Author: Becky Sarwate

When KJs Don’t Do Their Jobs (January 18, 2009)

Becky Sarwate1 Comment

Taking a break from politics for a moment, which I admit, occupies way too much of my free time and brain power, allow me to vent Andy Rooney-style for a moment against a phenomenon that threatens to overtake one of the few mindlessly enjoyable and affordable outings left to us in these rough economic times. Yes my friends, I refer to karaoke night at the neighborhood pub, sabotaged by a karaoke DJ who gets drunk (I mean this in both the literal and figurative senses) with power.

The night started promisingly enough. I met my friends Gary, Chad, Ed and Romana, along with some of Ed’s pals to celebrate Ed’s attainment of a new job. Clearly with a job market this hobbled, anyone finding employment has every right to call for a night of drunken celebration, accompanied of course with song. We all sipped cocktails, and the crowd was thick and enthusiastic. After a few drinks, Gary gave our table its first taste of the limelight with a rousing rendition of “I Touch Myself” by the Divinyls, complete with a sultry finale of spoken flirting. As the great Paula Abdul might have said, Gary made it his own and the night was on. My husband chipped in a typical Eddie Bon Jovi showstopping performance of “Always.” Another gal at our table did Dolly Parton proud with “9 to 5.” Even I added what I thought was a warm-up lark: my own rendition of “It’s Not Over” by Daughtry. Hey, one has to keep the repertoire from becoming stale, and think outside the box.

Our group sang along with everyone else’s songs, liquored up and feeling fine. We booed (Ok, I did that) when someone made what I considered to be a poor song choice, for example say, anything by Mary Chapin Carpenter. But we also whooped it up when someone either had actual talent, or performed a song so fabulous in nature, like the short gentleman who Rick Rolled us, that singing ability mattered not. And then….

Nothing. For nearly 3 sad hours we sat waiting for our table’s rotation to begin again. Though the place was crowded, any good karaoke DJ knows that you must intermingle the incoming would be singers with those who have been there all night, drinking, tipping and raring with liquid courage to display their talents. Not so, Mr. I Am Short, Bald, Powerless and Unnoticed In My Day Job, Therefore I Must Lord It Over The Whitetrash Crowd At Freaking Gio’s On A Saturday Night. He kept putting all the newbies at the front of the line, and even went so far as to assemble an ill-advised string of duets, before promising to get us back to our second songs by 1:00 AM. Now those of you who regularly karoke get what I am about to say. When you have been sitting on a bar stool drinking since 9:30, had your first adrenaline rush with your warm-up piece at 10:15, and have continued to booze and shout for the next two hours, you are angry, hoarse and exhausted by the time 1:00 AM rolls around. Worse, the energy of your friends has flagged as well, lending the whole evening a decidedly depressed feeling.

 Well I decided this was unfair. We had all been so high. Pleas to the by now totally inebriated KJ went unheeded. I will not, repeat, will not give a performance that is beneath the expectation and deserving of my audience. So, before Eddie could treat the crowd to the much-anticipated “Livin’ on a Prayer” and before I could debut my Taylor Swift (I will not tell you gentle readers which chart topper of the teen’s I was set to perform. I leave you in suspense for another time!), Eddie and I united in walking out of Gio’s in a grand huff. We are seriously holding a grudge this time, and may yet decide to find another drinking establishment that respects our celebrity status. While we mull it over, Mr. KJ better not think he is getting any more friendly waves from me on the Metra (yes, ironic and odd to see your KJ as a normal commuter). Nope, no siree.

It’s Official: God Hates Chicago (January 15, 2009)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

I am reminded of the words of Minnie Driver’s character, Benny, from Circle of Friends, a cute Irish film from the 1990s. Now I am paraphrasing here because it’s been awhile since I last saw the picture. Her character, an overweight but lovable girl, comments on the unlikelihood of finding love with her longtime crush, a svelte hunk played by Chris O’Donnell. Through her tears, Benny castigates herself for self-delusion, the belief that her fella could ever return her adoration. In one pivotal moment, she reflects that it is in fact not better to have loved than lost. She says (and again, I paraphrase), “It’s like being marched up to the top of a mountain, shown all the beauty that can’t be yours, and then promptly marching back down.”

These words come to mind as I consider the present state of affairs in my beloved hometown of Chicago. Am I dreaming that on an unseasonably warm November 5, 2008 evening, Chicago displayed itself at Grant Park, for all the world to see, as a beautiful City, a beacon of hope and change – “Yes we can” and all that good stuff? I stood on my tiptoes, wearing nothing heavier than a sweatshirt, part of the largest multi-ethnic and multi-cultural crowd I have ever witnessed. We were united in hope, in celebration, in the belief that Chicago was ready to assume its place on the universal stage as a place of forward thinking. Ah what a difference a mere two months can make.

Fast forward to January 15, 2009. Its is colder than the North Pole outside, and Mother Nature shows no sign of lifting her curse. It is -9 F, even before factoring in the wind chill. However the frostiness of the weather pales in comparison to the economic and political stagnation experienced by our denizens. Layoffs are coming in left and right, from all sectors of the corporate world, at all levels of seniority. It seems each day brings the news of a good friend, loved one or family member that is taking their spot on the bread line. We all hope that Obama’s ascension to the throne on January 20th will bring some sort of relief. Hope may foster a lot of things, but it doesn’t keep you warm or fill your belly as you lay awake at night wondering what in the world can go wrong next?

And any good discussion of Chicago’s current state cannot overlook the manic depression of our politics. From the mania of Obama’s historic victory to the hopelessness following the wrecking ball that is Blago. For those of us, me for certain, who celebrated along with Oprah, the corner turned by historically corrupt Illinois politics, there can be no crueller punishment than watching ‘the hairball” (aptly named by my good friend Tim) gleefully engage in his governatorial game of cat and mouse, at a local as well as national level. We have done corruption many times before in my own lifetime (ah Carol Moseley Braun, we hardly knew ye!), and yet, the most jaded among us have yet to pick our jaws off the floor.

I reach out to our still-developing readership to ask you to throw me a lifeline. Any chance we can conjure some spell to persuade God, or whichever powers-that-be, to please stop raining humiliation and misery upon Chi-town? November 5th, with the warmth of the air and the pride of success, cannot be an illusion after all, can it? Will we, my fellow Chicagoans, ever be warm (literally and metaphorically) again?

What Spain’s Populist, Gender-Neutral Mayoral Shift Could Mean for America in 2016 (June 17, 2015)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

spanish pop

Last weekend, the Spanish cities of Madrid and Barcelona put the official celebratory touches on a revolutionary transition that occurred during May’s municipal elections. In Madrid, 71 year-old retired judge Manuela Carmena’s supporters leveraged a bit of the Obama slogan magic (“Yes We Can!”) in a jubilant mayoral oath of office ceremony that promised real populist change for the third largest city in the European Union.

Throughout her campaign, Carmena warned both supporters and detractors that she and her team “want to lead by listening to people who don’t use fancy titles to address us…We’re creating a new kind of politics that doesn’t fit within the conventions…Get ready.”

621 kilometers away, housing market reform champion Ada Colau, 41, became the first-ever female mayor of Barcelona, claiming victory with a platform that includes an anti-eviction approach for struggling homeowners. The rise to power of the two women in two different Spanish cities is striking for a number of reasons.

Firstly, Spain’s conservative Popular Party, which currently runs the national government, has struggled mightily to reverse the country’s losses in the wake of the Great Recession. This party ruled Madrid for 24 years prior to Carmena’s win at the polls. Not any longer.  And in a commitment to fellow Barcelonians which demonstrates that change begins with the executive office, a June 14 report from RT.com states that Colau’s “administration will now draft a list of 30 measures aimed at creating jobs and fighting corruption. Along with her colleague in Madrid, Colau announced that she will slash her salary from €140,000, down to €35,000.”

Beyond the profound shift in political party loyalty among voters in the EU’s fifth-largest economy, where the unemployment rate hovers around 24 percent, the disparate ages of the new mayors is also significant. In a 2016 American Presidential primary contest where GOP candidates such as Florida Senator Marco Rubio are looking to frame the election as a “generational choice,” the voters of Madrid and Barcelona sent a very different message. Age? Not important as long as you’re willing to make a profound break with the status quo.

Lastly, beyond casual mention of the genders of Carmena and Colau, and the historical note of Colau’s demographic singularity as the new mayor of Barcelona, the story is not of two women in a still male-dominated political landscape. The narrative thread, rather, is exactly what it should be. As Colau put it, “In Barcelona…a bet was made for change.”

