The Awl http://www.theawl.com/ Be Less Stupid Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:30:41 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.2 Dick Joke http://www.theawl.com/2012/02/dick-joke http://www.theawl.com/2012/02/dick-joke#comments Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:30:41 +0000 Chris Lehmann http://www.theawl.com/2012/02/dick-joke Oh dear, here we go again: “Wall Street is a meritocracy, for the most part,” an irate but of course unnamed onetime Citigroup executive confides to junior father confessor Gabriel Sherman in this week’s hallucinatory New York magazine cover story, “The Emasculation of Wall Street.” “If someone has a bonus, it’s because they’ve created value for their institution.”

In the jumpy, suggestible universe of Gabe Sherman, Wall Street sleuth, things really are that simple: The beleaguered financial overclass creates value, in a rationally ordered system of maximally awarded talent. And the clueless public sector, intoxicated on post-meltdown regulatory prerogative, meddles with the primal forces of nature, skews executive compensation downward, panders to the blurry “populist” agenda of the Occupy Wall Street Crowd, generally foments market uncertainty and other forms of intolerable chaos so that presto, before you know it, we have “The End of Wall Street As They Knew It.”

In other words: To your crying towels, bankers! Correspondent Sherman is on the scene, and no howling distortion of recent financial history you care to offer is too outlandish for him to faithfully record! After duly huddling with a couple of dozen financial titans, our reporter has arrived at a chilling verdict: “what emerged is a picture of an industry afflicted by a crisis it would not be flip to call existential.”

Perhaps not—but what is exceedingly flip is brother Sherman’s account of the origins of the crisis.

Sure, there was that awkward business that sent the global finance sector to the brink of ruin, plus a devastating tsunami in Japan and whatnot—but the true culprit sending Wall Street titans back into their bedrooms to listen to Interpol on auto-repeat and cut themselves is of course the specter of government regulation. The Dodd-Frank financial reform act, a largely toothless measure lousy with loopholes and lobbying dosh, becomes in the alternate universe of Adam Moss’s New York magazine a rash bid to expropriate the expropriators. Even though the full provisions of the already anemic bill don’t go into effect until 2016, the very thought of a somewhat straitened financial playing field so terrifies Wall Street’s stout corridor of wealth creators that, well, they’re bidding farewell to the most valuable commodity of all—their big swinging dicks. “The government has strangled the financial system,” Dick Bove, an especially excitable and frequently mistaken bank analyst, tells Sherman. “We’ve basically castrated these companies. They can’t borrow as much as they used to borrow.”

You see, by force of the Volcker rule—a watered-down version of the central Glass-Steagall protections separating out commercial and investment banking that were disastrously repealed in 1999—Wall Street is re-thinking everything, from the scale of its year-end bonuses to its “core value to the economy.” And Bove, for one, preaches that all this doom-and-gloom thinking can’t help but be self-fulfilling: “These are sweeping secular changes taking place that won’t just impact the guys who won’t get their bonuses this year. We’ve made a decision as a nation to shrink the growth of the financial system under the theory that it won’t impact the growth of the nation’s economy.” Another unnamed informant tells Sherman that the financial industry is gearing up for a state of near permanent pay-austerity at the mere thought of the Volcker rule, which doesn’t kick in officially until July: “If you landed on Earth from Mars and looked at the banks, you’d see that these are institutions that need to build up capital and they’re becoming lower-margin businesses. So that means it will be hard, nearly impossible, to sustain their size and compensation structure.”

Never mind that this diagnosis is diametrically opposed to the Bove-ian school of market alarmism, which holds that banks are being starved of desperately needed leverage and credit; this unnamed fearmonger sees them in a frenzy to raise capital, and one thing the Volcker rule undeniably seeks to achieve is minimal capital requirements to prevent speculative lending from veering once more into toxic chaos.

No, for Sherman, all that’s needed to stoke the proper mood of Misean panic is to rouse the specter of frightened bankers, and a few quick-and-dirty quarterly profit reports.

From the moment Dodd-Frank passed, the banks’ financial results have tended to slide downward, in significant part because of measures taken in anticipation of its future effect. Since July 2010, Bank of America nosed down 42 percent, Morgan Stanley fell 25 percent, Goldman fell 21 percent, and Citigroup fell 16—in a period when the Dow rose 25 percent.

Other economic journalists might conclude that this downturn was a set of long-overdue market corrections, and given the broader turn around in the actual manufacturing economy, by no means an indication of worsening conditions—for investors and workers alike. Some radical others might even suggest that the shredded headcounts at the financial firms played a part in their own downturn in revenue. But while from his evidently privileged vantage in the driver’s seat of the Doc’s Time Machine, Sherman can divine all sorts of mischief arising from the yet-to-be-implemented provisions of Dodd-Frank, it does bear reminding that since 2010, BofA has been forced to eat a sizable portion of the toxic mortgage debt it acquired amid its spectacularly ill-advised purchase of Countrywide; Morgan has suffered tremendous losses in its Japanese operations and has, like most banks, been spooked by its exposure to the Euro-debt crisis (funnily enough, the firm’s US-based investment-banking operations—ie, the shop most directly affected by the dread Volcker rule, has booked profits amid all the tumult abroad); much the same general picture holds at Goldman, which as you may recall, has had more than its share of legal contretemps thrown into the bargain . As for Citigroup—the company whose very grotesque merged existence was the deregulatory excuse for repealing Glass Steagall—it’s been a basket case for so very long that a 16 percent loss in profits over the past two years seems cause for celebration, Volcker Rule or no Volcker Rule.

Indeed, for all of Sherman’s gullible huffing and puffing over the destructive reach of our new financial regulatory state, no one seems to have told the nation’s financial system this dire news, to judge by the actual behavior (as opposed to the opportunistic media rhetoric of its leaders). Yes, it’s been a rocky couple of years. And sure, Wall Street has lately shed plenty of jobs—who hasn’t? But in a report to investors inconveniently released one day ahead of Sherman’s dispatch from the existential trenches, Goldman Sachs—which continues to enjoy bullish stock performance amid its profit setbacks—announced this bit of non-emasculating news:

From a financial markets perspective, the environment looks quite friendly. The combination of better growth news and easier monetary policy is always welcome. In addition, we recently argued that corporate profit margins may still have room for further gains, despite the fact that they already stand at record levels from both a bottom-up and top-down perspective.

But no such merely empirical considerations can hope to stand up against the wrath of a stable of mainly unnamed bankers! Why, just look at Goldman itself, where Sherman reports that “months before the Volcker rule is set to kick in, star traders began [sic] to leave in droves.” And Goldman has lately shuttered its proprietary hedge-fund shop—in recognition that the line of essentially free credit that the Fed has opened up to investment houses may at last be about to dry up.

