when people were ceaselessly around us, talk was cheap, and a manufactured good was a real luxury item...,

NYTimes |  What is going on here? It may be that, in a world rich in digital information, physical contact, and the personal trust and relationship that still comes by spending time with someone, has become even more valuable, since it is harder to come by.

“All aspects of human life are being digitized,” said Geoffrey Moore, an author and consultant to several Silicon Valley companies. “You wonder what that will do to the human mind. For sure, you want to put down some strong personality roots. Companies have to create human communities of supporters, advocates for what the company does.”

That personal advocacy, he says, will matter more than anything an impersonal company can do for itself. There are similar increasing values for human networks of connections: People with taste and experience who know you, people who value you because you have looked at them in that close human way.

Looked at this way, the ever-higher rejection rate of elite colleges despite the increasing popularity of high-quality free online alternatives like Coursera makes perfect sense. People don’t want to be at Stanford; they want the personal relationships they get from being at Stanford. In a fast-changing digital world, that durable human network may in a decade be more valuable than anything a student learned in the classroom.

It is a sharp shift from an earlier time, when people were ceaselessly around us, talk was cheap, and a manufactured good was a real luxury item. When things are digital and can be consumed whenever we want, valuable analog things, perishable in time, become more valuable.

For some technologists, this shift represents a source of hope. The rejiggering of values means that much of the work that currently defines people will go away, but the parts of life that can’t be encoded will become the basis of still-unseen economic activity.

“We’re moving towards a ‘post-automated’ world, where the valuable thing about people will be their emotional content,” said SriSatish Ambati, co-founder and chief executive of 0xdata, a company involved in open source software for big data analysis. “The only way to defeat the machines is if the world, including our brains, has an impossible level of complexity that the machines can never map.”

As the original article accompanying the chart implied, however, the expensive goods of our new world — being authentically seen, being heard in ways that matter — may be increasingly unavailable to the poor. Finding ways to make all that emotional content within humanity, at all levels, into something valuable would be a real economic miracle.

hedonic inflation and the changed lives of the poor...,

zerohedge |  In a NYT article which perhaps was meant to boost poor Americans' spirits that despite their horrible economic plight (because, you see, the past five years of Fed monetary easing - which explicitly allowed US politicians to avoid engaging in much needed and very unpopular fiscal reform - only focused on helping just the wealthiest - sorry very much, better luck next time) things really are quite great because, through the magic of hedonics, most things are really cheaper than ever.

To wit:

Since the 1980s, for instance, the real price of a midrange color television has plummeted about tenfold, and televisions today are crisper, bigger, lighter and often Internet-connected. Similarly, the effective price of clothing, bicycles, small appliances, processed foods — virtually anything produced in a factory — has followed a downward trajectory. The result is that Americans can buy much more stuff at bargain prices.

They can. 

The only problem is they don't, because while one can use hedonic adjustments all day long to make it appear that one gets more bang for the buck, one still has to spend several hundred to over a thousand for a simple television set every few years, regardless of whether it is 1080p, 4K, 3D, or any other fleeting fad. 

The NYT does touch on this amusing sleight of hand used by economists always and everywhere to make inflation appear tamer than it is:

“If you handpick services and goods where there has been dramatic technological progress, then the fact that poor people can consume these items in 2014 and even rich people couldn’t consume them in 1954 is hardly a meaningful distinction,” said Gary Burtless, an economist at the Brookings Institution. “That’s not telling you who is rich and who is poor, not in the way that Adam Smith and most everyone else since him thinks about poverty.”

Indeed - because between soaring food and energy prices, and stagnant or outright declining wages (the average weekly wage this month was $24.31; the average weekly wage last month was... $24.31), and the indigestability of the iPad (a new version of which is offered every 8-12 months with new features, which somehow also makes it hedonically cheaper) America's poor couldn't care less about how "cheap" those things they simply can never afford, allegedly are.

And the other problem, and an indication of just how ridiculous hedonics really is, is shown on the chart below, which is what economists use to "justify" that inflation really is very tame.

The punchline: apparently the "hedonically adjusted" deflation in Television costs over the past ten years is over 100%.

4:14 - the worst and most disgusting moment in bush's presidency....,

people |  Standing firm that his decision to invade Iraq was the right one, revealing that he considered dropping Dick Cheney from his 2004 campaign to "demonstrate that I was in charge," and even admitting that a televised insult from Kanye West represented the lowest point of his presidency, former President George W. Bush has put pen to paper for a memoir, Decision Points, due from Crown Publishers on Nov. 9.

Talking about the book in his first TV interview since leaving the Oval Office, Bush met with NBC's Today show co-anchor Matt Lauer in Midland, Texas, from his childhood home and church, and from Centennial Park.

"I faced a lot of criticism as President. I didn't like hearing people claim that I lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or cut taxes to benefit the rich. But the suggestion that I was racist because of the response to [Hurricane] Katrina represented an all-time low,"

msnbc a trusted handmaiden of the establishment

rsn |   The central argument of Michael’s Arria’s lively new book about America’s so-called “progressive network” is not that MSNBC is bad at what it does, but that, all too often, even what MSNBC does well doesn’t do much good for most Americans. As Arria puts it in the introduction of “Medium Blue” (a spring 2014 release by CounterPunch Books):

This book doesn’t possess a hidden agenda. It’s an attack on MSNBC from the left, an attempt to highlight and track the problematic ties between the network and America’s ruling class. The message of MSNBC juxtaposed with the propaganda of Fox, forms a false dichotomy and leads Americans to believe a strong debate is gripping the nation…. [MSNBC] is very much part of the problem.

MSNBC is part of NBCUniversal, which is part of Comcast, and it would be naïve for anyone to expect much more than infotainment from a company that has a history of being a political style opportunist without any noticeable principles or ideology, those being mutually exclusive qualities. 

MSNBC is not “Fox for Democrats,” as Bill Clinton and others have claimed. Fox is reliably ideological and unreliably factual. MSNBC is not reliably ideological (at least not in the same predictable way – what would Democratic ideology sound like anyway?) but MSNBC is moderately reliable factually in the sense that what you hear on MSNBC is pretty much factual (at least in prime time). When MSNBC misleads, it’s mostly by indirection, through cliché and conventional demonization, by over-emphasis and omission.

As Arria sees it, “MSNBC is packed with true believers who preach the false hope of objectivity…. 

Everyone working for the station seems to believe that they operate without restriction, often defining themselves as independently minded journalists attempting to squash the lies of a deceptive media.”