So what do these international events portend for the 2016 general Presidential election?  Beginning with the 2013 referendum in New York City that saw liberal Democrat Bill DeBlasio ride a populist wave of Occupy Wall Street sentiment to the mayor’s residence, the country’s urban left has been louder and more demonstrative. One need only listen to Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton’s Roosevelt Island speech to understand the powerful effect vocal liberal heroes such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have had on moving the candidate’s platform sharply to the left. And as our own Jason Easley reported on May 22, self-reported liberals now outnumber conservatives.

It may have taken a decade longer than we can rightfully spare with such a lengthy and challenging list of obstacles standing between us and a return to the nation’s middle class solvency, but the growing consensus at home and overseas is clear. If ignorance is the greatest tool of oppression, the right is running out of arrows. The 99 percent knows it’s getting a raw deal, has in fact been receiving one for decades. During each post- Bush 44 election cycle, repudiation of the conservative economic “plan” grows stronger. If we move the conversation away from the age, gender and race of the 2016 candidates (an admittedly tall order), we are left with more than 80 percent of the electorate residing in urban, liberal-skewing hubs waiting for their Spanish moment.

Yale Instructor David Brooks Says “Campus Crusaders” Are Moral Zealots, Anti-Free Speech (June 6, 2015)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

Brooks

In a post-9/11 world, self-styled “moderate” conservative andNew York Times Op-Ed columnist David Brooks has carved out a cottage industry conflating morality with anti-liberal politics. To be fair to Brooks, this has been a good business opportunity afforded by the “Do as I say, not as I do” public hypocrisy of the modern conservative movement and its 24/7 mouthpiece, Fox News.

An obvious example includes screaming ad nauseam about runaway deficits as the biggest threat to our nation in a craven effort to destroy the social safety net. Yet those deficit concerns suddenly vanish when old white men with itchy trigger fingers salivate over defense spending. Or how about the sanctity of life?

Nothing is more important than controlling a woman’s right to choose, because morality. Yet once the babies are born, those takers are on their own, especially if they’re brown. And the nearly 5,000 American soldiers who have died in Iraq, a conflict of choice predicated upon manufactured GOP intelligence? That’s not a waste of human life at all. No moral peccadillo whatsoever.

We’ve all become inured to the right’s insincere pearl clutching over “controversies” such as Benghazi, Obamacare and more while the middle and lower classes continue to lose socioeconomic stability. It’s hard to muster more than listlessness at the endless, disingenuous analysis of the moral failings of the suffering. Because if you’re rich, successful and healthy, it’s not because you’ve benefitted from a scale tipped in your favor according to the GOP. Nope. If you rise to the top of economic pile, it can only be because you’re more deserving. That’s how they pretend the system works, and if something is repeated often enough, it becomes conventional platform wisdom.

David Brooks never tires of trying to inculcate us unrestrained liberals with his party’s morality dogma. But this week, in a column entitled The Campus Crusaders, he takes the blame game a step further, arguing that today’s weak and infantilized college students result in idea-free academic zones. In a logical fallacy of impressive dimensions, the younger generation’s growing fatigue with the same old conservative conversations translates into:

“They are going after people for simply failing to show sufficient deference to and respect for the etiquette they hold dear. They sometimes conflate ideas with actions and regard controversial ideas as forms of violence.”

So conservative is the new liberal among today’s kids, is that right Brooks? Pupils intolerant of ignorance and backward-looking policies that make true opportunistic equality impossible are ethically bankrupt. And Brooks is qualified to make this judgment because he’s a Professor at Yale, thus often in proximity to students.

Let’s call this what it really is – pretensions to osmotic cultural anthropology couched in culture war sour grapes. And while we’re justifiably impugning Brooks’ snarky brand of faux academia, let’s also review some of the “sources” the longtime columnist leverages in constructing his argument.

On the Regnery Publishing website, the book is summarized as evaluating “a growing intolerance from the left side of the political spectrum [] threatening Americans’ ability to freely express beliefs without fear of retaliation.” You may be shocked (shocked!) to learn that Powers is a Fox New contributor.

Brooks misappropriates the March 21, 2015 work of his Timescolleague Judith Shulevitz to tie issue-based sensitivity around sexual assault and rape culture on college campuses to a liberal “form of zealotry.”

By linking to this website in a general way, rather than to a specific topic, Brooks appears to hope that readers will connect the site’s mission to “defend and sustain individual rights at America’s colleges and universities” with a conservative agenda. Brooks takes the lazy route to serving up specific examples of imperiled free speech in academia, and fails completely to correlate the content with liberal moral infirmity.

