Month: May 2014

by Jonah Shepp

David Dayen is livid at how easy Credit Suisse is getting off after it became the first bank in 25 years to plead guilty to a felony in US court:

In the agreement, Credit Suisse pleaded guilty to one count of aiding tax evasion. The Justice Department made sure to check with New York’s banking regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve to eliminate any unwanted consequences from the guilty plea, like the revocation of Credit Suisse’s banking charter or investment-adviser license. (Incidentally, there are fewer of these collateral consequences with foreign banks, which gives away why Credit Suisse, and not JPMorgan Chase or Bank of America, was forced to plead guilty.) Instead of a corporate death penalty, Credit Suisse will pay $1.8 billion in fines to DOJ, $715 million to New York’s Department of Financial Services, and $100 million to the Fed. In addition, the bank will have an independent monitor overseeing its activities for two years.

This makes any fallout from the scandal mostly one of reputation, which means not much fallout at all.

Matt Levine finds something for everyone to hate:

If you’re a critic of bank impunity, you think this is dumb because no top executives will go to jail, or even be fired, and really there are no negative consequences beyond what you’d get from civil charges or a deferred prosecution agreement. If you’re a defender of banks, you worry that the Justice Department has missed some unintended consequences, and that Credit Suisse’s guilty plea will cause a colossal and accidental financial crisis.

Either way, the point is that the only consequences of the guilty plea — as opposed to a deferred prosecution, etc. — are the ones prosecutors forgot. Those consequences might be catastrophic, or they might be nonexistent, but if they exist, they exist because no one thought of them. It’s deterrence by accident: Prosecutors did their best to avert everything bad that might come from a guilty plea, but the deterrence value comes from the fact that their best might not be enough.

James Kwak thinks a more appropriate punishment would be to shut down Credit Suisse’s US operations entirely:

There are two main ways to really punish criminals and deter wrongdoing in the future. One is criminal prosecutions of the individuals involved, ideally getting lower-level employees to cooperate and gathering evidence as far up the management hierarchy as possible. (There are ongoing prosecutions against several Credit Suisse employees.) The other is putting a bank out of business by revoking its license. Even if he escapes jail, no CEO wants that on his résumé. And it seems entirely appropriate for a bank that engages in a decades-long criminal conspiracy that costs U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars.

The conventional wisdom, however, is that you can’t revoke a large bank’s license because of potential systemic consequences. (That’s why prosecutors only pressed for the guilty plea after receiving assurances that regulators would not revoke Credit Suisse’s licenses.) If this is true, of course, that’s an overwhelming argument that such “too big to jail” banks shouldn’t exist in the first place. We don’t want a financial system dominated by banks that can willfully flout the law.

Kevin Roose doubts the guilty plea will mollify those who are still angry that nobody went to jail for causing the financial crisis:

What we’ve learned since 2009 is that the prosecution of complex financial crimes is a zero-sum game. With limited resources and a ticking clock, every case you choose to prosecute fully has to be carefully selected, with the most important determinant questions being “will I win this?” and “how long will it take?” Insider trading cases are easier to convict on than mortgage fraud cases; accordingly, they get more attention. Tax evasion is lower-hanging fruit than CEO misbehavior, so it’s naturally where prosecutors want to direct their attention.

That’s understandable, and forcing guilty pleas on lesser charges is perhaps better than the alternative. But let’s not conflate issues here. “Too big to jail” isn’t a controversy about how banks will be treated in the future. It’s a scandal about how they’ve been treated in the recent past. And no number of guilty pleas is likely to calm the public down, especially when the pleas seem to have so few real-world consequences.

by Jonah Shepp

Putin closed a huge natural gas agreement with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping today:

The contract is worth $400 billion in total over the 30-year period, during which Gazprom will supply 38 billion cubic feet of gas per year. The details are still hazy at this point, including the most important fact of all: the price at which Russia is selling its eastern neighbor the vast supply of natural gas. Sources close to the deal seem to think the lowest the Russians would go would be around $350 per thousand cubic feet of gas, which is on the low end of the $350-$380 price range paid by their European customers.

But if that’s the lowest the Russians would go, it was likely the agreed-upon price; China was holding most of the leverage in this discussion, if only because Putin needed this more than Xi did. Negotiations reportedly went on until four in the morning, and Putin admitted that “our Chinese friends are difficult, hard negotiators.”

