By The River

It's been a good year for some on Wall Street. The New York Times reports today that John Paulson, a hedge fund manager, earned $3.7 billion--that's billion, not million--by shorting mortgage-based securities.

While I don't mind people making money--and the Times article cites several other hedge fund managers who did almost as well--I do object when they have to pay only 15 percent of their loot in federal income taxes. That's a rate reserved for the working poor, and, it seems, hedge fund managers, thanks to a loophole in the tax laws. They make a percentage of what the hedge fund earns, and because those earnings are capital gains, they are taxed at 15 percent instead of the 35 percent rate someone with that much income would normally have to pay.

Nice work if you can get it. Because George W. Bush has greatly reduced the taxes on millionaires (and John McCain wants to cut them even further), there isn't money for national health care, better schools, and everything else a progressive, modern society ought to have.

I'm not saying we should necessarily return to the 90 percent marginal tax rate in effect between 1950 and 1963, when it was cut by the Kennedy Administration to 77 percent and by Lyndon Johnson in 1965 to 70 percent, where it stayed until the early 1980s. That 70 percent figure seems about right for the wealthy. And remember, the late 1960s were a boom time for U.S. workers. Higher taxes aren't always a bad thing.

Posted by David at 04:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

An editorial in the New York Times today accuses the Bush Administration of a "relentless antipathy" to effective government. The case in point was the 2010 census, which has joined the long list of government agencies and programs saddled with screamingly incompetent administrators. But while this mess could result in a less accurate census--a Republican dream, because it could deny Democratic states seats in Congress--it won't likely kill anybody.

The same can't be said for another current mess involving airline safety. Federal Aviation Administration supervisors have been accused by witnesses under oath of "harassing and threatening" inspectors who tried to do their job regarding Southwest Airlines. Then it became clear that FAA inspectors at other airlines also may not have done their jobs, resulting in chaos after the airlines were ordered to pull airplanes out of service to make sure they weren't flying deathtraps.

There is short-term profit for airlines in ignoring maintenance, and because of that, strict oversight by the FAA should be a given. We have been lucky that one of these planes hasn't crashed and carried dozens of people to their deaths. Remember that "relentless antipathy" to effective government the next time you board a plane and consider if this is the way you want America to be.

Posted by David at 05:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What with the state of politics--we still have another year of George W. Bush--and the state of journalism, what's a blogger to do but turn to (writing about) drink?

I saw this story in the Toronto Globe and Mail tonight. We in the Keystone State complain often about the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board, or PLCB, but at least they let us buy cheap wine--to a point. The Liquor Control Board of Ontario, or LCBO, for a time had a policy of barring sales of any wine priced less than $10.95. The article says that policy is being lifted, giving Canadians access to wine from "value regions" like Australia, South Africa, and Portugal.

Portugal? Hmmm. I was at the PLCB Wine and Spirits store in Lemoyne, Pa., today and don't recall seeing a section of Portugese wine. Spain, yes, Italy, yes, France, of course, but nothing from that other country on the Iberian Penninsula. The only Portugese wines I recall tasting in Pennsylvania were samples sent for a story a couple of years ago by Lost Vineyards, which hoped to get their fine $1.99 wines into the State Stores. Nice try, fellas. I organized a tasting among my Shipoke neighbors and the verdict was, not bad. Great labels, too. Most of their wines then came from Portugal. They've since branched out to Spain and Argentina as well.

The PLCB turned them down because they were too cheap, cheaper even than their fine offerings in the Mad Dog category. Lost Vineyards, aka Brothers International of Batavia, N.Y., insisted that the uniform retail price be $1.99. The PLCB said that wasn't possible given the great amount of tax it normally applies to a bottle of wine here.

I always tell people that if we have to have a state store system, the ones we have today, at least in the larger cities and suburbs, are a decent compromise. Pretty good selection, okay prices, especially on the Chairman's Selection wines. They're a far cry from the State Stores of yore.

When I moved to the state in 1975, the State Store in Shamokin, Pa., was the way they all were. You'd walk in and be brought up short by a counter across the width of the store. You had to tell the clerk what you wanted--no browsing allowed. If you asked for a wine recommendation, he'd toss a mimeographed product and price list across the counter. Recommendations were verboten under law. Today, all the stores are self-service and they get around the recommendation prohibition by clipping out Wine Spectator ratings and taping them to the edge of the shelf. Heck, the store in Lemoyne occasionally has wine tastings, as shocking as that sounds.

