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Romney Will ‘Probably’ Release Tax Returns

by Amanda Terkel on January 17, 2012

Huffington Post…

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney moved a step closer to releasing his tax returns during Monday’s debate, saying he would “probably” do it around April if he becomes the nominee. “I looked at what has been done in campaigns in the past with Sen. McCain and President George W. Bush and others,” he said. “They have tended to release tax records in April or tax season. I hadn’t planned on releasing tax records, because the law requires us to release all of our assets — all of the things we own — that I’ve already released. It’s a pretty full disclosure.” “But you know, if that’s been the tradition, I’m not opposed to doing that,” he added. “Time will tell. But I anticipate that most likely I am going to get asked to do that around the April time period and I’ll keep that open.” When asked again whether he was agreeing to release them, Romney replied, “I think I’ve heard enough from folks saying, ‘Look, let’s see your tax records.’ I have nothing in them that suggests there’s any problem, and I’m happy to do so. I sort of feel like we are showing a lot of exposure at this point. And if I become our nominee, and what’s happened in history is people have released them in about April of the coming year and that’s probably what I would do.” Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Rick Perry have all called on Romney to release his tax returns, as has former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin , who released her records.

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Romney Will ‘Probably’ Release Tax Returns

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Perry Calls Significant Legislation ‘Theft’

by AP on December 19, 2011

Huffington Post…

MANCHESTER, Iowa — Seeking a late surge, Texas Gov. Rick Perry sought Monday to tar GOP presidential rivals Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney for supporting the $700 billion Wall Street bailout and said the billions loaned to banks and other financial institutions at the height of the 2008 financial crisis amounted to “the single biggest act of theft in American history.” Most of the money has been paid back. In the final weeks before the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3, Perry stressed his credentials as a Washington outsider – someone who he says understands Main Street and is not beholden to the wealthy Wall Street set. Perry said the values he learned growing up in rural Texas shaped his views. “No one was going to bail out a dry-land cotton farmer” and no one should have bailed out Wall Street, Perry said in northeastern Iowa. “This Wall Street bailout is the single biggest act of theft in American history,” he told voters at a pizza buffet. “And, you know, Newt and Mitt, they both were for it. That’s one of the reasons I say that if you really want an individual who is an outsider, someone who has not been engaged in part of that process, I hope you’ll take a look at me.” Romney and Gingrich supported the Wall Street rescue that was shepherded into law in fall 2008 by Republican President George W. Bush. They have since become critics of the program, which conservative voters tend to loathe. Perry joined the presidential contest in August to great fanfare but lost his luster following what was widely viewed as erratic behavior and lackluster performances in debates. He is hoping to achieve a comeback by pitching himself as “an outsider who truly believes that we’ve got more taxes and more regulation and more government than most Americans want.” “We need to make the decision that we’re not going to support bailouts and these wasteful earmarks,” he said. Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, has remained steady in polling and also has a sizable campaign fund. Gingrich, the former House speaker, has surged in recent weeks as voters started watching the race more closely. Perry is hoping to leapfrog them both by casting former business executive Romney as a Wall Street insider – although his venture capital firm was based in Massachusetts, not New York – and Gingrich as a Washington elite. “If you’ll have my back on Jan. 3 at the caucuses here in Iowa,” he told voters. “I’ll have your back for the next four years in Washington, D.C.”

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Perry Calls Significant Legislation ‘Theft’

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Rick Perry ‘Retires’

December 16, 2011

Gov. Rick Perry has done something his opponents have been hoping he’d do for years: retire. But it’s not what the governor’s detractors had in mind.

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Family Living On $22,000 A Year Reflects New Low-Income Stats

