Money in politics: Florida vying for lead in category of dubious value

Here's the Gail Collins column in the NY Times on Lebron, Ned Lamont, two of Florida's most-seen-on-TV-commercials candidates and other stuff that may be held together by Greenwich, Connecticut.

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/10/opinion/10collins.html?_r=2

NY Times mag piece -- What do you think of this view of Obama as party boss?

From the opening teasers for this Sunday magazine piece about Barack Obama as "Democrat in Chief," your blogger was in disapproving mode. Why is author Matt Bai saying the president is the only recent holder of the office who wasn't a party strategist? I was asking myself. Didn't we elect him because he wasn't a party hack like the two Bushes? Didn't we choose a transformational president?

What do you think? The comments are available for you to let it out.

And why would the NY Times be saying this about the president as we head for mid-term elections for which the president's political arm is gearing up a strong campaign? We want Democrats to hold Congress as strongly as possible and to do well in statehouse races in Florida and nationwide. This is why we're working with Organizing for America to make it happen, and why we're recruiting volunteers, and why we're energizing our Miami-Dade County Democratic Party.

We're also hoping to learn from this tremendously successful political campaigner who's now in the Oval Office, and who has new ideas that the NY Times finds dubious.

Memo to Miami Herald: Need story on our losses on Stuyvesant Town

Where’s the Miami Herald on this story? Referring to the fiasco now two years old with the Florida State Board of Administration and the way it lost money – taxpayers’ money that was supposed to be held in close and careful trust for pension funds, hospitals and the like.

This blog has been mad as hell and not standing for it any more for some time with main focus on Jeb Bush and his well-paid gig with Lehman Brothers after he left the governor’s office, whereupon Lehman went belly-up and the Lehman investments Jeb pushed on us became worthless.

There’s another famous episode, however, that’s now maturing to Florida’s detriment, and I don’t see it properly explicated in the Herald. It surfaced in New York early this week when Tishman Speyer caved on the $5.4 billion developments at Stuyvesant Town and Cooper Village. This cost Florida $250 million plus spare change amounting to millions, and you can read about it in the Jacksonville newspaper. But not in the Herald.

Is this a political decision, or is the Herald’s financial investigative staff overwhelmed?

Anyway, we need to have the Herald nag the perpetrators until they lay out their roles in this. And they are Charlie Crist and Jeb Bush. Meanwhile, you can read about it in the Jacksonville paper and in the New York Times today, which is looking at how the Democrat Andrew Cuomo is getting tons of campaign money from real estate interests, including Tishman.

A recent post on this topic can be found at this link. Or look up Jeb Bush on the tags list on the right.

NY Times agrees with this blog on dirty money in politics

Check recent posts here for how Florida and the US Congress are subverted by corrupt money. The Times thinks the situation in NY state is so bad that the entire legislature needs to be voted out. Sounds like a real national problem.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/opinion/31thu1.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

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Blogging at Miami-Dade-Dems.blogspot.com

FL-18: Ros-Lehtinen still on the lavish junket list

My flawed Republican member of Congress, US Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, is high on the list of miscreants in this story about congressional junkets that leads Monday's NY Times.

As the Times says, they tightened up the rules in the wake of scandals associated with jailbird Jack Abramoff, but the lobbyists figured out ways to keep on sending members of Congress on junkets worth big sums. Read the details of Ros-Lehtinen's trip to Israel, and it looks like she went all-out on behalf of her benefactor.

Let us also record here that the Miami Herald Naked Politics blog has taken note of this, and we can hope that the Herald will pester Ros-Lehtinen until she explains what this was about. She stonewalled the Times.

Don't be a Lieberman. Do the right thing on health care

For those whose juices are stirring because of the health-care legislation now emerging, could I suggest a pause to consider what the other side is planning? Take a few minutes and click on this piece with the title “Republican Guide to Undermining Health-care Reform.”

Don’t neglect to click on the link therein to Frank Luntz’ memo on the words to use. Who’s Frank Luntz? Think of Karl Rove and you’re in the same league.

My email inbox overflows with my progressive friends mad as hell at the “lying” Democrats in Congress who aren’t ordering from the progressive menu. Yes, you’re right. But what if at the end of the day your opposition to the bill helps to cause its defeat?

Yes, writing legislation is like making sausage. We’re going to have to live with it until we elect a better Congress. If this drive will increase coverage and stop the rise in health costs, it will be pretty darn good. If progressive opposition to the bill combines with clever conservative opposition and defeats it, will we be better off? Not in my best guess.