Arria doesn’t call this self-regard delusional, but he provides ample evidence that it is. In America today, an “independent broadcast or cable news operation” would be an oxymoron (if it could exist at all), since ratings and corporate profits depend on predictability within a limited spectrum of perspective that excludes actual independence. Or as Arria succinctly makes the point: “How much disrupting can a network like MSNBC ever really do?”

why hasn't the director of national intelligence been punished for lying to congress?

WaPo |  Snowden also repeatedly compared his actions with that of Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper, who denied that the NSA was "wittingly" collecting data on millions of Americans in a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing last spring -- a claim at odds with revelations about domestic phone records collection as a result of documents provided by Snowden. Clapper later apologized to Congress in a letter, saying his answer was "clearly erroneous."

But in a letter to the editor in the New York Times earlier this year, ODNI general counsel Robert Litt denied that Clapper had "lied" to Congress, but rather said he made an honest mistake. Although ODNI was provided the question in advance on the hearing by Senator Ron Wyden (D, Oregon), Clapper had not seen it, wrote Litt, and answered the question while having American's content information in mind. When his mistake was pointed out days later, Clapper corrected the issue with Wyden, but Litt argues "it could not be corrected publicly because the program involved was classified."

"The oath that I remember is James Clapper raising his hand, swearing to tell the truth and then lying to the American public," Snowden said. "I also swore an oath, but that oath was not to secrecy, but to defend the American Constitution."

Snowden recalled raising what he called the "famous lie" with co-workers, questioning why no one did anything about it, only to be warned about potential consequences. Snowden has previously said he raised concerns internally, but that as a contractor, he did not have the same protections as a government employee.

While Clapper has accused Snowden of perpetrating the most "massive and damaging theft of intelligence" in U.S. history, Snowden argues his actions were serving a larger public interest that superseded the national intelligence need for secrecy.

Later in the speech, he described Clapper as having "committed a crime by lying under oath to the American people," and questioned why charges were never brought against the director. By contrast, Snowden said, charges were brought against him soon after he revealed himself as the source of the leaks.

white privilege as the neutron bomb of moral warfare...,

globalguerillas |  The growing popularity of "check your privilege" and "white privilege" at Universities and in political debates is interesting. 

Why is it interesting? It's not a force for progress or positive change, it's a form of moral warfare.   That means it's not a constructive remark that improves the debate, rather, it's an attack that does damage the target.  However, it doesn't damage the target directly.  Instead, the damage is done by weakening or breaking the moral bonds that allow the target to function in a social context.  

In other words, the attack disconnects the target from the moral support of others.  You can see that disconnection at work in how groups within the target group "white privilege" are fleeing from it, rather than rejecting the concept outright.  For example, I've seen "white male privilege" as a form of attack now.  I've also seen "white straight male privilege" being used.  This divisibility of the attack makes it the neutron bomb of moral warfare.  The kind of attack that's meant to surgically remove a specific target group from the debate without doing damage to your own group.  Fist tap Dale.

malcolm at oxford: on goldwater's assertion that ‘extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue'

malcolmxfiles |  Mr. Chairman, tonight is the first night that I’ve have ever had opportunity to be as near to conservatives as I am. And the speaker who preceded me, first I want to thank you for the invitation to come here to the Oxford Union, the speaker who preceded me is one of the best excuses that I know to prove our point concerning the necessity, sometimes, of extremism, in defense of liberty, why it is no vice, and why moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. I don’t say that about him personally, but that type. He’s right, X is not my real name, but if you study history you’ll find why no black man in the western hemisphere knows his real name. Some of his ancestors kidnapped our ancestors from Africa, and took us into the western hemisphere and sold us there. And our names were stripped from us and so today we don’t know who we really are. I am one of those who admit it and so I just put X up there to keep from wearing his name.

And as far as this apartheid charge that he attributed to me is concerned, evidently he has been misinformed. I don’t believe in any form of apartheid, I don’t believe in any form of segregation, I don’t believe in any form of racialism. But at the same time, I don’t endorse a person as being right just because his skin is white, and often times when you find people like this, I mean that type, when a man whom they have been taught is below them has the nerve or firmness to question some of their philosophy or some of their conclusions, usually they put that label on us, a label that is only designed to project an image which the public will find distasteful. I am a Muslim, if there is something wrong with that then I stand condemned. My religion is Islam I believe in Allah, I believe in Mohammed as the apostle of Allah, I believe in brotherhood, of all men, but I don’t believe in brotherhood with anybody who’s not ready to practice brotherhood with our people.

I just take time to make these few things clear because I find that one of the tricks of the west, and I imagine my good friend...or rather that type from the west...one of the tricks of the west is to use or create images, they create images of a person who doesn’t go along with their views and then they make certain that this image is distasteful, and then anything that that person has to say from thereon, from thereon in, is rejected. And this is a policy that has been practiced pretty well, pretty much by the west, it perhaps would have been practiced by others had they been in power, but during recent centuries the west has been in power and they have created the images, and they’ve used these images quite skillfully and quite successfully, that’s why today we need a little extremism in order to straighten a very nasty situation out, or very extremely nasty situation out.

I think the only way one can really determine whether extremism in the defense of liberty is justified, is not to approach it as an American or a European or an African or an Asian, but as a human being. If we look upon it as different types immediately we begin to think in terms of extremism being good for one and bad for another, or bad for one and good for another. But if we look upon it, if we look upon ourselves as human beings, I doubt that anyone will deny that extremism, in defense of liberty, the liberty of any human being, is a value. Anytime anyone is enslaved, or in any way deprived of his liberty, if that person is a human being, as far as I am concerned he is justified to resort to whatever methods necessary to bring about his liberty again.

how does israel compel an old-line bonesman to lie and to grovel?!?!?!?!

rsn |  Kerry scurried to make this apology after his remark was reported by The Daily Beast and condemned by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which said: “Any suggestion that Israel is, or is at risk of becoming, an apartheid state is offensive and inappropriate.”

The only problem with AIPAC’s umbrage – and with Kerry’s groveling – is that Israel has moved decisively in the direction of becoming an apartheid state in which Palestinians are isolated into circumscribed areas, often behind walls, and are tightly restricted in their movements, even as Israel continues to expand settlements into Palestinian territories.

Key members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud government have even advocated annexing the West Bank and confining Palestinians there to small enclaves, similar to what’s already been done to the 1.6 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip where Israel tightly controls entrance of people and access to commodities, including building supplies.