This, too, might well be seen as a sign of comparative health in the broader economy—especially with Goldman itself sounding so bullish on the investment climate, with the dread implementation of the Volcker Rule a scant five months away. After all, easy credit is what creates unsustainable bubbles in the first place, as even the most cursory study of the 2008 debacle shows. But not so in Shermanland! Even breakaway hedge shops are booking fairly lackluster profits (despite the obscene tax advantages they continue to enjoy)—so you know: Panic, everybody! Only Sherman is even less clear in explicating just what the cause for alarm is supposed to be in this case—while banks' hedge-fund divisions are curtailed under the Volcker rule, hedge funds themselves need not tremble before its pending implementation. There’s the bad economy, yes—but it’s just as important, he insists, to note that the hedge sector is “as overbuilt as the housing and credit markets that drove its profits,” with the overall number of hedge funds exploding about 16-fold (610 to 9.553) from 1990 to 2011. One would assume that a slowdown in an oversupplied speculative sector is not, you know, a bad thing by itself, either—especially given that even the most diehard Randians would be hard-pressed to demonstrate that hedge funds create economic value of any kind. But Sherman nonetheless frets on behalf of hedge managers that “the easy obvious plays are oversubscribed, which shrinks margins.... Many have predicted a hedge-fund shakeout, and it seems to have started. Over 1,000 funds have closed in the last year and a half.” It’s evidently a taken-for-granted, second-nature kind of axiom in today’s American economy that an “industry” made up entirely of “easy obvious plays” is integral to our very survival.

Or at the very least, it’s a great enabling premise of lazy, overclass-osculating, dick-obsessed magazine journalism. Witness Sherman’s closing brief for the productive wonders worked by yon investment class:

It’s certainly true that Wall Street’s money played an important part in New York’s comeback, helping to transform the city from a symbol of urban decay into a gleaming leisure theme park. Consciously or not, as a city, New York made a bargain: It would tolerate the one percent’s excessive pay as long as the rising tax base funded the schools, subways, and parks for the 99 percent. “Without Wall Street, New York becomes Philadelphia” is how a friend of mine in finance explains it.

Well, Gabe, I have news for you and your friend in finance: For the vast majority of people living in the glorious and gleaming leisure theme park known as Michael Bloomberg’s New York, Philadelphia looks pretty goddamn inviting (and not just for delusional “sixth borough” hipsters). For one thing, the city’s schools have lately taken to looting state budget funds to make up for shortfalls; the city’s parks are already relying to a disproportionate degree on private donations to run themselves—except, of course, when the mayor wants to unleash city cops to displace and round up those irksome unproductive kids protesting wealth inequality. And do NOT get us started on the regressively funded, frequently inoperative subways, OK?

Then again, New York magazine is, God knows, a gleaming theme park all its own, and it’s perhaps best not to disturb the placid reveries of its well-appointed editorial brain trust. Yes, sustaining the enabling fictions of New York-style policy analysis does involve adducing sweeping assertions from the thinnest air: “The rising tide of the real-estate and credit markets lifted all boats,” Sherman burbles, apparently in reference to hedge funds, but a quick Google search for “Long Term Capital Management” will rapidly disabuse any civilian in the real economy of such a ludicrous notion. (And the ever-fallacious “rising tide” thesis is especially laughable when applied more broadly in today’s America.) Likewise, Sherman’s wind-up paragraph preposterously announces that “the strictures that are holding the banks back now are tighter than any since the thirties”—certainly news to any financial regulator of the mid-twentieth century, when off-shore mutual funds were heavily prosecuted and hedge funds were much more regulated (even without mandatory SEC registration); or to the economic policymakers of the Great Society era, who enforced corporate tax rates north of 40 percent, more than twice of today’s post-Dodd assessments. But why should we expect any other version of events from the hallowed precincts of Adam Moss’s TriBeCa wing of the great New York theme park? For as this week’s cover story plainly demonstrates, nothing can be considered real in this abject weekly’s pages unless it comes straight from the mouth of a banker.



Chris Lehmann is the co-editor of Bookforum and is the author of Rich People Things.

---

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]]> Oh dear, here we go again: “Wall Street is a meritocracy, for the most part,” an irate but of course unnamed onetime Citigroup executive confides to junior father confessor Gabriel Sherman in this week’s hallucinatory New York magazine cover story, “The Emasculation of Wall Street.” “If someone has a bonus, it’s because they’ve created value for their institution.”

In the jumpy, suggestible universe of Gabe Sherman, Wall Street sleuth, things really are that simple: The beleaguered financial overclass creates value, in a rationally ordered system of maximally awarded talent. And the clueless public sector, intoxicated on post-meltdown regulatory prerogative, meddles with the primal forces of nature, skews executive compensation downward, panders to the blurry “populist” agenda of the Occupy Wall Street Crowd, generally foments market uncertainty and other forms of intolerable chaos so that presto, before you know it, we have “The End of Wall Street As They Knew It.”

In other words: To your crying towels, bankers! Correspondent Sherman is on the scene, and no howling distortion of recent financial history you care to offer is too outlandish for him to faithfully record! After duly huddling with a couple of dozen financial titans, our reporter has arrived at a chilling verdict: “what emerged is a picture of an industry afflicted by a crisis it would not be flip to call existential.”

Perhaps not—but what is exceedingly flip is brother Sherman’s account of the origins of the crisis.

Sure, there was that awkward business that sent the global finance sector to the brink of ruin, plus a devastating tsunami in Japan and whatnot—but the true culprit sending Wall Street titans back into their bedrooms to listen to Interpol on auto-repeat and cut themselves is of course the specter of government regulation. The Dodd-Frank financial reform act, a largely toothless measure lousy with loopholes and lobbying dosh, becomes in the alternate universe of Adam Moss’s New York magazine a rash bid to expropriate the expropriators. Even though the full provisions of the already anemic bill don’t go into effect until 2016, the very thought of a somewhat straitened financial playing field so terrifies Wall Street’s stout corridor of wealth creators that, well, they’re bidding farewell to the most valuable commodity of all—their big swinging dicks. “The government has strangled the financial system,” Dick Bove, an especially excitable and frequently mistaken bank analyst, tells Sherman. “We’ve basically castrated these companies. They can’t borrow as much as they used to borrow.”

You see, by force of the Volcker rule—a watered-down version of the central Glass-Steagall protections separating out commercial and investment banking that were disastrously repealed in 1999—Wall Street is re-thinking everything, from the scale of its year-end bonuses to its “core value to the economy.” And Bove, for one, preaches that all this doom-and-gloom thinking can’t help but be self-fulfilling: “These are sweeping secular changes taking place that won’t just impact the guys who won’t get their bonuses this year. We’ve made a decision as a nation to shrink the growth of the financial system under the theory that it won’t impact the growth of the nation’s economy.” Another unnamed informant tells Sherman that the financial industry is gearing up for a state of near permanent pay-austerity at the mere thought of the Volcker rule, which doesn’t kick in officially until July: “If you landed on Earth from Mars and looked at the banks, you’d see that these are institutions that need to build up capital and they’re becoming lower-margin businesses. So that means it will be hard, nearly impossible, to sustain their size and compensation structure.”

