Posner Quotes

Capitalism is not a synonym for free markets.

IRWIN: At the time of the Reformation there were fourteen foreskins of Christ preserved, but it was thought that the church of St John Lateran in Rome had the authentic prepuce. DAKIN: Don't think we're shocked by your mention of the word 'foreskin', sir. CROWTHER: No, sir. Some of us even have them. LOCKWOOD: Not Posner, though, sir. Posner's like, you know, Jewish. It's one of several things Posner doesn't have. (Posner mouths 'fuck off.')

In the end, leaders don't decide who leads. Followers do.

They say love is supposed to set you free, but I think love binds you. It's only once you're so full of joy that you can imagine a devastation of loss.

Our mothers were largely silent about what happened to them as they passed through this midlife change. But a new generation of women has already started to break the wall of silence.

In a historic 1933 accord, the Vatican was the first sovereign state to sign a bilateral treaty with Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. The Nazis promised to protect Catholics inside Germany in return for the church endorsing Hitler’s government.

Eventually 400,000 Germans were sterilized, and the Vatican did not issue a Pastoral Letter against it for another decade, only after the tide of the war had begun to turn against the Nazis).23,I

A report that studied death certificates from the mid-1980s concluded that “The death rate of priests from AIDS is at least four times that of the general population.

But the fact that judges follow precedent regularly even though not invariably does not support the legalistic theory as strongly as one might expect. The original precedent in a line of precedents could not have been based on precedent.

John Paul was a bystander as the American church quietly approved an aggressive new legal strategy that included, as The Washington Post uncovered, “hiring high-powered law firms and private detectives to examine the personal lives of the church’s accusers, fighting to keep documents secret and engaging in new tactics to minimize settlements.”65

If changing judges changes law, then it is not clear what law is.

There's nothing more demoralizing than a leader who can't clearly articulate why we're doing what we're doing.

Just having a certain kind of attitude can be magic.

Mussolini’s insistence on public morality, belief in the inferior role of women, and the ban on contraception and abortion made the fascists palatable to the church.85

People are just more willing to follow someone they like and trust.

Space and time wouldn't let you be mine

To forgive or forget the crimes of Josef Mengele would require the amputation of our conscience and the dismemberment of our memory.

Managers can threaten people with the loss of jobs if they don't get with the program, but threats, power, and position do not earn commitment. They earn compliance.

The same year as the Perón visit, American counterintelligence concluded that the Vatican as an institution—not merely as a group of scattered, rogue clerics—was helping high-ranking Nazis escape justice.94

A poem by Rudyard Kipling says derisively of people who despise soldiers and police that they make ‘mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep.’ You are likely to have a strong reaction pro or con to this sentiment and how Kipling expressed it, but you will not be able to defend your view with arguments that would convince someone who has the opposite reaction. If you are intellectually sophisticated you mare recognize that your conviction, however strong, cannot be shown to be ‘right,’ but at most reasonable. Yet that recognition will not weaken the strength of your conviction or its influence on your behavior.” 105-06 (quoting Rudyard Kipling, Tommy.)

Case Closed, de Gerald Posner; Legend, de Edward Jay Epstein (una chifladura a lo Robert Ludlum, pero divertida); Oswald: un misterio americano, de Norman Mailer; y Mrs. Paine’s Garage, de Thomas Mallon. El último ofrece un brillante análisis de los teóricos de la conspiración y su necesidad de encontrar

Benedict’s resignation was a selfless act since he had come to realize he was not capable of leading the modern church and making the tough decisions that were needed. “It wasn’t one thing, but a whole combination of them,” concluded Paolo Rodari, Il Foglio’s veteran Vatican reporter. Vatileaks, said Rodari, “was a constant drumbeat on the Pope.”33

The logical end point of institutional investment and diversification is the coordination of all capital to extract maximum wealth from consumers and workers.

