Monday Morning Reads

Good Morning!

There’s been so many outrageous things in the news recently that I hardly know where to begin.  We talked a lot about the next two subjects but I think there’s some follow-up analysis worth reviewing.  First, Ron Paul’s assertions about “honest” rapes and his implication that third trimester “abortions” are every day happenstance is beyond reality and the pale.  Here’s some analysis on “The 2 Most Dangerous Things Ron Paul Gets Wrong about Honest Rape”.

1. Women do get raped by their husbands and partners. That’s not some out-there hypothetical. Intimate partner rape is a major problem — and yes, it happens to well-to-do women like Ron Paul’s daughters too.

2. Although Paul keeps going back to women seeking abortions late in their pregnancies, the reality is that 90 percent of abortions occur in the first trimester. So his focus on late-term abortions is disproportionate to the number of women actually seeking late-term abortions.

Paul seems to think married women are still property.  I think his exposure to the press this particular election cycle has shown him for the neoconfederate he truly is.  Hopefully, he’ll go crawl back under his rock in Texas and leave us in peace soon.

The more we find out about Komen for the Cure, the more appalled we become.   It’s apparent that Brinker sees the Foundation as her personal ATM and influence pet and continues to stack the board with Republican Droogies.  Brinker’s husband is a huge GOP donor.  Surrender the Pink!

A review of the board of directors of Komen by BuzzFlash at Truthout reveals that Brinker has the likely votes to control board decisions at any given time, and that those votes are either Republican stalwarts or individuals personally loyal to her. For instance, one of the members of the relatively small nine-person board – given its nearly half-billion dollars in annual revenue – is Brinker’s son, Eric Brinker. Another is Brinker herself, although, to be fair, many non-profit boards have the CEO as a member.

Linda Law, an apparently extremely accomplished real estate developer and consultant, includes in her Komen board biography that she is an “RNC regent.” This means she is a top bundler and fundraiser for the Republican National Committee, an odd detail to be included in a non-profit board bio. Komen board member Linda Custard, a Dallas social insider, and her husband, William, are listed on opensecrets.org as giving more than 95% in significant contributions to Republicans.

Connie O’Neill is a Dallas socialite, who headed the Junior League there and numerous charity balls, has been on the board and working with Brinker on developing Komen over many years. Although there is no opensecrets.org record of her political giving, unless something has changed she appears to be a Brinker friend and insider.

That’s not to impugn the integrity of Komen board members, despite Brinker’s apparent de facto control of the board and the partisan leanings of some key board members. Indeed, there are some members, such as the chair, Dr. LaSalle D. Leffall, Jr., who is a nationally distinguished oncologist — also a medical professor at Howard University — who appear non-partisan in terms of their roles on the board. So to for Brenda Lauderback, a cancer survivor, and Elyse Gellerman (also a breast cancer survivor), who represents the Komen affiliates.

Komen board member John D. Raffaelli, though, is a lobbyist who swings both sides of the aisle –although he started as a Democrat and has given donations to Dems — is now a full-fledged K Street operative. Raffaelli showed his K Street colors when he told the New York Times (NYT) that “Komen was bitterly disappointed that Planned Parenthood was using Komen’s decision to raise money.” In another NYT article he played the self-pity card: “”Why are they [Planned Parenthood] going nuts?” Mr. Raffaelli asked rhetorically. “And the answer is that they want to raise money, and they’re doing it at the expense of a humanitarian organization that shares their goals and has given them millions of dollars over the years.” Whether or not Raffaelli’s lobbying firm also has contracts with Komen could not be ascertained from the IRS filings online.

From some other of Raffaelli’s statements, it appears entirely possible that along with Karen Handel, he played a key role in coming up with the “congressional investigation” excuse for cutting off Planned Parenthood in the future (before the so called “mea culpa”).

Here’s a headline that’s worth a chuckle or two from Politico: “Trump endorsement a net negative for Romney”.  Really? Ya Think?  This is some weird polling methodology but I think it probably reflects a degree of reality.