Never mind that this diagnosis is diametrically opposed to the Bove-ian school of market alarmism, which holds that banks are being starved of desperately needed leverage and credit; this unnamed fearmonger sees them in a frenzy to raise capital, and one thing the Volcker rule undeniably seeks to achieve is minimal capital requirements to prevent speculative lending from veering once more into toxic chaos.

No, for Sherman, all that’s needed to stoke the proper mood of Misean panic is to rouse the specter of frightened bankers, and a few quick-and-dirty quarterly profit reports.

From the moment Dodd-Frank passed, the banks’ financial results have tended to slide downward, in significant part because of measures taken in anticipation of its future effect. Since July 2010, Bank of America nosed down 42 percent, Morgan Stanley fell 25 percent, Goldman fell 21 percent, and Citigroup fell 16—in a period when the Dow rose 25 percent.

Other economic journalists might conclude that this downturn was a set of long-overdue market corrections, and given the broader turn around in the actual manufacturing economy, by no means an indication of worsening conditions—for investors and workers alike. Some radical others might even suggest that the shredded headcounts at the financial firms played a part in their own downturn in revenue. But while from his evidently privileged vantage in the driver’s seat of the Doc’s Time Machine, Sherman can divine all sorts of mischief arising from the yet-to-be-implemented provisions of Dodd-Frank, it does bear reminding that since 2010, BofA has been forced to eat a sizable portion of the toxic mortgage debt it acquired amid its spectacularly ill-advised purchase of Countrywide; Morgan has suffered tremendous losses in its Japanese operations and has, like most banks, been spooked by its exposure to the Euro-debt crisis (funnily enough, the firm’s US-based investment-banking operations—ie, the shop most directly affected by the dread Volcker rule, has booked profits amid all the tumult abroad); much the same general picture holds at Goldman, which as you may recall, has had more than its share of legal contretemps thrown into the bargain . As for Citigroup—the company whose very grotesque merged existence was the deregulatory excuse for repealing Glass Steagall—it’s been a basket case for so very long that a 16 percent loss in profits over the past two years seems cause for celebration, Volcker Rule or no Volcker Rule.

Indeed, for all of Sherman’s gullible huffing and puffing over the destructive reach of our new financial regulatory state, no one seems to have told the nation’s financial system this dire news, to judge by the actual behavior (as opposed to the opportunistic media rhetoric of its leaders). Yes, it’s been a rocky couple of years. And sure, Wall Street has lately shed plenty of jobs—who hasn’t? But in a report to investors inconveniently released one day ahead of Sherman’s dispatch from the existential trenches, Goldman Sachs—which continues to enjoy bullish stock performance amid its profit setbacks—announced this bit of non-emasculating news:

From a financial markets perspective, the environment looks quite friendly. The combination of better growth news and easier monetary policy is always welcome. In addition, we recently argued that corporate profit margins may still have room for further gains, despite the fact that they already stand at record levels from both a bottom-up and top-down perspective.

But no such merely empirical considerations can hope to stand up against the wrath of a stable of mainly unnamed bankers! Why, just look at Goldman itself, where Sherman reports that “months before the Volcker rule is set to kick in, star traders began [sic] to leave in droves.” And Goldman has lately shuttered its proprietary hedge-fund shop—in recognition that the line of essentially free credit that the Fed has opened up to investment houses may at last be about to dry up.

This, too, might well be seen as a sign of comparative health in the broader economy—especially with Goldman itself sounding so bullish on the investment climate, with the dread implementation of the Volcker Rule a scant five months away. After all, easy credit is what creates unsustainable bubbles in the first place, as even the most cursory study of the 2008 debacle shows. But not so in Shermanland! Even breakaway hedge shops are booking fairly lackluster profits (despite the obscene tax advantages they continue to enjoy)—so you know: Panic, everybody! Only Sherman is even less clear in explicating just what the cause for alarm is supposed to be in this case—while banks' hedge-fund divisions are curtailed under the Volcker rule, hedge funds themselves need not tremble before its pending implementation. There’s the bad economy, yes—but it’s just as important, he insists, to note that the hedge sector is “as overbuilt as the housing and credit markets that drove its profits,” with the overall number of hedge funds exploding about 16-fold (610 to 9.553) from 1990 to 2011. One would assume that a slowdown in an oversupplied speculative sector is not, you know, a bad thing by itself, either—especially given that even the most diehard Randians would be hard-pressed to demonstrate that hedge funds create economic value of any kind. But Sherman nonetheless frets on behalf of hedge managers that “the easy obvious plays are oversubscribed, which shrinks margins.... Many have predicted a hedge-fund shakeout, and it seems to have started. Over 1,000 funds have closed in the last year and a half.” It’s evidently a taken-for-granted, second-nature kind of axiom in today’s American economy that an “industry” made up entirely of “easy obvious plays” is integral to our very survival.

Or at the very least, it’s a great enabling premise of lazy, overclass-osculating, dick-obsessed magazine journalism. Witness Sherman’s closing brief for the productive wonders worked by yon investment class:

It’s certainly true that Wall Street’s money played an important part in New York’s comeback, helping to transform the city from a symbol of urban decay into a gleaming leisure theme park. Consciously or not, as a city, New York made a bargain: It would tolerate the one percent’s excessive pay as long as the rising tax base funded the schools, subways, and parks for the 99 percent. “Without Wall Street, New York becomes Philadelphia” is how a friend of mine in finance explains it.

Well, Gabe, I have news for you and your friend in finance: For the vast majority of people living in the glorious and gleaming leisure theme park known as Michael Bloomberg’s New York, Philadelphia looks pretty goddamn inviting (and not just for delusional “sixth borough” hipsters). For one thing, the city’s schools have lately taken to looting state budget funds to make up for shortfalls; the city’s parks are already relying to a disproportionate degree on private donations to run themselves—except, of course, when the mayor wants to unleash city cops to displace and round up those irksome unproductive kids protesting wealth inequality. And do NOT get us started on the regressively funded, frequently inoperative subways, OK?

Then again, New York magazine is, God knows, a gleaming theme park all its own, and it’s perhaps best not to disturb the placid reveries of its well-appointed editorial brain trust. Yes, sustaining the enabling fictions of New York-style policy analysis does involve adducing sweeping assertions from the thinnest air: “The rising tide of the real-estate and credit markets lifted all boats,” Sherman burbles, apparently in reference to hedge funds, but a quick Google search for “Long Term Capital Management” will rapidly disabuse any civilian in the real economy of such a ludicrous notion. (And the ever-fallacious “rising tide” thesis is especially laughable when applied more broadly in today’s America.) Likewise, Sherman’s wind-up paragraph preposterously announces that “the strictures that are holding the banks back now are tighter than any since the thirties”—certainly news to any financial regulator of the mid-twentieth century, when off-shore mutual funds were heavily prosecuted and hedge funds were much more regulated (even without mandatory SEC registration); or to the economic policymakers of the Great Society era, who enforced corporate tax rates north of 40 percent, more than twice of today’s post-Dodd assessments. But why should we expect any other version of events from the hallowed precincts of Adam Moss’s TriBeCa wing of the great New York theme park? For as this week’s cover story plainly demonstrates, nothing can be considered real in this abject weekly’s pages unless it comes straight from the mouth of a banker.