In May 2011, Likud’s deputy speaker Danny Danon outlined the annexation plan in a New York Times op-ed. He warned that if the Palestinians sought United Nations recognition for their own state on the West Bank, Israel should annex the territory. “We could then extend full Israeli jurisdiction to the Jewish communities [i.e. the settlements] and uninhabited lands of the West Bank,” Danon wrote.

As for Palestinian towns, they would become mini-Gazas, cut off from the world and isolated as enclaves with no legal status. “Moreover, we would be well within our rights to assert, as we did in Gaza after our disengagement in 2005, that we are no longer responsible for the Palestinian residents of the West Bank, who would continue to live in their own — unannexed — towns,” Danon wrote.

By excluding these Palestinian ghettos, Jews would still maintain a majority in this Greater Israel. “These Palestinians would not have the option to become Israeli citizens, therefore averting the threat to the Jewish and democratic status of Israel by a growing Palestinian population,” Danon wrote.

In other words, the Israeli Right appears headed toward a full-scale apartheid, if not a form of ethnic cleansing by willfully making life so crushing for the Palestinians that they have no choice but to leave.

Just days after Danon’s op-ed, Netanyahu demonstrated his personal political dominance over the U.S. Congress by addressing a joint session at which Democrats and Republicans competed to see who could jump up fastest and applaud the loudest for everything coming out of the Israeli prime minister’s mouth.

Netanyahu got cheers when he alluded to the religious nationalism that cites Biblical authority for Israel’s right to possess the West Bank where millions of Palestinians now live. Calling the area by its Biblical names, Netanyahu declared, “in Judea and Samaria, the Jewish people are not foreign occupiers.”

Though Netanyahu insisted that he was prepared to make painful concessions for peace, including surrendering some of this “ancestral Jewish homeland,” his belligerent tone suggested that he was moving more down the route of annexation that Danon had charted. Now, with the predictable collapse of Kerry’s peace talks, that road to an expanded apartheid system appears even more likely.

But apartheid already is a feature of Israeli society. As former CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar wrote in 2012, “the Israeli version of apartheid is very similar in important respects to the South African version, and that moral equivalence ought to follow from empirical equivalence. Both versions have included grand apartheid, meaning the denial of basic political rights, and petty apartheid, which is the maintaining of separate and very unequal facilities and opportunities in countless aspects of daily life.

“Some respects in which Israelis may contend their situation is different, such as facing a terrorist threat, do not really involve a difference. The African National Congress, which has been the ruling party in South Africa since the end of apartheid there, had significant involvement in terrorism when it was confronting the white National Party government. That government also saw the ANC as posing a communist threat.

“A fitting accompaniment to the similarities between the two apartheid systems is the historical fact that when the South African system still existed, Israel was one of South Africa’s very few international friends or partners. Israel was the only state besides South Africa itself that ever dealt with the South African bantustans as accepted entities. Israel cooperated with South Africa on military matters, possibly even to the extent of jointly conducting a secret test of a nuclear weapon in a remote part of the Indian Ocean in 1979.”

Yet, Official Washington can’t handle this truth, as the capital of the world’s leading superpower has become a grim version of Alice’s Wonderland in which speaking truth about the well-connected requires immediate apologies while telling half-truths and lies against “designated villains” makes you a proud member of the insider’s club.

black voices employed in media, higher-ed, not-for-profit, and politics only promote race victimization and intellectual pacification

dream&hustle | What incentives are there for Black men not to work? What incentives are there for Black men to be lazy? Or even any inner city / urban male? We brothas can’t get food stamps, we can get free housing, we don’t even get child tax credits so what incentives is Paul Ryan talking about? But Paul Ryan is not who I have a problem with. The problem I’m having with this discussion is the Black politicians and everybody who is claiming how they so offended. Paul Ryan is holding up a “Path to Prosperity” document – do you see any Black politicians holding up any document on this subject matter? 

I have not heard one urban economic policy proposed by any Black politician or so-called pundit on how to find jobs and revenue for Black men in the inner city. All I’m hearing is these same Black people are so “offended” by Paul Ryan comments. This is the problem we see over and over in the African-American community where our people spend too much damn time trying to be “offended” than be offensive about solving problems in our community. Why one of these Black politicians or pundits couldn’t step up and proposed a real solution to Black male unemployment in the inner city and took over the conversation? You know why? Because we Black folks are too interested in whining about being “victims” and whining about how offended we are when someone says something.

piketty shrugged and dashed libertarian ayn rand fantasies...,

rsn |  As you’ll recall, if you watched the movie Titanic, the U.S. had a class of rentiers (rich people who live off property and investments) in the early part of the 20th century who hailed from places like Boston, New York and Philadelphia. They were just as nasty and rapacious as their European counterparts, only there weren’t quite so many of them and their wealth was not quite as concentrated (the Southern rentiers had been wiped out by the Civil War).

The fortunes of these rentiers were not shock-proof: If you remember Hockney, the baddie in James Cameron’s film, he survives the Titanic but not the Great Crash of ’29, when he loses his money and offs himself. The Great Depression got rid of some of the extreme wealth concentration in America, and later the wealthy got hit with substantial tax shocks imposed by the federal government in the 1930s and ’40s. The American rentier class wasn’t really vaporized the way it was in Europe, where the effects of the two world wars were much more pronounced, but it took a hit. That opened up the playing field and gave people more of a chance to rise on the rungs of the economic ladder through talent and work.

After the Great Depression, inequality decreased in America, as New Deal investment and education programs, government intervention in wages, the rise of unions, and other factors worked to give many more people a chance for success. Inequality reached its lowest ebb between 1950 and 1980. If you were looking at the U.S. during that time, it seemed like a pretty egalitarian place to be (though blacks, Hispanics, and many women would disagree).

As Piketty notes, people like Milton Friedman, an academic economist, were doing rather well in the economy, likely sitting in the top 10 percent income level, and to them, the economy appeared to be doing just fine and rewarding talents and merits very nicely. But the Friedmans weren’t paying enough attention to how the folks on the rungs above them, particularly the one percent and even more so the .01 percent, were beginning to climb into the stratosphere. The people doing that climbing were mostly not academic economists, or lawyers, or doctors. They were managers of large firms who had begun to award themselves very prodigious salaries.

