I Have Never Met Congressman Weiner

By Gennette Nicole Cordova, Guardian UK

03 June 11

Gennette Nicole Cordova is the student who was sent the tweet from Congressman Anthony Weiner's account. The following is her statement on the matter. -- SMG/RSN

The photo supposedly sent from Weiner's Twitter account was a form of harassment, but that's as nothing to what has followed.

My statement on Anthony Weiner and the lewd photo tweet.

riday evening, I logged on to Twitter to find that I had about a dozen new mentions in less than an hour, which is a rare occurrence. When I checked one of the posts that I had been tagged in I saw that it was a picture that had supposedly been tweeted to me by Congressman Anthony Weiner.

The account that these tweets were sent from was familiar to me; this person had harassed me many times after the congressman followed me on Twitter, a month or so ago. Since I had dealt with this person and his cohorts before, I assumed that the tweet and the picture were their latest attempts at defaming the congressman and harassing his supporters.

Annoyed, I responded with something along the lines of "are you f***ing kidding me?" and "I've never seen this. You people are sick." I blocked their accounts, made my page private, and let the matter drop, expecting them to eventually do the same.

Within about an hour, however, I realised that I had grossly underestimated the severity of the situation that I had somehow become a part of.

The last 36 hours have been the most confusing, anxiety-ridden hours of my life. I've watched in sheer disbelief as my name, age, location, links to any social networking site I've ever used, my old phone numbers and pictures have been passed along from stranger to stranger.

My friends have received phone calls from people claiming to be old friends of mine, attempting to obtain my contact information. My siblings have received tweets that are similar in nature. I began taking steps, though not quickly enough, to remove as much personal information from the internet as possible.

Not because I "was exposed as Weiner's mistress" or because I "was responsible for the hack," as Gawker has suggested. I removed my information because I, believe it or not, do not enjoy being harassed or being the reason that my loved ones are targets of harassment.

I have seen myself labeled as the "Femme Fatale of Weinergate," "Anthony Weiner's 21-year-old coed mistress" and "the self-proclaimed girlfriend of Anthony Weiner." All of this is so outlandish that I don't know whether to be pissed off or amused, quite frankly. This is the reality of sharing information online in the 21st century. Things that I never imagined people would care about are now being plastered all over blog sites, including pictures of me from when I was 17 and tweets that have been taken completely out of context. I tweeted once (it was reported that I said it twice) that "I wonder what my boyfriend @RepWeiner is up to."

I am a 21-year-old college student from Seattle. I have never met Congressman Weiner, though I am a fan. I go to school in Bellingham, where I spend all of my time; I've never been to New York or to DC. The point I am trying to make is that, contrary to the impression that I apparently gave from my tweet, I am not his girlfriend. Nor am I the wife, girlfriend or mistress of Barack Obama, Ray Allen or Cristiano Ronaldo, despite the fact that I have made similar assertions about them via Twitter.

There have never been any inappropriate exchanges between Anthony Weiner and myself, including the tweet/picture in question, which had apparently been deleted before it reached me. I cannot answer the questions that I do not have the answers to. I am not sure whether or not this letter will alleviate any future harassment. I also do not have a clear understanding as to how or why exactly I am involved in this fiasco.

I do know that my life has been seriously impacted by speculation and faulty allegations. My reputation has been called into question by those who lack the character to report the facts.

This article was originally published by the New York Daily News, and is crossposted by kind permission of the author.

The Truth About the American Economy - Part 2

By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog

01 June 11

he Stalled Recovery

The US economy was supposed to be in bloom by late spring but it's hardly growing at all. Expectations for second quarter growth aren't much better than the measly 1.8 percent annualized rate of the first quarter.

That's not nearly fast enough to reduce our ferociously-high level of unemployment. The Labor Department will tell us Friday whether the jobs situation improved in May, but there's been no sign of a surge in hiring. Nor in wages. Average hourly earnings of production and non-supervisory employees - who make up 80 percent of non-government workers - dropped to $8.76 in April. Adjusted for inflation, that's lower than they were in the depths of the recession.

Meanwhile, housing prices continue to fall. They're now 33 percent below their 2006 peak. That's a bigger drop than recorded in the Great Depression. Homes are the largest single asset of the American middle class, so as housing prices drop many Americans feel poorer. All of this is contributing to a general gloominess. Not surprisingly, consumer confidence is also down.