The outstanding examples are still Cardozo’s Nature of the Judicial Process18

It is not the practice of the Holy See to disclose information on the religious discipline of members of the clergy or religious according to canon law.

And a popular priest, Father Dyonisy Juricev, wrote in a leading newspaper that it was no longer a sin to kill Serbs or Jews so long as they were at least seven years old.

No matter how much time I spend here I can't escape the whiteness of my skin, the way I stand out no matter what I do. But it's more than my skin. It's my privilege.

Interestingly, one of the most important times to listen well is when you disagree with the message, especially as it relates to how we affect others.

Ultimately, he chose the coward’s path, preferring to live and die in denial. That is to his eternal shame.

A Supreme Court Justice writing about constitutional theory is like a dog walking on his hind legs; the wonder is not that it is done well but that it is done at all.

In return, the Vatican gave Hitler the formal endorsement he wanted. Article 16 of the Reichskonkordat required German bishops and cardinals to swear an oath of loyalty to the Third Reich.

It is not realistic to put legal constraints on war powers. Law works through general prospective rules that apply to a range of factual situations. International relations and national security are too fluid and unpredictable to be governed by a set of legal propositions that command general assent secured in advance. Laws governing war make us feel more secure but they don’t actually make us more secure

A supplementary 180-page U.S. government report issued that spring (June 2, 1998) provided more evidence that neutral countries, including the Vatican, had profited by hiding Nazi gold in their central banks.50

Everyone left London just shaking their heads in disbelief,” recalled Elan Steinberg, the World Jewish Congress’s representative. “Two hundred tons of gold from the pro-Nazi Croatian government found its way to the Vatican. Here they were, one of the world’s great moral institutions, and they refused to tell us what their view was, much less to lift a finger to help recover any looted assets. It was terribly disappointing.”44

God’s Bankers cuts through the masses of misinformation to present an unvarnished account of the quest for money and power in the Roman Catholic Church. No embellishment is needed. That real tale is shocking enough.

I want to say that it disturbs me deeply that I was part of such a criminal organization. I am ashamed that I saw injustice was being done and I did nothing to stop it. I apologize for my actions. I am very, very sorry.

Posner and Shiffrin are influential legal scholars and they are not alone in their views. Their intolerance of free speech that leads to what they deem the wrong policy conclusions or offends the wrong people is frankly typical of the illiberal left. Today’s progressive legal policy is less likely to treat the First Amendment as a bulwark against government infringement on the free expression of Americans than a roadblock to a progressive ideological agenda.

In World War II, Pius XII’s silence helped protect a complex web of interlocking business interests with the Third Reich, relationships that yielded significant profits for the Vatican. In some cases they are dealings the Church has denied to this day.

I do not apologize for these terms or, more generally, for discussing judicial thinking in a vocabulary alien to most judges and lawyers. Judicial behavior cannot be understood in the vocabulary that judges themselves use, sometimes mischievously. (11)

Two days after he had appointed the special oversight commission, sixty-one-year-old Monsignor Nunzio Scarano, an APSA senior accountant, was arrested. Prosecutors charged he was the mastermind in helping friends avoid taxes on $26.2 million, some of it cash flown to Italy on a private jet from Switzerland.

The small group of Benedict supporters gathered that night were not simply upset at money matters gone awry. There was, as they discussed that evening, something that made most of them squirm. They had seen the proof of what one called a “gay lobby.” The common bond for the gay clerics at the highest positions of the Curia was that they had abandoned their celibacy vows. The problem, the small group agreed, was that they often used sex as a carrot for advancement to ambitious up-and-coming clerics. It was deplorable, they concluded, that a fast career track was within reach for any cleric willing to submit to the Vatican’s equivalent of a casting couch.2,II

This arrangement, in which users take advantage of services and the company gains all the upside of the data they generate, may sound novel, but it is actually very old. Prior to the rise of capitalism, feudal labor arrangements worked similarly. Lords insulated their serfs from fluctuations in markets and guaranteed them safety and traditional rights to use the land and to keep enough of their crop to survive. In exchange, lords took all the upside of the market return on serfs’ agricultural output. Similarly, today, siren servers provide useful and enjoyable information services, while taking the market value of the data we produce in exchange. We thus refer to this contemporary system as “technofeudalism.

the Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research at the University of Melbourne published the results of an extensive study of international money laundering.9 The authors compared the banking systems of two hundred countries. The Vatican ranked in the top ten money laundering havens, behind Luxembourg, Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, and Liechtenstein, but ahead of Singapore.

