Tag: Premium

Massoud Hayoun reports that JPMorgan Chase has closed “hundreds” of porn performers’ bank accounts in just over a week:

Numerous porn actors have reported that they received no clear explanation of why their accounts were closed. “Out of left field we got a notice our two personal and two business accounts were being closed,” said Joshua Lehman, the husband and former manager of ex-porn actress Teagan Presley. Lehman said that branch and telephone bankers told him it was “because of our industry,” but staff at corporate headquarters “categorically denied this” and gave no reason for their decision. … Presley agreed with her husband, adding that a customer support representative on the phone said her account posed a risk but wouldn’t specify how. “I think it’s crazy that in 2014 that you wanna give a bank money and they won’t take it. Who doesn’t want money?”

Hayoun notes that Chase of course has no compunction taking cash from porn consumers. One performer is suing the bank for closing her account. But Lux Alptraum points out:

As a private bank, Chase is, of course, within its rights to deny accounts to whomever it chooses as it sees fit.

But there is still something disturbing about a major bank choosing to deny its services to an entire industry. Should other banks decide to follow in Chase’s footsteps, thousands of legitimately employed people and legal businesses could be cut off from one of the bedrock institutions of American society – and, as our nascent legal marijuana industry has shown, a business that cannot get access to banking services is a business that cannot function as a part of legitimate society.

Andrea Garcia-Vargas adds:

Sadly, none of this is particularly surprising as this is not the first time Chase Bank has attempted to deny services to businesses dealing with sex or sexuality. Mark L. Greenberg, founder of a softcore porn studio, even filed a lawsuit against Chase after they refused to allow him to refinance a loan, allegedly because of his job. And more recently, Tiffany Gaines, the CEO of Lovability, ran into trouble with Chase when the bank refused to process her payments – all because she was selling condoms. When reached for comment by Gaines, a Chase representative told her “processing sales for adult-oriented products is a prohibited vertical.”

However, Mary O’Hara suggests the DOJ could be responsible for Chase’ move:

[N]ews is slowly surfacing that shows the US Department of Justice may be strong-arming banks into banning porn stars. It’s called Operation Choke Point, and it has nothing to do with deep-throating. Instead, it’s a targeted effort to shut down as many as 30 separate industries by making it impossible for them to access banking services. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Thursday, American Bankers Association CEO Frank Keating wrote that the Justice Department is “telling bankers to behave like policemen and judges.”

“Operation Choke Point is asking banks to identify customers who may be breaking the law or simply doing something government officials don’t like,” Keating wrote. “Banks must then ‘choke off’ those customers’ access to financial services, shutting down their accounts.” Keating said the highly secretive operation was launched in early 2013. That’s when porn stars started to complain to the media that their bank accounts were being shut down without explanation. And while the actors are quick to blame banks like Chase and Bank of America for discrimination, those institutions may in fact have no choice.

Update from a reader:

The DOJ operation is without question behind Chase’s decision to cancel accounts belonging to folks in the porn industry. What I find interesting is that these are their personal accounts. I work for a bank and we’re doing this exact same thing – in fact, I spent no less than three hours today working on our crisis communication plan for when we cut off payday lenders, tobacco companies, etc from receiving commercial loans from the bank for which I work. We’re tiny compared to Chase, yet still disentangling ourselves from certain industries.

That said, we are not planning to quit providing personal banking services to owners or employees in these industries.

Another:

I work in the Anti Money Laundering department of a top 10 bank and I’m responsible for closing lots of accounts for unusual and illegal activities. The fastest ways to get an account closed is doing strange things with cash, sending wires to and from countries with lots of criminality, or dealing with Nigeria. In my business the likelihood of a Nigerian doing something illegal with their money is about the same as finding an honest politician. No joke.

This is the first thing I’ve heard about closing porn accounts. Not something my bank is on the lookout for. In fact, FINCEN (the guys who monitor banks for money laundering activity) just put out guidance for banks on how to bank legal pot businesses. I never thought I’d see the day that happened.

The main entities that are weighing on the banks are all from Treasury. I can only think of one time a DOJ employee made my life harder. Perhaps the most important thing to remember about Chase is they just got hit with a $2 billion fine for weak AML procedures. Biggest fine in history for AML issues. They may be overzealous to prove to their regulators that they are with the angels, because their next fine will REALLY hurt.