This phenomenon really got going after 1980, when wealth started flowing in vast quantities from the bottom 90 percent of the population to the top 10 percent. By 1987, Ayn Rand acolyte Alan Greenspan had taken over as head of the Federal Reserve, and free market fever was unleashed upon America. People in U.S. business schools started reading Ayn Rand’s kooky novels as if they were serious economic treatises and hailing the free market as the only path to progress. John Galt, the hero of Atlas Shrugged(1957), captured the imaginations of young students like Paul Ryan, who worshipped Galt as a superman who could rise to the top through his vision, merit and heroic efforts. Galt became the prototype of the kind of “supermanager” these business schools were supposed to crank out.

Since the ‘80s, the top salaries and pay packages awarded to executives of the largest companies and financial firms in the U.S. have reached spectacular heights. This, coupled with low growth and stagnation of wages for the vast majority of workers, has meant growing inequality. As income from labor gets more and more unequal, income from capital starts to play a bigger role. By the time you get to the .01 percent, virtually all your income comes from capital—stuff like dividends and capital gains. That’s when wealth (what you have) starts to matter more than income (what you earn).

Wealth gathering at the top creates all sorts of problems. Some of these elites will hoard their wealth and fail to do anything productive with it. Others channel it into harmful activities like speculation, which can throw the economy out of whack. Some increase their wealth by preying on the less well-off. As inequality grows, regular people lose their purchasing power. They go into debt. The economy gets destabilized. (Piketty, and many other economists, count the increase in inequality as one of the reasons the economy blew up in 2007-’08.)

By the time you get to 2010, U.S. inequality, according to Piketty’s data, is quantitavely as extreme as in old Europe in the first decade of the 20th century. He predicts that inherited property is going to start to matter more and more in the U.S. as the supermanagers, the Jamie Dimons and so on, bequeath their gigantic hordes of money to their children.

The ironic twist is this: The reason a person like the fictional John Galt would be able to rise from humble beginnings in the 1950s is because the Gilded Age rentiers lost large chunks of their wealth through the shocks the Great Depression and the deliberate government policies that came in its wake, thus loosening their stranglehold on the economy and society. Galt is able to make his fortune precisely because he lives in a society that isn’t dominated by extreme concentrated wealth and dynasties. Yet the logical outcome of an economy in which there is no attempt made to limit the size of fortunes and promote greater equality is a place in which the most likely way John Galt can make a fortune is to marry an heiress. So it was in the Gilded Age. So it may be very soon in America.

isn't it impossible to be violent against the most powerful military political economy on the planet?

bnarchives |  On April 16, 2014, we published a short article in the Indian fortnightly Frontline, titled 'Profit from Crisis'. Scarcely had a day passed from the article’s publication that we got an angry email from an asset manager whom we'll call 'Mr. X'. Mr. X is an enlightened capitalist, and reading our piece had set him on fire. Our article, he protested, was 'terribly flawed'. It 'failed miserably' in understanding capitalism, and its allegation that capitalists do not want recovery is doing 'tremendous harm'. This note deconstructs Mr. X's protestations in the context of the current capitalist angst.

Over the past few years, we have written a series of articles about the global crisis. [1] These papers try to break the conventional constrains of liberalism and Marxism, examining the crisis from the new theoretical viewpoint of capital as power. Capitalists and corporations, we argue, are driven not to maximize profit, but to ‘beat the average’ and increase their differential power. In this approach, the redistribution of income and assets is not a ‘societal’ side effect of the economy, but the central conflict that propels modern capitalism. And the main weapon in this struggle, we claim, is not investment and growth, but what the American political economist Thorstein Veblen called ‘strategic sabotage’ – the restrictions, limitations, hazards and pains that capitalists impose on the rest of society in order to sustain and augment their differential power.

Now, until 2011, distribution was a non-issue. Save for a few ivory-tower experts and justice-seeking activists, nobody spoke about it. It received little media coverage, let alone headlines, and elicited no meaningful debate. But with the global crisis lingering and upward redistribution continuing unfazed, the Occupy slogan ‘We are the 99 percent’ has finally gained traction. Suddenly, inequality and the excesses of the Top 1% are hot commodities, broadcast, discussed and written about all over the media.

The debate itself, though, remains largely conservative. The protest movements succeeded in putting distribution on the political table, but they haven’t figured how to take this achievement forward. So far, they have produced no new policy template, let alone a new theoretical framework, and this vacuum has left the political centre-stage open for policymakers, leading academics and Noble Laureates to recycle their worn-out platitudes.

In order to buck this trend, however symbolically, we wrote a short, pointy article titled ‘Why Capitalists Do Not Want Recovery, and What That Means for America’. The paper delivered a clear massage, backed by two highly contrarian graphs. The graphs showed that, contrary to the conventional creed, both mainstream and heterodox, accumulation thrives on crisis and sabotage. They demonstrated that, over the past century, the capitalist share of U.S. domestic income and the income share of the Top 1% have been tightly correlated not with growth and prosperity, but with unemployment and stagnation.

Looking for a publisher, we started with the two bastions of American liberalism: The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. We sent them the article, free of charge, but neither replied. We then moved to England, emailing the paper to The Guardian. Again, silence. Our last stop was The London Review of Books. This time we got a polite response, stating that the article ‘isn’t quite right for us’.

Clearly, the enlightened capitalist press wasn’t particularly keen on showcasing the power basis of accumulation. The article was too counterintuitive for readers to digest and too politically incorrect for advertisers to subsidize. It suggested that upward redistribution and its associated sabotage were not unfortunate manifestations of ‘social injustice’, but the twin drivers of capital accumulation. And that message, apparently, was unpublishable.

There was no point banging our heads against the wall. It was time to head elsewhere. And since salvation always comes from the East, we turned to the emerging market of India. Unlike in the United States and England, capitalism in India is still being debated, including in the mainstream press. So we submitted the article to Frontline, a fortnightly magazine published by The Hindu Group. And to our pleasant surprise, it was promptly accepted, as is, and appeared in the very next issue (Nitzan and Bichler 2014). One must admit that globalization does have its upsides.

The Letter
Scarcely had a day passed from the article’s publication that we got an angry email from an asset manager whom we’ll call ‘Mr. X’. Mr. X is an enlightened capitalist, and reading our piece had set him on fire. Our article, he protested, was ‘terribly flawed’. It ‘failed miserably’ in understanding capitalism, and its allegation that capitalists do not want recovery is doing ‘tremendous harm’:

uncle pookie not the only one forbidden from telling the truth...,

rsn |  n a closed-room meeting of the Trilateral Commission last Friday, Secretary of State John Kerry warned that Israel is on the verge of becoming an Apartheid state, according to a recording obtained by The Daily Beast.