Chris Lehmann is the co-editor of Bookforum and is the author of Rich People Things.

---

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17 comments

]]> http://www.theawl.com/2012/02/dick-joke/feed 17 The 1% Fires Back! "I Am a Fat Cat, I’m Not Ashamed"! http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/the-1-fires-back-i-am-a-fat-cat-i%e2%80%99m-not-ashamed http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/the-1-fires-back-i-am-a-fat-cat-i%e2%80%99m-not-ashamed#comments Tue, 20 Dec 2011 09:00:55 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/the-1-fires-back-i-am-a-fat-cat-i%e2%80%99m-not-ashamed Well, here you go. What to even quote? Let's try this!
Asked if he were willing to pay more taxes in a Nov. 30 interview with Bloomberg Television, Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman spoke about lower-income U.S. families who pay no income tax. “You have to have skin in the game,” said Schwarzman, 64. “I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.”
It's an incredibly hot defensive mess up in there.

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]]> Well, here you go. What to even quote? Let's try this!
Asked if he were willing to pay more taxes in a Nov. 30 interview with Bloomberg Television, Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman spoke about lower-income U.S. families who pay no income tax. “You have to have skin in the game,” said Schwarzman, 64. “I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.”
It's an incredibly hot defensive mess up in there.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/the-1-fires-back-i-am-a-fat-cat-i%e2%80%99m-not-ashamed/feed 60 Our Holiday Gift Guide for Extremely Rich People http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/a-holiday-gift-guide-for-extremely-rich-people http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/a-holiday-gift-guide-for-extremely-rich-people#comments Tue, 13 Dec 2011 12:20:32 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/a-holiday-gift-guide-for-extremely-rich-people Christmas is nearly upon us. Are you prepared? Let us help with this guide to gifting for every occasion. All of the gifts here are certified by us as things that people actually would truly like to receive this holiday season. (Hint, hint.)

JUST TRINKETS

Hermes leather coffee cup holder. $195.

The "My Helicopter" key ring, Loro Piana, $195.



FOR TRAVEL PALS AND VACATION BUDDIES

For ski! The Kjus Hawk insulated jacket. Super-trim, super-slim. $1490.

For her, for the boat: Bottega Veneta Nero Pewter Peridot Sandal (Cruise '11). $920.

For him, for the boat: Bottega Veneta Pewter Turquoise Intrecciato Suede Sneaker (Cruise '11). $560.



FOR ANIMAL LOVERS

The MacKenzie-Childs Pet Palace. "A royal setting for your prince of a Pekinese or Pomeranian. And a truly extraordinary piece of furniture." $3500.

Balenciaga neon large dog collar, $295.

The Louis Vuitton Pet Carrier. (N.B. Not approved for use on most commercial airliners; appropriate for private flights.) Circa $2100.



FOR YOUNG FRIENDS

Marc Jacobs Fall '11 "Garage Denim Pant." $792.50.

Prada iPad cover (color: "papaya"), in saffiano calf leather, $300.



FOR YOUR HOSTESS

Sharon Core, 1606, edition of 7, initial prints in edition start at $7500.00 and escalate.

Mahogany chess box and pawns. Loro Piana, $6450.

Jim Hodges, Untitled, metal chain, circa $375,000.



FOR THAT SPECIAL SOMEONE

Elizabeth Taylor's script for Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, bound for her by Eddie Fisher, "with attached leather bookmark gilt-stamped To My Wife – My Life – Love Eddie." Christies, estimate $3,000 – $5,000, realized price for auction on December 16th surely much higher.

Gaetano Pesce, "Executive Desk for TBWA/Chiat/Day New York, ca. 1994." Phillips de Pury, estimate $4,000-6,000, on auction December 14th.

Classic 1954 Bell 47G helicopter. $150,000.

5,834 acres in Lewis County, Washington, $10,979,000.

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]]> Christmas is nearly upon us. Are you prepared? Let us help with this guide to gifting for every occasion. All of the gifts here are certified by us as things that people actually would truly like to receive this holiday season. (Hint, hint.)

JUST TRINKETS

Hermes leather coffee cup holder. $195.

The "My Helicopter" key ring, Loro Piana, $195.



FOR TRAVEL PALS AND VACATION BUDDIES

For ski! The Kjus Hawk insulated jacket. Super-trim, super-slim. $1490.

For her, for the boat: Bottega Veneta Nero Pewter Peridot Sandal (Cruise '11). $920.

For him, for the boat: Bottega Veneta Pewter Turquoise Intrecciato Suede Sneaker (Cruise '11). $560.



FOR ANIMAL LOVERS

The MacKenzie-Childs Pet Palace. "A royal setting for your prince of a Pekinese or Pomeranian. And a truly extraordinary piece of furniture." $3500.

Balenciaga neon large dog collar, $295.

The Louis Vuitton Pet Carrier. (N.B. Not approved for use on most commercial airliners; appropriate for private flights.) Circa $2100.



FOR YOUNG FRIENDS

Marc Jacobs Fall '11 "Garage Denim Pant." $792.50.

Prada iPad cover (color: "papaya"), in saffiano calf leather, $300.



FOR YOUR HOSTESS

Sharon Core, 1606, edition of 7, initial prints in edition start at $7500.00 and escalate.

Mahogany chess box and pawns. Loro Piana, $6450.

Jim Hodges, Untitled, metal chain, circa $375,000.



FOR THAT SPECIAL SOMEONE

Elizabeth Taylor's script for Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, bound for her by Eddie Fisher, "with attached leather bookmark gilt-stamped To My Wife – My Life – Love Eddie." Christies, estimate $3,000 – $5,000, realized price for auction on December 16th surely much higher.

Gaetano Pesce, "Executive Desk for TBWA/Chiat/Day New York, ca. 1994." Phillips de Pury, estimate $4,000-6,000, on auction December 14th.

Classic 1954 Bell 47G helicopter. $150,000.

5,834 acres in Lewis County, Washington, $10,979,000.

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64 comments

]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/a-holiday-gift-guide-for-extremely-rich-people/feed 64 Everything Joe Walsh Has Done in Congress This Year http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/everything-joe-walsh-has-done-in-congress-this-year http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/everything-joe-walsh-has-done-in-congress-this-year#comments Wed, 07 Dec 2011 10:00:47 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/everything-joe-walsh-has-done-in-congress-this-year

My office was invaded by the Occupy Protesters today & all I saw were $1000 laptops & vomit on the carpet. Thank God for #febrezeWed Dec 07 03:49:02 via TweetDeckRep. Joe Walsh
RepJoeWalsh

I'll just leave this here. Oh, okay, how about a review of Joe Walsh's work activity this year, his first in Congress? Well, it's pretty amazing actually.

