WONKESS

I, Hypocracy...

I generally align myself with the liberals in the country.  See, e.g., my ties to the wondrous Momos.  However, the one place where I'm ardently centrist is in things financial.  I'm a bit more free market than the standard liberal, and I'm very VERY fiscally responsible.  The thing I hate most about Washington D.C./federal government is basically the national debt.  I find it beyond reprehensible that we've come out of 3ish decades of steady growth with over $10 trillion of debt.

Which is why I could not be the messenger against the most recent GOP strategy to block the Obama stimulus.  As much as I disliked their aggressive tactics and on the whole believed that there was a role for a stimulus, I just couldn't pick a fight against a message centering around the ideas of fiscal responsibility. Luckily, there are others who can.  From Andrew Sullivan (bold mine):

This Manzi post would be their argument going forward. Here's why they are not being intellectually honest, and Manzi's post includes the relevant facts. The GOP has passed what amounts to a spending and tax-cutting and borrowing stimulus package every year since George W. Bush came to office. They have added tens of trillions to future liabilities and they turned a surplus into a trillion dollar deficit - all in a time of growth. They then pick the one moment when demand is collapsing in an alarming spiral to argue that fiscal conservatism is non-negotiable. I mean:seriously. 

The bad faith and refusal to be accountable for their own conduct for the last eight years is simply inescapable. There is no reason for the GOP to have done what they have done for the last eight years and to say what they are saying now except pure, cynical partisanship, and a desire to wound and damage the new presidency. The rest is transparent cant.

There is a way to spend and borrow enough to mitigate the sudden downdraft - while working to mend long-term fiscal problems. Manzi sets it out here:

2. Make an at least off-setting change in future liabilities under entitlement programs. This would include things like means-testing benefits, increasing the retirement age and making this sustainable by linking it to a longevity measure and so forth.

3. Reduce the military budget by reducing military commitments. The United States is increasingly a nation among nations. This will likely become ever truer as the economic rise of the Asian heartland continues. We need to recognize this, and scale our expenditures accordingly.

The great tragedy of the Gregg withdrawal is that this was precisely what he had been selected to achieve. The chance of real entitlement reform - the one thing that can indeed put the US back on a path to fiscal sanity - is real in the first year of an Obama presidency. But it will require bipartisanship; and if a decent fiscal conservative like Gregg is simply forced by his own party to have no role in it, then it will not happen. My sense is that this is indeed why he felt it necessary to withdraw.

The GOP is not interested in the long term fiscal health of this country. Their reckless stewardship over the last eight years proves that. They are not interested in helping this new president, who has done everything he can to create a civil atmosphere, to use this moment to prevent the worst in the short term and move to improve matters in the long term. Instead,they spin.

Or, as I mentioned in a tweet last week: so much of US politics abt positioning for next election. Well, politics can #suckit #fucktheppl.

Real Alternatives to a $700 Billion Bailout

Over at Momocrats, I am urging all Americans to call or write their Representative or Senators and tell them that the $700 billion bailout plan being proposed by Paulson is unacceptable.  It's lack of transparency or accountability is astounding, even by the standards set by recent Fed/Treasury actions.  Here, I present some (far better) alternatives that have been presented by some of the best economic minds in our country.  I suggest that the current administration gets over its hubris in believing there is a single solution to this problem and that we should lay our trust, unquestioned, in a man who, as the one-time head of Goldman Sachs, has a very personal stake in the outcome of this bailout.

From Nouriel Roubini (subscription only link), who talks about another way we could have handled the AIG bailout (which is also a strategy applicable to the current bailout being discussed).

It is likely that AIG’s shareholders (both preferred and common) may be substantially wiped out; but then why does the government take only a 80% equity share in AIG? Why not 100% as it should? [Although Roubini does not mention it here, he knows, as most economist do, that the reason that the government took just under 80% of AIG is because this allows it to keep its ownership stake in AIG off the Treasury books, which keeps the entire transaction, and by implication, how bad it is for the American public, from being transparent.  -ed]  So, if by miracle, AIG is not liquidated, such private shareholders instead of being fully wiped out get any upside benefit from this government action.

...In the case of AIG it appears that the US “loan” has as collateral all of the assets of AIG; if this were to be the case (a point to be clarified as the Fed statement was not clear about the seniority of a loan that has equity-like characteristics) the creditors of AIG would not be scot free as the government claim would have priority over any other secured and unsecured creditors of AIG, including possibly the insurance policy holders of AIG.

