May 7, 2014

"Mike Milken was history’s greatest feminist"

As you may have noticed from reading the news recently, Southern California is full of trophy properties -- e.g., the L.A. Clippers, the Beverly Hills Hotel, the L.A. Dodgers -- owned by rich men and coveted by other rich men. You may ask: how do we remember which rich guys are History's Greatest Monsters (Donald T. Sterling, the Sultan of Brunei) and which are the Ultimate Cleanser, Supporter of the Middle Eastern Peace Process, or History's Greatest Feminist (respectively, Magic Johnson, Haim Saban, and, now, Michael Milken)? 

But I reply: I don't understood your question. Why do you ask? What are you trying to imply? Do you have some reason for wanting to know? The reason we are shown articles like the two below is because, obviously, the facts of the matter bear only one interpretation.

From the Jewish Journal:
American business magnate Michael Milken is a feminist
by Danielle Berrin
5 days ago

Among his many titles - financial genius, convicted felon, consummate philanthropist – it turns out the “junk bond king” Michael Milken has a thing for women, just not in that usual Wall Street way. 
During the 2014 Milken Global Conference held in Beverly Hills last week, a three-day confab for business titans focused on the future of the world, Milken repeatedly used his public platform to celebrate the achievements and contributions of women. 
It began at a small cocktail gathering for women on Wednesday evening, featuring an impressive panel of business leaders including PR Crisis Manager Judy Smith (upon whom the character Olivia Pope from ABC’s “Scandal” is based and who, most famously, handled the scandal of all scandals, the Clinton/Lewinsky affair), Nancy Dubuc, the president and CEO of A+E Networks, and Molly Ashby, CEO of Solera Capital LLC on Wall Street. 
Milken was one of a handful of men to attend. Although his public appearances were mainly reserved for the larger, headlining panels, Milken made a point of taking the stage to offer a personal editorial on women’s progress in the business world. Looking back on his more than four-decade career, he recounted a history of gender inequality in the financial industry. 
During the 1980s, when he was in a career transition, Milken said he spent three months consulting for a financial firm. When he met with the lead partner at the firm, he asked him, “Who is the smartest person here?” The partner replied—(duh)--“Me.” 
Three months later, after Milken had assessed the company, he went back to that same partner with some unexpected news: “You’re not the smartest person here,” Milken recalled saying. That title belonged to a woman Milken had met in another department who was not only financially savvy but tech savvy – and had become one of the first in her field to computerize the tax code. 
“Why isn’t she a partner?” Milken lobbed at the head of the firm. On stage, Milken widened his eyes and gave a little smirk. “A Woooomaaaaan?” he mimicked the partner as saying in response, “as partner?” His voice rose and fell in mock astonishment. 
In those days, female partnership at major financial firms was so infrequent that is was as shocking as it was unfair. Milken then rattled off some statistics about female advancement over the years, bragging about the many women who work for him. 
He offered truly lavish praise for Milken Institute managing director Mindy Silverstein, who sat among the hundred or so women in the audience. 
“She’s my boss,” Milken said with obvious reverence. He noted her round-the-clock work hours, early morning emails and meticulous conference planning. He told the crowd that it was Silverstein who had invited him to an illustrious dinner with a foreign head of state earlier that week, which was a little hard to believe considering Milken’s own venerable clout. And yet, that was how it happened: “Keep inviting me to those dinners,” he told her, looking over as she gleamed. ...
Again, Milken made a fuss over women – this time, in front of the entire conference – talking about how far women have come, how a record 1,000-plus women had registered and attended the Global Conference this year etc., etc., before giving Napolitano the courtesy of the first introduction. And the first opportunity to speak. 
I’ve never met Michael Milken face to face. But after hearing his overtures to women at Global Conference, I want to.

I've met Milken face to face. I had a five-minute conversation with him once at a Milken Global Conference. It was a little like talking to a hyper-intelligent space reptile who is trying hard to act friendly toward the Earthlings upon whose planet he is stranded.

From Quartz:
Nobel economist Gary Becker showed that Mike Milken was history’s greatest feminist 
By Noah Smith 7 hours ago 
Noah Smith is an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University. His blog is Noahpinion.

Gary Becker, who passed away this week, was a man who changed the field of economics. ...

One tradeoff Becker thought a lot about was workplace discrimination. Suppose that managers and executives are racist or sexist—for whatever reason, they just don’t want to hire women and minorities, or to pay them what they’re worth (pretty realistic, if you ask me). But this discrimination doesn’t come without a cost. If one company pays women and minorities less than they produce, they could jump ship. With a highly productive and relatively cheap workforce of women and minorities, a fair-minded company could out-compete a discriminatory company and drive it out of business.

Unless, of course, it can’t. Becker theorized that regulation and other government protections can shield discriminatory companies against attack. That would protect the jobs of the people who worked at those old-line companies, but would perpetuate workplace unfairness in the process.

In other words, Becker thought that competition kills discrimination. Open up the floodgates of dog-eat-dog capitalism, and women and minorities will win greater equality in the workplace.

If you’ve ever marveled at the progress women have made in the US economy, you can’t help but be intrigued by this story. After all, it was around 1980 that women really started to win economic equality.

