02.03.2012
Afghan Woman Estorai Killed After
Having Baby Girl
KABUL,
Afghanistan (AP) — An Afghan woman has been strangled to death, apparently by
her husband, who was upset that she gave birth to a second daughter rather than
the son he wanted, police said Monday.
It
was the latest in a series of grisly examples of subjugation of women that have
made headlines in Afghanistan in the past few months — including a 15-year-old
tortured and forced into prostitution by in-laws and a female rape victim who
was imprisoned for adultery. The episodes have raised the question of what will
happen to the push for women's rights in Afghanistan as the international
presence here shrinks along with the military drawdown. NATO forces are
scheduled to pull out by the end of 2014.
In the 10 years since the ouster of the
Taliban, great strides have been made for women in Afghanistan, with many
attending school, working in offices and even sometimes marching in protests.
But abuse and repression of women are still common, particularly in rural areas
where women are still unlikely to set foot outside of the house without a burqa
robe that covers them from head to toe. The man in the latest case, Sher
Mohammad, fled the Khanabad district in Kunduz province last week, about the
time a neighbor found his 22-year-old wife dead in their house, said District
Police Chief Sufi Habibullah. Medical examiners whom police brought to check
the body said she had been strangled, Habibullah said.
The
woman, named Estorai, had warned family members that her husband had repeatedly
reproached her for giving birth to a daughter rather than a son and had
threatened to kill her if it happened again, said Provincial women's affairs
chief Nadira Ghya, who traveled to Khanabad to deal with the case. Estorai gave
birth to her second daughter between two and three months ago, Ghya said.
Officials did not have a family name for either Sher Mohammad or Estorai.
Police
took the man's mother into custody because she appears to have collaborated in
a plot to kill her daughter-in-law, Habibullah said. Ghya, who visited the
man's mother in jail, said that she swears that Estorai committed suicide by
hanging. Police said they found no rope and no evidence of hanging from the
woman's wounds.
Boy babies are traditionally prized much
more highly than girls in Afghanistan, where a son means a breadwinner and a
daughter is seen as a drain on the family until she is married off. Even so, a
murder over the gender of a baby would be rare and shocking if proved true.
The
U.S. Embassy issued a statement Monday praising the Afghan government for
recent declarations supporting women's rights in the wake of the latest abuse
cases that have garnered media attention.
"The
rights of women cannot be relegated to the margins of international affairs, as
this issue is at the core of our national security and the security of people
everywhere," the statement said. It did not address the killing of the
young woman in Kunduz.
Intelligence Study Links Low I.Q. To Prejudice, Racism, Conservatism
Are racists dumb? Do conservatives tend to
be less intelligent than liberals? A provocative new study from Brock
University in Ontario suggests the answer to both questions may be a qualified
yes. The study, published in Psychological Science, showed that people who score low on
I.Q. tests in childhood are more likely to develop prejudiced beliefs and
socially conservative politics in adulthood. I.Q., or intelligence
quotient, is a score determined by standardized tests, but whether
the tests truly reveal intelligence remains a topic of hot debate among
psychologists.
Dr.
Gordon Hodson, a professor of psychology at the university and the study's lead
author, said the finding represented evidence of a vicious cycle: People of low
intelligence gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, which stress
resistance to change and, in turn, prejudice, he told Live Science.
Why
might less intelligent people be drawn to conservative ideologies? Because such
ideologies feature "structure and order" that make it easier to
comprehend a complicated world, Dodson said. "Unfortunately, many of these
features can also contribute to prejudice," he added.
Dr.
Brian Nosek, a University of Virginia psychologist, echoed those sentiments. "Reality
is complicated and messy," he told The Huffington Post in
an email. "Ideologies get rid of the messiness and impose a simpler
solution. So, it may not be surprising that people with less cognitive capacity
will be attracted to simplifying ideologies."
But
Nosek said less intelligent types might be attracted to liberal
"simplifying ideologies" as well as conservative ones.
In
any case, the study has taken the Internet by storm, with some outspoken
liberals saying that it validates their suspicions about conservatives and
conservatives arguing that the research has been misinterpreted.
What do you think? Do conservatives tend to be less
intelligent? Or is this just political opinion masquerading as science?
Police Layoffs Ripple Through Key Swing State Of Florida
Posted:
1/31/12 02:03 PM ET | Updated: 1/31/12 03:54 PM ET
A
man is arrested in Jacksonville, Fla., where nearly 50 officers were laid off
last fall.