If this is truly the case (and I say “if” because the Fed has not been fully clear on the nature of its claims in the pecking order of the capital structure of AIG) the objective of the Fed in its intervention on AIG (i.e. avoiding the systemic effects of a collapse of a large and too big to fail institution) may not be achieved: i.e. if the claims of the government are senior to those of all creditors of AIG then AIG bondholders and also other creditors of AIG get whacked if AIG is insolvent (i.e. if in the effective liquidation of AIG the assets of the firm are lower than its liabilities).

But if the action of the Fed are aimed at facilitating an orderly selling of AIG’s assets how does the Fed ensure that its investment in AIG is safe? In a formal bankruptcy (Chapter 7 and 11) there is a stay on the claims of a firm’ creditors; thus a roll-off of their claims cannot occur. But in this government takeover of AIG how does one ensure that such roll-off of claims does not occur?

The only way to avoid such risk is to impose a stay - like in a formal Chapter 7 or 11 – on such claims. But if the objective of the government was to avoid a disorderly workout that a formal bankruptcy would have entailed how does one ensure – short of an effective stay on all creditors claims – that the public money provided to AIG (the $85 billion “loan”) is not used by the unsecured creditors of AIG to roll off their exposure and run out of AIG scot free? Short of such a stay the apparent seniority of the government claims implies that any short term creditor of AIG should cut off its exposure and run. And if instead (“if” because again the Fed has not given any details on this crucial issue) the government claims are ensured by an effective stay on such creditors’ roll off then why did the government intervene in AIG rather than letting it go into Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 bankruptcy court?

So this is the conundrum of the government intervention in AIG: it was made to avoid a disorderly collapse of AIG with the provision of short term liquidity; but in order to avoid short term creditors of AIG to run and be full on their claims you need to impose an effective stay on such claims; otherwise some creditors are bailed out (those with short term claims who can run) and some creditors are whacked even more (those with longer term claims that are junior to the government) and such short term creditors become effectively senior to the government. But if the government has to be truly senior relative to all of the creditors of AIG you need to impose a stay on all creditors. And if you impose such a stay you whack all creditors, you impose losses on all the AIG debt holders and you risk the systemic panic and disaster that you wanted to avoid in the first place.

If this is the case it would have been better to push formally AIG in Chapter 11 or 7 bankruptcy court and then provide the government financial support in the form of traditional debtor-in-possession (DIP) financing. If this had been done such DIP financing would be formally – as provision of new money – senior to all of the other claims on the firm. So the government decision to avoid formal Chapter 11 (or 7) is puzzling: either the government loan is truly senior to all of the claims of AIG – in which case you need a formal stay to avoid short term creditors to run away (but such stay will impose the same potential systemic risks of a formal bankruptcy) – or if such a stay is not imposed then the government claims are junior to those of the short term creditors of AIG and the objective of avoiding a run on the claims of AIG cannot be avoided.

...[I]n the case of AIG we have a problem of solvency and the need for an orderly wind down of AIG so as to prevent a global systemic crisis. So it is rational for short term claimants of AIG to run if their claims are junior to those of the government. And if instead those claims were not junior (i.e. a stay is formally imposed) the systemic effects of such a stay will cause massive losses to all of the creditors of AIG and will thus not prevent the systemic crisis that the government intervention was meant to avoid.

The reality is that it would have been more honest and clean and proper to take AIG to bankruptcy court and then provide the government support (the $85 billion loan) in the form of a formal debtor-in-possession (DIP) financing. Why was this solution not taken? It is not clear. Going to court may imply a credit event that triggers formal default and consequences for creditors and CDS holders and the guarantees made by AG on toxic fixed income securities. But what has happened is effectively a credit event and such triggers should be occurring regardless of whether AIG goes into formal bankruptcy court or not. The Fed and Treasury should immediately clarify on whether their intervention includes or not a formal stay on all the creditors of AIG including the holders of the short term claims against AIG.