Give or take 10 or 15 years, but who can remember all the way back to the 1970s? It's easy to make up theories about eras you don't have any feel for based on a few statistics that you don't understand.
... What happened in the early ’80s? Laws mandating “equal pay for equal work” had been around since the early 1960s, but the gap hadn’t budged. The feminist movement had been shifting cultural norms for decades, but why should it suddenly score big economic breakthroughs in the relatively conservative 1980s after years of frustration?

One explanation for women’s sudden success is that Becker was right. The early ’80s saw a wave of deregulation, and the start of a steady increase in trade as a percent of GDP. It also saw the advent of new forms of finance, designed to take power out of the hands of managers and put it in the hands of shareholders.

Remember the movie Wall Street, when Gordon Gekko declared that “greed is good”? The real-life version of Gordon Gekko was Mike Milken, the “junk bond king.” Milken and his firm, Drexel Burnham Lambert, pioneered the use of high-yielding “junk bonds” to finance corporate takeovers. Boosted by Milken’s financial engineering and a helpful 1982 Supreme Court ruling, corporate takeovers exploded in the 1980s. America’s managers and executives saw their cozy empires come under assault. Corporatism went into decline, and shareholder capitalism went into ascendance.

Under the triple assault of shareholder capitalism, deregulation, and globalization, corporate America at first withered, laying off millions in the ’80s. The old social contract, where large safe companies gave long-term safe jobs to millions of working Americans (mostly white men), broke down. Inequality and insecurity rose.

“Neoliberals” usually claim that these unfortunate changes were justified by the economic growth they produced. But if Becker was right, then the unrestrained capitalism unleashed in the 1980s had another unexpected benefit—increased gender equality.

If Becker was right, then Mike Milken was one of history’s most important feminists. ...

Was Becker right? Was Mike Milken – that unlikely feminist hero, whose firm was itself notoriously sexist, who was thrown in jail for fraud–actually America’s most important agent of gender equality? We’ll never know for sure. We should never discount the importance of the feminist movement, which at the very least prepared society to accept rapid changes in gender roles, and probably also contributed to the changes in the workplace. But neither should we ignore the positive side effects of unrestrained capitalism. In the end, bigotry doesn’t pay.

Follow Noah on Twitter @noahpinion. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.
    
As we can tell from all those black women Milken employed as his frontmen in leveraged buyout raids, and the highly feminist "no wives" night he hosted at a private bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel during his annual High Yield Conference. Milken took a stand against traditional gender roles by not letting his 100 top clients bring their idle hausfrau wives, instead introducing them at the party to young, liberated working women for some all-night consciousness raising.

Wikipedia has a handy list of the dramatis personae in Connie Bruck's 1988 book about Milken, The Predators' Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the Junk Bond Raiders, and a quick glance shows just how committed Milken was to the cause of women and racial minorities:
Seriously, there was a definite "identity group liberation movement" aspect to Milkenism, but it didn't have much to do with women or blacks.

(There was, though, one black Milken frontman, Reginald F. Lewis, who made the Forbes 400 in 1992 before dying of a brain tumor -- this dealmaker's death set off a brief panic that the new cell phones could give you brain cancer.)
       

95 comments:

anony-mouse said...

Space reptile?

Well it'll be one way to smoke out any Icke-ites here.

Rifleman said...

...a quick glance shows just how committed Milken was to the cause of women and racial minorities:

OK, time for someone to count up the percentage of the "Predators" who are Jewish males.

For the sake of equality and diversity of course.

Anonymous said...

"Milken and his firm, Drexel Burnham Lambert, pioneered the use of high-yielding “junk bonds” to finance corporate takeovers. America’s managers and executives saw their cozy empires come under assault. Corporatism went into decline, and shareholder capitalism went into ascendance.
Under the triple assault of shareholder capitalism, deregulation, and globalization, corporate America at first withered, laying off millions in the ’80s. The old social contract, where large safe companies gave long-term safe jobs to millions of working Americans (mostly white men), broke down. Inequality and insecurity rose."

Very sneaky.

'Feminism' here is codeword for Jewish elites, metrosexual libs, homos, and urban elites.

According to the article, you'd think Milken hurt the corporate elites. But in fact, the Milken shakeup was welcome to the corporate heads since they could go for killer profits.

Traditional corporatism didn't mean what it means today: plutocratic domination of NY financiers and Silicon Valley. Traditional corporatism meant contractualism and mutualism between corporate elites and their work force. It meant national social-capitalism summed up in 'what is good for general motors is good for America'.

So, Milken didn't end corporatism but ended traditional corporatism and birthed neo-corporatism based on globalism. Thus, corporate heads were no longer bound to American workers. They could work the entire world. They could reap ever bigger profits.

Rich got richer. But since this doesn't sound so good and 'progressive', the article tries to justify neo-corporatism by saying it was good for women. But what kind of women? Elite Ivy league women or for working class women, the kind Pat Buchanan met who were laid off as their factories were sent to China, Mexico, or India?
And with so many middle class and working class white men no longer able to work and take care of their families, middle class and working class women couldn't spend as much time with their kids and raise families. They had to work long hours as motel maids and checkout clerks to make ends meet.
But they, they could get cheap stuff at Walmart. But hey, they got out of the house to work! Feminism!

