Ken Duncan sums it up

Politry Plus » Blog Archive » Creative Capitalism -- Ken Duncan wraps it up, all in one tight little package. Is there much more to say?

26.10.08
Creative Capitalism

In the free market country club,

being deemed “too big to fail”

insures a corporation against

the mistakes of poor managers.

No wonder those saved

by bucket-wielding taxpayers

avoid making needed loans

and acquire other banks.

Callahan nails it again--add your 2 cents

Callahan’s Cleveland Diary » Blog Archive » Battlegrounds and bailouts -- Go to Callahan's and add your two cents. If you want to find a few other talking points on these topics, call me at 216-255-6640, and we'll kick things around a bit. Not everything belongs on a blog.

The dialogue could be very interesting and productive these next few months, if we talk about what we as stakeholders critically need to talk about, not what "they" want to promote as the issues with which to manipulate and polarize the public prior to the election.

I'm not sure that our interests are parallel with "theirs."

this coming Wednesday at noon at the City Club: Jim Rokakis

The City Club - Speakers > Speaker Detail -- Our Wednesday is realigning as we plan to go see Cuyahoga County Treasurer and former Ward 15 Councilman Jim Rokakis speak at the City Club at noon. Here's the blurb from the link:

Speakers > Jim Rokakis

Wednesday, May 28, 2008 12:00 PM

Jim Rokakis
Cuyahoga County Treasurer

Reservation

Jim Rokakis will discuss a proposed Ohio bill to land bank foreclosed properties. Rokakis took office as county treasurer in March 1997 after serving for more than 19 years on Cleveland City Council, the last seven as chairman of the finance committee. He has brought sweeping reform to the treasurer's office, overhauling county property tax collection system by instituting more efficient collection and disbursement of tax revenue. Rokakis has significantly improved the county’s investment function and was recognized as having the best-performing portfolio among Ohio County Treasurer’s. Rokakis also revolutionized the way Ohio counties collect delinquent property taxes by working successfully to pass House Bill 371 that allows county treasurers in Ohio’s largest counties to sell their property tax liens to private entities. Additionally, he spearheaded House Bill 294, which streamlines the foreclosure process for abandoned properties and was instrumental in creating Cuyahoga County’s “Don’t Borrow Trouble” foreclosure prevention program. Rokakis developed nationally recognized linked deposit loan programs that help revitalize the county’s housing stock and reduce urban sprawl. Rokakis has been recognized by local and national organizations for his efforts in strengthening neighborhoods and communities. In 2007, he received the NeighborWorks America Local Government Service Award and the Leadership in Social Justice Award from Greater Cleveland Community Shares, and was named the County Leader of the Year by American City and County Magazine.

more good work from Mark and Henry

Auditor says Rosemary Vinci's failure to disclose felony record broke no law - OPENERS - Ohio Politics Blog by The Plain Dealer -- Although this one comes without an accompanying audio clip, we appreciate it immensely. Mark Puente and Henry J. Gomez are doing some good reporting for the good of the community, and we hope they keep can keep it up.

We like the part about her lobbying for "developers." Perhaps this all Flats-centric real-estate engineering needs reexamining. It seems that it may not be "organic" or natural growth. It may even be cancerous, and it may need excising.

ramping up the dialogue: Adam Wasserman

Meet the Bloggers » Blog Archive » Twitter Updates for 2008-03-25--George is using Twitter now to "live blog" the MeetTheBloggers interviews. It's good to have this immediate input and posting of content, to be followed a bit later by the posts of people in attendance, like the Equanimous Philosopher, to be followed still later by the permanently posted podcast itself.

And, just as our methods for ramping up the dialogue continue to gain traction and speed, our new participants in the dialogue continue to show more promise and receptivity. The Adam Wasserman interview should be enlightening to many and give hope to all who value candor and truth in the public space. Adam has a refreshing perspective, and I expect George will have the podcast up soon; it was a good sit that needs sharing as quickly as possible.

Roger works it out

Cleveland Equanimous Philosopher: Oh, Philosopher, Where Art Thou? -- Like the chronically constipated novelist Henry James, Roger Bundy has worked through and unbound a complex issue; Henry used to do it with a pencil, Roger uses a blog.

Based on Roger's fine arguments, I, too, am resolving the issue of anonymity here and on the Save Our Land blog. Henceforth, I will no longer rail against or abuse the anonymous commentors, nor will I continue to collaborate with them or to host them; I will not moderate comment, but will instead require that the commentor at least be a registered Googler. That should help somewhat. Here's Attorney Bundy's well-reasoned if prolix take, pro bono publico:

I believe that one of the fundamental aspects of a blog necessary to accomplish the above goals is to be open to comments with no restrictions or editing. This gives a blog credibility. I also believe that one of the fundamental, if not THE fundamental, aspects of enlightened public discourse is that participants stand by their views, comments, thoughts and ideas with their name. This gives credibility to their participation in the discourse.