Mark Adomanis, however, is reluctant to read too much into this:

Although I think that Russia-China partnership is a very important story, I would advocate extreme caution in analyzing the significance of this particular natural gas deal. Why? Well when dealing with “state capitalist” entities a contract is never really a contract:

if, 10 years from now, Gazprom realizes that it is subsidizing Chinese gas imports it will do what it has always done and threaten to cut off the flow unless it gets more money. The Chinese side will act similarly: if the leadership at CNPC realizes that they are paying a significant premium for Russia gas, they will switch to other suppliers as quickly as possible. The ability to quickly enter into or revoke contracts is simultaneously state capitalism’s greatest strength and its most glaring weakness. When necessary, companies like Gazprom and CNPC can move extremely quickly and enter into agreements without the need for shareholder meetings or discussions with boards of directors. They can take advantage of opportunities ruthlessly and with little warning. And, when they feel the need to exit a contract, they do not need to worry themselves with legal niceties: they simply do what they need to.

Richard Connolly also discourages over-interpreting Putin’s “pivot to Asia”:

Even after a number of high profile energy and infrastructure deals, China, South Korea and Japan account for just over 1% of foreign investment in Russia. So while Russia may be importing a growing volume of goods from Asia, it still turns overwhelmingly to Europe for capital.

Such dense trade links between Russia and Europe took decades to form, dating in many cases back to the height of the Cold War. If the two managed to trade amicably during the Cuban Missile Crisis, they shouldn’t have a problem now. So Europe will most likely remain Russia’s key economic partner for years to come as it continues to provide capital, technology and demand for Russian energy. While the economic pivot to Asia is real, this is Russia looking for some more friends, not an entirely new set of friends.

But Dmitri Trenin picks up on another sign that may point to growing military cooperation with China:

Putin’s visit to China will coincide with the joint Sino-Russian naval exercises. These are held regularly, with the last being in the Sea of Japan off Vladivostok. This time, the venue is the East China Sea, where the territorial dispute between Beijing and Tokyo over the Diaoyu Islands (Senkaku Islands in Japanese) has heated up.

The Russians, by not objecting to the area where the maneuvers will be held, are sending a message to Japan that signing up for US-ordered sanctions against Russia would entail a cost. In a public statement in March, Putin made it clear that Moscow does not intend to conclude a military alliance with Beijing, but the mere invocation of that possibility is a signal that the vector of Russian foreign policy has changed dramatically. Only four years ago, then president Dmitry Medvedev – with then prime minister Putin squarely behind him – were offering a “joint defense perimeter” to NATO. Today, NATO again considers Russia an adversary, and vice-versa.

And Simon Denyer notices that Xi and Putin seem pretty simpatico:

The two men have a few things in common: both are strong, authoritarian leaders, fiercely nationalistic and keen to counter Washington’s influence in the region, albeit in different ways: but they also found something else they shared this week, a desire to commemorate World War II. In their joint statement, the two men talked about celebrating the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, an anniversary that does not even fall until next year. A strange priority you might think, except that both men have been intent for some time on making as much political capital as possible about their respective country’s roles in defeating fascism. …

But Xi was reported as having told Putin the two men had similar personalities last year, and the pair seem to have found common ground on at least one other pressing issue. In Russia, Putin has been ramping up censorship of the Internet to muzzle his critics, something that Xi already knows an awful lot about. In their joint statement, the two leaders expressed concern that information and communication technology was being used in ways that “go against the goal of maintaining international stability and security, and violate national sovereignty and individual privacy.”

by Chris Bodenner

Though not really the gays, according to this reader:

Maybe men having sex with women fake it. Men having sex with men don’t, since, well, the juice is part of what men like about sex with each other (as delicately put as I possibly can), even with a condom.

I’m a gay man who has more than once not reached an orgasm with a partner, or had a partner not reach one with me. The thing is, I understand what may be going on with my partner and he doesn’t have to prove anything to me by reaching an orgasm. I certainly understand what I’m feeling and experiencing and have no problem saying “I don’t think I’m going to cum tonight.” I’ve found that true with most of my partners.

I’ve had some pretty good sex without an orgasm, and did not think it was a flaw in me, or in him, that I didn’t or he didn’t or we both didn’t. For that matter, I’ve had some mediocre sex where we both had orgasms. Plus, as Dan Savage has noted in a video posted on this blog, men know of several pleasurable ways to be together and reach an orgasm besides penetration, which seems to be expected in a male-female pairing. Must be a straight thing.