Here's every bill he's sponsored.

• Joe Walsh, West Bank Expert: In April, he was the sponsor of H.R.1501, which reads: "To withhold United States contributions to the United Nations until the United Nations formally retracts the final report of the 'United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict.'" You can read the UN report here; it's from 2009, perhaps you've already read it. (Summary: "UN Fact Finding Mission finds strong evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the Gaza conflict.") But let's retract it!

• Joe Walsh, Language Police: In July, he was the sponsor of H.R.2457, called the "Palestinian Accountability Act." The gist of that is a "PROHIBITION ON USE OF THE TERM `PALESTINE' IN UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS." It also includes a prohibition on funding the Palestine-supporting U.N.

• Joe Walsh, Economic Theorist: September brought H. R. 2945, the "Capital Gains Inflation Relief Act." Here, let "Americans for Tax Reform" (AKA Grover Norquist) explain that to you:

If an investor purchases a stock for $100, and later sells that same stock for $400, he must report and pay taxes on a $300 capital gain. However, some of that gain is merely due to the effects of inflation over the years. In many cases, much or all of a capital gain is merely inflation. With an historical inflation rate of 3%, inflation halves the real value of all assets every 24 years. While this is bad enough, it adds insult to injury to have to pay taxes merely on inflated gains.

• Joe Walsh, Lonely Scientist: H.R.3396 seems self-explanatory: "To abolish the Office of Polar Programs of the National Science Foundation." LOL: "Cosponsors: None."

• Joe Walsh, Christmas Lover: H.R.3403: The "Save Christmas Act." Spoiler: it has to do with Christmas trees.

• Joe Walsh, Constitution Amender: H.J.RES.54 and H.J.RES.56 are incredibly hilarious attempts to ensure a balanced U.S. budget—wherein yearly spending would not exceed 18% of GDP and some other wacky things.

• Joe Walsh, Annexer of Palestine: And then there's H.RES.394, "Supporting Israel's right to annex Judea and Samaria in the event that the Palestinian Authority continues to press for unilateral recognition of Palestinian statehood at the United Nations."

That's what Joe Walsh did this year. Two bills were referred to committee; the rest were referred to subcommittees, so they can laugh at him.

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My office was invaded by the Occupy Protesters today & all I saw were $1000 laptops & vomit on the carpet. Thank God for #febrezeWed Dec 07 03:49:02 via TweetDeckRep. Joe Walsh
RepJoeWalsh

I'll just leave this here. Oh, okay, how about a review of Joe Walsh's work activity this year, his first in Congress? Well, it's pretty amazing actually.

Here's every bill he's sponsored.

• Joe Walsh, West Bank Expert: In April, he was the sponsor of H.R.1501, which reads: "To withhold United States contributions to the United Nations until the United Nations formally retracts the final report of the 'United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict.'" You can read the UN report here; it's from 2009, perhaps you've already read it. (Summary: "UN Fact Finding Mission finds strong evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the Gaza conflict.") But let's retract it!

• Joe Walsh, Language Police: In July, he was the sponsor of H.R.2457, called the "Palestinian Accountability Act." The gist of that is a "PROHIBITION ON USE OF THE TERM `PALESTINE' IN UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS." It also includes a prohibition on funding the Palestine-supporting U.N.

• Joe Walsh, Economic Theorist: September brought H. R. 2945, the "Capital Gains Inflation Relief Act." Here, let "Americans for Tax Reform" (AKA Grover Norquist) explain that to you:

If an investor purchases a stock for $100, and later sells that same stock for $400, he must report and pay taxes on a $300 capital gain. However, some of that gain is merely due to the effects of inflation over the years. In many cases, much or all of a capital gain is merely inflation. With an historical inflation rate of 3%, inflation halves the real value of all assets every 24 years. While this is bad enough, it adds insult to injury to have to pay taxes merely on inflated gains.

• Joe Walsh, Lonely Scientist: H.R.3396 seems self-explanatory: "To abolish the Office of Polar Programs of the National Science Foundation." LOL: "Cosponsors: None."

• Joe Walsh, Christmas Lover: H.R.3403: The "Save Christmas Act." Spoiler: it has to do with Christmas trees.

• Joe Walsh, Constitution Amender: H.J.RES.54 and H.J.RES.56 are incredibly hilarious attempts to ensure a balanced U.S. budget—wherein yearly spending would not exceed 18% of GDP and some other wacky things.

• Joe Walsh, Annexer of Palestine: And then there's H.RES.394, "Supporting Israel's right to annex Judea and Samaria in the event that the Palestinian Authority continues to press for unilateral recognition of Palestinian statehood at the United Nations."

That's what Joe Walsh did this year. Two bills were referred to committee; the rest were referred to subcommittees, so they can laugh at him.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/everything-joe-walsh-has-done-in-congress-this-year/feed 11 What Perfumes Smell Like (Besides Money Burning) http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/what-perfumes-smell-like-besides-money-burning http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/what-perfumes-smell-like-besides-money-burning#comments Mon, 05 Dec 2011 16:20:46 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/what-perfumes-smell-like-besides-money-burning What does money smell like? The Times notes the rapid rise of "sweet" in perfumes, which makes sense, given that pop culture is garbage and syrup, though Prada Candy, God bless. There are also a few holdouts, like Hermes perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena: "Instead, his new Hermès Santal Massoïa, introduced in November, is made of the 'milky' woods sandalwood and massoia. It smells sort of like a tree that’s been through a brutal storm." LOL! (Also, weirdly true. Though also sort of like a ripe melon got trapped in a sauna after being beaten with a cedar bat.) Elsewhere a (terrible-sounding) perfume is described by saying it "conjures an image of Janis Joplin holding a lollipop." I wish they'd said "conducting a jam band with a lollipop." Anyway. People like to smell things, sometimes.