The Bluebook is an absurdity, but it endures, in fact thrives, impervious to criticism and ridicule. The judiciary navigates the sea of modernity, slowed, thrown of course, by the barnacles of legal formalism (semantic escapes from reality, impoverished sense of context, fear of math and science, insensitivity to language and culture, mangling of history, superfluous footnotes, verbosity, excessive quotation, reader-unfriendly prose, exaggeration, bluster, obsession with citation form) – an accumulation of many centuries, yet constantly augmented. There is little desire to give the hull a good scraping. There is fear that the naked hull would be unslightly, even unseaworthy. The fear is overblown. A week after all the copies of the Bluebook were burned, their absence would not be noticed.

Berry’s investigation was a searing indictment of how church officials in Louisiana buried reports of sexual abuse of minors and did their best to pay off victims to keep them silent. By the time his story ran, the tiny Lafayette diocese in which Gauthe had committed his crimes was deeply in the red from $4.2 million in confidential settlements to the families of nine victims, and $114 million in pending claims in another eleven lawsuits.

When Ali Agca, a Turk, shot Pope John Paul II in 1981, both the target and the would-be killer were well within Vatican territory,” wrote George Armstrong, the respected Rome correspondent for London’s Guardian. “The Vatican was happy to have him arrested, tried and sentenced in Italy, and under Italian law, and his life sentence will be at the expense of the Italian taxpayer. The Vatican becomes another country only when it chooses to be.

There are really only two standards of appellate review: plenary and deferential. Conventionally there are four basic standards (with many variants), which in ascending order of deference to the trial court or administrative agency are de novo, clearly erroneous, substantial evidence, and abuse of discretion. But the last three are, in practice, the same, because finer distinctions are beyond judges’ cognitive capacity. The multiplication of unusual distinctions is a familiar judicial pathology.

In our experience, most people living in wealthy cities who consider themselves sympathetic to the plight of migrants know little or nothing of the language, cultures, aspirations, and values of those they claim to sympathize with. They benefit greatly from the cheap services these migrants offer and rarely concern themselves with the poverty in which they live. The solidarity of such cosmopolitan elites is thus skin deep...but it is [still] better than the open hostility many ordinary citizens of wealthy countries feel toward migrants.

It works like this: when your team gathers to kick off a new project, conclude that meeting by pretending to gaze into a crystal ball and say, “Look six months into the future. The news is not good. Despite our hopes, the project has failed. How did this happen?” Give your team members three minutes to run a mental simulation, and ask them to write down why they think their work derailed. All sorts of reasons will emerge. For example, “There were too many distractions,” “The project was overly ambitious,” or “We pushed the project too much toward our own self-interests, without considering those of our partners.

Right-wing populist movements appeal to historically dominant population groups that have been left behind economically relative to their expectations: the poorly educated, those who live in rural areas, and workers who have lost jobs because of international trade.18 Arguments made by the leaders of right-wing populist movements for trade barriers and immigration restrictions fall on willing ears. But rather than explicitly appeal to class identity or distributive justice, the leaders of right-wing populist movements appeal to the ethno-nationalist creed of “blood and soil.” These groups look nostalgically back to a past when people like them enjoyed greater economic security and higher status.