On the heels of Letterman’s announcement that he’s retiring next year, to be replaced by Colbert, as well as Leno’s exit, The Late Late Show‘s Craig Ferguson is also giving up his seat:

The Late Late Show formed part of Letterman’s own contract. Because the two shows were produced by the same company, one has to wonder if CBS were only holding onto Ferguson till Letterman left. But on the Monday show’s cold open, Ferguson dispelled rumors he was kicked out: “About two years ago,” he said, “I had decided after eight years … that it was probably time for me to move on and do something else.”

Eric Deggans weighs Ferguson’s contributions to the late-night genre, which he disrupted much as Letterman did:

He never had a backing band – in part, early on, it was likely a money thing. But even after CBS upgraded his studio, Ferguson avoided the bandleader sidekick and live music, instead trading banter with a skeletal robot and with two people in horse’s costume. Really.

As interviews began with guests, Ferguson would symbolically rip up his blue note cards as a way of signifying that what was coming wasn’t really planned. Sometimes, that brought a lot of empty riffing with a celebrity who just couldn’t keep up. But sometimes, you got this (warning: parts of this are a little NSFW). …

Small wonder that more traditional shows hosted by Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers beat The Late Late Show in ratings. And it’s also no surprise that Ferguson might get tired of re-inventing the form every night and just move on (he already has his next TV gig lined up: hosting his syndicated game show Celebrity Name Game). Beyond hoping they don’t hire yet another white male, I’m crossing my fingers that CBS succeeds Ferguson with someone just as willing to blow up conventional ideas of what a late night talk show can and should be.

David Sims admires Ferguson’s approach to comedy as well as his serious moments:

His only Emmy nomination for the show came from the 2006 eulogy he delivered for his father, who had died the previous weekend [see the above video; Part 2 here]. Even though Ferguson has always been a candid and open performer, it was still a beautiful moment, one of those rare times on television when a performer seems as personally close as a family member.

Ferguson, a recovering alcoholic, was also resolute in which targets he would pick for mockery in his opening monologue, and shied away from criticizing celebrities who had similar substance abuse problems or were obviously going through profound suffering in public. It’s a tough line for any comedian to walk, and Ferguson would probably be the first to admit he broke his own rules, but his willingness to discuss the issue also set him apart from other late night hosts.

Poniewozik refrains from speculating over who will replace him and instead suggests that CBS put something entirely different in The Late Late Show‘s time slot:

Ferguson’s audience was small but intense, but for many others, late-night only exists as a kind of cultural proxy. There should maybe be a punch-card system, in which you need to show proof of having actually watched 20 full talk-show episodes in a year before venturing a heated opinion as to who hosts one. As a colleague once told me back during the Jay/Conan disaster, “I don’t really watch Conan, but I like to know that he’s there.”

So people will debate, again, who should host CBS’s late-late show, but there’s a good argument that we don’t need the show at all–not, anyway, a show with a monologue, a house band, two interviews and a musical guest. CBS might do much better creating a program to reach some part of the vast, vast audience that does not watch talk shows, period.

The Supreme Court heard arguments yesterday in two separate cases addressing whether the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures extends to the contents of your cell phone. Sarah Gray sums them up:

The two cases being heard are on opposite ends of the spectrum. The first is Riley v. California. In 2009, David L. Riley had an expired car registration, and was pulled over in San Diego. Police also found two loaded guns and text messages that associated him with a gang. A further search of the phone linked him to an attempted murder. He was convicted and received 15 years in prison. Both the guns and phone were found without a warrant; a California appeals court ruled that the search was like going through a person’s wallet or address book and did not require one.

The second case is United States v. Wurie. Brima Wurie was arrested in Boston in 2007 on drug and gun charges. Officers searched his flip-phone’s call log without a warrant. A Boston federal appeals court threw out the cellphone records as evidence. Judge Norman H. Stahl wrote, “Today, many Americans store their most personal ‘papers’ and ‘effects’ in electronic format on a cellphone, carried on the person.”