It’s also more of a straight thing because orgasms are more elusive and idiosyncratic among women than men, as this reader can attest:

I am a 50+ year-old woman who’s had slightly fewer than 10 sexual partners. I have gotten into trouble from sexual desire. I have committed adultery from sexual desire. I am a single parent because of sexual desire. But I’ve never had an orgasm during sex. I have never had an orgasm during sex.

My first orgasms were when I was 12 or so.

They happened in the swimming pool of a friend of mine. I discovered that if I had a somewhat full bladder, and I propelled myself up and then floated down in the water a few times, I could trigger some awesome spasms between my legs. I didn’t know this had a name, I only knew I liked it.

I get turned on during sex. I’ve had partners who know what they’re doing. But I’ve never had an orgasm during sex. And I’ve always felt inadequate because of that. And yes, I fake it. Although the faking is no fun and doesn’t add to my enjoyment. I’m only trying to satisfy what I think are my partner’s expectations.

The only orgasms I get now come early in the morning, again with a full bladder. It’s as if the muscles around my urethra need to be teased into spasms. When I wake, sometimes if I press down on my vulva and clitoris, I can trigger the same orgasm I enjoyed as a child. But I can’t make this happen during sex.

And so I feel like a failure at making love. I’ve been with the same man for seven years. He’s good. He’s got a mechanic’s feel for torque. He’s had plenty of experience with other women/wives. And I fake it because I don’t want to admit that I can’t come. And this is miserable in a big picture sort of way.

Why don’t the numbers of women who never climax during sex force the conversation to admit that we are normal too? That sex can be over-the-top enjoyable without orgasm? Because it is.

Another female reader:

I’ll accept that faking it can be a relatively benign deceit, especially when having sex with someone you don’t intend to see for long. But I would never recommend it with someone you actually care about, because the downside can be profound (speaking from long ago experience in a my first serious relationship).

I did it once kind of innocuously, and then felt I had to do it a second time, and then it just became a downward spiral that left me lonely and frustrated and him suspicious and confused. He was a crappy partner and I pretended it felt great but I was never wet. Ehhhh. I cringe remembering it. It was just a bad, bad thing. I never got a chance to learn what would actually make me come and he never got the chance to become better in bed. In the end, it killed the relationship, and I vowed I’d never do it again.

by Jonah Shepp

https://twitter.com/PatrickKingsley/statuses/469122068236492801

Anna Newby sums up the state of play in the lead-up to next week’s presidential election in Egypt, whose outcome has already been determined:

The country’s upcoming presidential contest will pit the former head of the Egyptian Armed Forces, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, against leftist politician and dissident Hamdeen Sabahi. Sisi promises firm leadership, security, and the close regulation of protests. Sabahi stands for social justice, Arab unity, and an independent foreign policy.

Opinion polls show Sisi far ahead. The most recent survey, conducted by the Egyptian Center for Public Opinion Research (Baseera) in March, found that 72 percent of respondents would vote for Sisi and only 2 percent had chosen Sabahi. The remaining quarter reported to be undecided. Sisi is effectively the “president-in-waiting,” as Egypt expert Nathan Brown writes.

Ursula Lindsey notices that Sisi’s “campaign” has opted for sentimentality over specifics:

El Sisi prefers to wax poetic about the extraordinary personal qualities of the Egyptian people, and his boundless love for them, rather than to address specific policy questions. He is clearly well-aware of his popularity with women, which he constantly plays to (although he seems incapable of imagining working women — his idealized Egyptian Woman is adamantly domestic, anxiously watching over her home and wisely encouraging her man to action outside it).

El Sisi is charismatic; he is also terribly aware of it. He radiates self-regard. His soft-spoken delivery is that of a man never used to being interrupted. But his veneer of kindliness and patience rubs off awfully quickly, the moment he is challenged. The unspoken message of his entire campaign is that he is actually above competing for the position — it is already rightfully his, and he is accepting it as a patriotic sacrifice.

Dov Zakheim suggests that we use the election as an opportunity to “reinvigorate” our relationship with Egypt, which he points out is “a long-standing and reliable ally” with or without democracy:

Those who argue that Egypt does not fully adhere to Western democratic standards should recognize that many other American allies in the region have far less open societies. Moreover, given the tumultuous recent past that has disrupted their lives, Egyptians, like most people, yearn for stability. Stability means, first and foremost, security, a roof over people’s heads and food in their bellies, an education, and a future for their children. Stability and democracy are not necessarily synonymous; stability, even more than a vibrant civil society, is a precondition for true democracy. While democracy can function in an unstable environment, even where there is a functioning civil society, it will always struggle. Pakistan, for example, has an active civil society. Yet one hardly would call it stable and accordingly, in light of its history of military coups, and the challenge of Islamic extremists, the longer term prospects for its current democratic governance are far from assured.