In the meat and potatoes of his column, David Brooks writes of today’s morally challenged student movement as one “led by students forced to live with the legacy of sexism, with the threat, and sometimes the experience, of sexual assault. It is led by students whose lives have been marred by racism and bigotry. It is led by people who want to secure equal rights for gays, lesbians and other historically marginalized groups.”

Here’s a thought I’d like to contribute to Brooks’ “idea-free” liberal debate. If the majority of today’s students refuse to create “safe space” for the continued subjugation of anyone not wealthy, white and male, perhaps the moral failing belongs to you and your fellow conservatives for expecting to be accommodated.  Many a belief and notion throughout history has been popularly shunted aside, not from moral corruption, but rather a modern inability to serve rational, progressive society.

What Great Recession? Wall Street Remains Unoccupied By Ethics (May 23, 2015)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

TheGreatRecession101413

Nearly seven years after the American economy foundered under the worst global recession since World War II, it seems nothing much has changed with regard to the behavior of those that brought us collectively to the brink. While the nation’s bankers and mortgage lenders were certainly assisted in their shenanigans by the middle and working class-looting policies of George W. Bush, which resulted in a 35 percent decline in median household wealth, Bush 43 has long since been shuffled into retirement. Meanwhile according to report this week fromThe New York Times writer Andrew Ross Sorkin, Wall Street malfeasance is alive and well.

In Many on Wall Street Say It Remains Untamed, Sorkin mines new data from a joint survey conducted by The University of Notre Dame and Labaton Sucharow LLP. The project, entitled The Street, The Bull and The Crisis: A Survey of the US & UK Financial Services Industry, engaged “1,200 traders, portfolio managers, investment bankers and hedge fund professionals both in the United States and Britain” in an effort to find out how the culture has changed in the wake of the Great Recession.

The results, for the overwhelming majority of us who would like to avoid such painful, debilitating economic calamities in the future, are not encouraging. Ross summarizes the Notre Dame/Labaton report as follows, “Rather than indicating that Wall Street has cleaned itself up, it suggests that many of the lessons of the crisis still haven’t been learned. And the mind-boggling settlement numbers, as well as stringent new rules, like the of Dodd-Frank regulatory overhaul in 2010, appear to have had little deterrent effect.”

Among the data highlights of the survey:

  • A third of Wall Street workers who earn more than $500,000 annually self-report that they “have witnessed or have firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace.”
  • “Nearly one in five respondents feel financial service professionals must sometimes engage in unethical or illegal activity to be successful in the current financial environment.”
  • Almost half of the over $500,000 crowd shared that law enforcement and regulatory bodies are ineffective “in detecting, investigating and prosecuting securities violations.”
  • A third of respondents “believe compensation structures or bonus plans in place at their company could incentivize employees to compromise ethics or violate the law.”

Though America has voted itself a much more competent and empathetic POTUS in Barack Obama versus the reckless mismanagement of “compassionate conservative” George W. Bush, the data from the study makes clear that the conditions are ripe for a crisis similar to the subprime mortgage scandal to occur. It’s only a matter of time. The unchastened criminals, having suffered nothing personally as a result of their misbehavior, are going about business as usual. As Sorkin writes, “Wall Street is…risk-taking and those who seemingly do it most successfully find that edge of the line and get as close to it as possible without crossing it.”

But as we know, the experts have crossed that line and in a culture where power, money and recklessness have a sexy image, in a regulatory climate where repercussions rarely go beyond a light wrist slap, there is little reason to reform.

But perhaps all hope is not lost. After all, thanks to Bernie Sanders, the 2016 Presidential campaign conversation includes ideas for balancing the “all gimme while the working man suffers” imbalance between Wall Street and the proletariat. Our own Jason Easley wrote Bernie Sanders Plans To Make College Free By Raising Taxes On Wall Street this week. She quotes Sanders as saying, “At a time when the wealthiest people in this country have made huge amounts of money from risky derivative transactions and the soaring value of the stock market, this legislation would impose a Wall Street speculation fee on Wall Street investment houses and hedge funds.”

Wall Street looted the country by operating in the shadows, conducting transactions so complex and murky that most lay people couldn’t understand them. Meanwhile, the Republican political establishment of the Bush II years was all too happy to look the other way. Discourse and study are not synonymous with action of course. But they offer an enormous advantage versus the willful ignorance of the early aughts.