The remark will raise a firestorm of criticism from Palestine-deniers, who are if anything more blindered and fanatical than climate-change deniers. What is sad is that Kerry phrased it in the future tense. That cow was out of the barn a long time ago.

As the Daily Beast noted, the Rome Statute defined Apartheid as “inhumane acts… committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”

Former South African deputy president Baleka Mbete and African National Congress leader has said that Israel-Palestine is actually “far worse than Apartheid South Africa.”

Israeli society inside 1967 borders is not broadly characterized by Apartheid conditions, though Palestinian-Israelis do labor under legal forms of discrimination. For instance, unless their villagers are “recognized,” they cannot receive water and other municipal services and are threatened with dispersal. Since no Jewish villages are unrecognized, this separate status for (indigenous!) Palestinian-Israeli villages is Apartheid-like. Still, the most thorough comparison of the Apartheid system of racial segregation with Israeli practices can only be made of the West Bank and Gaza, where Palestinians are ruled by Israel but kept stateless and without rights.

bomani jones spits the unvarnished in public and on the air

WaPo | At this point, it does appear likely that Sterling’s time as an owner is finally coming to a close, and not just because of the public outcry. Rather, the comments in the recording are starting to impact the one thing that we know actually gets leagues and owners to take decisive action: money. So far, Virgin America, CarMax, State Farm and Kia have all announced they are ending sponsorships of the Clippers, with others likely to follow. (State Farm runs those omnipresent Cliff Paul ads that feature Chris Paul, the star point guard for the Clippers and the president of the National Basketball Players Association; Blake Griffin, the other star Clipper, has an endorsement deal with Kia.)

These announcements seem to mark the beginning of the end for Sterling. We saw this just a few months ago in Arizona, where a controversial bill would have let businesses deny service to gay customers. The bill was roundly criticized by many businesses, and it seemed like it could have endangered the state’s chances of hosting the next Super Bowl, so the bill was vetoed.

It’s unclear right now what the league will do. The NBA says it will make an announcement on Tuesday. Players have said they want the maximum possible punishment for Sterling. NBA commissioner Adam Silver (who took that job in February) referenced “broad powers in place under the NBA’s constitutional bylaws” in discussing what sanctions could follow an investigation.

We don’t know what is actually in these bylaws because they aren’t public (something taxpayers should remember the next time an NBA team asks for millions to upgrade their arena). But Jeffrey Kessler, a sports lawyer who participated in talks during the NBA’s lockout in 2011 (amid some controversy), said he thinks the league could force the team’s sale. (Kessler also said it doesn’t matter if the recording was made illegally, because the NBA “is not a court of law.”) And Michael McCann noted that even though forcibly removing Sterling is unlikely, the NBA could just suspend him indefinitely.

The NBA will hold a news conference on Tuesday at 2 p.m. The Clippers host the Golden State Warriors for Game 5 of their playoff series a little more than eight hours later.  Fist tap Dorcas Dad.

from the kwaku net: pookie's very last day on the job, ever...,

Donald Sterling, thank you for your honesty (they are the enemy/ that was his words in the audio) and the players take the court 24 HOURS later in the hunt for a championship and most black men turn on the TV and watch….. That says it all. (That showed how absolute power works and the difference between an owner and an employee) and how dumbed down the consumers have become and how much control sports have over the masses.

Donald Sterling said he did not want you in his arena, what part of that did you not understand? There is no need for a  great debate or some public apologies and the last thing we needed  was to let Doc Rivers have his let’s have a team meeting moment or chicken George AKA Charles BARKLEY opinion or any other coonery there was an opportunity to take a stand and once again we chose to be the cowards that we have become, from this point on if you are a black man in America shut the hell up and get back to work……  you race of cowards you race of good for nothings.

Black men are real tough when it comes to fighting and killing each other and tearing down their community and marrying white women and buying  Jordan’s and flooding our community with bastard babies but when it comes to fighting against white supremacy you become cowards….  Most Black man have become a Joke around the world….. Useless creatures, powerless modern slaves.   

We need more Donald Sterling moments and maybe channels on the idiotic box (TV) were all they do is let billionaires speak truth without emotional intelligence and allow the truth to flow like water. 

The masses are not only sleep they have fallen into a coma and the players taking the court on sunday were more despicable then a billionaire speaking his truth, there is nothing they can do to Donald Sterling he is not Pac man Jones.  He is the OWNER worst case they vote him out the league…… so what, he is still a billionaire and will push his agenda behind closed doors……. That is the reality of a billionaire vs the reality of peasant employees, Doc Rivers and the clipper players are no more then hired help.  If you don’t know what that looks like watch the game tonight and watch the LA Mandingo Clippers play in the LA plantation coliseum. We need more Donald Sterling moments.   

LeBron had the nerve to say this is our league we are a league of 80% black men….. Shut the hell up you don’t own a damn thing get your ass back in the lay-up line before we turn this into a whites only league boy, if it was not for white men you boys would not have a league, you don’t own a damn thing.

Black AMERICA needs to stop it. You don’t own any thing.  Get back in line and wait for the next game to come on the Idiot box, idiots.  There is nothing you can do because you are a powerless people. Don’t fool yourself the only thing that can really happen is Donald Sterling agrees to move on because it is no longer worth the trouble….. That’s it. 

First you get the money and then you get the power, he has the power and the money and the idea of hundreds of millions of other white men and he said the truth in the audio (I feed and clothe all of them) the truth hurts does it black America. We hate the truth but the lies are killing us slowly thank you Mr. Donald Sterling for allowing the world to see what absolute power looks like live in HD. 

Black Folk don’t even have a platform that is black owned to talk about this subject, if you are getting your information from ESPN and Stephan A Smith and crew - you need your ASS kicked….if they speak one ounce of truth they are fired. Stay in your lane.  You are in employee not the owner of ESPN we all know who owns that.

We are a group without power and there are many sick cowards in the village and I had to avoid listening or reading the response from Black men over the weekend. It was a lot of noise and slave talk and very little empowerment talk. Until we start practicing black empowerment like every other group does, and start owning things like white America does, and collaborating together like the Asians do, shut the hell up and watch the game you group of buffoons.

Time to move past watching sports....

The best thing that happened over the weekend for me, I had no idea that any of this was going on with the Clippers until after the fact. 

I have not watched any NBA this year and will never watch another game outside of a social environment where I have no control over the content.  I have no idea what is going on in the world of sports outside of sports law, social political and sports business - and I believe I will keep it that way.