Unfortunately, these competing principles have created, for me, a conundrum -- accepting unresricted comments to be a credible blog permits anonymous posters with little or no credibility to hijack and crash the level of public discourse I hope to attain and maintain.

And that conundrum is a giant cold prickly that made me subconsciously avoid my blog since September. Until this morning.

I know there are many of you out there who are thinking right now -- Whoa, this guy is certifiable. Who cares, just post, you are WAY overthinking this. Well, part of me feels that way too. However, because I put my name on my blog and my posts, because I genuinely care about community, and because I sincerely want my blog to be a positive contributer in this new paradigm of communication; I'd rather err on the side of overthinking these matters than do otherwise. If nothing else, you now know that I take these matters very seriously. Hopefully, that will add to my credibility. If you just think I'm nuts, well that's fine too, as there is probably a grain of truth to that statement for all of us, even you.

If you look at the most recent posts prior to my hiatus, I spent a great deal of time sparring with Anonymous posters about issues that, as far as I am concerned, are in the gutter of public discourse and community dialogue. I made no bones about the fact that I think anonymous posting and anonymous blogs are an act of cowardice and are antithetical to enlightened community dialogue. After all, community and anonymity are practical antonyms. They cannot co-exist. You simply cannot have a community of anonymous people.

Therefore, beginning today, Cleveland Equanimous Philosopher has adopted a new commenting and posting policy.

Cleveland Equanimnous Philosopher will no longer accept unsigned, anonymous comments or posts. If you have factual information regarding a post or comment on my blog that contradicts or enhances the dialougue, but need to remain anonymous for extraordinary reasons, you may feel free to contact me directly to discuss your factual information and I will incorporate it into subsequent posts and/or comments and I will protect your identity. If you don't trust me, then you shouldn't be reading my blog anyway because you already believe I have no credibility. Opinion and commentary will not be entertained from anonymous sources under any circumstances.

The conundrum being, temporarily at least, resolved, Philosopher doth return.

eWeek: Financial Fact and Friction

Financial Fact and Friction -- In line with the recent furor over slipshod mortgage-lending practices and the careless administration of what is for most people their largest single financial asset, their personal residence, here is a reminder from Eric Lundquist over at eWeek that nobody is held to a fiduciary standard in the confiscatory lending business, and nobody really knows where the money goes. If you weren't aware already, this will be an eye-opener, and from a technical as opposed to a financial perspective. Here's a sampling from Opinion: Skip the frictionless-economy ideas and stick with the customer:

Financial organizations have always been big computer purchasers. They are usually among the first to install the latest supercomputers and big storage servers to process and track the millions and millions of shares traded each day. In the last couple of years, computing attention has turned to "quants": quantitative analysts who contend they can model the entire financial market and would love to talk to you for hours about stochastic calculus.

Yet, despite all those quants and all that computing horsepower on Wall Street and elsewhere in the financial world, it is increasingly evident that no one really knows where the money goes, how it moves and how much the leveraged buyout firms really have in their wallets at the end of the day. Why is that? Wasn't all this computing purchasing supposed to result in a frictionless economy where the movement of money and other financial instruments slides seamlessly through the world's economy and everyone can sleep well at night knowing how much money is in the bank?

When I add up all those CNN tidbits and wild swings on Wall Street as quant-driven computer trading tries to track the untrackable, I have to conclude that all the computing horsepower has been aimed at making money move faster with little regard for trying to settle accounts at day's end.

A computer is an obedient device that will do exactly what you program. If your goal is to track the flow of money after it gets splintered into the world's financial markets, then that is what the computer will do. If your goal is to accelerate that money movement and not really be concerned about where the funds go after they leave your company, then you will get what we have: a lot of panicked investors and corporate managers unable to say where the money has gone.

Forget about the frictionless economy and let's count on building some friction based on accountability and concern for customers who want to know where the money went.

is this the Clinic's PILOT?

$2 million gift to link students to digital learning - Cleveland Metro News – The Latest Breaking News, Photos and Stories from The Plain Dealer -- It's good to see the Clinic taking up some of the slack. I heard a good while back that the Clinic was to begin paying about 25% of its forgiven real-estate taxes into what they call a PILOT program designated for education. PILOT is very big in other prosperous, fair-share communities and stands for "payment in lieu of taxes."