'Feminism' was always about elitist women. Take 'take your daughter to work day'. It's only fun for rich women with cool jobs. What mother with factory or clerical job will take her daughter to that? Or a job at a fish gutting plant?

But GOP and American cons were to blame too. When Milken was doing this, GOP and American cons were all for it. They snubbed their noses at the working class and middle class. They were all for urban yuppies and free trade, so sure that the newly rich urban class would be pro-GOP since conservatism was all about success and money.

Well... yuppies begat the creative class or creass, so preening in their privilege and self-righteousness, like those Harvard Jerks with privilege bitching about privilege, which makes me wanna throw up.

But even more pathetic is the sight of unprivileged white cons standing up for the privilege of the UGLE or urban global liberal elites. Why is Ann Coulter championing stop-and-frisk-the-negro? I say let the negroes whup them UGLE. UGLE always be calling us 'racist'. Okay, then let them love the Negro fist.

Handle said...

The Palestinians accuse the Israelis of 'Pink-Washing' (instead of white-washing) when they try to excuse some controversial behavior by highlighting their enlightened and liberal attitude towards gay rights. Tel Aviv is The Castro on the Levant, but just try being openly gay in Gaza City, even with that awesome beach.

That is, the Israelis, in an attempt to make themselves more popular in the West, try to distinguish themselves as more deserving of sympathy because they are more progressive and enlightened whereas many Palestinians are retrograde and violent Islamist fanatics (AKA, 'moderates' in that part of the world).

The American version of Pinkwashing is, apparently, for an obvious and incorrigible chauvinist to get other people to push the message that he's the world's most unlikely - er, I mean 'greatest' - feminist.

There needs to be a catchy quip for this: The leveraging of braindead PC-sanctimony to rehabilitate your own reputation and/or baiting your opponents into scandals of heresy in order to force them to liquidate their trophies.

TGGP said...

I don't think you're necessarily disagreeing with Noah Smith, who you even quote claiming his firm was "notoriously sexist". I disagree with Noah on a number of things (his understanding of history is often shallow and simply defaults to the conventional wisdom), but I think he does have a point that there was a large influx of women into the workplace which can't easily be explained by explicitly pro-woomen laws. And American style "shareholder capitalism" really is somewhat distinct from what you'll find in Germany or Japan.

Anonymous 6:05, the percent of women in the labor force has gone up over time. It's male labor force participation that has gone down.

Anonymous said...

Note that both of these articles were written by Jews.

Uncle Peregrine said...

One reason people in Los Angeles are turning against the Sultan of Brunei for introducing sharia back home is that his personal habits are well known locally. Here is a Larry King interview of Heidi Fleiss:

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0202/08/lkl.00.html

KING: What's your biggest regret, Heidi? FLEISS: I should have taken that deal at the sultan of Brunei, you know.

KING: What was the deal?

FLEISS: Right when -- this goes back to hooker days, though...

KING: What was the deal?

FLEISS: I got the phone call from the two women who when this first started and no one knew about it yet, about all the girls going over there. And I got a phone call from these two women...

KING: You sent a whole bunch of girls over to the...

FLEISS: These two women were in charge of it. They said they heard about me, and they wanted to get in touch with a couple of girls that I worked with. And they asked me to -- if I wanted to hook up with them and join in on it. And I was like, I just don't feel comfortable sending a girl over there. What if something went wrong? I wouldn't know what happened, what to do or anything.

But if I did it, I think that I would have got caught and I would have made maybe instead of $10 million, $200 million. It's just a greedy thing.

KING: The sultan of Brunei would have taken care of you?

FLEISS: Oh, the sultan of Brunei thing was the best thing going on. I mean, these girls would go there for one month, they'd come back with $2 million.

KING: So of all that's happened to you, that's your regret?

FLEISS: No, that was one of them. Getting caught is my biggest regret. You know it. Come on.

KING: It's a funny line. Getting caught. Not doing what you did, getting caught.

Colorful characters like the sultan and his brother stand out more to Americans than members of the giant Saud family.

doombuggy said...

What 6:05 anonymous said.

The New Order is drafting off the fumes of the Old Order, while social pathologies have increased (drug use, out of wedlock births, etc.) All we've gotten is some increase in GDP, praise be its name.

kaganovitch said...

I also had brief contact with Milken and had identical impression -- really really bright poster child for aspergers if only it still existed

Anonymous said...

http://www.milkeninstitute.org/about/about.taf?function=detail&Level1=ProStaff&Level2=Bio&ID=43&cat=Staff

I'm sure Milken's effusive praise of Ms. Silverstein has nothing to do with the fact that she's a hot MILF.

Anonymous said...

In addition to noticing things, remembering things a la having a long memory regarding various statements

Wonder if these conferences, along with his philanthropic causes, falls under the category of image rehab for him?

Thus if Steve's theory that Milken could be interested in being a silent partner in LA Clippers, it would go along the lines of "See? I've more than paid my debt to society. I contribute to various charities and have helped pave the way for women and minorities in business (or at least they like to think I have so why be technical at a time like this) and they've even elected me an honorary feminist. So do allow me to step in and purchase the Clippers. After all, now that that goofball Elgin Baylor's gone I know I can at least appoint a better GM."

Thordaddy said...