Dahlia explains the court’s dilemma:

The problem for the court today is that they don’t much like the prospect of allowing the cops to search jaywalkers’ cellphones for evidence of anything bad they’ve ever engaged in. Even Justice Scalia conceded that for someone arrested simply for driving without seat belts, “it seems absurd that they should be able to search that person’s iPhone.” But at the same time, the justices also don’t want to hamstring the police who claim that if they can’t search cellphones, they will be in danger, and major crimes will go unsolved.

Serwer was unimpressed with the court’s tech savvy:

“Could you have a rule that the police are entitled to search those apps that, in fact, don’t have an air of privacy about them?” Chief Justice John Roberts asked. “What about something like Facebook or a Twitter account? There’s no real, there’s no – any privacy interest in a Facebook account is at least diminished because the point is you want these things to be public and seen widely.”

Roberts seemed confused by the difference between being able to see a public status update or a tweet and having direct access to a password-protected social media account through a mobile device – perhaps Anthony Weiner could enlighten him.

Noah Feldman hopes the justices insist on warrants for cell phone searches but fears they will settle for something less:

The court’s conservatives seemed very interested in the rule proposed by the office of the solicitor general, which is that the police should be able to search a smartphone without a warrant in order to find evidence relevant to the crime for which a person is being arrested.

On the surface, the proposed rule has some mild appeal. It certainly responds to Justice Scalia’s concern that every arrestee for any crime, no matter how small, could find his or her entire life’s data reviewed and logged into a single government archive. The trick would be figuring out how to limit a data search to information related to the cause of arrest. … As Justice Elena Kagan put it, “It sounds good as a limiting principle, but it ends up you can imagine in every case that the police could really look at everything.”

But that, as Amy Howe explains, wasn’t the only middle-ground rule proposed yesterday:

DuMont and Justice Alito, for example, suggested that a warrant should not be required as long as police are only looking at information – like a photograph – that is analogous to something that police could have searched in the pre-digital era.  But Justice Kagan objected that such a rule would actually exclude very little, noting that almost everything on a cellphone “could be reduced to a piece of paper.”  And Justice Stephen Breyer similarly noted that there is very little data on cellphones that wouldn’t have an analog from the pre-digital era, telling DuMont that the real problem is the quantity of data found on modern cellphones, which far outweighs the quantity of papers and photos that most people would carry around with them. …

And Justice Anthony Kennedy proposed yet another possible middle ground:  whether police can search an arrestee’s cellphone without a warrant would depend on whether the crime for which the individual was arrested was a serious or non-serious offense.   Having made that suggestion, though, Kennedy himself immediately expressed doubt about whether the Court’s cases would support a distinction between serious and non-serious offenses.

Orin Kerr points out that creating such a middle-ground rule is easier said than done:

[T]he Justices still have significant work to do in crafting a new rule, and not a lot of time in which to do it. If you go with a bright-line rule, the opinion pretty much writes itself; the choice of the bright line rule makes the decision easy to craft. But the middle-ground approach involves lots of different possible variables, with hard choices to be made among which variables should matter and how. That makes it tricky to craft, especially in a tight time window. To make things harder, there aren’t many examples of middle-ground answers from the lower courts. The only middle-ground approach that I recall from the lower courts was Judge Posner’s opinion in Flores-Lopez, which wasn’t necessarily a successful effort.

Brianne Gorod expects Scalia to come down, as he has in other recent cases, on the side of strong Fourth Amendment protections:

There should be little doubt about what Scalia will say about these searches. He has become a regular champion of the Fourth Amendments protections against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” In Navarette v. California, Scalia disagreed with the court’s conclusion that the police could lawfully stop a car after a woman anonymously called 911 and reported that the car had driven her off the road. Scalia wrote that such stops were not the constitutional framers’ concept of a “people secure from unreasonable searches and seizures.”

And in Maryland v. King, a case decided last term, Scalia disagreed with the court’s conclusion that the police may lawfully take a cheek swab of someone’s DNA after he or she has been arrested for a serious offense. He expressed “doubt that the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection.”