The recovery has stalled. It's unlikely America will find itself back in recession but the possibility of a double dip can't be dismissed.

The Problem of Demand

The problem isn't on the supply side of the ledger. Corporate profits are still healthy. Big companies continue to sit on a cash hoard. Large and middle-sized companies can easily borrow more, at low rates.

The problem is on the demand side. American consumers, who constitute 70 percent of the total economy, can't and won't buy enough to get it moving. They justifiably worry they won't be able to pay their bills or afford to send their children to college or to retire. Banks, with equal justification, are reluctant to lend to them. But as long as consumers hold back, companies remain reluctant to hire new workers or raise the wages of current ones, feeding the vicious cycle.

The timing is unfortunate. Foreign consumers won't help much even if the dollar continues to slide. Europe's debt crisis and embrace of austerity, Japan's tragedy, and China's fiscal tightening have reduced global demand. At the same time, the federal stimulus here has about run its course. The Federal Reserve is about to end its $600 billion of purchases of Treasury bills, designed to bring down long-term interest rates and make it easier for homeowners to refinance. Worse yet, state governments - starved for revenue and constitutionally barred from running deficits - continue to cut programs. Local governments are now in worse shape, laying off platoons of teachers and fire fighters.

Washington's Paralysis

Under normal circumstances, this would be the time for the federal government to take bold action to ward off a double dip.

For example, it could put more cash in peoples' pockets while giving employers an extra incentive to hire by exempting the first $20,000 of earnings from payroll taxes, for a year or two. It could lend money to state and local governments. It could launch a new WPA (modeled after its antecedent during the Great Depression) to put the long-term unemployed to work on public projects.

It could amend the bankruptcy law to allow people to include their prime residences in personal bankruptcy, thereby giving homeowners more leverage to get mortgage lenders to mitigate the terms of their loans. It could enlarge and expand the Earned Income Tax Credit so that the bottom 60 percent got a wage subsidy instead of a tax bill.

But these aren't normal circumstances. America has been through a devastating recession that poked a giant hole in the federal budget. And with a presidential election coming up next year, both parties are already maneuvering for tactical advantage.

Since taking over the House of Representatives in January, Republicans have focused on cutting government spending and paring back regulations. Their colleagues in the Senate, whose leader has proclaimed his major goal to unseat President Obama, are almost as single-minded. Cynics might suspect Republicans of quietly hoping the economy stays rotten through Election Day.

Democrats, meanwhile, are behaving as if they're powerless to affect the economy even though a Democrat occupies the White House and his appointees run the federal government. They'd rather not dwell on the slowdown because they don't want to spook the bond market or add to the prevailing gloom (Jimmy Carter's ill-fated comment about the nation's "malaise" during the stagflation of the late 1970s has served as a permanent admonition for presidents to stay upbeat).

Democrats are staking their electoral hopes on continuing disarray among Republican presidential aspirants, as well as the Republicans' suicidal plan to turn Medicare, the popular health insurance system for seniors, into vouchers that would funnel money to private, for-profit insurance companies.

The result is as if Washington were on another planet from the rest of the country (many Americans would argue this is hardly a new phenomenon).

The noisiest battle in the nation's capital is over raising the statutory debt limit - a game of chicken in which Republicans are demanding, in return for their votes, caps on future federal spending while Democrats insist on preserving the possibility of tax increases on the wealthy. Countless budget analysts are combing through endless projections of government revenues and expenditures in five or ten years. Think tanks and blue-ribbon panels are issuing voluminous reports on how to tame the budget deficit in decades to come. The President, meanwhile, is trying to appear as fiscally austere as possible - keeping a lid on non-defense discretionary spending, freezing the wages of civil servants, and offering his own deficit-reduction plans.

Washington's paralysis in the face of a stalled recovery is bad news - not just for average Americans but for the world. Ironically, it also worsens America's future budget crisis because it postpones the day when the debt begins to shrink as a proportion of the GDP. Yet as the 2012 election season looms, the prospects for sensible policy seem to decrease by the day.

(To read Part 1 click here. Written for the Financial Times.)

Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written thirteen books, including "The Work of Nations," "Locked in the Cabinet," "Supercapitalism" and his latest book, "AFTERSHOCK: The Next Economy and America's Future." His 'Marketplace' commentaries can be found on publicradio.com and iTunes.