Anyone who’s ever been in a leadership role quickly learns that you’re squeezed between others’ lofty expectations and your own personal limitations. You realize that while others want you to be of impeccable character, you’re not always without fault. You learn that you can’t see around every corner, and even if you know your way forward everyone may not end up at the same destination, let alone be on time. You discover that despite your best efforts to introduce brilliant innovations, most of them don’t succeed. You find that you sometimes get angry and short, and that you don’t always listen carefully to what others have to say. You’re reminded that you don’t always treat everyone with dignity and respect. You recognize that others deserve more credit than they get, and that you’ve failed to say thank you. You know that sometimes you get, and accept, more credit than you deserve. In other words, you realize that you’re human.

Dick Clark was pleased with the group’s success, but he was also happy to be rid of them. They had kept many of the other acts awake by practicing late at night on the bus, and Diane Ross had too many fights with other artists. Once, Ross had a spat with Brenda Holloway, who she thought had taken her can of hair spray. Another fight was with the Crystals’ Delores Brooks, whom Diane accused of stealing a pair of her shoes. Their shouting got them both temporarily kicked off the bus. Another time, she jumped on the back of Mary Wilson, pulling her hair and punching her. Other women complained that Ross hogged the single mirror in the small dressing rooms they all used. “Diane always had a temper,” said Mary Wilson, “and while some people might have seen her actions as the result of conniving, her behavior was actually more like that of a spoiled brat. Once she made up her mind about something, there was no reasoning with her…. Diane would fight with anyone, and often she would take a minor issue and keep on it until you reacted.

And so an untold number of Trump’s evangelical supporters believe that God has anointed him, God will protect him, and God will smite his enemies. However his presidency ends, the fundamental damage it has inflicted on our democracy will not be healed overnight. His “base” is not an accident of his unconventional foray into politics, or a quirk of this particular political moment. The vast majority of white evangelicals are all in with Trump because he has given them political power and allowed them to carry out a Christian supremacist agenda, inextricably intertwined with his administration’s white nationalist agenda. Conspiracy theories and lies about the core of our democracy—separation of powers, a free and independent press, and the dedication of public servants—run rampant through their print and social media, podcasts, and television programs. The depth and durability of their fervor have disproven the mantra “the religious right is dead” again and again—and their ability to sustain a presidency in the face of unprecedented scandal is the most compelling evidence against that mantra yet.

In exchange for some wide-ranging modifications demanded by the socialist government to the church’s 1929 concordat, Italy agreed to underwrite the remainder of the $406 million settlement.53 The changes to the concordat would have once been unthinkable. The church dropped its insistence that Roman Catholicism be the state religion. Moving forward, the state had to confirm church-annulled marriages. Parents were given the right to opt their children out of formerly mandatory religious education classes. And Rome was no longer considered a “sacred city,” a classification that had allowed the Vatican to keep out strip clubs and the porn industry. Italy even managed to get the church to relinquish control of the Jewish catacombs. “The new concordat is another example of the diminishing hold of the Roman Catholic church in civil life in Italy,” noted The New York Times.54 In return, Italy instituted an“eight-per-thousand” tax, in which 0.8 percent of the income tax paid by ordinary Italians was distributed to one of twelve religious organizations recognized by the state. During its early years, nearly 90 percent of the tax went to the Catholic Church (by 2010, the church received less than 50 percent as the tax was more equitably distributed). Not only did the tax relieve Italy of its responsibility for the $135 million annual subsidy it paid for the country’s 35,000 priests, it meant the church had a steady and reliable source of much needed income.55

I didn't originally intend to be an artist; I was much more interested in decorative arts--daily life, beautiful objects.

«Si usted no cree en el mensajero, no creerá en el mensaje». —JAMES M. KOUZES Y BARRY Z. POSNER

By contrast, in a liquidity crisis only one creditor can save the debtor: the government. There is no competitive market that offers emergency loans during a liquidity crisis. This means that the government can dictate terms. It can also neglect the interests of other stakeholders or discriminate among them for political reasons. The risk of abuse is far higher than it is in a normal bankruptcy.