The reason the "feminist" movement is never up in arms about these corporate "predator parties" is because the destruction of the young female's SOUL is the whole point of the movement. The "greatest feminists" are psychologically destroyed females.

Anonymous said...

>>Uncle Peregrine said:
""""Colorful characters like the sultan and his brother stand out more to Americans than members of the giant Saud family.""""""""""


Yes, and from a practical PR image thing, it's better to parade that side of the Saudi Royals in American headlines rather than, the 911 Terrorist/Hijackers, and any nefarious....types of....stuff.


"Strange Things Are Happening!" ---Red Buttons

Rob said...

I wonder who was history's second greatest feminist.

Anonymous said...

The destruction of american middle class life did force lots of mothers to go out to work.

Thordaddy said...

"Feminism" = Butch's liberation...

In the inverted economics of liberation, Butch is "alpha male." We are in the midst of this corporate inversion and the growing submission of Milken type "feminists" is just part of the liberation process.

ben tillman said...

One tradeoff Becker thought a lot about was workplace discrimination. Suppose that managers and executives are racist or sexist—for whatever reason, they just don’t want to hire women and minorities....

Talk about racism! Women and "minorities"? How about racists (like Noah Smith) who discriminate against "majorities"?

Wikipedia has a handy list of the dramatis personae in Connie Bruck's 1988 book about Milken, The Predators' Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the Junk Bond Raiders, and a quick glance shows just how committed Milken was to the cause of women and racial minorities:

There are perhaps 3 or 4 "majorities" among those 35; the rest belong to a minority group that constitutes about 3% of the US population.

Anonymous said...

Liberalism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Anonymous said...

bwn tillman:"There are perhaps 3 or 4 "majorities" among those 35; the rest belong to a minority group that constitutes about 3% of the US population."

How old fashioned. From a POC perspective, they are all the same: evil white men.

Anonymous said...

You would think that Millken would have had a better sprinkling of non-Whites. You know, for the sake of appearances....

Anonymous said...

Such hideous Whiteness.

Anonymous said...

The American version of Pinkwashing is, apparently, for an obvious and incorrigible chauvinist to get other people to push the message that he's the world's most unlikely - er, I mean 'greatest' - feminist.

But Danielle Berrin and Noah Smith, the authors of these articles, aren't representative of Americans.

Steve Sailer said...

Now, Milken always has Paul Kagame, the dictator of Rwanda and conqueror of much of the Congo, come to his conferences to hang out with Tony Blair.

Anonymous said...

And American style "shareholder capitalism" really is somewhat distinct from what you'll find in Germany or Japan.

It should be called "Milken style capitalism", not "American style", since as the article points out, it destroyed the kind of American capitalism that had prevailed.

Anonymous said...

"But Danielle Berrin and Noah Smith, the authors of these articles, aren't representative of Americans."

Who is "representative of Americans" these days? Sotomayor?

Anonymous said...

"It should be called "Milken style capitalism", not "American style", since as the article points out, it destroyed the kind of American capitalism that had prevailed."

think of it as evolution. Milken is merely the highest stage of American capitalism.

Anonymous said...

"think of it as evolution. Milken is merely the highest stage of American capitalism."

Final stage of parasitism before collapse.

Anononymous said...

a fair-minded company could out-compete a discriminatory company and drive it out of business.
[...]
One explanation for women’s sudden success is that Becker was right. The early ’80s saw a wave of deregulation,


Or maybe this:
sued+gender+discrimination

Dave Pinsen said...

In the late '90s, a high yield bond mutual fund manager at the company where I worked stopped by our office for a meeting and then went out for drinks with some of us at the local watering hole. Over drinks, he mentioned going to Drexel's high yield conference, and finding a woman in his hotel room when he checked in. At first he thought he had the wrong room.

pinkwash laundromat said...

Not to feed your overstuffed ego any more but I do have to question if JewishJournal.com is a worthy target. Their whole affect seems like the Woodland Hills version of dinky condominium-booster pseudo-weeklies I'd see in bins on the street downtown (e.g. there's a hip classic neighborhood being rediscovered right between the train tracks and the Santa Ana freeway). Clearly Mike peeled off a roll of twenties for some market-fresh feminist newz-copy.

Fall Line-Up said...

Coming up next on SphereTV...

10p/9p ... "The Soft(headed) Parade:" Steve explains why the tabloid's new Zac Efron/Taylor Swift piece defies basic principles of economics, with examples from Flaubert and the 1977-78 Washington Bullets

10:30 ... "Dancing With The Tiger Mothers:" Semi-final round with water torture and gaslighting routines

11:00 ... "On Notice": The stateside debut of the controversial BBC dramedy about militaristic German nudists forbidden to discuss the benefits of uniformed combat, and the local high-school debate champ who threatens to bring it all crashing down

Portlander said...

"It was a little like talking to a hyper-intelligent space reptile who is trying hard to act friendly toward the Earthlings upon whose planet he is stranded."

Funny you mention that. I was watching "The Day After Trinity" movie Steve Hsu put a link to. I guess I'm going to both date myself and show my ignorance, but I'd never really knew what Robert Oppenheimer looked like before then. Wow! After seeing him in the movie I realized where all those cartoon evil characters had come from. The guy definitely had a creepy look about himself. Something was definitely FLK going on there, though obviously in the other direction.