What would improve things would be an across the board tax reduction to bring the regular retail prices down to roughly those charged in Maryland and Delaware. Stop turning Pennsylvanians into bootleggers and give them decent prices on booze. You could run for governor on that platform.

Posted by David at 10:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I worry about a lot of things where my children are concerned. In the back of my mind, I've thought about what would happen if one of them was critically ill and my health insurance company refused to pay for a life-saving procedure-- and let her die--to make their quarterly numbers. In other words, to increase profits for their shareholders.

Thankfully, my kids are in great health, but that nightmare scenario appears to be one possible explanation for what happened to Nataline Sarkisyan, a 17-year-old California girl who died after the health insurance division of Philadelphia-based Cigna Corp. denied her a liver transplant earlier this month. As often happens when the press gets involved in a care-denial case, Cigna subsequently reversed its decision and said it would pay for the operation and follow-up care, but by then it was too late to save her.

This case has caused revulsion across a large spectrum of American society. Check out the comments on the Cigna message board on Yahoo! Finance. The American public has had it up to here with this sort of cold-hearted, profit-driven denial of care. The Sarkisyan family's well-known (and accomplished) attorney, Mark Geragos, who like them is Armenian-American, has urged the Los Angeles County DA to file criminal charges against Cigna executives involved in the care denial. Film maker Michael Moore, whose film "Sicko" chronicled a number of similar cases involving care denial by insurance companies, has also called for a murder or manslaughter prosecution.

That might be the only way to stop this sort of thing. Investors didn't punish Cigna for their cruel treatment of young Nataline--its stock is up slightly since the story broke on Dec. 21. The Sarkisyan family's expected lawsuit against Cigna will likely succeed and result in a large judgment, which will be covered at least in part by liability insurance. The only thing that can scare corporate executives sufficiently into changing their ways is the threat of being put in prison as a felon.

The political ramifications of this case could also be huge, in part, sad to say, because the victim was a white teenager and not a poor black child. White victims just get a whole lot more public sympathy in America than black ones do.

As Michael Moore notes in his statement on the Sarkisyan case linked above, all of the President candidates save one--Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich--favor keeping profit-driven health care as part of their approach to national health insurance. But you can see where the need to make profits in health care takes you. It costs a lot more, and you get dead children like Nataline Sarkisyan whose care costs more than Wall Street is willing to pay. I'll say it again: we need a national health care system like France has, paid for out of general tax revenues and covering everyone.

Posted by David at 05:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

NPR was interviewing some Iowa voters this morning and I'm still angry and blown away by one of them and her pure selfishness.

She proclaimed smugly that she "makes a lot of money" through her "own hard work" and is "tired of paying so someone else's kid can have breakfast at school." To be quite honest, I was hurling F-bombs at the radio before she was half through with her self-satisfied little speech.

We live in a community, and it is necessary and yes, desirable, for those of us with more money to help--through taxes, not charity--those of us with less. I don't begrudge my federal and state and city taxes. I just wish the amount of my federal taxes that go to finance George W. Bush's insane war in Iraq would instead go toward my share of a single-payer national health insurance program.

The greatest period in American history--the liberal democratic hegemony from 1933 to 1980--was also the period when federal taxes on the wealthy were at their peak. Things have gotten progressively worse beginning with Ronald Reagan, interrupted only slightly by Bill Clinton's eight years, the last time fiscal sanity reigned in Washington.

I wonder if that woman in Iowa would mind if the rest of us stopped contributing to the highways she drives on, the public library where she checks out books, and the public schools her children attend? Maybe be billed by the police if they investigate a burglary at her home? Or charged by the fire department--cash in advance, please--to put out a fire in her house?

Of course she would mind. But when it comes to helping the poor, the door slams shut.

Posted by David at 07:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The next time you eat a Burger King Whopper, think about the effort your local Burger King's corporate owners are putting into destroying an effort by a small Florida farm workers union to be paid one penny more per pound for the tomatoes they pick.

CIW, or the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, will march on Burger King's corporate headquarters in Miami this Friday to demand that the fast-food giant agree to stop fighting the modest piece-rate increases already approved by McDonald's and Taco Bell, which is part of Yum Brands. Burger King's unhappiness with the union effort has led the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange to threaten fines of $100,000 to any grower who sells tomatoes to Taco Bell or McDonald's under the agreement.