If a systemic crisis occurs, the FDIC may rescue a bank in the non-least-cost-way—for example, by paying off creditors who are not covered by deposit insurance or keeping a bank temporarily alive when it is insolvent—when nonpayment of creditors or the bank’s failure would threaten the system.

While the Fed is usually identified as the Lender of Last Resort (LLR) in the United States, the LLR function is actually shared by the Fed and FDIC.

Provision of liquidity by the Fed is, conceptually, no different from the government’s willingness to enforce contract rights.

the myth of Befehlsnotstand, or the requirement of compulsory obedience to orders from a superior – which over the past few years has become an outright falsification of history.

My first thought was “Auschwitz had a pharmacist?

Fifth, while the current mood, reflected in the Dodd-Frank Act, is to limit the LLR’s powers, the right response is to increase them while subjecting the LLR to equal-treatment principles that restrict favoritism.

Once it is recognized that the role of the state in a market economy is not only to enforce property and contract rights, but to ensure liquidity, then the bailout, properly understood, is no different from the enforcement of property rights. A host of legal consequences follow from this observation. This book gives an accounting of them.

The fact that large, solvent, heavily regulated banks would not lend to each other—or would lend to each other only at historically unprecedented interest rate premiums—and not lend to each other even overnight, was persuasive evidence, universally accepted by policymakers, that the crisis was essentially one of illiquidity.

Of all the things that sustain a leader over time, love is the most lasting. It’s hard to imagine leaders getting up day after day, putting in the long hours and hard work it takes to get extraordinary things done, without having their hearts in it. The best-kept secret of successful leaders is love: staying in love with leading, with the people who do the work, with what their organizations produce, and with those who honor the organization by using its products and services. Leadership is not an affair of the head. Leadership is an affair of the heart.

Most people live in urban settings and interact with others over telecommunications networks, implying their well-being is closely tied to and influenced by others around them. In such large-scale, connected societies, it is usually easier to provide benefits to many people as a group than to individuals separately. Information is easily shared by many; applications for social interaction have little value if used only by a few; public transport shared by many is often more economical than individual vehicles. Yet such large-scale services at present are either provided by monopolistic corporations or by dysfunctional public authorities. Fear of the failures of these providers often leads us to wastefully retreat from public life behind the walls of our homes, our gated communities, our private servers, and our individual cars. As early as the 1950s, economist John Kenneth Galbraith called this the paradox of 'public poverty among 'private affluence': while children are "Admirably equipped with television sets," "schools were often severely overcrowded . . . and underprovided." He complained that a "family which takes its air-conditioned . . . automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, blighted buildings and posts for wires that long since should have been put underground.