Any fuzziness and lack of transparency on this matter would be severely destabilizing for markets and investors. To truly safeguard the government claims such a stay should be imposed; and it is not imposed the government action will allow short term creditors of AIG to run scot free with two consequences: the government claims will be at risk putting taxpayers’ money at risk; and the claims of longer term creditors of AIG will be whacked more down the line as short term creditors were allowed to be bailed out. But in that case why should different creditors of AIG be treated differently with some being bailed out and some not and with the consequence that the bailout of some implies much bigger losses to the longer term creditors of AIG? Again a formal bankruptcy court would have allowed a more fair process for allocating losses between shareholders and short term and long term creditors of the firm.

The Fed statement is also fuzzy on the claims of the insurance policy holders of AIG. Are these insurance contracts junior or senior to the government claims? You may think that holders of standard insurance (life, casualty, etc.) should be treated as senior (in the same way as small depositors of banks are insured from loss)? But should only such policy holders (individuals and non-financial firms) should be bailed out and be senior or should also the holders of AIG insurance of fixed income assets (hundreds of billions of dollars of such insurance) be bailed out? If all of such insurance contracts are safe and made whole by the government why should the government bail out investors that bought insurance of toxic products (MBS, CDOs, etc) from AIG? There is no rationale for that.

...[I]nstead of doing the right thing – pushing AIG into bankruptcy court and providing government DIP financing – the Fed and Treasury have formally nationalized AIG and they have created a legal mess where there will be endless confusion and lack of transparency of the government claims relative to junior and senior creditors of AIG, short term creditors and long term creditors, insurance policy holders of a traditional sort and of a non-traditional sort (life and casualty holders versus bond insurance holders).

...[S]oon enough the transformation the USA into the USSRA (United Socialist State Republic of America) will be complete: we have defeated the USSRR to create a communist economy in the most advanced free market economy in the world. And calling it socialism (even socialism for the rich, the well connected and Wall Street) is giving a bad name even to a failed experiment like socialism; this is more akin to the creation of a corporatist state (like the Italian fascism or the Germany Third Reich) where private sector interest are protected (gains privatized and losses socialized) where the government is taken over by corrupt and reckless private interests.

Roubini apparently gives the plan a thumbs up, though I cannot comprehend the inconsistency between his aforementioned disdain for the AIG bailout compared to the current much larger and much kinder bailout.  (Sigh, another fallen hero).

From Steve Waldman over at Interfluidity, who offers a simply, yet elegant alternative:

I think we'll only get one shot to set things right by throwing a ton of money at the problem, so we'd better think carefully before we throw it at symptoms rather than causes. Trying to figure this out in a week before Congress goes off to reelect itself strikes me as ambitious. Broadly, my view is that if we are going to legislate, Congress should empower regulators to declare systemically important firms insolvent, write off existing common and preferred, fire incumbent management and unilaterally convert debt to equity as far up the capital structure as they need to go until the firms are unambiguously well-capitalized, with little or no public money involved. Going forward, investors should understand that firms that are too big to fail are too big to be debt-financed, and government enforcement of debt claims against such firms will be limited. If economies of scale are real, equityholders should be glad to reap them. Otherwise markets function better anyway when populated by small actors who compete rather than by behemoths who dominate. The government should not subsidize the many negative externalities of scale. Members of the Pigou Club might suggest that bigness should be taxed and diversity subsidized.

As far as the money is concerned, throw it at infrastructure. Increase worker bargaining power by offering Federally funded retraining sabbaticals for any worker over thirty who decides they want to retool. I'd rather see a new WPA than a new RTC. If it is true that during a debt deflation, the government can spend freely without fear of inflation, let's spend in a way that balances the economy, not in a manner that tries to ratify the imbalances that brought us here in the first place.

There's no such thing as a choice-free bailout. The government's largesse will go to some and not to others, and we have to decide. Don't believe self-styled technocrats who claim that science or the market tells them who deserves the tax- (or inflation-) payers' dollar. In a bail-out, there are winners and losers, and we get to pick. I think we should focus on a simple goal: Restructuring the economy so that the vast majority of Americans can afford a middle-class lifestyle with very little leverage on household or government balance sheets. That may be a radical suggestion in 2008, but our grandparents would have considered it only common sense.

Waldman is basically suggesting a structure more akin to the original RTC (Resolve Trust Company, formed in the aftermath of the S&L crisis), where all the institutions that need to go bankrupt go bankrupt first, then the government steps in with intervention.  The highlight is mine, my favorite part of the plan, beauteous in its simplicity and ultimate reliance on free-market decision making.