Donald Trump’s endorsement of Mitt Romney may have consumed the news cycle on Thursday, but Nevada Facebook users see the endorsement as a net negative for Romney, according to a Facebook/POLITICO poll.

Forty-one percent of those surveyed said Trump’s endorsement gave them a more negative view of Romney, compared with just 10 percent who said they now view him more positively. Forty-nine percent said the endorsement had no effect.

The results only represent the sentiments of Nevada users on Facebook, not registered voters or likely GOP caucus voters that tend to be more reliable barometers of caucus elections. The Facebook poll, for instance, doesn’t exclude Democrats or independents.

Daniel Kahneman—who recently won the Noble Prize in Economics–is the subject of  an interesting interview up at The Economist on the relationship between economic decision-making and psychology.  It’s all about trusting instincts.

If you assume that economic agents are completely rational, two immediate conclusions follow. One is people don’t need to be protected against their own choices—and that has been very explicitly the line of the Chicago economists, as illustrated by their opposition to social security. I think the evidence against perfect rationality is overwhelming. A large proportion of the population wants to save more than they do and they have firm intentions to start saving next year. Helping them do this will actually help them make the decision they wish they would make.

Another pernicious implication of the assumption of consumer rationality is that individuals need little protection from the firms with which they interact. For example, the law requires truthful disclosure, but there are no regulations about the clarity of the disclosure or about the size of the print. The assumption is that rational agents will make the effort to read the small print where it matters but, in fact, most of us don’t. Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click ‘I agree’ but you don’t know what you’re agreeing to. In the United States, especially under the influence of Cass Sunstein, the White House regulatory chief, firms are required to produce information for their clients in a form the clients can understand. I don’t see that this has any drawbacks, except for the corporations. Those changes in, for example, mortgage and credit card regulations have been fought by the industry, which means the industry thinks it is to its advantage to keep customers poorly informed.

I have a real uphill battle in my field because I don’t buy rational or efficient markets hypotheses.  There are just too many frictions and too many examples of behavioral paradoxes.  I’ve noticed that the few women in the financial economics field tend to be more behavioralists than not.  Perhaps if we ever get to actually dominate the field, we can get rid of that Chicago School nonsense started by the likes of Fama and perpetrated by his son-in-law Cochrane who are buddies of Paul Ryan and other Republican acolytes.

It’s been a year since the Egyptian uprising.  This Der Spiegal article asks of Egypt will be able to make democracy work in light of the outcomes of recent elections and violence.

One year after the revolution, Egypt has a new parliament, one that was elected more freely and fairly than ever before. More than two-thirds of its members are Islamists, who now hold as many seats as the former state party, the NDP, once held. There are eight women in this parliament, 13 former NDP members and only a handful of young revolutionaries. Together, they are charged with drafting a constitution, and at the end of June, when the president has been elected, the military council is slated to transfer power to a civilian government. That, at least, is the plan.

It is a double experiment, and the outcome will have an impact throughout the entire Arab world. Can a country, and an Islamic one at that, find its way to democracy through free elections alone? Or does it need a second revolution to sweep aside all corrupt institutions, including the police, state-run television and government agencies that still operate according to the old rules?

If the members of parliament join forces, and if, with the support of the people, they exert pressure on the military council, the generals will hardly be able to resist. But if they prefer to push their own agendas and reach an accommodation with the military to that end, the parliament could remain what it always was: a place where representatives of the people have met for 146 years without ever actually representing the people.

The revolution is now in the hands of the delegates. El-Eleimy, a social democrat, is one of them, a man who is conscious of his own power and filled with the desire to bring about change. But there are also men like Khaled Hanafi, 50, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood who has waited almost 20 years for a seat in parliament. And then there is the Salafist Ahmed Khalil, 33, who was not allowed to teach at his own private school because of his beard.

They have nothing in common, except for the fact that all three demonstrated on Tahrir Square, and yet they must now define important issues together: What kind of a country do we want? And what do we understand as democracy?

So, that’s just a few stories that I dug out.  Hard to find much these days because there appears to be so few things that attract the press outside of football and the Newt/Willard battle.  Oh well, hopefully you can add some more.  What’s on your reading and blogging list this morning?