The pragmatic mood is already visible in the Odyssey. The poem opens with Odysseus living on a remote island ruled by a nymph who offers him immortality if he will remain as her consort. A bit surprisingly to anyone steeped in the orthodox Western religio-philosophical-scientific tradition, he refuses, preferring mortality and a dangerous struggle to regain his position as the king of a small, rocky island and be reunited with his son, aging wife, and old father. He turns down what the orthodox tradition says we should desire above all else, the peace that comes from overcoming the transience and vicissitudes of mortality, whether that peace takes the form of personal immortality or of communing with eternal verities, moral or scientific—in either case ushering us to the still point of the turning world. Odysseus prefers going to arriving, struggle to rest, exploring to achieving—curiosity is one of his most marked traits—and risk to certainty. The Odyssey situates Calypso’s enchanted isle in the far west, the land of the setting sun, and describes the isle in images redolent of death. In contrast, Odysseus’s arrival at his own island, far to the east, a land of the rising sun, is depicted in imagery suggestive of rebirth. Another thing that is odd about the protagonist, and the implicit values, of the Odyssey from the orthodox standpoint is that Odysseus is not a conventional hero, the kind depicted in the Iliad. He is strong, brave, and skillful in fighting, but he is no Achilles (who had a divine mother) or even Ajax; and he relies on guile, trickery, and outright deception to a degree inconsistent with what we have come to think of as heroism or with its depiction in the Iliad. His dominant trait is skill in coping with his environment rather than ability to impose himself upon it by brute force. He is the most intelligent person in the Odyssey but his intelligence is thoroughly practical, adaptive. Unlike Achilles in the Iliad, who is given to reflection, notably about the heroic ethic itself, Odysseus is pragmatic. He is an instrumental reasoner rather than a speculative one. He is also, it is true, distinctly pious, a trait that the Odyssey harps on and modern readers tend to overlook. But piety in Homeric religion is a coping mechanism. Homeric religion is proto-scientific; it is an attempt to understand and control the natural world. The gods personify nature and men manipulate it by “using” the gods in the proper way. One sacrifices to them in order to purchase their intervention in one’s affairs—this is religion as magic, the ancestor of modern technology—and also to obtain clues to what is going to happen next; this is the predictive use of religion and corresponds to modern science. The gods’ own rivalries, mirroring (in Homeric thought, personifying or causing) the violent clash of the forces of nature, prevent human beings from perfecting their control over the environment. By the same token, these rivalries underscore the dynamic and competitive character of human existence and the unrealism of supposing that peace and permanence, a safe and static life, are man’s lot. Odysseus’s piety has nothing to do with loving God as creator or redeemer, or as the name, site, metaphysical underwriter, or repository of the eternal or the unchanging, or of absolutes (such as omniscience and omnipotence) and universals (numbers, words, concepts). Odysseus’s piety is pragmatic because his religion is naturalistic—is simply the most efficacious means known to his society for controlling the environment, just as science and technology are the most efficacious means by which modern people control their environment.

Admittedly, not everyone has access to the types of sophisticated training regimens that Michael Posner and Torkel Klingberg use to help folks strengthen their cognitive horsepower. The good news is that you can flex your working-memory in several different ways. Playing action video games, for example, can improve your brainpower. That’s right, spending several hours a week playing games like Grand Theft Auto, Half-Life, or Halo improves core cognitive abilities that extend well beyond the computer screen.

Many people are so miserable that they do not want to enter the future at all. Their whole future projected life is worthless to them. In technical terms, their utility over all future time intervals, appropriately discounted, is less than zero. Also, their current utility (present circumstance) is zero or negative (otherwise they'd stick around a bit longer to pick up extra utility). • Suicide is one option for such people. But there are two other options, according to Becker & Posner (terminology is mine): • Take what you have and "bet" it on a chance at something that would make life worth living. If it fails, you can always kill yourself. (Gamble) • Since there is an element of uncertainty to the future, take what you have and use it to make the present livable so you can postpone suicide. Something to make life worth living might be just around the corner. If not, you can always kill yourself. (Palliate & Wait)

Contemporary public intellectuals are mainly academics and think tank staff who do not risk their jobs or reputations by errors of prediction or assessment. Absent any risk when they are mistaken, they have become irresponsible in their analyses, predictions, and assessments of social policy.

Bordoni and his wife fled to Venezuela, where he used some of the stolen money to buy a $3 million home and citizenship.103

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops had authorized the study.92 It concluded that 95 percent of American dioceses had at least one complaint of a sexual assault by a priest against a minor (the authors did not count incidents before 1950).93 During the five-plus decades, 4,392 priests had been accused of abusing 10,667 children, a figure that in some years was as high as 10 percent of all priests.94 At least 143 were serial molesters who carried out their attacks in multiple dioceses.95 Four out of five victims were minor boys.96

It is a plain matter of biological fact that, as Grisez says, reproduction is a single function, yet it is carried out not by an individual male or female human being, but by a male and female as a mated pair. 50 So, in respect of reproduction, albeit not in respect of other activities (such as locomotion or digestion), the mated pair is a single organism; the partners form a single reproductive principle: they become “one flesh.” In response to Posner, Grisez proposes a thought experiment. Imagine a type of bodily, rational being that reproduces, not by mating, but by some individual performance. Imagine that for these beings, however, locomotion or digestion is performed not by individuals, but only by biologically complementary pairs that unite for this purpose. Would anybody have difficulty understanding that in respect of reproduction the organism performing the function is the individual, while in respect of locomotion or digestion the organism performing the function is the united pair? Would anybody deny that the unity effectuated for purposes of locomotion or digestion is an organic unity?