Anti-trust violation? The law is complex, but some legal minds think so. While the CIW represents only a fraction of Florida tomato pickers, the agreements are expected to affect many unorganized pickers as well. While a penny per pound sounds like nothing, it would raise picker wages from about $10,000 to $11,000 per year--that's below the poverty line--to about $19,000. It seems the least that Burger King can do.

And not eating at Burger King again until they do seems the least I can do.

Posted by David at 07:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Three Americans received the Nobel Prize in Economics today for their work in developing "mechanism design theory," which advances the heretical notion (at least to movement conservatives) that free markets don't always work well. They don't stop there, of course: their theory provides a way to predict how corporations will behave in the absence of a free market and determine whether government regulation (oh, the heresy!) might be needed.

To movement conservatives, the free market offers a solution to anything and everything. Most people know that's a bunch of bunk. Bought any free market health care or electricity lately? Or a copy of Microsoft Office? Thanks to the Nobel folks for sending another reality-based message to America.

Kudos to Leonid Hurwicz of the University of Minnesota, Eric S. Maskin of Princeton, and Roger B. Meyerson of the University of Chicago not for dealing with the world as it is, not as some ideological pipedream.

Posted by David at 09:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Okay, I'll admit that fellow homey Erik Prince of Blackwater is a darkly fascinating figure, a right wing conservative Christian who has profited immensely ($1 billion in Iraq War contracts) from a business that frequently involves killing people, as Jon Stewart put it so well. But comparing him to Bruce Wayne of Batman? You be the judge in this new profile of Prince in today's New York Times. He may need to hide out in the Bat Cave now that Iraqi investigators have found no justification whatsoever for the Sept. 16 massacre of civilians by Blackwater mercenaries in Baghdad.

Not sure where he'd find a cave in our mutual hometown of Holland, Mich., anyway, but maybe the 7,000 acres of swamps in North Carolina that Blackwater calls home has one.

Posted by David at 07:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With every passing day, the private security firm known as Blackwater increasingly resembles an American version of the Nazi SS, namely a brutal, ideologically-driven private army outside the command and control structure of the regular U.S. Army. They are in Iraq at incredible expense to the U.S. taxpayer to provide security for U.S. State Department personnel. On Sept. 16, they killed 17 Iraqi civilians at an intersection in Baghdad, and the more journalists look into it, the worse it seems.

The latest investigation of the massacre is in today's Washington Post. The New York Times tracked down a former Blackwater mercenary in Seattle who is accused of murdering an Iraqi in a drunken rage, but who was spirited out of Iraq by the State Department and Blackwater. Perhaps Jon Stewart put it best on Comedy Central last night: Blackwater gets paid for killing people.

One of many differences between Blackwater and the SS is that it doesn't appear any Blackwater mercenaries face legal retribution for their alleged crimes. Not that Germany would have prosecuted SS members for their crimes if they hadn't lost the war, but America is supposed to be on a somewhat higher plane than Nazi Germany.

Congress is moving to remove the legal immunity of American private security firms in Iraq, but that probably won't affect the participants in the Sept. 16 massacre or the fellow in Seattle. They and their leaders, possibly including Erik Prince, the Blackwater owner, ought to be turned over to the United Nations for war crimes prosecutions, just as the Serbians were a few years ago. That will be a start toward restoring the image of America in the world. And whatever contracts Blackwater has for work in Iraq or elsewhere for the U.S. government need to be terminated forthwith.

Perhaps it isn't fair to compare Blackwater to the Nazi SS. Blackwater mercenaries don't wear the infamous double lightning bolt insignia. And as far as anyone knows, they don't swear a personal oath of loyalty to George W. Bush. As far as we know.

Posted by David at 08:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In 1995, an industrialist by the name of Edgar Prince dropped dead of a heart attack in my hometown of Holland, Michigan. Prince, who made his fortune selling lighted visor mirrors to the auto industry, was the largest employer in Holland and was respected by the community for his local redevelopment work--he saved downtown Holland--and overall philanthropy.

When he died, his widow and children sold Prince Corp., where my sister worked, to Johnson Controls, Inc., for $1.35 billion. In a rare gesture in the cutthroat corporate world, the Prince family gave sizeable payments to both managers and rank and file employees to thank them for their service. I never quite figured Ed Prince for a Democrat--they're exceedingly rare in Holland--but I thought he must at least be a moderate Republican, if he had any politics at all.

How wrong I was.

