There are many milestones one encounters in life when heading down the road to becoming a daily user of marijuana. The first time you ever smoked. That first trip to the head shop to buy your own pipe. Which would inevitably be followed by the first time your parent’s found your pipe; Who could have imagined your mom could have penetrated the impregnable fortress of the back of your underwear drawer, right?
The only thing worse than mom and dad finding your Zig Zags is the first time your parent’s found your stash. That’s the “Oh, shit!” moment. You’re thinking, “Oh, shit! I’m, so busted!” Your parents are thinking, “Oh, shit! Do I still have the record player and that Dark Side of the Moon album?”
Outwardly, they must punish you and explain that drugs are bad, have no positive role in society, and will be a dead end in your life. But on the inside, they are secretly waiting for your next sleepover at a friend’s house so they can re-live their glory days, thanks to your freshly confiscated grass. In reality, the legal status of marijuana is the only thing stopping a majority of parents out there from enjoying it in their free time.
At the time of writing this, protesters in lower Manhattan have been occupying public spaces for five days now. Over the weekend, the ranks of marchers swelled to over 5,000, but only around 200 seem to be holding down the area on a regular basis, with a handful arrested each day in Zuccotti Park, formerly known as Liberty Plaza until a real estate company and architecture firm donated $8 million to renovate the area and rename the public space. Fitting, is it not?
First proposed by Adbusters, I covered #OccupyWallStreet and reasons why the movement was valid earlier this month. Although AdBusters gained a huge boost in notoriety when members of Anonymous decided to throw support behind the protest, the magazine fell short of the 20,000 strong army it called for to take to the streets.
It’s pretty easy to understand why there aren’t more people in the parks in New York City right now – we’re broke and busy. Whether keeping workers in America right on the edge of poverty to quell uprisings is a reality or a radical conspiracy doesn’t matter, the fact is that, socially, there is huge online support for the protests, but very few bodies taking action.
Why? Probably because getting to one of the most expensive cities in the world and taking two months off of work to write on cardboard signs and chant slogans would be financially devastating to millions who may otherwise come out for an afternoon rally. Lupe Fiasco and Roseanne Barr, who restated her run for President to protestors, might be some of the only people talking about the #OccupyWallStreet protest on a regular basis who can afford to take time off from grinding out a living each day.
In some ways #OccupyWallStreet is a failure. I suspect more and more people will be arrested, and if the police are smart, they will do it in the most peaceful way possible, slowly, day by day, until the core of the group is hollowed out and the remaining protestors give up and go home. Because the numbers of demonstrators is so low, and fluctuates so wildly depending on the time of day, this tactic could very well work. If, however, police become more violent, or if protestors can find a catalyst for broad public appeal, more and more people could start to flood into Manhattan from Brooklyn and outlying areas – those who are right on the cusp of heading down to Liberty Plaza.
However, in other ways #OccupyWallStreet is already a win. It’s shown that the youth are no longer afraid to take to the streets, and while we may be more likely to post on Twitter than we are to dress up as a comic book character and mock cops, there are some of us who are not afraid. But if this movement is to be successful, we must have a long view. Look at what the Pirate Party just accomplished in Berlin.
No matter what happens this week, at least some people in America and around the world know there are still some bold enough to go to jail for what they believe (and others who are willing to order pizza for them while they await arrest), and that spark, that idea, can be used to mold the next generation to become freer and fairer than the last.
“You can’t have a AAA credit rating with a junk rated Congress.”
– Harry Markopolos
Harry Markopolos has a way with numbers. It’s this innate ability that led him to uncover Bernie Madoff’s epic Ponzi scheme almost a decade before market forces ultimately leveraged a confession out of the spectacularly crooked investment fund manager.
In 1999, while working as a portfolio manager at Rampart, a Boston based investment management company, Markopolos had been asked to reverse engineer a fund offered by Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC so his firm could compete by offering a similar product. After studying Madoff’s marketing material for a mere 5 minutes, Markopolos realized that the results the fund claimed to achieve were highly improbable, a further 4 hours of mathematical modeling proved the stated returns were categorically impossible by legal means.
Smelling a rat, Markopolos assembled an informal investigative team to probe Madoff’s operation further. In May 2000, when Madoff’s scheme was only a $3 to $7 billion fraud, they submitted their first whistleblowing report to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). It was summarily ignored. Frustrated but undeterred, Markopolos’ tenacious group, dubbed The Foxhounds, submitted numerous subsequent memos (in 2001, 2005, 2007 and 2008) offering even more evidence, to no avail. A 2005 missive had what one might consider to be an attention-grabbing title -“The World’s Largest Hedge Fund Is A Fraud” – but even this failed to get an appropriate response from those charged with policing Wall Street.
It was only following the crash of 2008, when Madoff’s investors were clamoring to liquidate their assets and he was unable to meet their demands, that the man responsible for the largest act of financial fraud in world history was forced to fess up. By then, Madoff’s “fund” had grown on paper to a value of $65 billion. In the following days, the complete and utter failure of the SEC came to light, as press outlets – who had also been alerted by Markopolos, but by and large had declined to report his findings before Madoff’s arrest – competed to interview the “Madoff whistleblower.” With egg on their faces, the government also sought out Markopolos’ knowledge and expertise, and on February 4, 2009 he delivered some riveting televised testimony in front of the House of Representatives’ Financial Services Subcommittee.
In March 2010, Markopolos published a book chronicling his investigations into Madoff and the utter incompetence he bore witness to during his dealings with the SEC. Called No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller, it became a New York Times bestseller. A new film, Chasing Madoff, based on the book is currently in cinemas. SuicideGirls caught up with Markopolos, who now works as a freelance investigative accountant exposing Fortune 500 wrongdoing, to talk about Madoff and the current state of play in our financial markets. We also asked him to focus his considerable financial acumen our nation’s balance sheet and assess the future prospects of our economy. Given Markopolos’ track record, his conclusions about America’s should-be junk status are indeed cause for concern, if not outright alarm.
Did you miss me last week? No? Didn’t notice at all, huh. Well, fuck you. I’m back.
This shit on this list has been deemed cool by a panel of Internets.
1. Making Fun of President Barack Obama
I found about these comics on What Things Do from someone on Facebook who was talking to Tom Neely, who’s excellent The Wolf is now available and worth your money. Anyway, sorry guy-who’s-name-I-can’t-remember, you should get credit for finding these gems. The overall premise of making President Barack Obama wondering-mind leader like George W. Bush is strong, but I found only a few of the comics to be hilarious. Here they are: