By The River

Huzzah to the U.S. House of Representatives for voting 328-93 to pass a bill that would impose a 90 percent tax on employee bonuses granted by companies such as A.I.G. that received or will receive more than $5 billion in taxpayer bail-out funds. The measure still must be approved by the Senate, where the Republicans will dig in hard to stop it from passing.

Harrisburg's own Congressman, Democrat Tim Holden, voted for the tax, as did West Shore Republican Congressman Todd Platts, who is clearly worried about the next election. Only four Congressmen from Pennsylvania, all Republicans, voted against the bonus tax. For the record, they are Tim Murphy, who represents a region south of Pittsburgh, Joe Pitts, who represents mainly Lancaster County but also parts of Chester and Berks counties, and Bill Shuster and Glenn Thompson, who represent the middle third of Pennsylvania, the "Alabama in the middle" part in the incomparable words of James Carville.

So, do they really think their constituents support the obscene A.I.G. bonuses? I'd love to see an insta-poll in those districts. The Republican leadership is already frantically spinning this as a slippery slope to Congress cutting YOUR pay. I don't think many will buy into that foolishness. This is pure voter anger at a blatant Wall Street rip-off.

Posted by David at 04:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What a choice.

Is it better to have U.S. Sen Arlen Specter run in 2010 as an Independent and be handily re-elected, thus preserving all the benefits to Pennsylvania of his seniority? Or better to have him seek re-election as a Republican, get thwacked in the primary by Pat Toomey or Peg Luksik, and then have Toomey or Luksik thwacked by whomever the Democrats put up to run?

Decisions, decisions. Specter told the Hill newspaper today that he's considering running as an Independent in 2010 to avoid a Republican primary he will probably, though not certainly, lose. Pennsylvania law doesn't allow him to run as an Independent if he first runs in a party primary, unlike some states.

Specter is one of the last of a dying breed, the moderate Republican. Nearly all Republicans in Congress now are rightwing conservatives, which Specter certainly is not. In the Hill article he speaks wistfully of making the GOP once again a national party instead of a regional party based in the Bible Belt South and Mormon Utah and Idaho. That could happen, but only after the GOP undergoesa thorough electoral thwacking that reduces their Congressional numbers to Socialist Party levels. The name will disappear, but it will be America's second, somewhat more conservative party.

America has figured out it doesn't like what Republicans stand for, and that's a hard opinion to turn around. The "moral" issues aren't working for the GOP anymore as people worry more about their jobs and health care than whether the gay couple down the street want to get legally married, or whether the Hispanic man doing work on their neighbor's house is a legal or illegal immigrant. And good riddance. The Republican right has hurt America for the past 30 years, and we need to get back to real liberal democracy.

Specter has been urged by Gov. Rendell, Sen. Casey, and Vice President Biden to switch to the Democratic side, but he doesn't show any inclination to do so. Don't be too surprised if he changes his mind. Specter is a consumate survivor, quite willing to spend the year before an election making people forget what they don't like about him. In this case, that he's a member of the party of George W. Bush.

Posted by David at 03:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the classic exchanges in American literature supposedly occurred between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, probably at some bar in Paris. Fitzgerald said, "The rich are different from you and me," meaning they have a different culture and are a cut above the rest of us. But Hemingway's classic rejoinder was, "Yes. They have more money." Meaning the only difference is the base one of money in the pocket.

I think there is some truth to Fitzgerald's statement and a lot to Hemingway's, but I began thinking about them today in the wake of stories in the Washington Post and New York Times that A.I.G., the huge worldwide insurance company, planned to pay $165 million in bonuses to employees in the derivative trading unit that pushed the company to the brink of collapse. Only the infusion of $170 billion in taxpayer funds--so far--has kept the company from total collapse.

The Obama Administration has harshly condemned the bonuses, which A.I.G. claims it is contractually obligated to pay. Late today, the White House said it would subtract $165 million from the latest $30 billion installment in taxpayer assistance to the firm. The problem is, that won't claw back the money from the traders who got the bonuses. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo today subpoenaed the names of those who received bonuses from A.I.G., but so far hasn't received them. This could potentially be a way to shame the traders into giving back the money, but don't hold your breath. In a perfect world, a co-op board in New York City, for example, would reject these tainted funds from a trader seeking to buy a luxury apartment, but this isn't a perfect world.

Not until Wall Street receives a loud wake-up call that the days of greed are over will the abuses stop. We can make the rich the same as you and me by insuring they have less money.

Posted by David at 09:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's a shocker: the Washington Post reports that Heat Surge "Roll 'n Glow" space heaters aren't really made by Amish people, as the Ohio company's newspaper ads imply. Yes, all those bearded, straw hat-wearing men in the ads are really non-Amish placing cheap Chinese space heaters in expensive wooden mountings.

Just about anyone who lives in central Pennsylvania, aka, Amish central, laughs at the idea of "Amish" being a mark of quality. I have nothing against the Amish, but they do run a lot of puppy mills, and their fat-and-calorie rich food leaves much to be desired. I'll buy Amish furniture, maybe, on a cold day in hell. But to the outside world, Amish inexplicably means quality, and sales of the "Roll 'n Glow" heaters are booming. No one ever seems to ask why a religious sect that eschews electricity and powers their tools with windmills, steam engines, and horses would sell electric space heaters.

Newspapers didn't used to take ads like these, but with the precipitous decline of the industry, just about any joker with cash can get his ad in print, and it will go right up next to the sooper-dooper hearing aid and patent medicine ads.

Oh, and the headline on this post refers to a story told me by a Franklin and Marshall College graduate years ago. Seems he was strolling through downtown Lancaster and minding his own business when a big car with New York plates rolls up. The window rolls down and the driver called out, hey, boy, which way de Amish?

Which way, indeed?

Posted by David at 11:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I suppose I'll miss radio commentator Paul Harvey, who has died at age 90 after a very long career in radio broadcasting.

He was a regular part of my youth in the Midwest, where he was a ubiquitous presence on AM radio. I can do a fair Paul Harvey imitation, so many times did I hear him. "Hello Americans, this is Paul Harvey (pause) Stand by for news!" He had one of those classic radio voices. Broadcasting from Chicago, he would mix a few of the top headlines of the day with some cute little story.

But he was also quite conservative. Harvey was a big backer of Red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the spiritual father of modern movement conservatism, in the 1950s. He loved President Nixon. His "cute little story" more often than not seemed to bash hippies or any American youth who didn't toe the line of their conservative parents. And he supported the Vietnam War until Nixon expanded it into Cambodia in 1970, by which time tens of thousands of young Americans, many of them draftees, had already died in that useless and pointless war that McCarthyism had forced upon us.

Harvey's longevity was due to the truth that in radio, no one cares how old you are so long as you have a great voice and the commercial sponsorships keep rolling in. I was surprised to read in the obituaries of Harvey that he had a rich contract with ABC Radio that still had two years to run. I suppose, like Lawrence Welk reruns, there was still an audience for that sort of thing.

Posted by David at 06:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)