I’m with Paul Krugman’s message in today’s NY Times column. If you’re not with us, you’re being a Lieberman. 

Yesterday I saw MSNBC where Big Ed Schultz tried to get Rep. Dennis Kucinich to say he would vote against a health-care bill that didn’t have a state option for single-payer. Even Kucinich was – yesterday, anyway – not willing to go that far.

This is a signal to me to moderate opposition. Get ready to suck it up.

And PS: Thanks to Krugman for the tip on the existence of the blog at the White House Budget Office. Very sharp exchange therein between Peter Orszag, the budget director, and Fred Hiatt, editor of the Washington Post editorial page.  It seems pretty plain that Hiatt didn’t know what he was writing about. We have to be wary against being led astray.

A quick updater on the debates swirling over US foreign policy

The NY Times weekend book review section has an endpiece that's more about an issue than about a book. Last weekend it was about foreign policy, under the headline "Which Way Do We Go?"

It was meat and potatoes to this student of foreign policy, covering nine recent books (if I counted right) and pingponging between neoliberalism and neoconservatism (both now out of fashion) and landing on neo-isolationism.

Is that the way we're going? To a "return to the inwardness of the post-World War I years?" Public opinion may be forcing the United States in that direction, though its history is not exactly replete with success.

Here's the final word from the esssay:

It may not be a bad thing that almost no one in foreign policy circles is proposing anything new. Foreign policy is not modern dance; tried and true may be better than avant-garde and visionary. Still, in today’s world, marked by unparalleled threats and characterized by a striking division between elite ideas and broad public opinion, it’s hard to believe that America’s way forward is a return to the past.

First lady's roots in slavery are revealed

This story in today's NY Times reveals a slave ancestor Michelle Obama didn't know she had. This is the story of our America, in its grit and mix, and the imagination hopes it was friendly rather than violent. Required reading.

Thinking of lunch?

This will get your juices flowing. Go to this item at the NY Times freakonomics blog and click on the photo flowchart.

Yum.

Notable in media catching my attention this weekend:

!. The cover of the June 29 New Yorker is a masterpiece of subtlety. A young woman looking at a punch card. No, a young woman with a head scarf looking at a voting record. No, a young Iranian woman raising her eyeglasses like the vote-counters in Broward County in 2000 to better fix her dubious stare on a paper record of a lost chance for better government.

Here’s a link to the New Yorker contents page where you can admire Barry Blitt’s artwork with the brilliant title ”Hanging Chador.” Wasn’t there a letter in a recent Miami Herald comparing our election two terms ago with what the Iranians now have to endure?

2. The Sunday NY Times Book Review section had a fine surprise on p. 14, with a photo of the lovely former Miami Herald columnist Ana Menendez and, under the headline “Sleeping with the Enemy,” a review of her new novel, “The Last War.” We’ve missed your column, Ana Menendez, but will trot out and get your book that may be about your wandering NY Times war correspondent husband, Dexter Filkins, and the life that adds temptations galore to married people living apart.

Whence comes the federal deficit?

Here's a link to a terrific summary by the NY Times economics writer, David Leonhardt, of the makeup of the federal deficit. Your neo-con friends will be impressed as you rattle off the facts that the giant and continuing federal deficit breaks down as follows:

1. 37 percent is due to the business cycle, so we can look forward to some of that going away when the economy finally turns up again.
2. 33 percent is largely a creation of George W. Bush (who also can be blamed for the depth of the business cycle) in such legislation as tax cuts.
3. 20 percent comes from President Obama's continuation of some Bush policies such as the Iraq war and some tax cuts.
4. 10 percent from new Obama policies, which break down as 7 percent for the stimulus plan and only 3 percent for such proposals as health care, education, energy. etc.

Footnote: The NY Times style is to use two words for health care, unlike quite a few media outlets. I enthusiastically agree.

On second thought, your neo-con pals may not be pleased to see this breakdown.

NY Times on Cuba travel operators

Does it cost too much to fly from Miami to Cuba? This article in the NY Times says Yes, it costs too much. Should this be a surprise? Doesn't everything cost too much?

Who's after our banks? "Lowlife grave dancers."

It was one of those below-the-fold stories on the front page of the NY Times about some unfathomable business thing, but the time was late and I decided to read it anyway. Despite the headline: "As Investors Circle Ailing Banks, Fed Sets Limits." And despite the dateline: "Cainsville, Mo."