From Robert Reich (UC Berkeley):

Paulson is right that it makes sense to allow the big banks to wipe their balance sheets clean of as many bad loans as they can identify, and put them into a special agency that then sells them for as much as possible. The agency would bundle or unbundle the risky loans, slice and dice them as needed, with the goal of getting the most for them on world markets by creating a market for them.

But there's no reason taxpayers need to be involved in this. 

Whether you call it a reorganization under bankruptcy or just a hellova fire sale, the process should resemble chapter 11 under bankruptcy. Any big financial institution that wants to clear its books can opt in. But the price for opting in is this: Investors in these institutions lose the value of their equity. Executives lose the value of their options, and their pay (and the pay of their directors) is sharply limited. All the money from the fire sale goes to making creditors as whole as possible.

Meanwhile, policymakers work on a new set of regulations to ensure transparency on Wall Street -- governing disclosures, minimum capital requirements, avoidance of conflicts of interest, and better ensurance against stock manipulation -- so that, once the bad debts are off the books, the new numbers can be trusted.

I repeat: This isn't a crisis of solvency or liquidity; it's a crisis of trust.

From Luigi Zingales (U Chicago):

As during the Great Depression and in many debt restructurings, it makes sense in the current contingency to mandate a partial debt forgiveness or a debt-for-equity swap in the financial sector. It has the benefit of being a well-tested strategy in the private sector and it leaves the taxpayers out of the picture.  But if it is so simple, why no expert has mentioned it?

The major players in the financial sector do not like it. It is much more appealing for the financial industry to be bailed out at taxpayers’ expense than to bear their share of pain.  Forcing a debt-for-equity swap or a debt forgiveness would be no greater a violation of private property rights than a massive bailout, but it faces much stronger political opposition. The appeal of the Paulson solution is that it taxes the many and benefits the few.

Although these suggestions (and the many others that may be out there) all vary in specifics, they are all very similar in the following ways: all demand greater transparency, all demand that the current equity holders be wiped out first and all have at least taken into account the risk to the taxpayer.  Considerations that Paulson is apparently incapable of.

In parting, I leave you with this rather scary reader comment from Naked Capitalism:

I worked at [Wall Street firm you've heard of], but now I handle financial services for [a Congressman], and I was on the conference call that Paulson, Bernanke and the House Democratic Leadership held for all the members yesterday afternoon. It's supposed to be members only, but there's no way to enforce that if it's a conference call, and you may have already heard from other staff who were listening in.

Anyway, I wanted to let you know that, behind closed doors, Paulson describes the plan differently. He explicitly says that it will buy assets at above market prices (although he still claims that they are undervalued) because the holders won't sell at market prices. Anna Eshoo pressed him on how the government can compel the holders to sell, and he basically dodged the question. I think that's because he didn't want to admit that the government would just keep offering more and more.

 

 

Seventh Anniversary...

Taking a page from Citymama.  I was living abroad when 9/11 happened, but I am a life-long New Yorker, and worked in Manhattan for several years before moving abroad.  If any city is my city, New York was, and still is, it.  On the tragic day, I was actually in London, visiting a friend.  I was supposed to be on a flight on 9/12, returning to New York.  Instead, I was on the London Eye when the first plane struck. 

I knew something was wrong the moment we walked into a pub, after our ride on the Eye.  There was absolute silence, except for one woman openly weeping, and everyone was standing in a huddle, eyes riveted on the sole Television screen hanging above the bar.  I looked at the screen as the first building disintegrated.

The next few days were a blur.  I managed to get in touch with some American friends at LBS and was invited to a memorial.  Many there knew people who had perished in the towers.  One had just left Cantor Fitzgerald to pursue her studies at LBS.

I also remember crossing a busy intersection in Kensington, and seeing a young man standing in the middle divider, waving an enormous American flag.  When I told him that I was American and asked him why he was doing that, he told me that he felt so powerless but just had to do something.  I burst into tears.

I was on the first international plane to land in JFK after 9/11.  Despite the hundreds of travelers that had been stranded in London when the planes were grounded, tightened security meant that the plane was less than half full.  I managed to get on by waiting at the airport for 18 hours before the flight took off.  Everyone applauded when the plane touched the tarmac.