For Sullum, however, this is not a tough call:

The truth is that Court’s rules for arrest-related searches have been needlessly deferential for decades. Preserving evidence and protecting officers from hidden weapons were the two original justifications for making an exception to the warrant requirement. But neither of those goals requires reading detailed information about an arrestee, whether it is stored on a cellphone or in a notebook. Barring far-fetched emergencies, there is no legitimate reason why police, having secured such evidence, cannot go to the trouble of getting a court order authorizing them to examine it. That point is especially clear in the case of cellphones and other portable electronic devices, which routinely contain just the sort of private information the Framers meant to protect when they banned unreasonable searches of people’s “papers” and “effects.”

A reader remains unsatisfied with the Sovaldi discussion:

I can appreciate the gratitude you feel towards the pharmaceutical industry whose anti-retrovirals drugs saved your life. They saved my life too. However, the fact that the status quo has done great good does not mean that things could not be better.

Sure, research and development of drugs is expensive. But I would like to read your views on studies like this one suggesting that the pharmaceutical industry spends twice as much on marketing as it does on R&D. Also, I would like to see you grapple with the conflict between pharmaceutical companies’ responsibility to maximize shareholders’ profits, and the ethical responsibility to maximize human welfare. They are clearly often – many would argue always – in direct conflict.

Again, I appreciate the gratitude you feel towards the pharmaceutical companies. But I don’t think that gratitude requires an unconditional support of the status quo in the pharmaceutical industry. I would like to see you grapple more with the ethical conflicts and human costs involved.

My support of the drug companies’ innovation is not unconditional. In fact, it’s constantly derailed by some of the worst practices of those very drug companies. Over-aggressive and sneaky attempts to extend patents, heavy marketing of not-so-vital drugs, lobbying to ensure that the balance between the free market and the moral demands of healthcare is always tilted toward profits: I could go on. But my deeper point is a capitalist one: if the only incentive for curing people was human benevolence, I’d be dead and countless others would be suffering. A free market tries to harness human selfishness for the greater good. And maintaining that balance is what we need to do. Broad-brush condemnation of the private drug sector doesn’t help us with that balance. Another reader notes:

Here is an interesting look at the issue in Forbes. Basically, if every person suffering from Hep C in the US took this drug, Gilead would generate $227 billion in revenue. In comparison, the entire frigging drug industry in the US booked $260 billion in revenue last year. That right there is a sign that market forces have absolutely nothing to do with Gilead’s pricing. This is pure extortionary pricing. I completely understand that there are different aspects to consider for this one issue, but there is really no rational, defensible, quantitative way to justify the current price of Sovaldi … a price, by the way, that by itself will restrict access to this drug for many who need it.

But another defends Sovaldi:

I’ve been following this story on your site and around the web pretty closely, as I work for a consultancy that (in part) specializes in pharmaceutical price setting. We didn’t work on US launch pricing for Sovaldi, but the press reaction has stirred quite a bit of attention around our offices.

Our analysis shows that the price of Sovaldi should have actually been higher.

The drug sets a new standard for both efficacy and safety (and has a significantly shorter duration of treatment), and is potentially even better than the competitor drugs coming to market over the next few years. The crux of the problem is that Sovaldi is so effective and so tolerable that many more patients than expected want to initiate treatment immediately. For years, insurance payers have taken for granted that doctors “warehouse” patients who do not have HCV advanced enough to warrant treatment. Patients are streaming out of such “warehouse” queues, and that doesn’t even account for the >50 percent diagnosed population in the US.

So we see that the drug is clinically far superior to standard options that are priced at comparable or even higher levels, but as a result is having a huge impact on insurance risk pools. Is it really fair to tell a manufacturer that they shouldn’t price their breakthrough drugs at parity to inferior competitor drugs that have gone without a negative press reaction for years? The story here isn’t that manufacturers are gouging consumers for a life-saving product, but actually that our drug benefit insurance schemes are simply not equipped to give sick patients drugs that they need when a honest-to-goodness breakthrough comes out.

Another:

Thanks for defending my industry.  I admit I’m biased, and certainly my industry does some stuff that makes people unhappy.  That said, $84K to be CURED of Hep C is a bargain.  When I first saw the news I thought, well, $84K a year to stay alive is maybe a bit steep … but no, this is $84K to be CURED.  My industry doesn’t do a lot of curing.  This drug is a miracle, and those don’t come cheap.

