DISGRACED FORMER WOULD-BE TOP COP 9/11 HERO and WHITE HOUSE LIAR-TO Bernie Kerik’s 48-month federal prison sentence begins just a month from now, and he’s just, you know, hanging out, updating his new Blogspot blog. Now, unfortunately, he’s not running Google ads or anything, because we are pretty sure, once he racked in some dollas, we could find some state from which to draw a plaintiff to file a Son of Sam claim against him? (JUDITH REGAN?) This would be great.

Wednesday’s explosion of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland, and the gigantic cloud of ash that it spawned, is still causing flights to and from many European countries to be canceled; one doomsaying volcanologist who clearly hasn’t planned any transatlantic trips claims that fallout from the ash could affect travel “for weeks to even months.” The Times has a handy chart of airports’ status here, and while some airports have allowed a few flights through these cancellations are going to probably go on through the weekend. [Pic via]

by Simon Dumenco

The Awl’s Morning Market Report:

• After a down session yesterday morning, Wall Street recovered nicely, giving the Dow Jones Industrial Average another up close by the end of the day. In this morning’s session, though, stocks are dipping once again as investors express wariness that today’s Sexy Person might not be as awesome as yesterday’s Sexy Person, Corinna.
• The Nasdaq is down in morning trading, but consensus among Wall Street analysts is that tech investors will rally this afternoon as word spreads that Veronica Belmont has solved that whole what’s-the-best-way-to-prop-the-damn-thing-up problem that has been plaguing the iPad, the magical and revolutionary tablet computer recently introduced by Apple.

by Mark Bergen

I flocked from LGA to O’Hare earlier this week on a grad school visit. Conversations veered-as they preternaturally do with Chicagoans’ stodgy inferiority complex-to contrasts between the two American cities. Since this was a public policy school, the boasting rights were based less on cultural attributes than political corruption. Less deep dish v. thin slice, math rock v. post-punk. Think Blago v. Eliot & Dave. They had a Lt. Gov. candidate dethroned for “allegedly” attacking his prostitute girlfriend with a knife. To which I countered, “we’ve got our very own girlfriend-slasher too!” Plus, we’ve got Carl Paladino, a tea-partying gubernatorial hopeful who sent out graphic e-missives of the racist, sexist, NeverSFW variety. Then more of Blago’s conniving surfaced and I thought that we New Yorkers were vanquished.

But, alas and hooray! Now we can take the corruption cake.

The SEC (whose employees finally stopped reading Paladino’s emails) teamed with Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to bring new charges against a private equity fund and a political consulting firm in our state. Both are deeply awash in cash and political placenta. These charges are part of a nearly 3-year long (!) investigation into nepotistic corruption in the state’s $130 billion pension fund.

The charges were brought down on the private equity dealers, Quadrangle Group, for what was described as their involvement in an ongoing “pay to play” investigation. This is, reductively, the sordid-and commonplace-practice of politically connected elites vying for control of billions of public pension funds. Under former state Comptroller Alan Hevesi, Quadrangle, the SEC lawsuit contends, wrangled in a $100 million investment for the NYS Common Retirement Fund. Two deals preceded the handshake. The first was a “sham ‘finder’ fee” of a cool mil to a former Hevesi advisor. This finagling, as Ben Smith explains, is not a rare occurrence:

Other arrangements walk a finer legal line, though even some of the accused in New York — notably Hevesi’s former top political adviser, [Hank] Morris — have argued that while the use of political connections to gain access to pension money may be unseemly, there’s no law against it.

The second was a trifle more rare. David Loglisci, the former chief of investment officer of retirement fund, had a brother producing this really rad movie. Chooch, a comedic romp about a Queens dimwit (whose trailer first appears in searches on Spike TV’s site (well, right?), stars such notable thespians as Ray ‘Boom Boom’ Mancini and Joe ‘Pepper’ Tomczyk.

Chooch’s producers were only short a willful distributor to make their low-budget dream come true. Enter Steve Rattner. Quadrangle’s founder-a high-profile Democratic fundraiser, schmaltzer, and one-time Obama “car czar”-intervened to finalize the movie and, thereby, pension deal. A former reporter wunderkind for the Times, Rattner has been for some time BFFs with Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.. He used his considerable political heft to score $5 million in fees from the investment-gambling with the treasured retirement funds of thousands of working New Yorkers.

Hevesi’s scandal, Smith reports, entangled “three of New York’s highest-profile Democratic private equity titans.” The SEC-Cuomo lawsuit also roped in Global Strategy Group (GSC), the (perfectly-innocuous-sounding) consulting firm that has worked with a slew of New York politicos, including Cuomo. According to the suit, GSC lobbied for pension investments to shuffle private equity pockets. For the first time, the investigation has reached the current Comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, for his commingling with GSC.

Quadrangle paid a $12 million fee to the state-and threw Rattner under the bus in the process. GSC forked over $2 million. Although neither firm admitted guilt, both agreed to cooperate with the investigation and dished out the fines, which was nice. Perhaps they didn’t spot a problem with their maneuvering. An editor of a private equity publication unloaded to Smith: “In the case of New York the corruption is a lot more brazen.” (You hear that, Chicago?!)

Attempting to auction off one of the highest seats in a representative democracy is unequivocally corrupt. But this nepotism is just shameless power-grabbing. Politicizing and plundering the savings of public employees is a far more egregious offense. And, I think, quite worthy of our corruption crown.

Of course, our richest citizen failed to be deterred. A few months ago, Mayor Bloomberg announced he was moving his superlative fortune from Quadrangle over to a Bloomberg-dedicated new startup firm-staffed by a dozen of Steve Rattner’s folks at Quadrangle.

Mark Bergen lives on Bergen St. He is moving to Chicago.