I wonder if they run a can genotype on him.

little dynamo said...

You just did a series about how vast and potent the race-grievance industry is, total media uh blackout etc. Milken, as you note, is just another jackal, but he's working the gender vein of New Amer'ka. Stranded space reptile is about right, oh and as long as he's here, he's gonna cheat n steal n ride whatever Current Scam he can fleahop aback of.


He sees the Pres, VP, Senate, House, government, corporations, schools etc. grovelling to the WomanPower agenda... and he goes right to cooin' and a'Milkin' Ole Bossy, queen of the empowered herd. Cuz all is forgiven when you bow to mistress. The folks whose lives you ruined? eh whaddevah.



Milken knows an easy scam, it's his lifeline.




Did you catch the end of the warriors game, with the s. diego crowd gleefully chanting the lyrics to their own doom? That's the underground river connecting the sterling and milken incidents. We Are One. Or else.



Fine piece, thx.

Anonymous said...

Of all the glittering generalities polluting the discourse I'd thought feminism long ago took the lead in the gallop toward meaninglessness (in fact I usually see the word in scare-quotes even at leftish venues now, so maybe Ms. Berrin isn't nearly as au courant as she hopes). It's akin to "Islam means peace" or "Save the Earth," just a box-office-winning bromide and a signal that you'll have to dig more in order to obtain some real information. The plague isn't endemic to the U.S. either.

David said...

Da Milk shoulda given a shout-out to V. Stiviano as a strong woman standin' tall against racism. She was in the audience, wasn't she? No? I guess that would have been a little too obvious.

little dynamo said...

Handle -- "That is, the Israelis, in an attempt to make themselves more popular in the West, try to distinguish themselves as more deserving of sympathy because they are more progressive and enlightened"



Agree, and the same motivation of self-righteousness and (hidden) self-service drives a lot of the (false) hebrews living in america, who worship and enable the secular New Religion. That list is long, ignoble, and a betrayal of their true religion and heritage.


Many elements in the current State of Israel, trying to hide behind the U.S., try to out-progressive their benefactor, apeing the empire culture, currying favor.


I don't suppose God is too fond of all that.



Cheers.

TiVosphere said...

What if a cable news producer accidentally booked Michelle Malkin and Michael Milken for the same segment? That'd be fun

Anonymous said...

http://www.4thmedia.org/2014/05/why-china-is-winning-in-the-pacific/

"The more decisive trend is occurring in America. I mean, the United States has 4.5 percent of the world’s population, less than 20 percent of its production, but accounts for half of the whole world’s defense spending. It is constantly at war in distant lands. In a little more than a generation’s time after winning the Cold War, it has become deeply in debt, its industry is hollowed out, its middle class is collapsing, its infrastructure is badly in disrepair, its education is under-funded, and its social contract is in shambles. It is not sustainable; it simply can’t go on forever. American foreign policy is “pivoting” to Asia, then to the Middle East, then to Ukraine, while the American people badly need a pivot to Ohio. And that is the context within which China seems to be considering its strategic options in the very long term."

Anonymous said...

Stranded space reptile is about right, oh and as long as he's here, he's gonna cheat n steal n ride whatever Current Scam he can fleahop aback of.

As long as we're pitching TV pilots in here can I just say that Patton Oswalt's outtake from the Parks & Recreation episode was far superior to anything that's ever appeared in the show itself? How's that guy not in charge of Sony by now

Anonymous said...

http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/05/muslim_illegal_immigration_in_india_sparks_violent_resistance.html

Yet dotters preach to us about inclusion.

Anonymous said...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/10792895/Election-candidate-arrested-over-Churchill-speech.html

Anonymous said...

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2014/05/07/clay-aiken-winning-congressional-race

Rotfl

Anonymous said...

http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_1_campus_rape.html

Worst. Retcon. Ever said...

If memory serves Oppenheimer's photo was used -- very lame and on-the-nose sight gag -- in the scene from "Jurassic Park" where it's revealed which corporate secrets the hotshot contract programmer is going to sell to some shady developers outside the operation (thematically a big change from the novel, in which the main evil figure was the industrialist owner, depicted as a misguided-but-angelic grandfatherly Attenborough not so much). Subsequently the actor who played Nedry became the de facto 'villain' of sorts on 'Seinfeld'--well, anyway, maybe there's material for something here, I'm just not seeing it yet...

Anonymous said...

http://www.city-journal.org/2014/24_2_chinese-immigrants.html

"Over the past several decades, hundreds of thousands of mostly poor and sometimes undocumented immigrants from the Chinese province of Fujian have crammed themselves into dorm-like quarters, working brutally long hours waiting tables, washing dishes, and cleaning hotel rooms—and sending their Chinese-speaking children to the city’s elite public schools and on to various universities."

My head hurts.

Andrew Sullivan and Armed Space Reptiles said...

From that list T. Boone Pickens was, according to scrupulous pre-Depression Oklahoma record-keeping, the first ever Caesarean at the hospital, thus lending credence to the "Earth-born human" hypothesis, but I can't locate compelling nativity anecdotes for the rest of Milken's crew. BTW C-section ratio would seem an important Big Datum to incorporate (alongside left-handedness, height, and tough-love parenting style) for that work-in-progress Chart of Leadership & Destiny of All the Races of Man project hosted at this blog; n.b. the Chinese stat is 46% while the Nordic lands are pikers at 15%--gotta be something freakonomic goin' on there.