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]]> What does money smell like? The Times notes the rapid rise of "sweet" in perfumes, which makes sense, given that pop culture is garbage and syrup, though Prada Candy, God bless. There are also a few holdouts, like Hermes perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena: "Instead, his new Hermès Santal Massoïa, introduced in November, is made of the 'milky' woods sandalwood and massoia. It smells sort of like a tree that’s been through a brutal storm." LOL! (Also, weirdly true. Though also sort of like a ripe melon got trapped in a sauna after being beaten with a cedar bat.) Elsewhere a (terrible-sounding) perfume is described by saying it "conjures an image of Janis Joplin holding a lollipop." I wish they'd said "conducting a jam band with a lollipop." Anyway. People like to smell things, sometimes.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/what-perfumes-smell-like-besides-money-burning/feed 12 Churning the 'NYT' Vows Data and the Dangers of Self-Selection http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/churning-the-nyt-vows-data-and-the-dangers-of-self-selection http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/churning-the-nyt-vows-data-and-the-dangers-of-self-selection#comments Thu, 01 Dec 2011 11:50:25 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/churning-the-nyt-vows-data-and-the-dangers-of-self-selection Well, it is fun to run the numbers on exactly what "sort" of person runs a wedding announcement in Vows (technically now called "Weddings/Celebrations," which is so dull). The numbers are useful and also, sure, about what you'd expect. Harvard. Credit Suisse. Gay. That sort of thing. But two things: our trusty researcher friends here are comparing education and job credentials to the "average American," which, oh no. Vows is a section that is for New Yorkers, not average Americans. And New York is a funny place. (Full of gays who went to Harvard.) But then also they're dismissing self-selection in a totally untoward way, writing: "There's also no easy way to rule out a self-selection bias. (Theoretically, 9.4 percent of the people who want to be in the wedding section could have Harvard degrees...)" Um, I would say that that is way more than true? You have to submit to Vows a minimum of six weeks in advance, and the submission form is quite lengthy. In fact, it's so long that as you start to fill it out, you have time to realize that it's all basically for snobby gay a-holes who work at Credit Suisse and then you stop filling it out, if you have any real sense. Once it's like "AND WHAT DOES YOUR FATHER DO FOR A LIVING?" you're like, oh God, who cares, go pound sand. (Seriously, their sample form goes like this: "(first celebrator's) father, who is retired, was a (job title/I.D. here) in (location here) for (company/organization name here). (his/her) mother is a (job title/I.D. here) in (location here) for (company/organization name here)." Which is so LOL! It's like the worst and least-fitting game of Mad Libs ever.) Anyway then you're like "Why do I want stupid people to read about MY SPECIAL DAAAAAY?" and you realize that you'd like to retain some dignity, instead of splashing it in the faux society pages. Besides if you're gay, there's likely another wedding in another state or country coming your way soon, so you can always reapply later. Suckas.

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]]> Well, it is fun to run the numbers on exactly what "sort" of person runs a wedding announcement in Vows (technically now called "Weddings/Celebrations," which is so dull). The numbers are useful and also, sure, about what you'd expect. Harvard. Credit Suisse. Gay. That sort of thing. But two things: our trusty researcher friends here are comparing education and job credentials to the "average American," which, oh no. Vows is a section that is for New Yorkers, not average Americans. And New York is a funny place. (Full of gays who went to Harvard.) But then also they're dismissing self-selection in a totally untoward way, writing: "There's also no easy way to rule out a self-selection bias. (Theoretically, 9.4 percent of the people who want to be in the wedding section could have Harvard degrees...)" Um, I would say that that is way more than true? You have to submit to Vows a minimum of six weeks in advance, and the submission form is quite lengthy. In fact, it's so long that as you start to fill it out, you have time to realize that it's all basically for snobby gay a-holes who work at Credit Suisse and then you stop filling it out, if you have any real sense. Once it's like "AND WHAT DOES YOUR FATHER DO FOR A LIVING?" you're like, oh God, who cares, go pound sand. (Seriously, their sample form goes like this: "(first celebrator's) father, who is retired, was a (job title/I.D. here) in (location here) for (company/organization name here). (his/her) mother is a (job title/I.D. here) in (location here) for (company/organization name here)." Which is so LOL! It's like the worst and least-fitting game of Mad Libs ever.) Anyway then you're like "Why do I want stupid people to read about MY SPECIAL DAAAAAY?" and you realize that you'd like to retain some dignity, instead of splashing it in the faux society pages. Besides if you're gay, there's likely another wedding in another state or country coming your way soon, so you can always reapply later. Suckas.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/churning-the-nyt-vows-data-and-the-dangers-of-self-selection/feed 18 Here Is What To Get Rich People For Christmas http://www.theawl.com/2011/11/here-is-what-to-get-rich-people-for-christmas http://www.theawl.com/2011/11/here-is-what-to-get-rich-people-for-christmas#comments Tue, 29 Nov 2011 12:40:25 +0000 Alex Balk http://www.theawl.com/2011/11/here-is-what-to-get-rich-people-for-christmas "[T]he most popular gift that all income groups want to receive is money, either in the form of gift card, check or gift certificate. Ranking second was clothing. Among those worth $800,000 to $1.49 million, the third most popular gift is an iPad or similar tablet computer. For the $6 million or more crowd (the real one-percenters), the second most popular gift is books or CDs. Fine jewelry was more popular with the affluent than the one-percenters (only 2% of the one-percenters want jewelry this season, compared with 8% for the affluent). Yet the one-percenters are twice as likely to buy sport equipment."

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]]> "[T]he most popular gift that all income groups want to receive is money, either in the form of gift card, check or gift certificate. Ranking second was clothing. Among those worth $800,000 to $1.49 million, the third most popular gift is an iPad or similar tablet computer. For the $6 million or more crowd (the real one-percenters), the second most popular gift is books or CDs. Fine jewelry was more popular with the affluent than the one-percenters (only 2% of the one-percenters want jewelry this season, compared with 8% for the affluent). Yet the one-percenters are twice as likely to buy sport equipment."

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/11/here-is-what-to-get-rich-people-for-christmas/feed 14 Rich People Things: Live http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/rich-people-things-live http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/rich-people-things-live#comments Mon, 03 Oct 2011 16:45:18 +0000 Alex Balk http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/rich-people-things-live Got plans tomorrow night? Cancel 'em! Or at least modify them so that you give yourself time to attend this: "Mark Crispin Miller hosts Chris Lehmann, author of Rich People Things: Real-Life Secrets of the Predator Class. In Rich People Things, Chris Lehmann lays bare the various dogmas and delusions that prop up plutocratic rule in the post-meltdown age. It's a humorous and harrowing tale of warped populism, phony reform, and blind deference to the nation's financial elite." Awl pal Chris Lehmann! You'd be a fool to miss it. (McNally Jackson, 7 PM)

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]]> Got plans tomorrow night? Cancel 'em! Or at least modify them so that you give yourself time to attend this: "Mark Crispin Miller hosts Chris Lehmann, author of Rich People Things: Real-Life Secrets of the Predator Class. In Rich People Things, Chris Lehmann lays bare the various dogmas and delusions that prop up plutocratic rule in the post-meltdown age. It's a humorous and harrowing tale of warped populism, phony reform, and blind deference to the nation's financial elite." Awl pal Chris Lehmann! You'd be a fool to miss it. (McNally Jackson, 7 PM)

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/rich-people-things-live/feed 3 Today's Recall Election: A Warning to the Future http://www.theawl.com/2011/03/todays-recall-election-a-warning-to-the-future http://www.theawl.com/2011/03/todays-recall-election-a-warning-to-the-future#comments Tue, 15 Mar 2011 09:00:42 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2011/03/todays-recall-election-a-warning-to-the-future Oh yes: you probably do not know this, unless you read all of the papers. (And if you do read all the papers, that means you got to enjoy "Recall election could trigger change," a real doozy from the Herald, though they also have this brisk and informative thing for those unfamiliar. Trigger change! It sure could. Or could not. Anyway!) Today the mayor of Miami and also a Miami-Dade county commissioner are up for a recall vote, which is notably the work of one man. One billionaire, no less: Norman Braman. Now... the squeaky thing here is: he's right! There should be an ability to recall these people. And also there should be crazy things like "term limits" and fewer people ransacking the county, which is Braman's agenda. And then there is absolutely no discussion of who comes next: there's a monster-sized vacuum for a monster to pop up in. Given the scope of the pro-privatization, "anti-tax," right-wing-funded political candidate training going on in the country, the rash of recalls we'll likely see over the next year have the same problem. The post-recall elections are wide-open to anyone with the funding to run. And you know who's got the money.