The day after I returned to New York, I walked down Broadway as far south as I could before being stopped by the police barricades.  There were street vendors hawking WTC gold, there were flowers and candles lain in front of a local fire station, there were yellow ribbons tied on wire fences, there were those thousands and thousands of missing posters covering every upright surface block after block after block.  The city was quiet, not frenetic.  People were overwhelmingly sad, but friendly.

I wrote this after I returned to Asia:

I turn on the TV and head for CNN automatically. If the TV could be like my web browser, I would have CNN set as my homepage. As it is, I can only hope that my roommates have not changed the channel recently, or risk losing precious seconds of the “continuing coverage”.

So many people in New York say that in lower Manhattan, the only way to orient yourself when leaving the warm and steamy confines of the subway is to look for the glittering duo of the World Trade Center. So when the newspapers report that people in Manhattan walk the streets in a daze, looking lost, it seems so obviously relatable to the loss of these markers, these directional icons.

I usually take the 1/9 south. I get out at Canal, where I can find Chinatown, my favorite art supply store and the best 2nd hand clothing stores in town. And no matter how often I take that line, I still find myself completely mystified when I hit street level, leaving behind the dull thunder of the next approaching train. There is always the immediate mist of apprehension: did I get off at the wrong stop? Why does this street look so different? And then as quickly, a heady rush of comprehension when I look up and see the twin towers, so permanent, so immobile, so there. That way is south, I say to myself, and I recover my New York sense of purpose, taking my long New York strides towards my final destination.

When they amputated the city, it was like they amputated my sense of direction as well.

I suddenly find myself standing in the middle of a local intersection, an intersection I should know from all my years in the city, and I can’t tell north from south, east from west. It’s like one of those childhood games, where you get blindfolded and spun around and around. The game's over and I’ve taken the blindfold off, but I can’t stop my head from spinning.

I Choose My Choice...

Here is a quite good article on motherhood, feminism, and career from the Atlantic Monthly: I Choose My Choice! (H/T Escape Brooklyn).  I strongly recommend it to SAHM, working moms, feminists, all women, really.  It makes me wonder how I have not heard of this author (Sandra Tsing Loh) before today.  Here are some of my favorite passages.

Not that being an academic isn’t a hell of a lot of fun; in fact, its very pleasantness contributes to a bias peculiar to members of the thinktankerati. So argues Neil Gilbert, a renowned Berkeley sociologist, in A Mother’s Work: How Feminism, the Market and Policy Shape Family Life. According to Gilbert, the debate over the value of women’s work has been framed by those with a too-rosy view of employment, "mainly because the vast majority of those who publicly talk, think, and write about questions of gender equality, motherhood, and work in modern society are people who talk, think, and write for a living. And they tend to associate with other people who, like themselves, do not have 'real' jobs—professors, journalists, authors, artists, politicos, pundits, foundation program officers, think-tank scholars, and media personalities."

Many of them can set their own hours, choose their own workspace, get paid for thinking about issues that interest them, and, as a bonus, get to feel, by virtue of their career, important in the world. The professor admits that his own job in “university teaching is by and large divorced from the normal discipline of everyday life in the marketplace. It bears only the faintest resemblance to most work in the real world.” In other words, for the “occupational elite” (as Gilbert calls this group), unlike for most people, going to work is not a drag.

Being an academic wife, this is a tension that I can unequivocally say I feel, daily.  In fact, one of the most tragic conflicts I have with my husband is his perception that I am giving my career undue weight.  For example, over the past year and half, there have been many, if not hundreds, of instances where I get a late afternoon call from a senior associate or a partner which requires me to change my original plans to get home and have dinner with J and my girls.  As far as J is concerned, this throws an almost unbearable wrench into our domestic tranquility.  First, it means a certain amount of last minute wheeling and dealing to make sure that the nanny can stay or that everything is in place for J to take over.  More importantly though, J finds it an unacceptable that I would make these sacrifices in the name of my job/career.

To some extent, I suppose his feelings are warranted.  I have made no secret of the fact that I have no intention of making partner at my current law firm, or any law firm for that matter.  Given my lack of "commitment", J simply doesn't understand why I can't or won't set stricter boundaries.  Why I don't tell the partner that I cannot stay late that day, or that what the partner needs will simply have to wait.  For me, it comes to my own sense of obligation - my competitive nature, and a generations deep work ethic, prevents me from working any less hard than those around me.  Furthermore, knowing what I do about the firm culture, I know that I'm not the type that can hold her head high while bearing the unfortunate tsk tsk-ing that will inevitably happen behind my back if I start to "slack".  (And not to mention, my firm has no beef with lay offs.  It has laid-off several associates this year already, under the guise of poor performance, and there are daily rumours about what group, what class will face the axe next).