Anonymous said...

You've linked the wrong Saul Steinberg, oy vey (however you did get the right Ron Perlman)

The Dude said...

I'm pretty sure only "credibility" can be lent, but you can still "give credence" to anything of course. Or, "impart verisimilitude," if you're not into the whole brevity thing.

Anonymous said...

If Milken and co. really brought down the "glass ceiling", then we should see women being hired for managerial positions at an accelerating rate in the 1980s compared to the 1970s. However, if you look at page 11 of this document, it's clear that while more women were being hired in the 1980s than before, the slope of the trendline was the same in the 1970s as in the 1980s. By the late 1980s, it reached an asymptote though.

Robot said...

Steve, hotbnk has a new sharing economy competitor: PareUp, where restaurants auction off leftover food to hip poor people with smartphones.

http://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-new-pareup-app-buy-excess-restaurant-food-prevent-waste-20140501-story.html

Anonymous said...

Ah yes, the era of long term stable well paying jobs was bad, because mostly white men had said jobs. Now everyone participates in a ruthlessly insecure economy. Progress!

Anonymous said...

The destruction of american middle class life did force lots of mothers to go out to work.

And they're loving every minute of it, you know, since that crappy clerical job downtown is so Sex-in-the-City-like.

The next big revelation to working women will be when they retire. They'll find out their Social Security is no bigger than the spousal pension they could have received by staying home for 40 years.

Simon in London said...

"If one company pays women and minorities less than they produce, they could jump ship."

This ignores that humans are not interchangeable. Eg: If women value security and continuity more than men, they may be less likely to jump ship, so even if they are equally productive it may make economic sense to pay them less.

IRL of course people are not equally productive in the first place; for instance mothers will often prioritise time with their children over time at their jobs, and different ethnies vary a lot in productivity, as explained in A Farewell to Alms.

Anonymous said...

The forgotten about superinjunction was the one involving "Sir" Fred Goodwin who promoted his mistress to the boardroom at RBS and she sacked anyone who was seen as a threat to dispacable duo so that there was no one left who had the ability to run a bank. Somehow Milken reminds me of him.

Anonymous said...

Does anybody know what happened to the Vdare site?

Anonymous said...

The trophy properties are a cosmetic award. They don't make any decent return because all the other rich people want to own them and bid the price up.

Anonymous said...

So Milken still sells sh*t. I thought he wasn't supposed to do that anymore.

Anonymous said...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/07/us/politics/sotomayor-finds-her-voice-among-the-justices.html?smid=pl-share&_r=0

Wise Latina's logic:

If good for me, it's good.

So, if someone steals $100 and gives it to her, it's good cuz she has money in her pocket.

Nostalgic said...

"I wonder who was history's second greatest feminist."

Gengis Khan?

“The greatest happiness is to scatter your enemy and drive him before you, to see his cities reduced to ashes, to see those who love him shrouded in tears, and to gather to your bosom his wives and daughters.”

Gene Berman said...

I am very surprised that no one seems to recall or to mention that Milken had (for about a decade, as I recall) a gsl as personal assistant who had to have been exposed (and to have absorbed) to the crookedness (and cleverness) of Milken's Drexel-Lambert operation. One who had, most likely, been familiar with tidbits like "parking" (probably how--in another time and place--an obscure Arkansaw governor's wife--ignorant of investment and speculation-- reaped a $100K profit on cattle-futures), might well internalize the intellectual sophistication of recognizing (and acting on) "market signals" like just how Ivan Boesky rubbed (or didn't) his nose.

And who went on to found her own super-enterprise, to be appointed to the governing body of the NYSE but, so unable to control her own greed that she stepped into an FBI "perjury trap," costing her dearly (including a 6-month prison term).

Anonymous said...

I fail to see how Milken's pro-feminism stance is any different from Sterling's pro-NAACP stance.

It'll be interesting should Milken be involved in buying the Clippers and for some reason later becomes a persona non grata again. And then we'll hear of the shock and horror from feminists that Milken was a convicted insider trader and he held "no wives" parties in LA.

Anonymous said...

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/03/david-stockman/the-china-ponzi-scheme/

David said...

Which comes first, the greatness or the donation?

Anonymous said...

Worst.Retcon.Ever

"(thematically a big change from the novel, in which the main evil figure was the industrialist owner, depicted as a misguided-but-angelic grandfatherly Attenborough not so much)."

That happened because Spielberg saw the evil industrialist as a Disney-esque figure, and Spielberg reveres Disney.Which is interesting, seeing as how many Jewish media figures have tried to paint Walt as an anti-Semite (the "evidence" is, at best, flimsy). Spielberg, though, seems to have not read the memo.

Anonymous said...

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/05/changing-nature-middle-class-work.html

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/05/usa-created-terrorist-safe-haven-libya.html

Anonymous said...

Anonymous:""think of it as evolution. Milken is merely the highest stage of American capitalism."

Final stage of parasitism before collapse."

According to Marx, we're long overdue....

Anonymous said...

>>Steve Sailer observed:
"""""It was a little like talking to a hyper-intelligent space reptile who is trying hard to act friendly toward the Earthlings upon whose planet he is stranded.""""""