Last October, the Jacksonville Sheriff's
Office, one of Florida's largest law enforcement agencies, laid off nearly 50
police officers and eliminated 23 vacant officer positions, in response to an
$18 million budget cut by the Jacksonville city council. The cuts trimmed the
sheriff's department to roughly 1,600 officers, who must patrol a city of
820,000 that sprawls over nearly 900 square miles.
Warren
A. Jones, a Jacksonville councilman who represents a high-crime district, called
the vote on the cuts one of the most difficult he could recall. "Right
before we took up the budget, I had 15 people shot in my district over a
48-hour period," Jones said. "It was tough."
Like most of Florida, Jacksonville has been
battered by the housing bust, with falling real estate prices sapping tax
revenues and vanishing construction jobs contributing to stubbornly high
unemployment. The result has been ever-deeper budget deficits requiring heavy
cuts in city services.
Florida,
a perennial swing state, is expected to play a pivotal role in this year's
presidential election, and the wave of police layoffs and deep police
department budget cuts in Jacksonville and other cities is a clear indicator of
the economic malaise that the state still faces. And while the budget cuts may
not have an impact on Tuesday's primary, by November they could play a
significant role.
Still,
how Jacksonville's police cutbacks will impact public safety remains unclear.
As with many cities across the country, Jacksonville has seen its crime rate
decline over the past decade, after reaching a record high in the 1990s. But as
recently as last year, Duval County, which includes Jacksonville, had the
highest murder rate in Florida -- which itself remains one of the most violent
states in the country.
Other
Florida cities are wrestling with the same painful budget math. Buffeted by the
economic crisis, police agencies large and small have been forced to slash
payrolls -- or squeeze painful concessions in pay and benefits from police
unions.
Miami,
with the highest murder rate in the state, has trimmed its police budget by $25
million since 2009, but federal assistance has so far allowed the city to avoid
significant police layoffs.
Nevertheless, Miami only narrowly avoided
laying off nearly 120 officers in January, after the city's police union
grudgingly accepted a contract requiring officers to contribute 4 percent of
their pay to cover their health insurance. Even so, police layoffs might be
inevitable, with city leaders projecting an additional budget deficit of $30 million or more later
this year. Smaller cities, from Daytona Beach to Port St. Lucie, have also trimmed
police payrolls in response to budget woes.
But while Florida, which received tens
of billion of dollars in stimulus funds, could clearly benefit from a
continuing influx of federal aid, the rhetoric from Republicans campaigning in
Tuesday's primary has emphasized sweeping cuts to federal spending in the name
of deficit reduction and largely rejected further stimulus spending as a waste
of taxpayer money.
President Barack Obama, on the other
hand, proposed last fall more than $400 billion in federal tax relief and
direct aid to boost job creation and help struggling cities. The president's bill, which has not advanced in the Republican-led
House, includes $4 billion in direct grants to prevent further police officer
layoffs. The measure would be largely financed with a tax increase on incomes
of more than $1 million.
Neither Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich, the
leading Republican contenders, have offered specific policy proposals to reduce
layoffs of public sector employees such as police officers, and campaign
representatives for both candidates did not respond to questions about police
layoffs.
Michael Linden, director of tax and budget
policy for the Center for American Progress, said that a jobs plan advanced by
former Massachusetts Gov. Romney, currently leading polls in Florida, would do
little to reduce layoffs of cops, firefighters and teachers. "There's no
recognition that state and local governments are feeling the pinch and are
having to lay off these folks," Linden said.
Newt Gingrich, the former U.S. House
speaker, "is an even more radical version of Romney," Linden added.
Gingrich has called for a 15 percent individual "flat tax"
that would reduce federal revenue by an estimated $1.28 billion annually, a
roughly 35 percent reduction of current revenue, according to the Tax Policy
Center of the Brookings Institution.
Such
massive cuts on the federal level would quickly result in further layoffs of
state public sector employees, as federal outlays dried up, Linden said. Democrats,
meanwhile, appear likely to seize on the issue of police officer layoffs in the
coming general election campaign. Last October, Vice President Joseph Biden
touted the Obama administration's jobs plan while visiting Michigan and
Pennsylvania, where budget deficits have forced numerous cities to lay off officers,
even in the face of rising crime.
"I call on the members of Congress to
step up," Biden said in Philadelphia. "Make a choice for the people
in your district. Should they have more teachers back in school? Should they
have police on the beat?" "Should they have firefighters in the
firehouse? Or should you save a millionaire from a $500 tax? Ladies and
gentlemen, it's that basic and that simple," Biden said.