Is this $2 million the beginning of that?

Gloria Ferris on the Breuer Tower: nailing down the dialogue

Gloria Ferris begins to nail the smarmy dynamics of the Breuer Tower deal and throws some light on self-serving motives, and our recourse. What's important here is that she touches on the perilous tactical position in which the City Planning Commission finds itself.

Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership does wi-fi

Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership now offers free wi-fi downtown for up to 2 hours daily. The annual rates at $120 for unlimited access aren't bad if you live or work there, either. How soon will we have similar service in Cleveland+? Why don't we have it now?

they're doin' it in Knoxville, too

Free Press : Is Tennessee Ready for AT&T to Enter Cable Market? Here's an intelligent piece from The Knoxville News Sentinel about AT&T trying to pull off the same full-court-press offensive in Tennessee that it is in Ohio, regarding delivery of cable services.

There are so few positives and so many negatives to the legislation that I cannot really see why it's still alive and kicking, unless the money's talking just too, too loud to our elected and appointed employees.

The AT$T cable-delivery behemoths we've seen--across from the car barns off Pearl Road and up and down poor Clifton Boulevard--seem to be especially vulnerable to all sorts of disruption. They're hastily contrived and cheaply installed. I think they ought to be put below grade, first of all, for security purposes, then second, for shielding, and then third, for appearance.

The nasty evidence we see of AT$T's late-stage attempt at entry into the cable market, when they're losing telephone market share to VOIP providers, is sort of sad. They've been outflanked and now are lumbering around trying to respond with the quickest-but-not-the-best maneuver to gain a toehold--the technology seems not to be too well thought through, the design is barely sustainable. They are desparate. They want to stay alive, they want to stay in the game, they want to do it on our backs. We've found these past few years, with VOIP telephone delivery, that they've overcharged us for years. They've taken our discretionary savings dollars to themselves and back to Wall Street.

We don't owe them anything. And they don't really owe us customers anything, either, besides whatever service we contract to pay for. Remember that their first duty is to the shareholders, not the customers. And they're not good neighbors.

SB117 and Matt Zone, now on BFD

Brewed Fresh Daily » Cleveland City Councilman Matt Zone’s testimony to the Ohio Senate on SB117 -- Last Friday morning, I once again took time to participate in a MeetTheBloggers session about Ohio Senate Bill 117 at Gypsy Beans. From what we learned, our recently elected representation, in this case co-sponsors Bob Spada and Lance Mason, have lost no time in linking arms across the aisle and proceeding to sell out the public interest to their goombahs at AT&T. They think they're players. Listen to the whole thing. It's sickening.

We must take our government back from these careerists. Our imposition of term limits has made it so these guys early on form unholy alliances that either get them campaign funds to get on to the next government level or else line up good private-sector jobs after elected office ends. Harbor no illusions; we are compromised by those whom we just placed in office.

This bill is fast-tracked to slide by under our noses, and we'll find ourselves sold down the river, paying exhorbitant prices for a newly installed but already obsolete utility infrastructure. The television commercials, I am told, talk about choice and competition. Turn off the TV. It's lying to you. Keep it off. Your life will improve.

We can easily bypass this AT&T attempt at staying alive, staying in the game. Bring on the beefed-up broadband wireless. Disrupt the utility franchise.

And don't let AT&T put one more of those old-fashioned refrigerator-looking things on one more tree lawn. They lower property values.

And don't forget to read Matt Zone's testimony over on BFD.

great news from Tremont

Plain Press: The Community Newspaper Serving Cleveland's West Side Neighborhoods -- great article here about Sammy Catania providing new leadership at the Tremont nonprofit, news about reinvolving the neighbors, expanding wi-fi using local contractors, security cameras to enhance safety, branding with a logo that sounds attractive and cool, fostering transparency and communication, building out the community, strengthening the networks already there. This bears watching, perhaps emulating.

chas wants bob to fight

cleveland.com: Weblogs: Fight Bob, Fight--In case you missed it last week, Chas. Rich has an interesting take on how this BOE situation can play out optimally for the citizenry. I hope he's not counting on the BOE members' being dumber than they actually are.

connecting the dots, doing simple math, just noticing, just wondering

Taxing balance Abatement reviewed: From the SunNEWS on March 15th, with my emphasis added. The SunNEWS quote is italicized:

"Cleveland's existing citywide residential property tax abatement law was renewed in 1999 and is set to expire June 15. A separate abatement law for downtown won't expire until 2010. Cleveland began offering residential tax abatement, at 100 percent for seven years, for new downtown construction in 1987.
In the decade prior, new housing construction in Cleveland was almost non-existent. In some years, fewer than 20 homes were built. After 1987, the pace quickened. It accelerated in 1991 when the use of tax abatement was expanded citywide, offering a 100 percent abatement over 15 years. The abatement applies only to structures, not land.
Since then, 11,259 residential units were built, according to a 2007 study by Cleveland State University's College of Urban Affairs. The study also showed 60 percent of people buying tax-abated housing are coming from outside Cleveland. "

The forecast for 2007 is that Cleveland will have between 10,000 and 12,000 vacant or abandoned properties, which can be accounted for nearly directly by the 11,259 tax-abated new properties. The overall Cleveland population is less now than what it was in 1991. Where is the benefit? Where exactly is the gain? What is the loss?

Nobody's doing the simple math. Nobody's talking straight talk.

lots of statistics, for the record

Mortgage Trouble Clouds Homeownership Dream - New York Times -- Now, nearly two years after we gave testimony for the Cuyahoga County commissioners and five years since Cleveland-Marshall law professor Kathleen Engel began writing her papers warning of the impending debacle, the numbers begin to appear in the popular press, and the evidence of greed is incontrovertible.

In the same edition, the NYT tells in "Buying With Help From Mom and Dad" about how the high price of residential real estate is spawning new specialties among lawyers, third-party administrators, psychiatrists, and counselors, as parents and children cope with the imbalanced behavior of committing more money to the children's housing than the children can afford. I wonder what the upshot of all this will be if ever the prices in the housing markets recede, and they find themselves in the uncomfortable condition called "upside down."

Finally, Gloria tells me that in the PD Friday, someone with insight into the mortgage and real-estate industries talked of "mortgages that are designed to strip wealth rather than allow homeowners to build up equity in their properties." It's good that all this is coming out now, while the huge intergenerational transfer of wealth from the post-WWI crowd to the post-WWII crowd is still under way.

Do you think that, if we paid cash for our housing and our cars, that the prices would moderate and approach true value?

Blackwell tries endless-loop theory on legal system

Plain Dealer Business: Former OSU prof loses appeal of insider trading conviction -- Roger Blackwell keeps squirming and trying to introduce the frustration of the endless-loop theory into the legal system, even as he is told to report to prison and ante up a $1 million dollar fine. The noted OSU prof and strategist is a bright guy, granted, but there may be such a thing as "too clever"; another way of stating this would be to say he's become the "poster child for hubris," but hasn't quite acknowledged it, yet. He still seems to think that the courts will abandon their claims against him if only he can wear them down and overwhelm them with his brilliance. He's still parsing the insider-trading issue to the point where he comes out right, and everybody else, even his own legal representation, is wrong. It's them, not him, you see.

Stay on top of the business strategies revolving around the idea of "the endless loop." It's one of those things that's unconscionable but not really illegal, yet. People tell me Blackwell, who seems to be a good example of amoral intellect, was one of its proponents. We should be seeing it discussed more and more as we delve into the depradations of the mortgage-lending, the mortgage-servicing, and the mortgage-foreclosure industries, as well as other things that disenfranchise the consumer to enrich the provider.

private transit catching on

Google’s Buses Help Its Workers Beat the Rush - New York Times -- Here, Google offers as a perk what we in Cleveland, East Cleveland, Shaker Heights, Cleveland Heights, and Lakewood take for granted--mass transit. Private, customized transit systems seem to be catching on. In addition to Google, Ebay is trying private systems. Around here, The Cleveland Clinic runs its own bus system despite the presence of RTA, and yesterday, we noticed the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority also has its own little private transit system.

Google and Ebay do business in the open market of for-profit corporations and contract their transit service through an outside provider. The Cleveland Clinic finances its transit, and its real estate, using dollars gleaned in the nonprofit market for health-care services, and the CMHA exists because of the tax dollar. The more I think about it, the more I come to the realization that the Clinic and the CMHA transit services may be redundant and need to be looked at very closely.

We don't have much choice about paying the "taxes" levied either by the health-care system or by the entities that finance the CMHA as well as the RTA. Bear in mind, too, that the Clinic does not pay into the tax pool that the rest of us do. What I'm getting to is that we are probably paying for way more transit than we need, and not maximizing the usage of what we pay for. We ought to consider having CMHA use the RTA for its needs, and we ought to ask the Clinic to contribute to the tax pool before it goes starting up its own bus system. Then, we ought to ask the Clinic to cut back on health-care costs by having its employees use what the rest of us use--unless of course, the employees are so special and hard to recruit that they need the same livery service perquisite that Google employees have on that other coast. Am I making sense?