Good decision. There about in the middle of the story was a note that the same business vulture was circling Florida's own BankUnited, which is in deep trouble.

Even better was to plow to the end of the story and get the kicker (we old hacks know the last lines often are the second-best thing in a long story): It quoted J. Christopher Flowers, who's desperately rich and desperate to get much richer:

He has estimated his banking empire will one day earn at least a 35 percent return on banks it has bought in the United States. “I find it to be an extraordinary time to invest,” he said.

He was even more blunt when he spoke to an industry group in New York earlier this year. “Lowlife grave dancers like me will make a fortune,” he predicted.

Suddenly, I'm dubious that this is going to turn out well for the rest of us. A few of the super-rich of the world will do great for themselves, and we will think that we're doing better as the stock markets claw back a fair amount of what they've lost, and we'll lose resolve to make our economic system work better. And in a decade or so J. Christopher Flowers and his gang of hedgers will be too big to fail but failing anyway, and there we go again.

That story was on p. 1 of Wednesday's Times. On Thursday the Times had an editorial on the same topic, urging the Obama administration and the Fed not to relax rules about who can run banks. The editorial also said:

If you’ve had a nagging feeling that the banking mess is a colossal raw deal for taxpayers, consider the suspicion confirmed.

When they're bold enough to call themselves lowlife grave dancers, I'd say, Yes, raw deal for us.

Here are some more links on this topic, some rather technical.

Source: Two main bidding groups for BankUnited - South Florida Business Journal:

Confessing here that I hadn't paid much attention to BankUnited. I note now that its shares go for about a quarter these days. There's a commenter after the SoFla Business Journal article who says, "Folks in South Florida are so asleep there has not even been a run on the bank deposits."

Next is a newswire item from March 10 when BankUnited didn't file its reports to the SEC as required, and NASDAQ said it wasn't in compliance with rules to be listed.

Now excuse me please. The secretary of the treasury has an op-ed in the Times, and I'm going to read it to stave off the nightmares that otherwise would be disturbing my rest.

Let's think again of how Jeb and Lehman cost Florida bigtime

In Wednesday's NY Times, this article:
New Jersey Sues Over Its Lehman Losses - DealBook Blog - NYTimes.com
served as a reminder of how Florida got ripped off in the same way. Has Florida sued? Not mentioned in the article, though California was cited as having sued before New Jersey.

Where are we? Why no suit?

New Jersey is out $180 million thanks to the collapse of Lehman. Florida also lost many millions, though a light search doesn't reveal how much. There is an interesting similarity between Florida and New Jersey, in that both states had a board of officials supposedly overseeing the operation of the fund -- like the money market funds we ordinary citizens have been forced to use by our friendly banks -- where revenue was parked until needed by local governments to pay their staff and other obligations. In Florida it's the State Board of Administration. New Jersey calls it the State Investment Council. Here's a quote from the Times story about that board:

State Senator Joseph Pennacchio, a Republican who has been critical of both Lehman and the State Investment Council, told The Times in an interview that it made sense to sue. But he also called for legislative hearings into the council’s investment practices and said that the council included three former Lehman executives and the wife of a former Lehman executive.

“That raises our level of suspicion and cynicism about the whole deal,” Mr. Pennacchio told The Times. “It makes sense to go after Lehman. But we also want to know if people on the council did things they should not have done.”

I'd like to know the same kind of stuff about our Florida counterpart. It's deeply suspicious because Jeb Bush was on that board and then when he left the governor's office he became a well-paid consultant to Lehman.

Jeb, are you refunding your bonuses?

Christmas present: Finally revealed who was B. Virdot

Those of us of a certain age and from the heartland will have known this story for many years. Picture the Great Depression, hard times in Ohio, and an anonymous donor is offering money in small amounts to people who only have to write and describe their need.

The checks for $5 or $10 came from an account with the name B. Virdot on it. That was 75 years ago. I didn't learn who B. Virdot was until this fine article in the Monday NY Times. I hope readers will enjoy the same thrill of remembrance and heart-warming that struck me.

And a footnote: I sent the link to friends in Ohio, with a note that the author, Ted Gup, is a journalism prof at Case Western Reserve University, and perhaps their son who's studying there knows him. Turns out the young man is about to take his second course from Prof. Gup and has nothing but praise for him.