I stop watching ESPN two years ago and the NBA/NFL/MLB is about to be on the same level as BET and MTV at my house permanently blocked…..have not watched that garbage in over five years. Time for a some new outlets.  Sports is a big soap opera and there is a lot of Shuckin' and jiving' going on in the world of sports.

There is a group in America that is not playing games and you will not find any of them in the layup line or the tackling drills in the NFL because they will leave that to the Mandingos because they are too busy owning and controlling the world. They own everything we do and every move we make.  If you like it or not, that is the reality of the game, no one cares about black rage because like he said……. we still own you.

Thank you once again Donald Sterling for teaching the real game it’s not called Basketball or football or baseball it’s called unapologetic power in the land of capitalism and if you don’t like it - who gives a damn?

tokowitz(sterling) a sad old shakespearian cuckold with "a" bullying iago?

powerlineblog |  The more you learn about the story, the stranger it gets. If you listen to the tapes, which have been made public by TMZ and Deadspin, it is hard to make sense of them. Sterling doesn’t want Stiviano to put up photos of herself with African-Americans on Instagram or bring them with her to Los Angeles Clippers games. He says he doesn’t care if she associates or sleeps with black people, just don’t put them up on Instagram. An odd distinction! His request was motivated, evidently, by the fact that one or more of Sterling’s friends called him to comment on the Instagram photos. While Sterling never says this, reading between the lines it appears that someone must have teased him about his mistress consorting with blacks. 

What makes this bizarre is that Stiviano herself if black and Mexican, a fact that she reminds Sterling of during their argument. The situation is otherworldly, in that Sterling seems not to have noticed that his own girlfriend is black.

So Donald Sterling emerges as a pathetic figure: a reverse image of Othello, a doddering old man with a young black mistress who cheats on him. He understands, but asks her not to embarrass him before his friends. He may also be suffering from dementia. For a billionaire, he makes precious little sense on the tape(s). But then, most of us probably wouldn’t make much sense to outsiders if tapes of our domestic arguments were made public. Not a single person has defended Sterling, to my knowledge.

So an 80-year-old man with a much younger, mixed-race girlfriend is sexually insecure–go figure! He has a friend, a negative-image Iago, who plays on his insecurity and teases him when the mistress posts pictures with black men, however innocent they may be. So the old man asks her not to do it. She can spend all day with black men and even sleep with them, he says, just don’t post photos or attend Clippers games with them. But the young woman already has one foot out the door, and she illegally records her conversation with the old man, and then turns it over to two of the most disreputable gossip sites on the internet.

On the tape, Donald Sterling says, “I love the black people.” I can’t vouch for his sincerity, but there is nothing in the DMZ/Deadspin tapes that belies that sentiment. It is telling that this domestic upheaval between an aging billionaire and his gold-digging, disloyal mistress represents the best the Left can come up with to support its claim that racism and the “legacy of race and slavery and segregation” are alive and well. As for Sterling, he is merely collateral damage.

should I reconsider my disdain for the lowly sex-worker?

yahoo |  We already know plenty about Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, by the numbers the worst owner in major professional sports and the target of a torrent of lawsuits regarding his off-court business dealings and conduct. But what about the other alleged voice on the tape? What do we know about V. Stiviano, Sterling's frequent guest at Clippers games?

Her real name is Vivian. Perhaps. Stiviano changed her name from Vanessa Maria Perez in 2010, claiming in court filings that she had not "yet been fully accepted because of my race." She claims to be of both Hispanic and African-American descent."One day I will look back at Instagram & say,'I've been there & I've done that.' I do it all," she says on her Instagram page, billing herself as "Artist,Lover,Writer,Chef,Poet, Stylist, Philanthropist." Of note: a lawsuit filed against her by Sterling's wife (more on this later) names her as "V Stiviano, aka Vanessa Maria Perez, aka Monica Gallegos, aka Maria Monica Perez Gallegos, aka Maria Valdez.”

She's a social-media maven. The popularity of her Instagram page, the source of this latest controversy, has exploded, and now stands at more than 144,000 followers. That makes this a bad time for her website to be simply a parked GoDaddy domain.

She is the target of a lawsuit from Sterling's wife. Most of the information about the 31-year-old Stiviano derives from court papers related to a lawsuit filed by the 80-year-old Sterling's estranged wife Rochelle. The lawsuit, filed in March, claims that Sterling met Stiviano at the Super Bowl in 2010, and that Stiviano “engages in conduct designed to target, befriend, seduce and then entice, cajole, borrow from, cheat and/or receive as gifts transfers of wealth from wealthy older men.” The suit charges that Rochelle Sterling believed the $1.8 million duplex in which Stiviano now resides was being purchased in the Sterlings' names, and that Stiviano has received gifts including four cars (two Bentleys, one Ferrari, and one Range Rover) and about $240,000 in "living expenses." The allegation, then, is that Donald Sterling gave Stiviano about $2 million in community property without Rochelle Sterling's knowledge.

She claims she didn't release the tape to TMZ. Stiviano's attorney, Mac Nehoray, said in a statement that Stiviano "did not release the tape to any news media. Due to the present litigation [from Rochelle Sterling] and its absurd allegations, which Ms. Stiviano vehemently denies, Ms. Stiviano and this office have no comments at this time.”

She hasn't admitted to being Sterling's girlfriend. "Neither Ms. Stiviano, nor this office has ever alleged that Ms. Stiviano is, or ever was, Mr. Sterling's girlfriend," Nehoray said in a statement. Stiviano further countered Rochelle Sterling's claims that she bewitched Sterling, saying in court papers that it was absurd to believe the "feminine wiles of Ms. Stiviano overpowered the iron will of Donald T. Sterling who is well known as one of the most shrewd businessmen in the world." However, she has been listed as a director of the Donald T. Sterling Foundation.

kareem didn't do jeet kune do very well either...,

time |  And now the poor guy’s girlfriend (undoubtedly ex-girlfriend now) is on tape cajoling him into revealing his racism. Man, what a winding road she led him down to get all of that out. She was like a sexy nanny playing “pin the fried chicken on the Sambo.” She blindfolded him and spun him around until he was just blathering all sorts of incoherent racist sound bites that had the news media peeing themselves with glee.

They caught big game on a slow news day, so they put his head on a pike, dubbed him Lord of the Flies, and danced around him whooping.

I don’t blame them. I’m doing some whooping right now. Racists deserve to be paraded around the modern town square of the television screen so that the rest of us who believe in the American ideals of equality can be reminded that racism is still a disease that we haven’t yet licked.

