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Personal Information

Website
http://www.dagblog.com
Biography

Michael Maiello (also known as "Destor23") is a New York based columnist, performer, fiction author and playwright. He worked for ten years at Forbes Media, writing and editing for both Forbes Magazine and Forbes.com. He also appeared frequently on CNBC, Fox News, Fox Business News, CNN and MSNBC.  He is also the author of the 2004 book Buy The Rumor, Sell The Fact: 85 Wall Street Maxims and What They Really Mean. He has performed stand up comedy at The Laugh Factory, The Comic Strip and the Philadelphia Fringe Festival and now reads regularly with Mama D's Arts Bordello in New York. He has had four plays published (Night of Faith and Waiting For Death by Playscripts.com; Principia and Troy! Troy! Troy! by The New York Theatre Experience/indiethieatrenow). From inception to dissolution, he wrote a weekly op-ed column for The Daily, a News Corp. publication designed for tablet computers and he is an occasional op-ed contributor to Reuters.

Favorite Quotes

"Hi, nice to meet you. I'm David Mamet.  Fuck." - David Mamet

Superpowers

Figure Four Leglock.

History

Member for
4 years 13 weeks
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Blog Posts

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The Michelle Bachmann Dozens

by Michael Maiello 6/28/2011 - 4:34 pm   |

Michelle Bachmann is...

...so flaky that when she showers with Head and Shoulders, she disappears.

...so flaky that if she eats a Hershey's Kiss she becomes pan au chocolat.

...so flaky that she snowed in her own cross country bus tour.

...so flaky that when she goes to KFC, biscuits order her.

...so flaky that she could sell herself in Japan as panko under the brand name Pannko.

…is so flaky that she thought the first primary debate would be held on the Food Network.

…is so flaky that the Gorton’s Fisherman chases her around.

…is so flaky that Eskimoes have 27 words for her.

That is all.  Unless you have others!

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What If Obama Loses?

by Michael Maiello 6/27/2011 - 3:45 pm   |

I'm pretty bad at the politics part of politics.  Sure, I can read opinion polls and guess at what messages will play well in communities I know well, but I don't have a great crystal ball for predicting how groups of people will react to major events.

When I look over at the Republican ticket I see one threat (Mitt Romney) and a lot of nothing else.  I also think Romney is eminently beatable and that so long as the economy is improving, even if it's improving too slowly, Obama has to be the odds-on favorite to win in 2012.  But, hey, anything can happen, right? [Read more]

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Corporate Power and American Democracy

by Michael Maiello 6/22/2011 - 10:51 am   |

Writing a weekly column and blogging here adds up to a lot of spilled words every week.  I'm even starting to sense an evolving theme that wouldn't have been the one I'd necessarily chosen if I'd set out to write a whole bunch of little pieces that were going to add up to something.  Don't worry, I'm not going to go all meta on you here.  Just introducing the idea I've been struggling with -- the role of the economy as an organizing factor in society and the role of corporate executives as the most influential, powerful and unaccountable leaders.  My column for The Daily this week has its origins in my recent Dag post about Obama's  [Read more]

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Will Barack Obama Work For GE?

by Michael Maiello 6/21/2011 - 11:47 am   |

Update: after considering Genghis' comments, I edited the headline here and I want to add one thing, for those of you who have already read the post.  Even according to the Times story I linked to, Obama and Geithner are right now skeptical about the idea of a repatriation tax holiday.  It also looks as if the lobbying effort for this dates back to 2010.  So, yes, I probably did get ahead of myself.

That said, Immelt is an Obama adviser and GE does keep funds offshore to avoid US taxes, by its own admission.  So I'll leave the rest of this unaltered and await future events.  I don't want to be too dogmatic, though, about some hasty conclusions.

The Original Post, Unaltered. (Discuss!) [Read more]

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Obama's Down and Out On Wall Street

by Michael Maiello 6/17/2011 - 11:30 am   |

Apparently, President Obama is having trouble raising Wall Street money for 2012.  One anonymous champion of capitalism even complains that it's because "Obama simply doesn't like rich people."  I figure a statement like that will draw cackles around here.  If Obama doesn't like rich people, who the heck does he like?  And, if he treats the people he dislikes as well as he's been treating the rich, how do I get on the big guy's bad side? [Read more]

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Corporate America Breaks Up With The Middle Class

by Michael Maiello 6/15/2011 - 10:16 am   |

American businesses are breaking up with the middle class.  This won't be news around here, though it might stir up some controversy over at The Daily today.  In my column this week I looked into some of the potential implications of two big changes in American business.  They used to rely largely on domestic middle class consumers to make their profits.  This was true even in the 1990s, when the main effect of globalization was overseas exploitation in order to sell cheap goods back home.  But it's not true anymore. [Read more]

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Obama's New Stimulus, (He's Still Not Getting It)

by Michael Maiello 6/9/2011 - 9:59 am   |

I was delighted to see this Bloomberg story about the White House pursuing additional stimulus after the failure of QE2 and the recent rise in unemployment.  But the method he's pursuing -- a temporary holiday for the employer portion of the payroll tax, which funds Social Security, is not going to fix things, even if the Republicans go along with it. [Read more]

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Legalize Drugs, Gambling and Prostitution

by Michael Maiello 6/8/2011 - 10:53 am   |

My social libertarian side comes out in my column for The Daily today.  I've always been a live and let live and let your freak flag fly type of person.  I think that people who want to live an atypical life should enjoy being chemically, sexually, physically and emotionally adventurous, so long as that's what they want to do.  If we only get one go at life, there's probably no point in returning your rental body without a few dings in it. [Read more]

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Is Obama Giving Up?

by Michael Maiello 6/6/2011 - 2:54 pm   |

Over the weekend, Austan Goolsbee went on the chit chat shows to tell people that the economy is out of the emergency zone, that slipping into a Great Depression is no longer what we all fear and that the government isn't going to do anything else dramatic to put Americans back to work, to say nothing of raising wages and living standards.

So... this is the recovery?  This is it?  Obama seriously looks at America as it is now and shrugs?  Or maybe he'd like to do more but doesn't think it's possible with the Republicans in congress, or maybe he thinks the debt is the right issue right now or maybe he doesn't believe that there's anything left to be done. [Read more]

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Big Brother Obama

by Michael Maiello 6/2/2011 - 11:23 am   |

My column for The Daily today is about the reinstatement of The Patriot Act and how the fact that the government can and will spy on 300 million Americans is now just an accepted fact of life, and is no longer something that inspires serious debate.  I believe that we will live with The Patriot Act forever and that government and corporate abuses of privacy are just going to get worse. [Read more]

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