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]]> Oh yes: you probably do not know this, unless you read all of the papers. (And if you do read all the papers, that means you got to enjoy "Recall election could trigger change," a real doozy from the Herald, though they also have this brisk and informative thing for those unfamiliar. Trigger change! It sure could. Or could not. Anyway!) Today the mayor of Miami and also a Miami-Dade county commissioner are up for a recall vote, which is notably the work of one man. One billionaire, no less: Norman Braman. Now... the squeaky thing here is: he's right! There should be an ability to recall these people. And also there should be crazy things like "term limits" and fewer people ransacking the county, which is Braman's agenda. And then there is absolutely no discussion of who comes next: there's a monster-sized vacuum for a monster to pop up in. Given the scope of the pro-privatization, "anti-tax," right-wing-funded political candidate training going on in the country, the rash of recalls we'll likely see over the next year have the same problem. The post-recall elections are wide-open to anyone with the funding to run. And you know who's got the money.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/03/todays-recall-election-a-warning-to-the-future/feed 7 The Roberts Court: Five Easy Pro-Business Terms http://www.theawl.com/2010/12/the-roberts-court-five-easy-pro-business-terms http://www.theawl.com/2010/12/the-roberts-court-five-easy-pro-business-terms#comments Mon, 20 Dec 2010 13:20:14 +0000 Chris Lehmann http://www.theawl.com/2010/12/the-roberts-court-five-easy-pro-business-terms In the passing convulsions of partisan government, it’s easy for our corporate lieges to depict themselves as victims. There’s always some legislative push, or Congressional leader, to bedeck with alarmist rhetoric about the “tax-and-spend” set in Washington—even as these same clever professional victims harness the supine Congress to tamp down the estate tax, extend regressive tax cuts and ensure that the regulatory state keeps weighing the financial industry’s various roulette wheels in the house’s favor.

But behind the all the public inveighing over the wild-eyed excesses of our Jacobin Congress and (more laughably still) an "anti-business" White House, our business chieftains are, true to management form, pursuing a longer-term agenda to secure their federal interests on a far more permanent footing. There is, after all, a third branch of our federal government, and as the New York Times’ Adam Liptak notes, the U.S. Supreme Court has been far more obliging in delivering pro-business verdicts under the current leadership than at any other point in its modern history.

And while the business community can use its lobbying clout to handily retool whatever reform initiatives Congress erratically puts forward, the high court is where much of the real action is for the corporate set. It’s the lead forum for the bids to limit tort claims and class action suits, the rollback of environmental regulations, the generous recastings of antitrust, labor and intellectual property law, all in the interests of the people who own the greatest percentage of the American dream and who also pay the highest hourly fees. Oh, and let’s not forget campaign finance law, recently rolled back to giddy 19th-century robber-baron form, vastly simplifying and streamlining the business world’s bankrolling of all our representative bodies at once.

And as Liptak observes, the obsequious performance of the Roberts court before the bar of business is wonder to behold. A study conducted by the Times in conjunction with researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago found that of the 1,450 business-related cases the Court has decided since 1953, the present court possesses an outsize share. Over its five-term tenure, the Roberts Court has also decided a higher proportion of the cases on its business docket in business’s favor—61 percent, versus 46 percent from the still quite right-leaning Rehnquist Court, and 42 percent overall since 1953.

One handy measure of this shift is the frenetic litigating getting done over at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The group’s legal team, the National Chamber Litigation Center, recently enjoyed an impressive run of 13 victories in the last batch of 16 business rulings handed down by Team Roberts. That’s heartening news indeed for the companies who sit on the Litigation Center’s board, including Lockheed Martin, GlaxoSmithKline, Verizon, Viacom and Ford. But as Carter G. Phillips, a commercial litigator who often represents the Chamber in high-court proceedings, these winning streaks are, well, just business as usual. As he wrote on the occasion of the group’s 30th anniversary in 2007:

I know from personal experience that the chamber’s support carries significant weight with the justices. Except for the solicitor general representing the United States, no single entity has more influence on what cases the Supreme Court decides and how it decides them than the National Chamber Litigation Center.

The liberal Center for Constitutional Accountability has toted up the numbers on the Chamber’s recent record, finding that the group prevails in 68 percent of the cases heard by the Roberts court, compared to a 56 percent success rate over the last 11 years of the Rehnquist Court. But of course the Chamber Litigation Center’s executive vice president, Robin S. Conrad, is well versed in presenting the wishlist of the market’s lords as the very fabric of our natural order, so she offers a more serenely impartial estimate of the group’s recent run of pleasing high-court outcomes.

Why have we been successful? [...] I’d like to think it’s because of the quality of the arguments and the briefs we present to the court. The court is looking for reliable voices to confirm its decisions, and I’d like to think it’s looking to the chamber because it tells a straight story, and we try not to be shrill or ideological. The chamber has earned a reputation for being a credible voice of business.”

But such self-enamored assessments overlook a key factor: The most accomplished arguments in the world won’t gain much headway without a sympathetic auditor, and in John G. Roberts the owning and executive classes have a Chief Justice so attuned to fulfilling their every whim they may as well go ahead and call him Jeeves. During its short tenure, five lucky voters on the Roberts Court have stricken a 97-year-old central doctrine of antitrust enforcement and erected barriers to equal-pay litigation in the workplace so that Congress drafted new legislation to uphold legal remedies for workers victimized by gender discrimination. As the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin has reported, that track record prompted Associate Justice Stephen Breyer, who votes in the court’s moderate minority, to remark “It is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much.” And that was before the bit of egregious corporate errand-running known as Citizen’s United.

This boardroom-first outlook on legal affairs is entirely in keeping with Roberts' career in private legal practice. “Shortly before Roberts became a judge,” Toobin writes, “he successfully argued in the Supreme Court that a woman who suffered from carpal-tunnel syndrome could not win a recovery from her employer, Toyota, under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Likewise, Roberts won a Supreme Court ruling that the family of a woman who died in a fire could not use the federal wrongful-death statute to sue the city of Tarrant, Alabama. In a rare loss in his thirty-nine arguments before the Court, Roberts failed to persuade the Justices to uphold a sixty-four-million-dollar fine against the United Mine Workers, which was imposed by a Virginia court after a strike.”