What bothers me about this whole Donald Sterling affair isn’t just his racism. I’m bothered that everyone acts as if it’s a huge surprise. Now there’s all this dramatic and very public rending of clothing about whether they should keep their expensive Clippers season tickets. Really? All this other stuff I listed above has been going on for years and this ridiculous conversation with his girlfriend is what puts you over the edge? That’s the smoking gun?

He was discriminating against black and Hispanic families for years, preventing them from getting housing. It was public record. We did nothing. Suddenly he says he doesn’t want his girlfriend posing with Magic Johnson on Instagram and we bring out the torches and rope. Shouldn’t we have all called for his resignation back then?

Shouldn’t we be equally angered by the fact that his private, intimate conversation was taped and then leaked to the media? Didn’t we just call to task the NSA for intruding into American citizen’s privacy in such an un-American way? Although the impact is similar to Mitt Romney’s comments that were secretly taped, the difference is that Romney was giving a public speech. The making and release of this tape is so sleazy that just listening to it makes me feel like an accomplice to the crime. We didn’t steal the cake but we’re all gorging ourselves on it.

the story of America's rise to power starting in 1959 using nothing but archive footage and American pop music

America, the media, the apologists, the enablers: "We don't know if the tape is legitimate": RIGHT!!!

WaPo | Salters asked Shelly if it was her husband’s voice on the tape released Saturday by TMZ. “I don’t know,” Shelly Sterling said. “I haven’t listened to the entire thing, but I do believe there are some parts that were cut out. I will let the experts handle that.”

Deadspin has an extended version of the recording that’s 15 minutes long.

Shelley Sterling is suing V. Stiviano, her estranged husband’s girlfriend and the woman whose voice is on the recordings released to TMZ, in a lawsuit that predates the tape. Shelly states that she believes Stiviano “engages in conduct designed to target, befriend, seduce, and then entice, cajole, borrow from, cheat, and/or receive as gifts transfers of wealth from wealthy older men whom she targets for such purpose,” according to a copy of the lawsuit posted online by EveryJoe.com.

Basically, Shelly Sterling thinks her husband’s girlfriend is a gold digger, and she wants a judge to declare the same.

Stiviano is also identified by the aliases Vanessa Maria Perez, Monica Gallegos, Maria Monica Perez Gallegos, and Maria Valdez.

The lawsuit, filed in superior court for Los Angeles County on March 7, appears to be Shelley Sterling suing for the return of gifts her husband gave to Stiviano, which she’s asking be considered community property. The list includes a 2012 Ferrari, two Bentleys and a 2013 Range Rover, along with $240,000 in living expenses. Essentially, Shelly is saying Donald didn’t have the right to give the gifts, so Stiviano should return them. Stiviano has refused. Earlier reports, based on a statement by the Clippers, said that Sterling was suing Stiviano for embezzling $1.8 million from the Clippers. However, there’s no mention of this in the lawsuit, only the $1.8 million Los Angeles duplex Sterling bought for his girlfriend.

Said the Associated Press:

Clippers President Andy Roeser said in a statement that the team did not know if the tape is legitimate or has been altered. He said the woman on the tape, identified by TMZ as V. Stiviano, “is the defendant in a lawsuit brought by the Sterling family alleging that she embezzled more than $1.8 million, who told Mr. Sterling that she would ‘get even.’”

why did stern and silber turn a blind eye to the slumlord billionaire all this time?

Donald Sterling -- NEW AUDIO RELEASED ... I Put Food on Black People's Tables

rsn |  Sterling is narcissistic and CliffsNotes literate enough to present himself as a self-made Gatsbian figure. He even has “white parties” at his Bevery Hills home where guests all wear white “like in the book.” He’s a Gatsbian who never read The Great Gatsby. Jay Gatsby was running from his past, hiding his rough background behind the artifice of taste and wealth. Sterling presents himself as the tony developer of high-end properties in the Hollywood Hills, and plays it much closer to the street. Sterling is also the Slumlord Billionaire, a man who made his fortune by building low-income housing, and then, according to a Justice Department lawsuit, developing his own racial quota system to decide who gets the privilege of renting his properties. In November of 2009, Sterling settled the suit with the US Department of Justice for $2.73 million, the largest ever obtained by the government in a discrimination case involving apartment rentals. Reading the content of the suit makes you want to shower with steel wool. Sterling just said no to rent to non-Koreans in Koreatown and just said hell-no to African-Americans looking for property in plush Beverly Hills. Sterling, who has a Blagojevichian flair for the language, says he did not like to rent to “Hispanics” because “Hispanics smoke, drink and just hang around the building.” He also stated that “black tenants smell and attract vermin.”

The Slumlord Billionaire has a healthy legal paper trail, which creates a collage of someone very good at extorting rents from the very poor. In 1986, the spiking of rents in his Beverly Hills properties—the so-called “slums of Beverly Hills”—led to a large march by tenants on City Hall.

Former NBA commissioner David Stern, always so PR-conscious when it comes to where players mingle, how players dress, whom players consort with after hours, has turned a blind eye to this disturbing pattern. Now these chickens have returned to Stern’s back porch to roost. There is a second racism lawsuit buzzing around Sterling’s helmet of hair.

Sterling’s other lawsuit comes from inside his own NBA offices: his long-time general manager Elgin Baylor. Baylor, an NBA legend with the Los Angeles Lakers, has spent more than two decades making a series of personnel decisions that have ranged from depressing to enraging. Baylor’s was called without irony by a television commentator as “veteran of the lottery process” watching the ping-pong balls bounce around to see who gets the number-one pick. The Clippers draft picks under Baylor’s tenure—and their entire roster—have largely been a dyspeptic horror show. According to Baylor, one reason for their continued ineptitude was Sterling in telling Baylor he wanted to fill his team with “poor black boys from the South and a white head coach.” 

10 things I learned about the world from ayn rand's insane atlas shrugged...,

rsn |  ver the past year, I've been reading and reviewing Ayn Rand's massive paean to capitalism [3], Atlas Shrugged. If you're not familiar with the novel, it depicts a world where corporate CEOs and one-percenters are the selfless heroes upon which our society depends, and basically everyone else — journalists, legislators, government employees, the poor — are the villains trying to drag the rich down out of spite, when we should be kissing their rings in gratitude that they allow us to exist.

