are about to enter another banking related shitstorm. The short version is that a large group of banks colluded to steal very small amounts of money from basically every person on Earth for about five years. The money siphoned off from consumers is estimated to be in the billions of dollars. This latest in a long line of banking and finance scandals is not anticipated to send the “Global” Economy (which mostly means the OCED economies) into a downward spiral, but I think there are good reasons why USians (among others) should still care.

First by way of background for those unfamiliar with how interest rates are set, LIBOR is the London InterBank Offer Rate. [Wiki] Its the interest rate banks charge one another typically for short term borrowing. LIBOR is relevant to the rest of us because its rate is used as the “base rate” in many other types of loans. The idea is that the rate that banks would charge each other is a cheapest market rate because banks are so creditworthy (HA!), so the rates of all other borrowers can be adjusted based this lowest market rate. For a example a floating rate mortgage may require that the homeowner pay LIBOR plus 2 percent or a credit card may charge LIBOR plus 8 percent. If banks lend to one another at 1 percent then the homeowner pays 3 percent and the credit card borrower pays 9 percent.

Something like $800 trillion – no that is not a typo, I do mean *T*rillion – dollars in assets are affected by LIBOR. [The Economist]

So what happened? Well, what always happens when you give a small number of people unfettered control over the reins of our economy? COLLUSION! A bunch of traders allegedly got together and said…Hey! If we knew what the LIBOR rate was going to be tomorrow we could trade on that information and make enormous amounts of money! And then they realized…oh wait…our friends over there at the other table are the ones who tell the people who calculate LIBOR what the rates are. Hey, you guys want a cup of coffee?

Seriously, they bribed them with coffee. [UK Government’s Complaint – PDF]

(Okay, there was probably more than coffee involved, but I like the hyperbole.)

The full consequences of this fraud may never really be known. But as economist Robert Shapiro explains:

Early analysis suggests that for several years, the LIBOR was off by an average of 30 to 40 basis points. (A hundred basis points equal one percentage point in an interest rate.) That is enough, for example, to add $50 to $100 to the monthly cost of a $100,000 loan. In 2007 and 2008, Americans held $11.1 trillion in outstanding residential mortgage debt. At the time, between 30 percent and 40 percent of that debt carried adjustable rates. If the bankers’ manipulations of the LIBOR was responsible for raising LIBOR rates by just 20 basis points in that period, their shenanigans added between $1.1 billion and $2.2 billion to the yearly interest paid by American homeowners.

[Shapiro’s Blog via an MSNBC article]

Given that consumers will likely never see that money again why should we care? Because there is something we can do to protect consumers going forward. While many of us would prefer wholesale change to our political and economic solutions, I think incremental change is still worth pursuing. In the US, I think that means we need to defend (politically) the financial regulation we have in place from attempts by “free-market” asshats to undermine its effectiveness and we need to work to extend oversight of financial institutions. One thing we’ve learned from recent history is that financial institutions have extraordinary reach, the ability to defraud substantial numbers of people, and no real fear that their fraud will ever be detected.

To be completely partisan for a second, the Republican party seems determined to keep it that way. Recently, the House voted to “defund” implementation of Dodd-Frank. [The Hill.] Since the Republicans regained the House in 2010, they have systematically reduced the ability of our regulatory agencies to police the financial markets by repeatedly cutting their budgets [New York Times Editorial]. Now Romney is running on a platform that includes the repeal of Dodd-Frank – or at least parts of it…which parts he’s not ready to talk about yet…but it will include the parts that are “unnecessary.” [Bloomberg]

Can you guess whose interests he’ll be considering when making the determination of what parts are “necessary”?

Often when I talk to people about equality (I do not just inflict these questions on Feministe readers), the first response is “we should just treat each other the same.” A statement that is typically followed by the assertion that they always treat everyone the same.

But, of course, people aren’t the same. We live in a complex hierarchical world that values some attributes and abilities over others, makes access to certain preferences are more readily available.

As a few people pointed in the comments on the last thread this approach to equality – which is a variation on resource equality – doesn’t lead to a just society it merely perpetuates existing inequalities. Equal treatment sounds great but if we stock the world’s bathrooms with urinals then those of us who need to sit to pee are going to be highly uncomfortable.

The philosophical counterpoints, (Bentham’s) utilitarianism and welfare equality, are not without their own problems. To start with the obvious, happiness or utility are not measurable, not easily comparable, fluid, and probably competitive. But even if we were to posit an omniscient being with the amazing ability to continually adjust the happiness level of every person on earth – we’ll call hir Super Utilitarian, we’re still left with the immoral preference problem. If a person derives well-being from causing harm and the rules of the society restrict that person’s activities, then Super Utilitarian would have to provide additional compensation to that person in order to equalize hir well-being. Allocating additional resources to someone because they derive happiness from hurting other people violates my personal sense of justice. But your mileage may vary.

The middle ground is equal opportunity or equal access to welfare which many of you found compelling. Mxe cited Alexander Berkman’s seminal work What is Anarchism? but philosophers from the other side of the political spectrum like G.A. Cohen agree with the principle of equal opportunity (although they disagree in many of the details). To completely butcher the concept with a summary, equal opportunity is giving each person the same opportunity to satisfy their own preferences. Said differently, equal opportunity is the idea that we should equalize everything but “preferences.” In that sense, preferences are seen as something that may justifiably lead one person to a different outcome than another person.

One difficulty as you may imagine is determining what is a “preference” and what is luck or circumstance. Is ambition a preference? Is the enjoyment of more dangerous activities a preference? Preferences aren’t formed in a vacuum and even more challenging is the possibility that our preferences may be ordered against one another [University of Warwick]. To move to an even more meta perspective, by delineating between circumstances and preferences, particularly where the difference isn’t at all clear, aren’t we simply introducing a new system that values certain “preferences” or “circumstances” such that once again we’re living in a complex hierarchical world filled with a New and Improved type of oppression and inequality?