Yet
it remains unclear whether the administration's jobs argument will resonate in
cities like Jacksonville, where despite shrinking police payrolls, crime
continues to steadily decline from the record highs of the 1990s. Jacksonville
Sheriff John Rutherford says the recent layoffs have not affected his office's
emergency response capabilities. And statistics show that homicides and other
violent crime continued to fall last year, following a decade-long trend.
But Jones, the Jacksonville city councilman,
said that if the city's budget situation does not improve, further police
layoffs may be on the horizon -- potentially reducing the city's ability to
patrol neighborhoods still beset by high crime. "If additional cuts were
to come, I don't know how we would respond," Jones said. "We would
have some tough decisions to make."
Wall Street Executives Thrive Under Obama But Still Won't Support Him
WASHINGTON
-- They bristled when he called them "fat cats." They fought every
step of the way, unsuccessfully, to prevent his financial reform bill from
becoming law. And some who supported him in 2008 are now throwing their money
at Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
But
for all their grumbling, Wall Street executives have fared exceptionally well
under President Barack Obama. In fact, some of Wall Street's highest earners
are making as much now, if not more, than they did under President George W.
Bush.
Check
out these ungrateful SOB Salaries
Take Wells Fargo president and CEO John
Stumpf. He made $18.9 million in 2010, compared to $21.3 million in 2009, $13.8
million in 2008 and $12.6 million in 2007. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has
also watched his paychecks fatten over the past three years: He took home $20.8
million in 2010, compared to $1.3 million in 2009 (when some bank executives
took a pay cut because of the financial crisis), $19.7 million in 2008 and
$27.8 million in 2007.
The list goes on. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd
Blankfein made $14.1 million in 2010, compared to $862,657 in 2009, $1.1
million in 2008 and $70.3 million in 2007. Bank of America president and CEO
Brian Moynihan earned $10 million in 2010, compared to his predecessor Ken
Lewis, who made $4.2 million in 2009, $9.9 million in 2008 and $24.8 million in
2007.
Even Vikram Pandit, the CEO of Citigroup who
worked for two years for just $1 a year as a symbolic gesture after the
financial crisis, was awarded a $23.2 million
retention package in May 2011.
Banking
elites have thrived under Obama for a number of reasons. For starters, Justice
Department prosecutions for financial fraud are at a 20-year low,
despite what many claim is a strong pattern of financial-sector misconduct in
recent years. The Securities Exchange Commission has brought few civil fraud
cases against big banks, and even those cases were settled so cheaply that
Federal Judge Jed Rakoff has held up or rejected the
deals.
Obama
has also kept tax rates low. He extended the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003,
which means Wall Street executives' salaries are taxed at 35 percent and their
capital gains income -- where the bulk of their take-home pay comes from -- is
only taxed at 15 percent. And of course, many big banks are still standing
because the president forked over tens of billions in taxpayer dollars to bail
them out during the financial crisis that their industry fueled. Amid all of
that, Obama didn't touch executive bonuses; in fact, he defended their right to
keep them.
"I,
like most of the American people, don't begrudge people success or wealth. That
is part of the free market system," Obama said, during a Feb. 2010 interview with
Bloomberg, of the $17 million bonus awarded to Dimon and the $9
million to Blankfein that year.
Despite
thriving under his polices, none of these executives is rallying behind Obama.
Even those who identify as Democrats are signaling they'll support Romney in
2012.
Many are angry about Obama's populist
rhetoric about the wealthy, since they translate it as code for Wall Street,
where many of the richest Americans work. Some bank executives who were
previously on good terms with Obama fumed when he said in Dec. 2009, in a moment of
frustration over banks not freeing up enough credit to businesses to create
jobs, that he didn't become president to help out "a bunch of fat cat
bankers on Wall Street."
"They're still puzzled why is it that
people are mad at the banks. Well, let's see," Obama said at the time.
"You guys are drawing down $10, $20 million bonuses after America went
through the worst economic year that it's gone through in -- in decades, and
you guys caused the problem. And we've got 10 percent unemployment."
Dimon,
a lifelong Democrat once rumored to be on Obama's short list for Treasury Secretary,
blasted Obama's
"fat cat" remark, saying he didn't think "the president of the
United States should paint everyone with the same brush." He also complained last
month that the public is giving Wall Street too hard of a time. "Acting
like everyone who's been successful is bad and that everyone who is rich is bad
-- I just don't get it," he said at a conference.