Another looks at a different medication:

My 7-year-old daughter was diagnosed with asthma a few years ago and given a rescue inhaler. Recently the prescription ran out and we called to have it refilled. The pediatrician insisted on seeing her, then prescribed her another inhaler, a daily use corticosteroid – which costs twice as much as the original rescue inhaler.

Never having heard of this particular medication before (QVAR), I googled it and came across a Consumer Reports study noting that the drug is now 92 percent more expensive than it was in 2009, in part because of the FDA’s decision to ban CFCs – a ban which the pharmaceutical industry itself lobbied for.

I’m sorry. This absolutely qualifies as fleecing, as greed.

The NYT did a deep dive into the subject of asthma drug pricing as part of its “Paying Till It Hurts” series last October. Meanwhile, a reader raises the issue of waste:

I’m speaking as someone who worked for years in a firm that was hired by many large pharma companies to help make their internal processes both effective (i.e., defect-free, without rework) and efficient (i.e., not wasting physical, human, or financial resources).  Processes ranged from clinical trials, to marketing campaigns, to production of the active pharmaceutical ingredient.

You cannot begin to imagine the sheer amount of waste involved; it is truly, truly mind-boggling. For years, these firms resisted process improvement efforts (such as Lean and Six Sigma, popularized by Toyota and GE, respectively) in part because the FDA neither rewarded such efforts nor punished the lack of them, and in part because they did not see their activities as “processes” that could be tuned up. I remember first hearing about one firm’s method for analyzing adverse events from their products. So appalling was this description that when I got home, I checked to ensure that the meds I was taking for a chronic condition weren’t made by that company.

I agree that the cost of drugs needs to cover what it takes to bring them to market, and that not all research will result in a salable product. But consumers should not be paying for gross inefficiencies that are relatively easily fixed.

I’m not going to disagree with that. Lastly, a reader wants to clear up some confusion about the NIH:

I work in pharmaceuticals (specifically, early stage startup, not big pharma) and am very familiar with the relationship between academic-/NIH-funded research and industrial drug research and development. The NIH funds very basic research that allows us in industry to then discover and develop new drugs. There is no debate around this, and anyone in a pharma company will agree.

However, NIH funding, with rare exceptions, doesn’t even discover new drugs, let alone develop them. Typically, NIH funding will allow an academic researcher to identify a novel aspect of biology and associate it with a disease state. Pharma usually picks it up at this point by verifying the research, running chemical screens to identify potential drugs, and then modifying the potential drugs to the point where they are safe and efficacious. It is then that a drug will enter clinical trials. The entire process just to get to a clinical trial can take four to eight years and cost millions of dollars. The clinical trials are where the real money and time are spent, of course, but there is a substantial investment by a drug company prior to this that is easily overlooked.

I’m not defending drug pricing; I think we have a long way to go in terms of demonstrating value for money spent. But this is intertwined in healthcare costs itself and drug companies are responding to market pressures. I do however want to dispel the belief that the NIH funds academic research that discovers drugs, and then drug companies take it away and charge an arm and a leg. Drug companies assume the vast majority of the risk and the investment to both discover and develop new drugs.

Scott Clement unpacks yesterday’s WaPo/ABC poll, which included bad numbers for Democrats. What it may mean for turnout:

While nearly seven in 10 of all registered voters say they are “absolutely certain” to vote in November, several key Democratic constituencies are much less committed to voting. Barely half of voters ages 18 to 39 are certain about voting (53 percent) and 55 percent of non-whites describe themselves as certain to cast a ballot. By contrast, more than seven in 10 whites and voters older than 40 say they will definitely cast ballots — both groups that have favored Republicans in the past two elections.

The turnout gap is smaller among self-identified partisans, with Democrats six percentage points less apt than Republicans to be certain voters (72 percent vs. 78 percent). Closing that gap, however, could be difficult, given that Democrats are more than twice as apt to rate themselves “50-50” or less likely to vote; 15 percent of Democrats say this, compared with 5 percent of Republicans.

