Boys Club

Bank of Israel Chief Will Battle Lagarde for IMF Head

Israel’s Fischer challenges Lagarde for IMF head Reuters

Early press reports take seriously Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer’s challenge to front-runner Christine Lagarde. Fischer makes a third in the field of candidates that also includes Mexican central bank chief Agustin Carstens.

Fischer says the IMF post is one of the best jobs in international finance and he wants it.

“There arose an extraordinary and unplanned opportunity — perhaps one that will never happen again — to compete for the head of the IMF, which after much deliberation I decided I wish to follow through on,” Fischer said in a statement.

The IMF would have to change its rules that no one over 65 is appointed to the post and that no one should hold the post beyond age 70.

A former deputy managing director of the IMF and ex-vice chairman of Citigroup, Fischer was born in what is now Zambia but holds Israeli citizenship. Reuters suggests that Fischer’s Israeli citizenship could pose a problem for Arab countries.

Mohamed El-Erian, co-chief investment officer at the world’s largest bond fund company PIMCO, said Fischer would be a popular choice within the Fund, having served as its number two.

“He is extremely well liked by the staff of the IMF, well known and genuinely respected by the member countries of the institution,” El-Erian told Reuters.

Damn Political Wives!

Newt Gingrich’s Wife Callista New Victim of GOP’s Blame-the-Wife Brigade The Daily Beast

‘The problem was the wife’ is the headline of a Fred Barnes piece on the collapse of Newt Gingrich. We’re not clear if Gingrich’s team that resigned en masse this week was all boys club, but insiders say Callista is to blame.

Gingrich was dragged off to the Mediterranean by his wife, who wanted him to pursue the presidency at a less strenuous pace. As for the baubles from Tiffany’s. Her fault.

The Republican Party long has been the one that preaches individual responsibility. Perhaps those seeking to lead it might find a way to make use of that particular virtue. And, it must be said, press outlets might want to think twice before allowing them to do otherwise.

All of which brings us to the primary reason why Americans should welcome Michele Bachmann to the race. It’s unlikely that anyone will blame her problems on her husband. And he doesn’t have a skirt for her to hide behind.

New York’s Hotel Maids Speak Out

‘It could have happened to me’: hotel maids protesting at Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s court appearance protest speak out The Observer

Lourdes Colon-Santos and Ada Velez-Escalera outside the arraignment of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Photograph: Mike Segar/REUTERSWhen former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn appeared in Manhattan Court last week, he was greeted by hotel maids showing their support for the alleged victim in the case. The maids, many of them originally from the Caribbean region and other poor countries, yelled at DSK with words of shame.

Lourdes Colón-Santos, arm raised on the left in this photo, is speaking out about her experiences. She has worked at the New York Hilton for seven years and sends part of her $24.19 an hour wages back home to relatives.

Ada Vélez EscaleraVélez, woman on the right in image, arrived in the US from Puerto Rico when she was 16 to study. Vélez has been working at the Hilton for 19 years. ‘We are so proud of the jobs we do. It’s very physically demanding and on top of that there can be compromising situations,’ she said.

The one “situation” she remembers herself involved a travelling businessman who took a liking to her and put a gift out on the bed – a skimpy nightdress and a heap of cash. “On day one, I ignored it. On day two, I ignored it. On the third day of his stay he made sure he was in the room when I arrived, and he asked me to go out with him,” she said. She politely turned him down, explaining she was happily married. Fortunately, he did not react badly.

Gabrielle Giffords Update

First photos of Gabrielle Giffords released AP

The first photos of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords taken since her shooting in Tucson about five months ago have been posted on her Facebook page. With the repair of her skull last month, Giffords no longer has to wear the protective helmut that she hated.

Earlier in the week, Pia Carusone, Giffords’ chief of staff, gave an interview to the Arizona Republic about the Congresswoman’s condition.

Saying that she believes that Gabrielle Giffords has excellent comprehension of events around her, the real problem lies in communicating back.

Does her struggle to communicate mean that she’s not using complete sentences?

“Exactly,” Carusone said. “She is borrowing upon other ways of communicating. Her words are back more and more now, but she’s still using facial expressions as a way to express. Pointing. Gesturing. Add it all together, and she’s able to express the basics of what she wants or needs. But, when it comes to a bigger and more complex thought that requires words, that’s where she’s had the trouble.”

Is that frustrating for her?

“Absolutely,” Carusone said. “When she is trying to come up with a word or a sentence and she’s clearly struggling, putting everything she’s got into it, and sometimes she’s not successful. When she is, there’s a relief that comes across her face that she has found the word. But when she can’t come up with that, it is absolute frustration.”

Brainiacs

Women in China: A Social Revolution More Intelligent Life

When Jawaharlal Nehru read Buck’s captivating tale “The Chinese Children Next Door” aloud to Mahatma Gandhi on his sick-bed, both men burst out laughing. With India so similar to India in gender relations, the two men were totally familiar with the realities of a world where female infanticide, domestic slavery and sexual bondage were commonplace.

Of course things have moved on since Buck’s day. Starvation is no longer endemic in the countryside. Girls are not commonly driven to suicide by implacable mothers-in-law, nor sold into slavery or exchanged for food in time of famine. Even the villages now have television and telephones. But rural society is still constricted by isolation and hardship, by lack of prospects and, for women, by dread of conceiving a baby girl.

Can China Go Green? National Geographic

We once thought of China as the “yellow peril” and then the “red menace.” Now the colors are black and green. An epic race is on, and if you knew how the race would come out—if you knew whether or how fast China could wean itself off coal and tap the sun and wind—then you’d have the single most important data point of our century. The outcome of that race will determine how bad global warming is going to get. And right now the answer is still up in the air.

Thanks a Lot, Ken Burns Slate

Burns performs an impressive kind of alchemy. Working in the soft glow of nostalgia, he manages to take a knotty and complex history of violence, racial conflict, and disunion and turn it into a compelling drama of national unity. “Between 1861 and 1865,” David McCullough tells us in the series’ introduction, “Americans made war on each other and killed each other in great numbers—if only to become the kind of country that could no longer conceive of how that was possible.” … But the Civil War forged something different—the powerful modern juggernaut that we boldly and ungrammatically refer to in the singular—“the United States is.” And that, according to Foote, “sums up what the war accomplished. It made us an ‘is.’

Hard Core The Atlantic

Pornography, with its garish view of male sexual desire, bares an uncomfortable truth that the women’s-liberation movement has successfully suppressed: men and women have conflicting sexual agendas.

Pornography neatly resolves the contradictions—in favor of men. They fuck with impunity. Women never dream of staying. And if, God forbid, the women get pregnant, well, they can be used in pregnant pornos and then in an episode of Exploited Moms. What a marvelous means of delving into the heads of men. And for women peeping in on the Web, an important lesson—one that can’t be gleaned in a sex-ed class where condoms are placed over bananas, nor from poring over the umpteenth edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves—is that sex can be a bitter, crushing experience, no matter how much power you think you have.