Fucking hell. Apparently, we need Super Preference Identifier.

Once preferences are identified, under the equal opportunity theory, people may still justifiably suffer as a result of those preferences. In the most extreme example, if my preference is to exchange all of my resources for the chance to win the lotto then I am responsible for outcome of that risk including having zero resources on which to survive. Very few proponents of equal opportunity would argue that equal opportunity should equalize poor decision making – although I would argue that poor decision making is a feature of human nature not an aberration. I think that is what makes SamLL’s definition of equality so intuitively appealing:

[A]n equal world is one where no person in that world would be overwhelmingly unhappy with the prospect of having their social position swapped with a different person, selected uniformly at random from all others in the world.

This definition provides for the exercise of preferences but limiting the bounds of any resulting inequality. Still without a super power we’re left with trying to sort out the fundamental tension of wanting people to have the ability to exercise their preferences (or choice) and never wanting the outcomes of individuals to be so disparate as to be intrinsically unjust. I’ve got some ideas along those lines that I’ll share in the next post (this one is hitting tl;dr territory) but what are your thoughts?

TRIGGER WARNING: A jackass in the comments section brings up date rape in an extremely uncouth and tasteless manner.

Tonight I’m writing about something inspired by a conversation I had with someone I work with.

He’s the type of straight man who is sensitive and in touch with his emotions. He’s the type of straight man that translates book reviews on the Arab queer community. He’s the type of straight man who wants to be called out on male privilege. He’s the type of straight man who won’t freak out if you do. He’s a good man.

So, I make jokes where I tell him to let women send their own e-mails and get their own notepads.

Tonight we were walking to an event—mostly so that he could smoke profusely—and started talking seriously about gender.

“I’m surrounded with several strong, independent women,” he told me. “But sometimes it seems like they’re adopting unflattering traditionally more masculine characteristics—like emotional distance, and refusing care from someone else.”

I tried to explain that for women, it can feel impossible to admit that you are stressed, overworked, or taking on too much—as we try to compete in what is so obviously a man’s world, we strive to be as close to invincible as humanly possible.

Of course, I was fumbling for words and in a state of end-of-the-day delirium. In a subject so tense—and fraught with my own emotional vulnerability—it’s difficult to find the perfect language to eloquently convey something so knit into daily life, much less find the reasons for why things are the way they are. Also, I make much more sense when I write than when I speak—so while our conversation was lovely, I chose to come home, drink cheap wine and listen to Ani Difranco circa the 90’s to start figuring out all of my (super womanly) feelings about this subject.

(Whoever called out that I was listening to “Talk to Me Now” has me completely pegged)

But as women, I feel that we fear that showing that we are emotionally vulnerable could make us seem weak. It makes us seem like our emotions will take over our work, and we wont be able to function while drowning in a sea of our own overanalyzed emotions—whether they are sadness, anger or annoyance. It’s too dangerous to risk it. Even though plenty of men experience depression, alcoholism and other health conditions and diseases that interfere with their work and are deeply rooted in their psyche, this will never be attributed to their gender. We seem slightly upset, and the looming possibility of our period or ever presences of our maternal instincts creates an automatic divide.

After all, there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent literary trope about male psychosis—even though plenty of men display enough characteristics of it that there probably should be. Even if there was equality in literary trope, female characters would probably be taken care of, or lamented for not having care, while male characters would be forced to navigate it alone.

Outside of literature, we have to resist the multiple forces that are trying through whatever means possible to reduce us to sex objects or baby machines. Many times we are taught to care about, and attend to others before attending to ourselves or acknowledging that we need care.

I am sure you have all heard of the constant media message that there is no way any of us can possibly, “have it all.” When I hear this, I find myself becoming defiant and trying as much as humanly possible to constantly prove these messages wrong. But can’t we redefine what it means to “have it all” according to what we actually need and find relevant to our lives?

As a result of being on this constant treadmill of achievement, proving capability if we it becomes too hard to prove equality, we often navigate the world with an aggressive competitiveness. Showing or voicing that we need care—even if it is the platonic loving support of a friend—chips away at our independence. If that friend is a man or a male lover, it can feel like a complete submission to patriarchy.

I write all of this partially in response to the questions he brought up, and partially as a critique of myself—I know that I am one of the independent, workaholic women with a sometimes unflatteringly traditionally masculine handling of my own emotions. I can publicly express that I am pissed off—but sadness, discontent and confusion are emotions that I rarely explore myself, lest they absorb value time in “proving myself to the world.”

I know these qualities are unflattering—or perhaps unproductive and unhealthy are better words, but like many things, there are structural and cultural reasons why I navigate the world this way—and why I am not alone. It’s not to say that I am an emotionless stoic—I simply open up only those I trust, and only ask anything of them in dire instances. In most cases, I open up to women before men, close friends before love interests and even serious relationships.

It’s even a little bit terrifying to blog about it right now. It feels…emotionally vulnerable. Did the patriarchy just win a little bit? (that is a joke)

Or am I taking it down a little bit by admitting this? (that is not a joke)

What does the sanctimonious women’s (gender) studies set of Feministe readers think? Is being emotionally guarded something traditionally masculine in the first place? Is it necessary to use it to patch over our emotional vulnerability to prove just how much we can take on the world by ourselves?

Is it something a little more about culture and a little less about gender? Or is it how our culture navigates what it has created as gender?

*Edited out jokes that might not translate as such, since I don’t wish to offend and chose to ask more questions. Oh, and named that Ani song.