Zeke Miller uses another poll to read likely voter tea leaves:

Facing an uphill battle to hold the Senate, the Democratic Party may be in for a wakeup call from young voters, according to a new poll conducted by Harvard’s Institute of Politics. Just 23 percent of the key Democratic-leaning demographic of 18-29 year-olds say they will definitely vote in the midterms this fall. At this point in 2010, 31 percent said they would definitely go to the polls, but only 24 percent ultimately voted. Additionally, Republican-leaning 18-29 year olds are significantly more enthusiastic about voting this fall.

Boer Deng notes that young voters, “despite casting ballots in limited numbers, can make a difference in tight races”:

Tight races abound this year, especially in the Senate, where Democrats have more seats to lose. History says that the president’s party is set for a drubbing during a midterm year. So it is worrying for Democrats that fewer of their young supporters seem to care. In fact, they are disillusioned with politics all together. The Harvard poll found that trust in political institutions has fallen to a historic low of 31 percent. Young people, no matter their political philosophy, are cynical about American democracy today: 62 percent think elected officials enter politics for a “selfish reason,” and few would run for office themselves. They can be hardly expected to canvass for votes, if that’s the case.

Sargent adds his two cents:

In short, this is more evidence the electorate is likely to tilt older, whiter, redder, and more male. Yet at the same time, Dems are more trusted than Republicans to handle the nation’s main problems (40-34), more trusted to help the middle class (52-32), more trusted on the minimum wage (49-33); and more trusted on health care (43-35). Meanwhile, women trust Dems over Republicans on their issues by 54-27. (Republicans win on guns and the deficit.)

All of this underscores what Ed Kilgore and Sasha Issenberg have been arguing: That if Dems are going to have any chance of offsetting the “midterm dropoff” among their core voters, issues alone aren’t going to do it. The sheer grunt work of contacting voters again and again and urging them out to the polls is what it will take, and it won’t be easy. The one bit of good news is that Democrats are aware of this and are planning accordingly.

Bouie warns the GOP not to get cocky:

[I]f I were a Republican strategist, I would advise my clients to ease up on the anti-Obamacare rhetoric. … As a whole, the public opposes repeal and doesn’t support the GOP’s scorched-earth approach to the law. If the GOP claims a mandate for their opposition, it risks a repeat of 2011, when it destroyed its standing with voters through a series of stunt votes and standoffs. This didn’t doom its presidential chances the following year, but it was an unnecessary obstacle.

Mike Pesca thinks it was a bad call for NBA Commissioner Adam Silver to impose a lifetime ban on Sterling and encourage the board of governors to force a sale of the Clippers:

A swift beheading by the commissioner robs players and fans of a chance to foment justice on their own. Silver did a favor to the Clippers players who didn’t want to be put in the uncomfortable position of having to actually do anything beyond the symbolic in opposition to Sterling’s racism. …

In accepting plaudits for serving as an exacting executioner, Silver also sidesteps the fact that his office—led by David Stern with Silver as his longtime No. 2—was for years an institutional enabler. The lesson of Donald Sterling seems to extend no further than Donald Sterling, and stretches no earlier than the revelations of the past week. In fact, injustice existed longitudinally and latitudinally, with the damage done by the NBA’s inaction reaching beyond that league’s offices. If the NBA had punished Sterling a long time ago, would Major League Baseball have approved Astros owner Jim Crane, despite his company having paid a multimillion-dollar settlement for allegedly having engaged in discriminatory behavior?

Along those lines, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar criticizes the media and the public for focusing their outrage on Sterling’s racist remarks after ignoring years of much worse behavior:

He was discriminating against black and Hispanic families for years, preventing them from getting housing. It was public record. We did nothing.

Suddenly he says he doesn’t want his girlfriend posing with Magic Johnson on Instagram and we bring out the torches and rope. Shouldn’t we have all called for his resignation back then? … So, if we’re all going to be outraged, let’s be outraged that we weren’t more outraged when his racism was first evident. Let’s be outraged that private conversations between people in an intimate relationship are recorded and publicly played. Let’s be outraged that whoever did the betraying will probably get a book deal, a sitcom, trade recipes with Hoda and Kathie Lee, and soon appear on Celebrity Apprentice and Dancing with the Stars.