Of course, J's infinitely flexible academic schedule makes him particularly insensitive to the pressures I feel at work.  He doesn't understand the grind and numbness of the daily work, the dread of being called into a partner's office unprepared, the endlessness and thanklessness of the work that lawyers do.  So to some extent, he is jealous, because he would far prefer to "work" than to have to labor at home doing the thankless job of taking care of our children, made even more thankless when I'm not around.

But aren’t women at home subject to the oppression of their chauvinistic, soul-crushing husbands? As if a mere human could compete with clogged freeways and Sisyphean paper pushing (or its more up-to-date equivalent, paperless pushing) and burnt-coffee-laced afternoons counting the acoustic tiles in stale conference rooms, and the hours spent arguing over the wording of a memo that within minutes after its dissemination will be dragged into the now-two-dimensional circular file. Unless he’s an abusive alcoholic or something similar, [it would be difficult for a husband] to be more oppressive than a “real” job...

But surely women’s economic independence is worth it? Oy. Wrong again... 

[While] the economy benefits [as double income means more discretionary income], for working-class families with young children, so much of a second income is eaten up by child care and taxes and other costs related to holding down a job that, after purchasing the microwave—now necessary to produce hot meals in the 10 minutes left for food preparation—and the de rigueur DVD player, the second wage earner might as well have stayed at home. Gilbert concludes, then, that financial need is not the force behind women’s shift in the past 50 years from work in the home to work in the market­place; rather, it is the desires of those who have made out like bandits in this new order, the tiny minority (3.5 percent in 2003) of women who earn $75,000 or more. Members of this occupational elite have created a host of cultural norms by which their far less privileged sisters—who, again, make up the vast majority of working women—feel they must abide. [emphasis mine] For Hirsh­man’s doctors, lawyers, judges, and professors, work has been terrific, so it’s no wonder they’ve advocated social change, imposing on society between the 1960s and the mid-1990s “new expectations about modern life, self-fulfillment, and the joys of work outside the home.”

This is scary for me, and it makes me fear for its veracity.  Although I interact with all socio-economic levels of women, the truth is, based on their educational backgrounds, most women I am close with belong to the described "privileged elite".  I think the measure is wrong - many of my non-profit breathren, for example, earn less than that keystone $75k.  But for most of them, they have done so as a choice.  Many of these women could have higher earning jobs as lawyers or bankers or upper managers, but they have chosen to take unconventional career paths that they find rewarding (much in the way that J has chosen his career path for its psychological rather than financial rewards).  Some of these women can afford to do so because they have husbands in more conventional careers providing a safety net.  Others, without the support of a partner, live paycheck to paycheck, but in some measure secure in the knowledge that if this particular endeavor were to fail, they have the kind of educational foundation (and socio-economic savvy) that would make it easy for them to reinvent themselves into more financial security.

I hate the feminist argument that if I don't succeed, I am letting down those generations of women before me that have paved the way for me.  I am grateful that we have seen cracks (18 million of them, according to Senator Clinton) in the glass ceiling.  I love the fact that I have never personally felt impeded by my sex with regards to the things I have chosen to do.  But I hate the idea of replacing one set of unattainable ideals (the stepford housewife) with another set of unattainable ideals (the ball-breaker super-woman).

SATC's Charlotte, whose plaintive wails of "I choose my choice! I choose my choice," when given flak for quitting her job to please her smug first husband may have been the too-loud protests of a woman in denial, but it behooves us to listen carefully when a woman declares that she has chosen her choice.  Sometimes, she has.

It's a Hard Knock Life for Lawyers...

I know I kvetch a lot on this blog about my so-called life as a lawyer, and I'm sure there are those out there who thing I'm just a bleepity bitch who has had it all too easy in life and cries at the slightest hardship. Considering that I've never had to live in poverty (subsisting on Ramen after graduating from college doesn't really count), never been physically or sexually abused in any capacity, never been tortured during wartime, I guess it's basically true.