Play, don’t pray” was the mantra for some, who according to the insiders included dinner parties of clerics and male prostitutes that ended in nights of drugs and sex.

But don’t let the trendiness fool you. A multitude of studies suggest that the ancient practice of mindfulness meditation actually holds promise as a way to improve cognitive abilities, to increase attention, expand working memory, and raise fluid intelligence. Some of the best are by one of the most respected psychologists in the United States, Michael Posner, professor emeritus at the University of Oregon and former chair of its psychology department.

I can tell you that I have taken all the names I have found in the newspapers and looked them up myself. I didn’t find a single one of these names. This Mafia boss, this politician, Osama bin Laden. None of them have accounts here, nor are they delegates to accounts.

In 2009, Benedict faced a firestorm after he lifted the excommunication of Richard Williamson, a British bishop based in Buenos Aires.61 Bertone, who oversaw Williamson’s vetting, had apparently not even Googled him. If he had, he would have discovered an interview the bishop gave only three days before to Swedish television, in which he said about the Holocaust: “I believe that the historical evidence is hugely against six million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler. I believe there were no gas chambers.

And even in this digital age, when face-to-face contact seems to be diminishing—and this change is the source of many of the leadership problems being experienced these days—it is the interaction between leaders and constituents that turns opportunities into successes. The key to unlocking greater leadership potential can be found when you seek to understand the desires and expectations of your constituents and when you act on them in ways that correspond to their image of what an exemplary leader is and does.

Posner’s group proposes that attention training should be part of the education of every child, giving a boost in learning across the board.

A Catholic family had hidden a Jewish boy from the Nazis, and had learned that the Germans had murdered the child’s parents. They brought the youngster to Wojtyla and asked him to baptize the child. In contrast to Pope Pius IX and his abductions and forced baptisms of two Jewish boys, Wojtyla refused. The boy should be raised Jewish in the tradition of his parents, Wojtyla told the parents.

Late that autumn a Venezuelan attorney, Alberto Jaime Berti, cooperated with Italian magistrates in return for immunity from prosecution on charges that the IOR was at the center of laundering several hundred million dollars through Swiss and Panamanian banks on behalf of a handful of senior Opus Dei officials.72 The Italian media reported that Berti fingered De Bonis as his Vatican Bank connection and produced dozens of documents with the monsignor’s signature. Prosecutors believed that De Bonis had the key to a safe deposit box at Geneva’s Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas. It was in that box, said Berti, that a cache of documents laid out exactly how the IOR laundered the money. De Bonis, cloaked by immunity in his Knights of Malta position, denied even knowing Berti.73 The prosecutors, unable to move against him, had to stand down.

Ratzinger was afraid to intervene on a deadlocked Roman Curia, with reformers on one side, and the money changers on the other,” wrote author Gianluigi Nuzzi. “So he decided to create a clean slate by bowing out and paving the way for the election of a strong Pope.”34

The result was a remarkable December 30 decree that gave the Vatican its first ever anti–money laundering law, set to go into effect the following April 1.27 “The Prevention and Countering of Illegal Activities in the Area of Monetary and Financial Dealings” was issued as a motu proprio, a document historically signed personally by the Pope. Benedict took full responsibility for the decision.