Many readers are flagging a similar argument on YouTube from Bomani Jones, an ESPN radio host who wrote a column eight years ago called “Sterling’s racism should be news.” One reader adds:

Think about this. Al Sharpton was prepared to mount a boycott of the NBA’s major advertisers if the league didn’t suspend Sterling as a result of the phone call. BUT, before the phone call was revealed, Sharpton was willing to stand beside Sterling while the two were honored by the NAACP. This, in spite of the fact that Sharpton knew (or certainly should have known) Sterling’s record. Does this mean that Sharpton thinks this phone call was worse that housing and employment discrimination?

Bouie elaborates on that disconnect:

When it comes to open bigotry, everyone is an anti-racist. The same Republicans who question the Civil Rights Act and oppose race conscious policy are on the front lines when it’s time to denounce the outlandish racism of the day. …

At the same time, we all but ignore the other dimension of racism—the policies and procedures that sustain our system of racial inequality. The outrage that comes when a state representative says something stupid about professional basketball players is absent when we learn that black children are punished at dramatically higher rates than their white peers, even as preschoolers. Likewise, it’s absent when we learn that banks targeted minorities—regardless of income—for the worst possible mortgage loans, destroying their wealth in the process. In turn, this blinds us to the racial implications of actions that seem colorblind. In a world where racism looks like cartoonish bigotry, it’s hard to build broad outrage for unfair voter identification laws or huge disparities in health care access.

Meanwhile, according to Adam Serwer, “There’s a more disturbing element to the controversy that has largely escaped notice”:

Sterling’s remarks show how deep, interpersonal racism can persist despite longstanding, even intimate relationships with people of color. Stiviano, Sterling’s girlfriend, is black and Hispanic. Through his charitable foundation, Sterling has given money to organizations like the NAACP,  the United Negro College Fund, and the Black Business Association. He is the owner of a basketball team made up largely of black athletes.

Yet none of these things appear to have moderated Sterling’s feelings towards black people. This is nothing new of course – even during slavery, white plantation owners sired entire families with people they owned as chattel without ever questioning the legitimacy of a system that treated blacks as property. The “black friends” defense has become a running joke precisely because it’s equally popular and unpersuasive. Sterling’s remarks are a reminder that having black associations, friends, or even lovers, doesn’t mean you can’t still hold racist views.

A reader chimes in:

So they’re banning Sterling for life and fining him $2.5 million. Listen, I think the guy is racist as hell. But are we really convicting people without a hearing, taking away their property and fining them $2.5 million for not liking black people? Isn’t that his right? It’s odious to be a jerk, and I’m appalled, but I think people have a right to hate other people. There isn’t much record of him breaking the law in his specific duties as owner of the ball team, is there?

Again, I’m troubled by this stuff. This guy makes my skin crawl. And the Mozilla guy who wants to ban my own marriage, yuck, but doesn’t he have the right to be biased too, as long as they don’t break the law? I hate that bias, and think they’re losers, but I’m uncomfortable with this witch hunt – even if they happen to be real witches.

Another

I want to disagree with the reader who questioned “convicting people without a hearing” and talks about people’s right to be biased “as long as they don’t break the law.” That’s not what is at issue here. The NBA as an association has its own rules and regulations, which Sterling’s remarks fall afoul of, and the fine and ban are entirely an internal matter to the league. Sterling has been an NBA owner for decades; the rules are written and voted on by his peers, and enforced by an employee of the league (the commissioner) who is therefore an employee of his and of his peers’; and players and coaches are routinely held to these standards of public conduct (albeit for lesser offenses). This isn’t a matter of legal or governmental punishment. It’s not even the same as the Eich case, precisely because there were actual pre-existing standards Sterling violated. The issue that Sterling was known to hold these views already is a valid one (the man discriminated in housing, after all), but the idea that this is somehow a violation of his rights is ridiculous.

And another:

As the news about Sterling’s comments unfolded, I too was initially uncomfortable with the “witch hunt.” But then I realized this has nothing to do with the NBA passing judgment on Sterling’s racism – and everything to do with the NBA protecting its own brand.

As the past thirty years have shown, the NBA doesn’t care about Sterling’s racism. What it does care about is the money his racism was potentially going to cost the league. The NBA very quickly realized that if they left Sterling in place – say, if they suspended him for a year, or even “indefinitely” – this issue was going to fester, advertisers were going to continue to abandon ship, and the team’s revenues (if not the league’s) would be in jeopardy.