But this is my blog about being a mommy and being a lawyer, and it's been really hard for me. Really, really hard.

If I had to distill what it is about being a law firm associate that is so hard, I would say:

(1) Lack of control over your time. This is my absolute #1. Being a law firm associate means giving up control of your life and relegating it to the law firm (or specifically, the partner or senior associate). I have not had so little control over my time since I was probably 10, when my life was completely structured by my parents. I know that this can vary between practice groups, between firms, between partners, but I think that every associate has had to deal with this on some level, to some degree.

As I say to my friends (those who are still listening to me), being a lawyer, and especially being a corporate lawyer, is being a client's bitch (except in my case, I said that it was like being a banker's bitch). We are expected to work in tandem with their needs and requirements, but in many cases, given false and unrealistic timelines. Even in the short time that I've been at this firm, I've had half a dozen cases where I was told to work frantically for days because of an impending deal happening, only to have the deal unceremoniously die, or worse, to have the terms of the deal completely change (which then triggers another round of frantic work, which involves dumping all of the work previously done). I'm told, day after day, to not go home because the client absolutely needs to have a document turned by the morning, only to have the partner call me at midnight to tell me that they wouldn't be able to get us the necessary information until the next day. (For those who haven't experienced the beauty that is hourly billing, that means sitting in your office, surfing the internets, not billing and therefore not being given credit for sitting in your office for hours).

(2) Lack of management skills among the partners/senior associates. Maybe this is because I came from a corporate culture first, but on average, the management skills among the partners at this law firm (and, by trickle down effect, among the senior associates) is absolutely appalling. I sometimes wonder if this is because so many lawyers do go directly from school to school to being a six figured salaryman handling hundreds of millions of dollars.

Partners either ridiculously over-manage, or else they manage not-at-all. I classify these management styles as being directly correlated with the two dominant lawyer personalities - the snob (nobody can do this as well as I can) and the snot (I'm too important to do this and too important to deal with junior people). I have had partners that will literally call me every 10 minutes, and read the same 400 page document three thousand friggin times, each time catching an errant semi-colon, and then partners that will dump a massive assignment on me, with no direction and no precedent and then disappear to the Middle East for two weeks.

Seriously.

So on the one hand, I get killed with boredom, spending hundreds of hours being a glorified word processor, on the other hand, I am so stressed by not knowing what the frak I'm doing that I'm popping Alka-Seltzer to keep my innards from imploding.

(3) Being Mommy-Tracked. I know that I cut corners and take advantage whenever I can in a way that some of the younger, non-familied associates don't. I keep my load at exactly what I can handle, if I have slow days I don't seek out additional assignments, I leave early if I can.

On the other hand, I'm pretty conscientious and what work I do is done well.  (Ok, I'm not the most thorough person in the world, but I have a serious focus problem that is almost borderline medical.)  I may not be the most aggressive 2nd year associate at this firm, nor the brightest tack in the box, but at the same time, I know that my work is better than several others at my level (this is not entirely bragging - ok, just a smidge - but I attribute it to my 10+ years on the other junior associates). 

But what this translates to, in the firm world is, aww... isn't it cute that you're balancing motherhood and a law job?  Which translates to, I get just as much work, but I don't get the juicy work, the partner making work.

Lots of work + bad work = massive suckage

(4) Blackberry-itis.  I guess this isn't a lawyer thing, because apparently, nowadays, there are bloggers who carry crackberries so that they can always be plugged in to their blogs.  But at least, for many bloggers, being linked to their on-line life is something they love.  My love for my law job is highly debatable. 

I give a lot at work.  I give a lot on the weekends.  But when I'm expected to give on the four day vacation that I take after I've worked for two straight weeks in at 9, out at 2 (am, not pm), that's just mean. 

Or maybe it's just me.

Ok, internet peeps.  That's my $0.04.  If any lawyer types out there would like to add to my litany of why I hate my job, feel free :)

Cheaper by the Half-Dozen...

We were driving home from some friend's homes after a long day of playing and stopped at a Wendy's on the way.  It was late-ish in the evening, so the place was pretty empty, except for a boisterous young family that consisted of parents and six children who were between (I would guess) 3 months and 8 years of age. 

Loo was absolutely mesmorized by this family, especially the fact that they were all wearing matching grey sweatshirts with "Team [last name]" on the front and each of their first names (except for the father, who had "Coach [first name]" on his) on the back.