The original The Flintstones show had a recurring character named the Great Gazoo (or 'Mr. Gazoo). Only Fred and Barney could see him, but he couldn't leave Earth to get back home to his own world.

"The Great Gazoo is a tiny, green, floating alien who was exiled to Earth from his home planet Zetox as punishment for having invented a doomsday machine, a weapon of immense destructive power. His invention was a button which if pressed would destroy the universe in an explosive "ZAM," though he insists he made it on a whim ("I wanted to be the first on my block to have one!") with no intent of using it."


So maybe the Great Milken and Great Gazoo do have a couple of things in common after all.

jody said...

are you trying to say milken was the vanguard of a race of space lizards about to land on earth in 1983?! or was it 2009. i can't keep up with all these remakes.

by the way, the labor force participation rate is now down all the way to 1978 levels, so yes, at least a few people keep statistics. if you wanted to know what 1978 was like, 2014 is at least similar in that regard.

the US is in a recession right now as well.

Anonymous said...

Am I a bad man for noticing T Boone Pickens, Gerry Tsai and maybe Carl Lindner on the Predators Ball list?

Anonymous said...

From the Carl Lindner, Jr. Link:

Even though Lindner wasn't Jewish, he's considered as one of the largest non-Jewish donors to the organized Jewish community in the United States. In 1978 he was named the Man of the Year by the United Jewish Appeal, and was later named a recipient of the Tree of Life Award for the Jewish National Fund, and was recognized as the largest non-Jewish purchaser of Israel Bonds. Lindner, who said an early loan from Isaac Wolfson inspired him to never forget his gratitude to the Jewish people, donated to such causes in multiple occasions, including $1 million in a 1991 fundraiser and $5 million in 2004.

David said...

>I wonder who was history's second greatest feminist.<

Some broad, I think.

Mr. Anon said...

By doing more than any other single person to promote the establishment of Israel, I suppose one could call Adolph Hitler the world's greatest zionist. Yet, I don't think that makes a lot of sense either.

Mr. Anon said...

"That would protect the jobs of the people who worked at those old-line companies, but would perpetuate workplace unfairness in the process.

In other words, Becker thought that competition kills discrimination. Open up the floodgates of dog-eat-dog capitalism, and women and minorities will win greater equality in the workplace."

Why is it unfair for those who have jobs at a particular company to have those jobs, and for those who don't have them to not have them. If it suits both the employer and his employees, and the firm's customers, why should it be anybody else's business?

But capitalism comes to the rescue - to break up any relationships between people based on trust, mutual respect, ethnic solidarity, familial obligation, etc., and dictates that the only permittable social interactions are those mediated through the exchange of money. Marx was right about a few things, including the essential soullessness of capitalism.

Anonymous said...

The destruction of american middle class life did force lots of mothers to go out to work.

And go chasing billionaires....

Anonymous said...

"According to Marx, we're long overdue...."

Yes and ironically it was the creation of the middle class** that messed up Marx's initial prediction.

**In Marxist terms the middle class is the proletariat + disposable income.

Anonymous said...

The NWO is wonderful for the likes of Victoria Nuland and Sheryl Sandberg!!!

Feminism!!!

But for wives of middle class white men? Hope for more hrs at Walmart and put off having kids.

But who cares? Having children and raising families with a middle class husband who can earn enough to take care of his family is sooooo patriarchal and evil.

Anonymous said...

You will notice that among the most successful women, a good number of them are Jewish.

So, rich Jewish men work with rich Jewish women, get married, and have kids.

Feminism!

Feminist empowerment or success certainly isn't equal or diverse.

But any kind of women will do, I guess. So, if a bunch of Jewish women make lots of money, it's VICTORY FOR ALL WOMEN!!

Using this logic, the success of some rich white guys should be great news for all men. So black and brown and yellow guys need to stop bitching. Bloomberg is rich for all of them and not just for himself or the Jews.

Anonymous said...

"I wonder who was history's second greatest feminist."

Jesus of Nazareth

Anonymous said...

I also had brief contact with Milken and had identical impression -- really really bright poster child for aspergers if only it still existed

People tend to overlook Milken's aspergers because of his looks. Milken: aspie trapped in a jock body.

Anonymous said...

Mr Anon:"By doing more than any other single person to promote the establishment of Israel, I suppose one could call Adolph Hitler the world's greatest zionist. Yet, I don't think that makes a lot of sense either."

The magic of unintended consequences...

Whiskey said...

Isn't Jewish fertility abysmally low? Something like 1.0 or less? Indeed Jewish men seem to marry very late, to women about their own age, and struggle to have even one kid before fertility ends. Unspoken is the large amount of Jewish men marrying Asian women who are more forgiving of male unsexiness: higher IQ, higher education. Meanwhile Jewish women seem to find their men simply unmarriageable, being that they are far too intelligent. As male intelligence is simply repulsive to women, being highly correlated with ... lower levels of testosterone, social domination, and aggressiveness.

This just in, Bill Gates pulled less women than Arnold.

Jewish High IQ is essentially incompatible with feminism and such. How many kids does Milken have again? Compared to say, Antonio Cromartie? Wiki says 3 for Milken, Antonio Cromartie has 12 children with 8 different women.