So the NBA kicked Donald Sterling out of the club. In effect, through their behavior over the last thirty years, the other NBA owners essentially told Sterling, “Everything would have been fine if you would have just kept your mouth shut. But now you’re messing with our money, and if there’s one thing rich, white guys don’t like, it’s other people messing with their money.”

Another adds along those lines:

If the league didn’t act quickly, decisively, and harshly, this would have derailed a highly enjoyable playoffs but also led to more advertisers re-evaluating their relationship with the league in general. It also would have caused a players’ revolt. There were rumors that Golden State and the Clippers’ players were going to boycott the game in protest if the league didn’t handle it.

Basketball is a stars league (more so than any other team sport) and the stars were going to act (see LeBron and the Heat engaging in a solidarity protest before their game over the weekend). And if the players acted, the league was going to be in trouble. It could result in fewer sponsors and lower attendance/viewers. Energizing the players to act collectively is not something the owners want. If the star players were going to boycott games, it would be incredibly damaging (and all signs were pointing that way).

And don’t feel bad about Sterling – he is going to get paid north of $1 billion dollars when the team is sold (I’ve seen basketball guys like Bill Simmons estimate north of 1.5 billion). He’s being kicked out of a private, high-profile, exclusive club because he was going to hurt the overall brand of the NBA irreparably if he wasn’t.

(Chart via Mona Chalabi)

Jared Bernstein reacts to the new Commerce report:

[R]eal GDP grew only 0.1% in the first quarter of the year, according to this morning’s report from the Commerce Dept.  That’s a huge deceleration from last quarter’s 2.6%, and well below analysts expectations of around 1.2%.

Remember, that 0.1% is an annualized number–the actual, quarterly percent growth of GDP was 0.03%, meaning that the real level of the value of goods and services in the US economy was essentially unchanged in the first three months of the year.  That’s unusual and alarming, if it’s correct.

However, given the jumpiness in the quarterly estimates, and this is the first of three estimates, based on preliminary data, it’s important to look at year-over-year results as well, to smooth out some noise, including recent weather effects.  By that measure, real GDP is up 2.3%, a deceleration from last quarter’s 2.6%.  In that regard, look at this quarter’s number as a stern warning, one that may or may not herald a downshift in GDP growth, but one that is hopefully not indicative of the underlying trend.

Neil Irwin digs into the data:

Business investment … contributed quite a lot to growth from 2011 to 2013, as companies increased their investments. Companies have been adding buildings, buying new equipment and acquiring new software packages strongly enough that such investment contributed 0.84 percentage points to growth in 2011, almost precisely the same as in 2012. The contribution shifted down to a third of a percentage point in 2013.

In the first quarter of 2014, however, the corporate sector was a net negative for the economy, with investment in structures, equipment and intellectual property falling at a 2.1 percent annual rate, enough to subtract a quarter of a percentage point from overall G.D.P. That was surely in part caused by the harsh winter weather, but the basic trend is real: American business, once a major driver of the expansion, no longer is.

Ben Casselman adds an important caveat:

A key note of caution: Preliminary GDP estimates are notoriously unreliable. On average, the figures get revised by half a percentage point between the first and second estimate (which we’ll get next month) and by a whopping 1.3 percentage points when the final numbers come in.

Jordan Weissmann chimes in:

Most economists seem ready to chalk up much of the slowdown to the miserable winter weather, which kept shoppers indoors, slowed construction, and otherwise turned the last few months into a cold and soggy mess. Chances are, there will be some rebound this quarter—a spring awakening, if you will.

Still, one part of the report seems like a genuine cause for concern: housing.Residential investment has now fallen for two straight quarters.

James Pethokoukis’s view:

How does the economy typically respond after a weak, but positive GDP quarter? It varies. After that weak 4Q 2012, GDP growth averaged 1.8% over the next two quarters. After 0.3% growth in 1Q 2007, growth averaged 2.9% over the next six months. A 0.2% 4Q 2002 was also followed by 2.9% growth the subsequent two quarters. Then again, weak quarters in late 1990 and 2000 were quickly followed by recessions within six months. This time around, however, odds are growth will accelerate — weather permitting.

(Chart via the WSJ)