“In addition to the gropers, there have been less extreme but still unnerving encounters. Mr. Rawls, for example, said that standing with his arms at his side he had felt more erections ‘across the back of my hand than I can count…’”
–It’s been rough sledding for the naked performers who are part of the Marina Abramović retrospective up at MoMA, many of whom have been victimized by inappropriate touching, surreptitious photography, bodysnarking, and, yes, the dreaded “hard cock against the back of the hand.” Talk about suffering for art!

“The Commission brings this securities fraud action against Goldman, Sachs & Co. (‘GS&Co;’) and a GS&Co; employee, Fabrice Tourre (‘Tourre’), for making materially misleading statements and omissions in connection with a synthetic collateralized debt obligation (‘CDO’) GS&Co; structured and marketed to investors.” So begins the most amazing complaint to yet come out of the financial meltdown. What the SEC is doing, it seems to me, after doing their reporting, is recasting a rather common business practice as a crime-which is, quite likely, how it should have been considered all along. And the language is rough!

“As set forth above, Goldman and Tourre, in the offer or sale of securities or securities-based swap agreements, by the use of means or instruments of interstate commerce or by the mails, directly or indirectly (a) employed devices, schemes or artifices to defraud; (b) obtained money or property by means of untrue statements of material facts or omissions of material facts necessary in order to make the statements made, in the light of the circumstances under which they were made, not misleading; or (c) engaged in transactions, practices or courses of business which operated or would operate as a fraud or deceit upon purchasers of securities.”

We’re looking forward to someone explaining much of this to us, because it is a bit over our heads, but this grabbed us as of interest as well:

At the same time, GS&Co; recognized that market conditions were presenting challenges to the successful marketing of CDO transactions backed by mortgage-related securities. For example, portions of an email in French and English sent by Tourre to a friend on January 23, 2007 stated, in English translation where applicable: “More and more leverage in the system, The whole building is about to collapse anytime now…Only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab[rice Tourre]…standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstruosities!!!” Similarly, an email on February 11, 2007 to Tourre from the head of the GS&Co; structured product correlation trading desk stated in part, “the cdo biz is dead we don’t have a lot of time left.”

How to pay a lot of money to attend a baseball game during your first year of being above the legal drinking age, by Matthew Clemmens of Cherry Hill, N.J.:

1. Get drunk, obviously.

2. Unnerve the two young ladies sitting in front of you (aged 11 and 15) with your inebriated antics.

3. Realize in your beer-soaked haze that scaring the young ladies makes you awesome, and up the ante by pelting them with “insults and vulgarities.” Also, overpriced stadium beer.

4. Say “I’m gonna get sick,”

and subsequently induce vomiting by sticking your fingers down your throat.

5. Succeed in your mission to imitate the T-shirt gun with your recently consumed food, especially the “puke on the kids” part.

6. Fail to realize that the vomit victim’s father is a police officer, a fact that might make you feel more punk rock in the moment but that will only make you look even more like a drunk idiot who can only feel like a big man when he picks on people smaller than he is.

7. Get arraigned on a host of charges, with bail set at $12,000.

8. Or the price of approximately 1,777 in-stadium beers. Oopsie!

[Via]

Say what one will about Mike Bloomberg, and we certainly will, if these Antony Gormley statues were up during Giuliani’s reign of stupid-terror, he would have been shrieking and flapping in the tabloids, instead of telling everyone to shut the hell up and enjoy or at least don’t enjoy but definitely shut the hell up. It’s a huge improvement! Never forget!

President Obama issued a memo ordering that “all hospitals getting Medicare and Medicaid money honor all patients’ advance directives, including those designating who gets family visitation privileges.” Congratulations, gays! You are one step closer to almost being considered full citizens of this country!

I often wonder how the rise in antibacterial cleansers-soaps, dish soaps, laundry detergents, and so on-will ultimately affect our built-to-handle-some-bacteria bodies, and a new bit of research making the rounds would seem to claim that these products are actually responsible for allergies running rampant in the West these past few decades. Cast off your soaps! Liberate your dishwasher! Free yourself of the sniffles!

University of Montreal Cleanliness Researcher Guy Delespesse has more:

‘The more sterile the environment a child lives in, the higher the risk he or she will develop allergies or an immune problem in their lifetime.’

In 1980, 10 per cent of the Western population suffered from allergies. Today, it is 30 per cent. In 2010, one in 10 children is said to be asthmatic, and the mortality rate has increased 28 per cent between 1980 and 1994.

‘It’s not just the prevalence but the gravity of the cases,’ says Dr. Delespesse. ‘Regions in which the sanitary conditions have remained stable have also maintained a constant level of allergies and inflammatory diseases.

‘Allergies and other autoimmune diseases such as Type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis are the result of our immune system turning against us.’

Delespesse has been working out theories of sterility for a while; in 2003, he produced an article claiming that “one yoghurt” would solve the problems of restoring intestinal flora that had been stripped by overly clean environments. (“’A market worth several billion dollars will open up to dairy companies,’ remarks the researcher, who serves as scientific consultant to one of these companies.” Convenient! And not mentioned in the bit of the Mail piece that cites his embracing of these sorts of yogurts.) And it’s likely that there are other factors that are contributing to the rise in allergies, like, I don’t know, the toxins that accumulate gradually thanks to there being billions and billions of people on the earth.

And even though it’s one of those “a new study” articles that newspapers love to run without any attempt at finding an objectivity-satisfying counterpoint, this item is only serving to increase the little bits of paranoia I feel when I see “antibiotic” soaps in public bathrooms and hand-sanitizers in odd places where people might have put their hands. What if this whole move towards “sanitization” is just a way to make us all more sick? You have to admit it would be a hell of a marketing opportunity.