The End of the End of the Revolution - Castro's Cuba at 50 - NYTimes.com

It's sneaking up on me that we're a few weeks from the 50th anniversary of Castro. What to do about it? Read stuff about Cuba. I'm recommending one good summary of the Cuba situation in the Sunday NY Times magazine:

The End of the End of the Revolution - Castro's Cuba at 50 - NYTimes.com

You can read and read and not find a whole lot of new information. Toward the end I found a nugget in this:

Cuba is some way down Obama’s priority list. But early in his presidency, another Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, did something that changed views of him in the hemisphere: he negotiated, against all the odds, the transfer of sovereignty over the Panama Canal to Panama. It seems clear enough that a breakthrough of similar proportions with Cuba would bring a major reconciliation with Latin America.

Today's winner of the Most Appropriate Name in the News

This one should please those of us who appreciate food and read about it, a seasonal choice, in other words:

Michael Batterberry, editor and publisher of Food Arts magazine.

It appears in a newsy article in the Wednesday NY Times Style section, link below.

Gael Greene - Insatiable, and Also Dismissed - NYTimes.com

In Florida’s Economic Pain, Obama Gains Ground: Ny Times

Here's the NY Times take on Florida a month before the election.

NEW PORT RICHEY, Fla. — Jim Piccillo lost his job as a bank vice president in August, applied for food stamps to support his two young daughters and swore off a life of loyalty to the Republican Party. He now volunteers here in Pasco County for Senator Barack Obama of Illinois.

That's not the entire story, of course. The questions are many. The watchword is -- what else? -- Turnout!

Insane in the highest reaches of the republic

I was watching MSNBC after 9 p.m. and thought I’d never seen such strange stuff happening, especially when the fate of the republic purportedly was in the balance – its economy, anyway. It was wrapped up by (new) anchor Rachel Maddow talking with the NBC congressional correspondent, Mike Viqueira, who started his report by exclaiming, “What an insane day!”

As a retired AP foreign correspondent, I’ve been in some dramatic news situations myself, though not recently, so maybe standards have changed since I lived through Anwar Sadat’s sudden decision to visit Jerusalem in 1977, or the weird experience of sitting in the Hilton Hotel in Tel Aviv in 1991 and watching on CNN as Saddam Hussein fired Scud missiles at Tel Aviv and their fiery tracks were shown live heading for me. Or seeing Soviet citizens selling the belts off their jeans around the formerly invulnerable Berlin Wall on the eve of German unification in 1990.

There is insane stuff in the world of public events, and we have to keep our calm in the face of it.

(Now MSNBC is showing Sarah Palin’s pathetic attempt to make living in Alaska into foreign policy experience. Heck, I have a lot more of that.)

Anyway, then I turned over to the online NY Times and found the following two paragraphs on top of their 10 p.m. current sitrep:

WASHINGTON — The day began with an agreement that Washington hoped would end the financial crisis that has gripped the nation. It dissolved into a verbal brawl in the Cabinet Room of the White House, urgent warnings from the president and pleas from a Treasury secretary who knelt before the House speaker and appealed for her support.

“If money isn’t loosened up, this sucker could go down,” President Bush declared Thursday as he watched the $700 billion bailout package fall apart before his eyes, according to one person in the room.

So, hizzoner the President is worried that “this sucker could go down.” And the secretary of the treasury “knelt before the House speaker and appealed for her support.”

I see what Mike Viqueira is talking about. Insane.

Anyway, as to the debate scheduled for Friday night. In the larger scheme of things, the debate is a peanut in comparison to the financial fate of the republic. But I do think that John McCain has no chance of making a contribution to fixing the financial crisis, so it may be good to lure him away from Washington and skewer him thoroughly in a debate.

Get digitally close ... Republican thinker ... Afghanistan and Pakistan

It's Saturday 6 a.m. and I've finally finished reading last Sunday's NY Times magazine. There's a terrific recipe for duck breasts but first let me tip you to the three big articles. They will only take a week or so to read.

First, are you afraid of Facebook? Twitter? Read this and learn to be brave:
I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You


The next is about Pakistan/Afghanstan. Do you think this is a simple problem? Read this article by Dexter Filkins and learn of the subterfuges and camouflage that extend from the Tribal Areas to the Rose Garden. Especially good if you've just read "The Way of the World" by Ron Suskind. This book became famous recently for the "forged letter" about Niger yellowcake and Mohammed Ata's purported training Baghdad but it's more about Pakistan. The author was practically there when Benazir Bhutto was assassinated.

Next is the Republican view of why they're about to lose massively. David Frum outlines how they've neglected to help their fellow citizens and have created a society with increasing inequality. This is heartless stuff, so brace yourself.