Meanwhile, Eric Trager checks up on the hopelessly deadlocked efforts at reconciliation between the Muslim Brotherhood and the military government:

While the Brotherhood often downplays its demand that Morsi return to power, it still emphasizes the restoration of “legitimacy,” which effectively means the same thing. “The return of Morsi, continuing his rule, is not what we want,” Mohamed Touson, a former Brotherhood parliamentarian and a member of Morsi’s legal team, told me, before adding: “Morsi should come back just to take the decision for new elections and leave office.”  The Brotherhood is also demanding “transitional justice”—a phrase that Brotherhood leaders deliberately borrowed from post-apartheid South Africa, but then stripped of its conciliatory significance. …

The military’s demands are similarly non-starters for the Brotherhood. According to Emad Abdel Ghafour, a former Morsi adviser who serves as a liaison between the Brotherhood and top generals, the military is willing to release all but 300 of the Muslim Brothers that have been arrested. On paper, this is a major concession, because it would mean that over 10,000 detained Muslim Brothers could go home. But the 300 Muslim Brothers whom the military wants to keep imprisoned are likely top leaders, and given the Brotherhood’s hierarchical command-chain, this would mean accepting its own decapitation.

by Patrick Appel

Trigger warnings are in the news again. Dan Savage’s objection to them:

Here’s what has always annoyed me about trigger warnings—even when they’re being used for their original purpose, i.e. to warn rape victims about content that discusses rape and not to warn morons about Shylock: Someone who uses a trigger warning before writing about rape or sexual violence will probably write about rape and sexual violence with enough sensitivity that the trigger warning wasn’t necessary. And someone who writes about rape and sexual violence in an insensitive manner won’t be sensitive enough to use a trigger warning. So the kind of writing about rape and sexual violence that may actually trigger someone won’t have trigger warnings and the kind of writing about rape and sexual violence that’s unlikely to trigger someone will have trigger warnings.

So what purpose, then, do trigger warnings serve? It seems to me that they exist not to protect the reader, but to draw attention to the writer. You’ve heard of false consciousness? Well, trigger warnings are false conscientiousness. The writer who uses trigger warnings isn’t saying, “I care about you.” The writer is saying, “Look at meeeeee.” It’s narcissism masquerading as concern.

Alan Jacobs raises another fair point. He decries the “failure to realize that just as important as what you read is whom you read it with — the social and personal context in which you experience and discuss and reflect on a book”:

A list of troublesome “topics” — basically, tagging books with simplistic descriptions — is an utter trivialization of all these matters. Any teachers who think that they have met their moral responsibilities to students by loading their syllabuses with such tags — and any institutions who  find such tags adequate — have grossly misunderstood what education is. And that would be true even if such tags could adequately capture the ways in which a given theme (sexual violence, say) is treated in a given work of art, which they can’t.

If you trust your teacher and your fellow students, then you can risk intellectual encounters that might be more daunting if you were wholly on your own. That trust, when it exists, is grounded in the awareness that your teacher desires your flourishing, and that that teacher and your fellow students share at least some general ideas about what that flourishing consists in.

Richard McNally adds that “these warnings may be counterproductive”:

Trigger warnings are designed to help survivors avoid reminders of their trauma, thereby preventing emotional discomfort. Yet avoidance reinforces PTSD. Conversely, systematic exposure to triggers and the memories they provoke is the most effective means of overcoming the disorder. According to a rigorous analysis by the Institute of Medicine, exposure therapy is the most efficacious treatment for PTSD, especially in civilians who have suffered trauma such as sexual assault. For example, prolonged exposure therapy, the cognitive behavioral treatment pioneered by clinical psychologists Edna B. Foa and Barbara O. Rothbaum, entails having clients close their eyes and recount their trauma in the first-person present tense. After repeated imaginal relivings, most clients experience significant reductions in PTSD symptoms, as traumatic memories lose their capacity to cause emotional distress. Working with their therapists, clients devise a hierarchy of progressively more challenging trigger situations that they may confront in everyday life. By practicing confronting these triggers, clients learn that fear subsides, enabling them to reclaim their lives and conquer PTSD.