Final thought: Do you suppose the perk, the shuttle-bus service, that the Clinic employees now receive is listed as such, as additional compensation, on their wage and earnings statements submitted to the IRS?

we talked about this with Jim Rokakis

Lender Stops Accepting Mortgage Applications - New York Times--We talked about this subprime mortgage-lender meltdown situation with Jim Rokakis a few weeks ago in a MeetTheBloggers session at Gypsy Beans, and how our county and our state may proceed in the matter. Gloria tells me that our governor has little more sympathy than Rokakis for the people who have created this sloppy subprime mess. Here's an excerpt from the NYT March 9th article about this New Century, "at the center of the subprime storm:"

Like other subprime lenders, New Century’s problems can be traced to a sharp spike in defaults among mortgages written last year, when lending standards eased across the industry and companies sought to increase loan volume. More borrowers with extremely poor credit were given mortgages without being required to make down payments or to prove the income they stated on mortgage applications.

As more recent borrowers began falling behind on payments, New Century’s financial backers on Wall Street demanded the company buy back nonperforming loans under terms of its securitization agreement with the company. It appears that New Century compounded that problem by incorrectly accounting for loans that it had to buy back and by not setting aside adequate reserves to deal with the problem.

The company said yesterday that it had significantly tightened its lending standards in the last few months and was no longer allowing borrowers to take out loans without putting any money down. The new policies, it says, have reduced the number of borrowers who are defaulting on their first mortgage payment to 1.9 percent in February, from 2.5 percent in 2006.

draft-dodging gamers and gangsters: high time for Rove & Company to account

A New Mystery to Prosecutors: Their Lost Jobs - New York Times--here's another smelly long tale about behind-the-scenes machinations prior to the political change of command at the start of 2007. What's so ironic is that these creeps in Republicans clothing, these draft-dodgers, these boys who would never put it on the line themselves but love to do sneaky-pete, clandestine operations from the shadows of government--what's so ironic is that we're losing our freedoms and our government and our assets to a bunch of adolescent-level gamers who operate as gangsters with impunity and government immunity. We have to expose them and strip them of their protections. (how about old gamers versus young gamers, CIA versus CIA (Central Intelligence Agency versus Cleveland Institute of Art?) It came as a revelation to me a few months ago, reading through The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, that our young gamers here in Cleveland can save the world. (in the sections about PAM, decision markets, games, and simulations). We also need to be aware that these old gamers, like Karl Rove, have the potential to destroy the world as we know it, as well.

Read the whole article; the link is permanent. Here's an excerpt:

United States attorneys have four-year terms but can be removed at any time, and for almost any reason.

But across the country, legal and public officials have expressed dismay over the firings. In Western Michigan, for example, lawyers and a federal judge came to the defense of Margaret M. Chiara, the United States attorney there, saying she was well regarded.

“It just doesn’t look right,” said James S. Brady, who was United States attorney in Western Michigan during the Carter administration. “It compromises the credibility that justice is being dealt with fairly and impartially. There is a fear that politics have entered in life and death situations.”

Discussions began in October at the Justice Department about removing prosecutors who were considered flawed or deficient in carrying out administration policy by law enforcement officials, lawmakers and others, several officials said. The White House eventually approved the list and helped notify Republican lawmakers before the Dec. 7 dismissals, officials said.
While Justice Department officials expected that top assistant prosecutors in each office would probably fill the jobs initially, the officials said they had not chosen permanent successors. However, officials knew that if the replacements were to have a substantial tenure before Mr. Bush left office, they needed to be named quickly.

The list of prosecutors who were targets was approved by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and the deputy attorney general, Paul J. McNulty, the day-to-day manager of the Justice Department since he was appointed in the fall of 2005.

Under Mr. Gonzales, Mr. McNulty has become a powerful deputy with a wide-ranging portfolio. He was a United States attorney in Virginia, but he worked in Congress for more than a decade and was once legal counsel to the House majority leader. He is regarded in legal circles as more attuned to policy and politics than his predecessor, James B. Comey, a former career prosecutor in New York.

That leadership change may explain the removal of prosecutors who had mostly been in place since the start of the Bush administration.

“I and my colleagues are the same people in December of 2006 that we were in 2001,” said one former prosecutor who would speak only on the condition of anonymity. “The only thing that has changed is the administration of the Department of Justice. We were making the same arguments and the same points before.”

Justice Department officials, who would speak about the department’s decision making only anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss personnel matters publicly, now acknowledge that the dismissals were mishandled. They failed to anticipate how much attention the highly unusual group firing would draw, and the agency’s contradictory accounts about whether the dismissals were performance-related helped spur suspicions.