In
a sign that their frustrations may be turning into retaliation, Dimon was
spotted last fall meeting privately with Romney. A JPMorgan insider told The
New York Post at the time that Dimon hadn't made any
contributions to Obama in that election cycle but had been
meeting privately with Republican presidential candidates.
Dimon
isn't the president's only detractor. Blankfein, who donated $4,600 to Hillary
Clinton's presidential run in 2007 and whose company contributed more than $1
million to Obama's 2008 campaign, has said he will support Romney in 2012,
according to a Fox Business News report.
Goldman Sachs is now the top donor to Romney's 2012
campaign, too.
Moynihan
stopped short of a direct challenge to Obama. In an Oct. 3 interview, the
president told ABC's George Stephanopoulos that banks don't have an "inherent
right" to a "certain amount of profit." Two days
later, Moynihan replied in a CNBC interview that
he has "an inherent duty as a CEO of a publicly owned company to get a
return for my shareholders" and that his customers "understand we
have a right to make a profit."
Moynihan's
comments came at a time when Bank of America was defending its decision to
impose a new $5-per-month debit card fee on its customers. They scrapped the
fee a month later, however, in the face of widespread criticism.
Big
banks aren't the only Wall Street entities that have prospered under Obama's
policies. The government bailouts resulted in shielding hedge funds and private
equity firms from losses if they owned stocks or bonds issued by big banks. Low
tax rates on capital gains and carried interest also mean these executives are
taking home a greater share of their paychecks than their workers who are paid
traditional salaries. And while Obama's proposed millionaire surtax has rankled
many of these high-earners, the reality is that he passed up the chance to let
their tax rates increase in late 2010 when he cut a deal with Congressional
Republicans to preserve the low rates.
Zach Carter contributed to this report.
Wall Street Lobbyists Could Severely Weaken Derivative Regulation
The Huffington Post Alexander
Eichler First Posted: 01/30/2012 12:22 pm Updated:
01/30/2012 12:22 pm
Wall
Street lobbyists are trying hard to weaken the extent to which the government
can police a practice that played a central role in the 2008 financial crisis.
Some of the country's largest banks --
including Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of
America -- are lobbying Congress to grant regulatory exceptions for derivatives
traded outside the U.S. Each of these banks has at least half its assets in
overseas operations, according to Bloomberg, meaning that hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of trading could
lie outside the scope of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill if the lobbyists
are successful.
In the years leading up to the financial
crisis, the derivatives market was where Wall Street firms shifted their risk
around in increasingly complex ways, until nearly everyone with skin in the
financial game, from major corporations to ordinary homeowners, was somehow
implicated in one deal or another. Derivatives trading has been a source of
major profit for Wall Street -- JPMorgan Chase reportedly took in $5 billion in 2009, during an otherwise awful year, thanks to
its derivatives desk -- but it's also a large part of what sent the national
economy into a tailspin just a few years ago.
Analysts
have voiced concern that the latest lobbying efforts, -- which would place much
of the derivatives market outside the jurisdiction of Dodd-Frank -- could put
the financial system at risk for another catastrophe. Yet it's hardly the first
time that Wall Street lobbyists have attempted to blunt the effects of Dodd-Frank
and other measures meant to curtail risky banking activity.
Commercial banks spent $61 million on political lobbying in 2011, according to
the Center for Responsive Politics -- the sixth year in a row that lobbying
spending increased in that sector. The securities and investment industry spent
another $97 million on lobbying that same year. Much of this spending reflects
attempts to influence the way Dodd-Frank is being put into practice, although
financial firms also lobbied vigorously to change Dodd-Frank in 2010, when the law was still being written.
Such
efforts haven't been in vain. Thanks to lobbyists, the latest draft of the
Volcker rule -- a key piece of financial reform legislation that would prevent
banks from making high-risk trades with their own money -- has grown from its
original 10-page version to a document nearly 30 times as long, which may severely damage its chances of getting passed. (Such activity,
known as proprietary trading, has been a reliable source of profit for banks,
and the subject of both intense regulatory attention and protective industry
lobbying.) Bank lobbyists have also succeeded in getting the Commodity Futures
Trading Commission, a major regulator, to repeatedly delay a critical package of derivatives regulations.
And
in June, the Federal Reserve gave banks a victory when it set a 24-cent maximum on the
fee banks can charge retail merchants for debit-card transactions, which was
much higher than what retailers had hoped for. Retailers sued the Fed later that year over the fee.
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