But Kat Stoeffel, formerly a critic of trigger warnings, has changed her mind. She writes, “what now strikes me most about trigger warnings is how small a request they are, in proportion to the backlash they incite”:

by Patrick Appel

Aaron Carroll notes that high copays keep people with chronic illnesses from getting medical care:

A study just published in JAMA Pediatrics looked at how children with asthma obtained care under different levels of cost-sharing, and how much stress their families were under financially because of their child’s illness. It’s important to understand that children with asthma, by definition, require care. We want them to use the health care system. With respect to asthma, prevention and maintenance are far better than trying to treat a child already suffering from an attack.

What we see from this study is that families with higher levels of cost-sharing were significantly more likely to delay or avoid going to the office or emergency room for their child’s asthma. They were more likely to have to borrow or cut back on necessities to afford care. They were more likely to avoid care. This isn’t a good outcome. We’re talking about children with a completely manageable chronic condition who are being hampered by cost-sharing. That’s not what cost-sharing is supposed to do.

He points out that it “doesn’t have to be this way”:

In France, co-pays are set by levels of sickness. Those who have chronic conditions have all of their co-pays waived. Even Singapore, beloved among conservative health care wonks because of its reliance on cost-sharing, makes exceptions for many with chronic illnesses. The rules do so explicitly to encourage them to seek care.

by Jonah Shepp

No, not #Benghazi the pseudo-scandal, but the Libyan city itself, where fresh fighting broke out last week between militias loyal to the current government and forces led by a rogue ex-general who wants to excise Islamist extremists from the country’s political life:

Two camps are taking shape: The Islamist politicians who dominate Libya’s interim parliament, and their rivals, who are gradually amassing behind Khalifa Haftar, the retired general. His forces have attacked Islamist militias in Benghazi and claimed credit for an attack on the General National Congress (GNC), as parliament is called. In a bid [Monday] to diffuse the crisis, acting prime minister Abdullah Al-Thinni called on the GNC to vote immediately on a 2014 budget and to confirm his successor, the prime minister-elect, before a recess and elections for a new interim legislature. …

Last Friday forces under Mr. Haftar attacked Islamist militias in Benghazi that he said authorities had failed to rein in. On Sunday, militiamen apparently aligned with Haftar attacked the GNC building in Tripoli. He is demanding that the parliament cede its role to a constitutional drafting committee elected in February; he insists that he does not aspire to lead Libya.

Juan Cole takes a closer look at the sequence of events. Ishaan Tharoor provides some background on the militias:

According to a recent RAND Corp. report, Libya’s militias number in the “low hundreds” — and that’s a conservative estimate. The rebels who fought the Gaddafi regime were never a united, cohesive force. They were at best a loose alliance of various, motley factions: tribal bands, army and regime defectors, armed groups that emerged during certain intense uprisings — such as those in the port city of Misrata and the towns of the Nafusa Mountains, for example — which then became power brokers with guns in the chaotic aftermath that followed Gaddafi’s overthrow. Meanwhile, in the security vacuum, Islamist groups once repressed or marginalized gained traction, launching a string of attacks and assassinations on government officials and other factional rivals in major centers such as Tripoli and Benghazi.

Keating thinks Qaddafi’s paranoid style made the current situation more or less inevitable:

As Robert Haddick of Small Wars Journal wrote in 2011, Qaddafi’s army was likely weak by design. The late leader was always more concerned about coups and internal uprisings than international threats. A strong military with a well-developed command structure could have created a situation in which—as with Hosni Mubarak in Egypt—the commanders pushed him aside in the face of popular discontent. For security, he relied instead on institutions like the Khamis Brigade, a special operations forces “Praetorian Guard” commanded by his son. …

What Qaddafi’s paranoia essentially created was a country with a disorganized and underdeveloped central military that was nonetheless flooded with heavy weaponry. In other words, once a power vacuum emerged, there was a perfect mix in place for violence and chaos.

And yes, by the way, America has learned a thing or two from the 2012 attack:

[P]ost-Benghazi considerations appear to have played a role in precautionary security steps taken by the Pentagon this week as inter-faction fighting has escalated across Libya and in the capital, Tripoli, in particular. The Pentagon has moved aircraft and dozens of Marines to a US naval air station at a NATO base on Sicily in Sigonella, Italy. The Marines were dispatched from a US crisis response team based in Spain that was created in response to the Benghazi attacks.

The State Department says the US is watching Libya closely with the security of Americans there in mind, but that no evacuation decision has been made. “The situation on the ground, obviously, could change quickly, and so we’ll continue to evaluate and update our posture as needed,” spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Monday.