Loo was so fascinated that between bites of her frosty (the reason we stopped) she would hop off her chair to run over and sneak a peek at the family.  At one point, she cozied up to J and whispered, "daddy, I want to be in that family."

Um... not with my uterus?

Loo's been lots of trouble lately.  And it's so deliberate now.  We'll tell her not to do something, and you can see her standing there, processing our words, and then doing precisely what we forbade her to do.  Time-outs barely make a dent in her consciousness, she doesn't really dislike doing a time out because she sits in her "naughty" chair and sings songs, kicks her feet up on the back, does an awkward downward dog, and her 3 minutes are done.

Her favorite phrase right now is "not right now". 

Loo, it's time for dinner.
Not right now.
Loo, let's get ready for bed.
Not right now.
Ok, time to turn off the TV.
Not right now.

Anyways, you get the point. 

Couple of things.  Obama won big this weekend in Washington, Nebraska and Louisiana.  I won a bet with J, since I said Obama would take Washington, and he was sure that it would go Hillary.  J now thinks that Obama has a real shot to take it all the way, though, for fear of jinxing the whole enterprise, I'm keeping a lid on my hopes.  I donated the money to Obama's campaign, which seemed like the right thing to do.

I need to update my net worth chart, just haven't gotten around to it, hopefully I can do it tonight.  I have a big addition to put in (yea!): an etrade account that I just haven't really looked at for a while which had more value in it than I remembered.

J and I are so up and down right now.  We went through several tense moments this weekend where we were barely speaking to each other.  There is such a perpetual sense of frustration and disgust that lingers over all of our interactions that it must be affecting our daughters.  But at the same time, I still recognize that J's a good guy, he's trying, and when we're friendly to each other, it's still the best relationship in the world.  But I get a giant black pit in my stomach whenever I think about our fights.

The truth is, we're not really the most effective parents in the world.  This applies to both of us.  Combine two completely useless parents who still have strong senses of parental responsibility, and we have a disaster in the making.  For example, neither of us seem to be able to take care of the two girls alone for very long periods of time.  So weekends without the nanny (like this weekend) are utterly disasterous.  J will sneak off to take a nap, which pisses me off to no end, and I will do things like make lunch or dinner, which pisses J to no end (because that effectively leaves J in charge of Loo and Kali, and J thinks that we should just order out instead of wasting my time on cooking).  All those mothers on the blogosphere whose husbands that take their children off for a morning or afternoon so that the moms can get a nap or read a magazine.  It has NEVER happened to me in the almost four years since we had Loo.

But I'm just as much to blame.  My work hours start early and end late, and when I'm on, I'm really really on -  I end up dumping all the childcare stuff onto J.  This morning, I had an assignment that had to be done by 10, so I got up extra early to start working on it.  Since our nanny doesn't get in until 8:30ish, J had to get the girls up, change them out of their pajamas and get them started with their breakfast.  His work is much more flexible than mine (for example, the only fixed claim on his time are his classes) so then he ends up staying for an extra hour after the nanny arrives to help her get them through breakfast, and to play with them.   And he resents the hell out of the time that he spends with them on the weekdays when I'm absent because of my work.  He constantly reminds me that he would be far more successful at his work if he wasn't playing househusband to my law job.

We're also coming to a real bitter battle in terms of where we want to be.  I don't really see myself working in a big law firm for the long term and I would like to get to a point where we have a more "normal" family life.  Unfortunately, I think that for me, that means moving out of the big cities in the Northeast.  J, on the other hand, seems to have decided that there are only three cities in which he could live: Boston (but only if he could stay in academia, which, right this moment, is questionable), New York and Tokyo.  I'm really really really not keen on any of these.  I'm leaning towards Portland (OR), Austin (TX), Kansas City (MO) or any similarly mid-sized, liberal city.  Basically, I want to get out of the big mega cities.  We're at an impasse in this argument, and anytime we even try to discuss this, we end up in an enormous shouting match, with accusations flying around.

I know there are others who have it much worse that us and that I should be grateful for the good things in our relationship.  I hate how petty our arguments have gotten, and how vicious.  And every day I hope that we're just on a big enormous hump, that we'll get over it someday, somehow.  But right now, I'm sad and confused and lonely, and my once best friend in the world isn't there to hold my hands through this.