Rand's protagonists are Dagny Taggart, heir to a transcontinental railroad empire, and Hank Rearden, the head of a steel company who's invented a revolutionary new alloy which he's modestly named Rearden Metal. Together, they battle against evil government bureaucrats and parasitic socialists to hold civilization together, while all the while powerful industrialists are mysteriously disappearing, leaving behind only the cryptic phrase "Who is John Galt?"

Atlas Shrugged is a work of fiction, but as far as many prominent conservatives are concerned, it's sacred scripture. Alan Greenspan was a member of Rand's inner circle, and opposed regulation of financial markets because he believed her dictum that the greed of businessmen was always the public's best protection. Paul Ryan said that he required his campaign staffers to read the book, while Glenn Beck has announced grandiose plans to build his own real-life "Galt's Gulch," the hidden refuge where the book's capitalist heroes go to watch civilization collapse without them.

Reading Atlas Shrugged is like entering into a strange mirror universe where everything we thought we knew about economics and morality is turned upside down. I've already learned some valuable lessons from it.

who is calling donald sterling and breaking his balls?!?!? everything else is frivolous conversation....,

cbssports |  Deadspin.com has obtained a longer version of the tape that contains a man alleged to be Donald Sterling making, somehow, even more disturbingly racist comments than the version released by TMZ on Saturday. In the 15-minute cut of the tape that features discussions of Dodgers outfielder Matt Kemp, Israel, and the Holocaust, the man alleged to be Sterling makes it clear he feels he does enough for the black players he employs:

V: I don't understand, I don't see your views. I wasn't raised the way you were raised.
DS: Well then, if you don't feel -- don't come to my games. Don't bring black people, and don't come.
V: Do you know that you have a whole team that's black, that plays for you?
DS: You just, do I know? I support them and give them food, and clothes, and cars, and houses. Who gives it to them? Does someone else give it to them? Do I know that I have—Who makes the game? Do I make the game, or do they make the game? Is there 30 owners, that created the league?

via Exclusive: The Extended Donald Sterling Tape.

national association for the advancement of certain people been licking and sucking them crusty toes for years...,

IBT | In a tweet Saturday evening, the California state NAACP, said: "As the investigation is in progress, we urge the LA Branch of the NAACP to withdraw Donald Sterling from the honoree list." The president of the California state NAACP, Alice Huffman, said, "Racism is not a footnote of our past but a reality of our present we must confront head on."

Despite Sterling's long history of racism, he has been honored twice previously by the NAACP's Los Angeles chapter. He was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009, shortly after former Clippers general manager, Elgin Baylor, filed an employment discrimination claim against him. Sterling also received the NAACP Presidents Award in 2008.

The branch's president, Leon Jenkins, attempted in 2009 to explain why the august civil rights group would honor a man many consider a racist. Jenkins began, by telling the Los Angeles Times, that the NAACP's Los Angeles chapter had planned to honor Sterling long before Baylor’s lawsuit. Seeming to sense the inadequacy of that response, Jenkins added the Clippers owner and real estate mogul's years of service to Los Angeles minority community.

“He has a unique history of giving to the children of L.A.,” Jenkins told the Los Angeles Times, then. "We can't speak to the allegations, but what we do know is that for the most part [Sterling] has been very, very kind to the minority youth community."

Sterling is no stranger to racism accusations and has settled several discrimination lawsuits. He settled a lawsuit confidentially in 2005 that accused him of discriminating against black and Hispanic tenants at properties he owned. In another housing discrimination lawsuit in 2009, he paid $2.7 million to settle the claim. Sterling denied wrongdoing and said the settlement wasn't an admission of guilt, according to the L.A. Times.

cliven bundy a saint: old lizard likes its crusty toes sucked and licked....,

nydailynews | Eighty-year-old rich man dictates life's terms to younger woman, tells her what she can and cannot do. Sex with black men? OK. Hanging out publicly with black men? Not OK.

Ick. Nobody seems to mind that part of the tape, those paternalistic, sexist ramblings. And none of it should come as a surprise, because Sterling's disrespect for women, verging on the criminal, has been on display and purposefully ignored for more than a decade. In 2003, he sued a mistress, Alexandra Castro, demanding back property she claimed he'd given her. In a deposition obtained and made public by TheSmokingGun.com back in August, 2004, Sterling's graphic, repulsive testimony was shockingly Neanderthal — and earned him no suspension from David Stern.

In excerpts from that two-day pretrial deposition, Sterling talks about how he enjoyed having his feet licked and toes sucked. And he goes a lot further:

"The girl was providing sex for money," Sterling said. "She was exciting. It was exciting. I have to tell you, and it was good. And it was delicious, and it was the best of the best. And maybe I morally did something wrong… I probably didn't tell my wife."

 There are also parts of his testimony in which his total disdain for women is horribly apparent:

"The girl always cried, never had any money, always talked about sex, 24 hours a day, when she talked to me, talked about sex and how I was so cheap. She just stripped every time you saw the woman. I have never seen anything like it in my life.

"I wouldn't have a child and certainly not with that piece of trash. Come on. This girl is the lowest form… She is a freak. A total freak… She would say anything I asked her to say, and I would say anything she asked me to say. It was purely sex for money, money for sex, sex for money, money for sex."

At one point, Sterling was asked whether he called Castro, "honey."

"I call everybody (that)," he said. "Every secretary is honey. I'm a very flowery man. If you are having sex with a woman you are paying for, you always call her honey because you can't remember her name."

babylon bubbling...,

cnn |  The racism controversy embroiling Don Sterling, the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, has reached half way around the world to Malaysia, where President Obama is on a diplomatic mission to Asia Pacific nations.

At a press conference with Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak Sunday, Obama was asked about racist comments Sterling allegedly made about African Americans.

"When ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance, you don't really have to do anything, you just let them talk. That's what happened here," the President said.

Obama also said Sterling's alleged comments are an example of how "the United States continues to wrestle with the legacy of race and slavery and segregation."

"That's still there, the vestiges of discrimination. We've made enormous strides, but you're going to continue to see this percolate up every so often," Obama said in Malaysia.

Sterling, who has owned the basketball franchise for nearly three decades, is now under investigation by the NBA over the alleged comments.

According to the website TMZ, Sterling made the discriminatory remarks during a 10-minute argument he had with girlfriend V. Stiviano on April 9. TMZ posted a recording of the argument online Friday.

If authentic, the remarks seem to reflect Sterling's embarrassment and frustration with Stiviano over her associating with African-Americans at Clippers games and for posting such pictures on her Instagram account.