Roberts’s best-known case before the high court was Lujan v. National Wildlife Federation, where he successfully argued that an environmental advocacy group had no legal standing to challenge a Reagan White House decision to place 180 million acres of federal wilderness land on sale to mining interests. The Wildlife Federation’s complaint should be thrown out, Roberts argued, because it “was in no way distinct from the interest any citizen could claim, coming in the courthouse and saying, ‘I’m interested in this subject.'"

That dismissive reference to the policy hobby horses favored by “any citizen” makes for edifying reading—particularly coming as it does out of the mouth of a rock-ribbed anti-government Reaganite, here making an inapposite, robust case for the unmolested sovereignty of the executive bureaucracy. But laid alongside the expansive protections afforded to the speech of our corporate polity in the court’s campaign finance ruling, the logic of Roberts’s Lujan argument at least looks consistent, if not sensible. It points out what the Court has long held, ever since it first began tussling with the awkward questions of social equality back in the nineteenth century: Some citizens are more equal before the law than others.



Chris Lehmann has a book.

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]]> In the passing convulsions of partisan government, it’s easy for our corporate lieges to depict themselves as victims. There’s always some legislative push, or Congressional leader, to bedeck with alarmist rhetoric about the “tax-and-spend” set in Washington—even as these same clever professional victims harness the supine Congress to tamp down the estate tax, extend regressive tax cuts and ensure that the regulatory state keeps weighing the financial industry’s various roulette wheels in the house’s favor.

But behind the all the public inveighing over the wild-eyed excesses of our Jacobin Congress and (more laughably still) an "anti-business" White House, our business chieftains are, true to management form, pursuing a longer-term agenda to secure their federal interests on a far more permanent footing. There is, after all, a third branch of our federal government, and as the New York Times’ Adam Liptak notes, the U.S. Supreme Court has been far more obliging in delivering pro-business verdicts under the current leadership than at any other point in its modern history.

And while the business community can use its lobbying clout to handily retool whatever reform initiatives Congress erratically puts forward, the high court is where much of the real action is for the corporate set. It’s the lead forum for the bids to limit tort claims and class action suits, the rollback of environmental regulations, the generous recastings of antitrust, labor and intellectual property law, all in the interests of the people who own the greatest percentage of the American dream and who also pay the highest hourly fees. Oh, and let’s not forget campaign finance law, recently rolled back to giddy 19th-century robber-baron form, vastly simplifying and streamlining the business world’s bankrolling of all our representative bodies at once.

And as Liptak observes, the obsequious performance of the Roberts court before the bar of business is wonder to behold. A study conducted by the Times in conjunction with researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago found that of the 1,450 business-related cases the Court has decided since 1953, the present court possesses an outsize share. Over its five-term tenure, the Roberts Court has also decided a higher proportion of the cases on its business docket in business’s favor—61 percent, versus 46 percent from the still quite right-leaning Rehnquist Court, and 42 percent overall since 1953.

One handy measure of this shift is the frenetic litigating getting done over at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The group’s legal team, the National Chamber Litigation Center, recently enjoyed an impressive run of 13 victories in the last batch of 16 business rulings handed down by Team Roberts. That’s heartening news indeed for the companies who sit on the Litigation Center’s board, including Lockheed Martin, GlaxoSmithKline, Verizon, Viacom and Ford. But as Carter G. Phillips, a commercial litigator who often represents the Chamber in high-court proceedings, these winning streaks are, well, just business as usual. As he wrote on the occasion of the group’s 30th anniversary in 2007:

I know from personal experience that the chamber’s support carries significant weight with the justices. Except for the solicitor general representing the United States, no single entity has more influence on what cases the Supreme Court decides and how it decides them than the National Chamber Litigation Center.

The liberal Center for Constitutional Accountability has toted up the numbers on the Chamber’s recent record, finding that the group prevails in 68 percent of the cases heard by the Roberts court, compared to a 56 percent success rate over the last 11 years of the Rehnquist Court. But of course the Chamber Litigation Center’s executive vice president, Robin S. Conrad, is well versed in presenting the wishlist of the market’s lords as the very fabric of our natural order, so she offers a more serenely impartial estimate of the group’s recent run of pleasing high-court outcomes.

Why have we been successful? [...] I’d like to think it’s because of the quality of the arguments and the briefs we present to the court. The court is looking for reliable voices to confirm its decisions, and I’d like to think it’s looking to the chamber because it tells a straight story, and we try not to be shrill or ideological. The chamber has earned a reputation for being a credible voice of business.”

But such self-enamored assessments overlook a key factor: The most accomplished arguments in the world won’t gain much headway without a sympathetic auditor, and in John G. Roberts the owning and executive classes have a Chief Justice so attuned to fulfilling their every whim they may as well go ahead and call him Jeeves. During its short tenure, five lucky voters on the Roberts Court have stricken a 97-year-old central doctrine of antitrust enforcement and erected barriers to equal-pay litigation in the workplace so that Congress drafted new legislation to uphold legal remedies for workers victimized by gender discrimination. As the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin has reported, that track record prompted Associate Justice Stephen Breyer, who votes in the court’s moderate minority, to remark “It is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much.” And that was before the bit of egregious corporate errand-running known as Citizen’s United.

This boardroom-first outlook on legal affairs is entirely in keeping with Roberts' career in private legal practice. “Shortly before Roberts became a judge,” Toobin writes, “he successfully argued in the Supreme Court that a woman who suffered from carpal-tunnel syndrome could not win a recovery from her employer, Toyota, under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Likewise, Roberts won a Supreme Court ruling that the family of a woman who died in a fire could not use the federal wrongful-death statute to sue the city of Tarrant, Alabama. In a rare loss in his thirty-nine arguments before the Court, Roberts failed to persuade the Justices to uphold a sixty-four-million-dollar fine against the United Mine Workers, which was imposed by a Virginia court after a strike.”

Roberts’s best-known case before the high court was Lujan v. National Wildlife Federation, where he successfully argued that an environmental advocacy group had no legal standing to challenge a Reagan White House decision to place 180 million acres of federal wilderness land on sale to mining interests. The Wildlife Federation’s complaint should be thrown out, Roberts argued, because it “was in no way distinct from the interest any citizen could claim, coming in the courthouse and saying, ‘I’m interested in this subject.'"

That dismissive reference to the policy hobby horses favored by “any citizen” makes for edifying reading—particularly coming as it does out of the mouth of a rock-ribbed anti-government Reaganite, here making an inapposite, robust case for the unmolested sovereignty of the executive bureaucracy. But laid alongside the expansive protections afforded to the speech of our corporate polity in the court’s campaign finance ruling, the logic of Roberts’s Lujan argument at least looks consistent, if not sensible. It points out what the Court has long held, ever since it first began tussling with the awkward questions of social equality back in the nineteenth century: Some citizens are more equal before the law than others.



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