Let us start by looking at Ed Prince's son, Erik Prince . When his father died, I learned only today, Erik used his inheritance to found Blackwater, the private security firm that operates as a mercenary army for the U.S. State Department in Iraq. I'll spare you for now my thoughts on the need for higher, not lower inheritance taxes. Blackwater, on Sept. 16, killed at least 17 Iraqi civilians at an intersection in Baghdad. The incident apparently began when a Blackwater guard in a convoy shot and killed an Iraqi man driving his mother to pick up her husband at the hospital where he worked.

Accusations have since been leveled that Blackwater personnel have killed other Iraqi civilians. Blackwater, it seems, whisks the involved mercenaries out of Iraq and pays off the families of the victims. The killers are fired, but don't face legal prosecution.

Erik Prince testified yesterday before a House committee chaired by U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman. He defended his men, denied they were mercenaries, and even more corrosively funny, denied that political connections played any part in Blackwater's success in the no-bid world of Iraq War contracting.

Prince is about as connected as they come in the GOP and religious right, according to Media Mouse, a blog that tracks the religious right in West Michigan. His father, Ed Prince, was a backer of James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who wields major influence in today's Republican Party. In 1993, he provided seed money to start the anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-sex education Family Research Council and went on its board. Gary Bauer, the first head of the FRC, paid tribute to Ed Prince and outlined his role in this letter after his death. It makes interesting reading, and thanks to Media Mouse for putting it online.

But it doesn't stop there. Erik Prince's sister Betsy is married to Dick DeVos, Jr., son of the Amway/Quixtar co-founder Richard DeVos. DeVos, Jr., was the unsuccessful Republican candidate for governor of Michigan last year. Members of the DeVos family are likewise major backers of rightwing Republican candidates and causes. If there's anyone the Dick Cheney cabal would have listened to in handing out no-bid Iraq contracts, it's this bunch.

If there's any good side to this sordid tale for me, it's that Erik Prince isn't an alumni of Holland High School, where I went. He graduated from our Bible-thumping rival, Holland Christian High School. Nor did he attend Hope College, where I went, although his sister, Emilie Wierda, is on the board of trustees there. Sometimes I think Hope has been taken over by pod people--it was far less conservative when I was there.

Many in the Prince family are members of the ultra-conservative Christian Reformed Church that claims many, though not nearly all Holland residents as members. Erik Prince has since converted to Roman Catholicism, according to this article that originally ran in the Grand Rapids Press.

None of this should necessarily overshadow the considerable good that Ed Prince did for Holland. But since he helped in a major way to finance political activities I greatly oppose, I'll never think of him in quite the same way again.

Posted by David at 08:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The abject apology last week to China by U.S. toymaker Mattel highlights once again how different the values of the business world are from those of most Americans. Mattel apologized to China because the reputation of China for turning out faulty and dangerous products was further cemented in the American public mind--it's been a weekly horror show of late--when Mattel recalled toys made in China that were colored with poisonous lead paint.

I suspect most Americans view this as analogous to abjectly apologizing to one'sneighbor for having glass windows that his son broke with a carelessly batted ball after having been asked repeatedly not to play ball near your house. Most Americans would confront the neighbor, even if he was their boss, and demand payment for the window, not kow-tow like Mattel. And if that didn't work, punch him in the face or file a lawsuit. But Mattel was far more concerned about angering China's rulers and losing access to China's vast pool of cheap labor than it was in standing up for American values.

Mattel in one sense got what it deserved for closing down its U.S. toy factories and moving the work to the shop floors of China. And it might seem an obvious solution to bring the work back to the U.S., where health and safety requirements are in general taken a lot more seriously than they are in China. If you want to read a good book about the horrors behind the so-called 'China price,' check out "The Coming China Wars" by Peter Navarro.

I've always suspected that greed is the greater reason for closing American factories and moving the work to China. Higher corporate profits and thus bigger bonuses for corporate management are what is driving a lot of this, not so much pure survival or even a desire to bring lower prices to consumers. In other words, I suspect they could survive and thrive by continuing to make things here, but go to China to line their own pockets. I doubt American consumers reap the full benefit of those China prices, especially if one subtracts the added costs of shoddy and dangerous goods from the supposed savings.

Since the corporate world won't self-regulate, the only answer is intervention by the American government to create serious disincentives to moving work to China. That won't happen under George W. Bush, who would probably like to see more U.S. jobs go to China because that would mean greater profits for his corporate buddies. But the Democratic administration that will likely take office in 2009 must take action so all Americans, not just Mattel, don't find themselves kow-towing to Beijing.

Posted by David at 06:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)