Who is more successful in life? Who will leave a greater mark on the future? Who OWNS the future? Hint its not Milken.

Anonymous said...

Whiskey: What Jewish men need to do is marry Armenian women.

Big Bill said...

So who is doing all of this rehabilitation?

Someone has been handling Spitzer, trying to get him back in the good graces of the left: TV gigs. guest commenter spots, op-ed pieces, etc.

Likewise Milken.

And Rahm Emanuel has that whole "Chicagoland" TV series going pimping him for President in 2016 or 2020.

Mr. Anon said...

"Whiskey said...

Meanwhile Jewish women seem to find their men simply unmarriageable, being that they are far too intelligent. As male intelligence is simply repulsive to women, being highly correlated with ... lower levels of testosterone, social domination, and aggressiveness."

Yes, this is why the Jews are an obscure, extinct historical people, who died out soon after the Sumerians.

There is, apparently, nothing so stupid or false that Whiskey will not write it. And he aggressively asserts his mendacity with the conviction of a used-car salesman.

Anonymous said...

"I wonder who was history's second greatest feminist."

Jesus of Nazareth


Christianity was never a boon to women. Nor was it much of an oppressor, unlike what feminists say. The only way it was "sexist" was in being anti-sex, and even there it was an equal opportunity oppressor when it came to man and woman.

The ones who gained the most from Christianity were not women, but effeminate men.

ATBOTL said...

"People tend to overlook Milken's aspergers because of his looks. Milken: aspie trapped in a jock body."

It's wrong to think that aspergers=nerd.

Many men with aspergers syndrome are physically strong and have very masculine mannerisms.

Probably a disproportionately large number of the extremely masculine men who have extremely high IQs have AS.

Note that there are now pro-athletes and gangster rappers who have aspergers syndrome.

Rifleman said...

There is, apparently, nothing so stupid or false that Whiskey will not write it. And he aggressively asserts his mendacity with the conviction of a used-car salesman.

True. Whiskey is a regular on many sites and basically posts a variation on the same theme - "Excuse the Jews and Blame the White Women".

Some claim he is a Jew passing online as "Scots-Irish". There is no way he's Jewish. His complete failure to understand Jewish women and his pathological fear of women and his Zionophilia indicates he is a sheltered Christian omega nerd.

He does have a near sociopathic ability to cling to his dogmas and block out reality and contrary evidence.

He is clearly an Aspergers type, all too common on these internet sites.

Anonymous said...

The men on the Predators' Ball list were not just Jewish. They included an unusually large proportion of short, fat, physically unattractive Jewish men who smoked cigars. A large minority of their lawyers and a fair number of their investment bankers matched the same description. Spy magazine used to have a running joke whenever they mentioned Ron Perelman or another of the Milkin-minted billionaires. They would say "Ron Perelman, the thick-fingered dwarf," or "Henry Kravis, the thick-fingered dwarf," and that was only a slight exaggeration. I worked on merger deals back in those days, and more than once, I saw an elevator door open and 6 or 8 short, ugly men pour out, shouting, gesticulating and sending up clouds of cigar smoke. It looked like a vaudeville routine.

By the way, don't misunderstand me: most Jewish men are not short, fat or ugly and most don't smoke cigars. It's just that Milkin, for some reason, chose to finance an awful lot who were.

As another aside, I worked with Reginald Lewis pretty closely, and he was actually a reasonably impressive guy. If you're calling him a "front man" because you suspect he was just a token black, I think you're wrong. In a sense, all of the guys that Milkin sponsored were "front men." They weren't geniuses but they were smart, energetic, greedy men who could and would do the things they had to do to make a lot of money. Lewis graduated from Harvard Law School back in the days before widespread affirmative action, on his own merits. He was as smart as most of Milkin's other proteges, just as driven and, in my own experience at least, less of an asshole (although that's a low hurdle to jump).

And less vindictive. Bearing that in mind, I think I'm going to post this one anonymously.

Steve Sailer said...

Thanks.

Lewis seemed like a pretty good guy.

Anonymous said...

>>> Israelis, in an attempt to make themselves more popular in the West


Israeli thought is almost-exclusively expressed in Hebrew. Can you quote us some original source material to back up your claim of correctly summarizing Hebrew thought?

Anonymous said...

>> Meanwhile Jewish women seem to find their men simply unmarriageable, being that they are far too intelligent.


Only women decide which men get sex.


But only men decide which women get a ring.

Anonymous said...

They included an unusually large proportion of short, fat, physically unattractive Jewish men who smoked cigars.

Are you sure they weren't Armenian secret agents disguised as Jews, trading their gold chains for cigars?

Anonymous said...

Women are sex objects; men are success objects.

Anonymous said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htmO1Cyl73s

Same with Russia.

Steve Sailer said...

I shouldn't toss around the term "frontman" lightly since it gets tied into the almost metaphysical legal question involving Milken and insider trading. Milken's defenders argued that his knowing when various junk bond raiders were going to spring an LBO offer wasn't insider trading because Milken, rather than his frontmen, was the ultimate insider, the Prime Mover as it were.

In contrast, my vague impression is that the late Reginald F. Lewis was more of an independent operator who got some help from Milken, more like Ted Turner than Milken's normal frontmen.