Castillo Lara believed it might not be possible to demolish the parallel IOR without making the Vatican Bank crash in on itself. At every turn, he adeptly blocked Caloia’s efforts to make the bank more transparent.66 Some reformers meanwhile suspected that the cardinal was more than just an obstacle to reform. They thought the powerful APSA boss was the source of press leaks that made it appear that it was Caloia’s team that had failed to rein in the bank’s questionable activities.67

Gianluigi Nuzzi, the author of the 2009 book that precipitated the string of events from Caloia’s exit to the motu proprio, expressed the feelings of many Vaticanologists: “A few years ago, an anti-money-laundering law in the Vatican and the Holy See would have been unthinkable. They used to say, ‘We’re a sovereign state; these are our affairs.’ The important thing is that they created an anti-money-laundering law and an authority to enforce it. Without that, the Vatican Bank will remain an offshore bank.

common

It took the OSS nearly two years after the IOR’s formation before it stumbled across intelligence that Hitler’s Reichsbank was transferring money to the Vatican and disguising its origin by using a Swiss bank as an intermediary.62

it was impossible not to be amazed, impressed, and heartened by the questioning that Richard Posner, judge of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, a Reagan appointee, delivered to Wisconsin assistant attorney general Timothy Samuelson, who defended Wisconsin’s gay-marriage ban before the court in August 2014.

Italian reporters uncovered evidence that the Vatican had invested in Istituto Farmacologico Serono, a pharmaceutical company that made birth control pills, as well as Udine, a military weapons manufacturer (there were also unconfirmed newspaper reports of church money in gunmaker Beretta, a Monte Carlo casino, and a printing firm that published pornographic magazines).

Kouzes and Posner emphasize the importance of leaders' engaging people throughout the organization in what they do and why they do it. They ask us to imagine how much more ownership of the values of the organization there would be when leaders actively involve a wide range of people in their development. “Shared values,” they note, “are the result of listening, appreciating, building consensus and practicing conflict resolution. For people to understand the values and come to agree with them, they must participate in the process.

Listening is seen as one of the most important leadership skills.

In my own eyes, I could only see how ridiculous I looked. How typical white-girl-goes-to-Africa. But in their eyes, the hair was a way to make me part of them, at least for a moment.

Ever since I was a child my reaction to the forbidden has been a stubborn desire to keep pushing: obstacles make something uncontrollably and deeply necessary.

Building character and culture is a function of aligning your beliefs and behaviors with principles that are external, objective, and self-evident. They operate regardless of your awareness of them. What principles guide an authentic leader? Authentic leaders are humble. They are unassuming in the way that they share the glory with their team members and are modest about their accomplishments. Their courage ensures that they have the integrity to make the right choices when necessary. Skills

Leaders must ask themselves, “What do I stand for? What are the principles that guide me in my day-to-day work and keep me here in this job, doing this work, and supporting these people?” Once affirmed, leaders must act out their values, demonstrating what they mean.

Marcuse also believed that sexuality was a political., an ideological, category, not found but made.

The most important lesson here is that what is tolerable risk for a company may well be intolerable for a nation. This is particularly true in banking. There is no real economy if the financial economy fails. As elaborated by Posner, “The risk to the nation is not the bankruptcy of a single major bank but the collapse of the banking industry, precipitating a financial crisis that can bring on a depression.” The

Everyone tolerates your dumb questions. By constantly asking, “Why do we do this, and why do we do that?” you’ll uncover some needed improvements. Don’t stop at what you can find on your own. Ask employees what really bugs them about the organization. Ask what gets in the way of doing the best job possible. Promise to look into everything they bring up and get back to them with answers in ten days. Commit yourself to removing three frequently mentioned organizational roadblocks that stand in the way of getting extraordinary things done. Questioning the status quo is not only for leaders. Effective leaders create a climate in which others feel comfortable doing the same. If your organization is going to be the best it can be, everyone has to feel comfortable in speaking up and taking the initiative.

There is a whole mythology, a set of rules and issues surrounding a relationship like ours, that sneaks in uninvited.