December 16, 2011

When doctor’s bills started to mount after Joe Gallardo’s daughter was born prematurely in September, the father of three took on a second job — upping his work hours to about 15 a day. But even with the additional time he clocks at Fiesta Pizza, Gallardo, 28, is barely scraping by. He lives with his fiancé’s parents, a home he shares with 14 other family members. The Gallardos, who live on less than $22,00 a year, are just one of a record 10.2 million low-income working families — the highest number this country has seen in at least a decade — according to a new analysis by the Working Poor Families Project and the Population Reference Bureau, a nonprofit research group based in Washington. This new reality means that struggling parents, like Gallardo, are forced to sacrifice sleep, family time and their well-being in order to barely make enough money. The South Austin dad begins his workday at 3 a.m. at Getty’s Pizza, where he prepares pizza dough for about eight hours. He tries to catch a quick nap before he starts his second job at Fiesta Pizza at 3 p.m., but that’s not an easy feat for someone sharing a home with 14 others. He stocks shelves until 10:30 p.m. and takes one day off a week. “Basically, I had no choice,” Gallardo told The Huffington Post of his decision to work two jobs. “I have to do something to try and provide for my family.” Gallardo, who brings home about $1,800 a month, isn’t the anomaly when it comes to the face of struggling families, but he also has the added challenge of bearing a tarnished record. Since serving three years in prison for a burglary he committed in 2005, Gallardo said he’s committed to starting over, to dedicating himself to a crime-free life and providing the best he can for his family. But these days, such staunch determination isn’t always enough, especially in the West and the South, which have been hit the hardest, according to the Associated Press . Both Texas and California have the most low-income families, each with more than 1 million. “The reality is that prospects for the poor and the near poor are dismal,” Sheldon Danziger, a University of Michigan public policy professor who specializes in poverty, told the Associated Press. “If Congress and the states make further cuts, we can expect the number of poor and low-income families to rise for the next several years.” These economic woes have taken a visible toll on the Gallardo family. Though Gallardo carves out movie nights and family dinners for his one day off, he said it’s been about a year since he and his fiancé, Norma, 22, have spent any quality time alone. He said his kids, who are 6, 5 and 3 months, have been missing their dad since he started working around the clock in July. “The most difficult part is not spending as much time with my family as I would usually spend before I started working two jobs,” Gallardo said. “It gets kind of depressing sometimes.” While the Gallardo family has been able to seek help from Any Baby Can , an Austin nonprofit that serves the area’s poorest, sickest and youngest children and their families, the organization says it’s been inundated with requests from clients in need of its programs. While the organization is able to serve 6,000 clients a year, it has had to implement a waiting list, which has 104 people who are eagerly waiting the chance to get access to the therapy, financial and health programs Any Baby Can offers. “We are tightening our belts,” said Allison Daskam, communications manager. “They were already very tight.” Though Gallardo has had to squeeze his entire family into one of the four bedrooms in his fiancé’s parents’ house for more than a year, he hopes to start looking for a place to call his own after Christmas. “Sometimes I don’t have energy, but I just force myself to do it,” Gallardo said. “I just think about my kids and that’s just all the motivation I need.” Want to help Austin families in need like the Gallardos? Consider donating to Any Baby Can here.

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Texas Adopts Rules On Fracking Chemical Disclosure

December 13, 2011

HOUSTON — Texas regulators have adopted rules requiring oil and gas drillers to disclose on a website the chemicals they use in hydraulic fracturing operations. The Texas Railroad Commission adopted rules Tuesday to enforce a law passed by the Legislature earlier this year. Texas has been a pioneer in efforts nationwide to force drillers to be more open about chemical-laced water pumped into the ground to crack dense rock formations to withdraw oil and gas. The process is known as fracking and some environmental groups fear the chemicals could taint water and pollute the air. Texas will require companies to disclose chemicals but not concentrations. Other states, such as Colorado, require disclosure of concentrations.

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Full Disclosure: Fracking Fluids Subject To New Colorado Rule

December 13, 2011

DENVER — Colorado will require energy companies to disclose the concentrations of all chemicals in hydraulic fracturing and also ask drillers to make public some information about ingredients considered trade secrets. Colorado regulators unanimously approved the new rules Tuesday that take effect in April. The guidelines are similar to those required by a first-in-the-nation law passed in Texas this year but go further by requiring the concentrations of chemicals to be disclosed. “That’s the big advancer here. We’re getting a full picture of what’s in that fracking fluid,” said Michael Freeman, an attorney for Earthjustice who worked with industry to write the rules. Also, if Colorado drillers claim a trade secret, they would still have to disclose the ingredient’s chemical family. In emergencies, companies would have to tell health care workers what those secret ingredients were. “It yielded a good rule for the state and a workable rule for the industry,” said Jep Seman, an attorney for the Colorado Petroleum Association. Companies have been fracking for decades, but as drilling expands to more populated areas, residents near wells are concerned about the effects on their health and drinking water. Texas, in passing its law this summer, noted that fracking has been done safely in that state for 60 years. Arkansas, Montana, Texas, and Wyoming all require companies to disclose the chemicals in fracking fluid but not their concentrations, said Matt Watson, senior energy policy manager for the Environmental Defense Fund. Louisiana and New Mexico only require disclosure of some chemicals deemed workplace hazards by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Other states, including Michigan and Pennsylvania, have proposed similar regulations. Gov. John Hickenlooper called for Colorado to draft a disclosure rule. The commission proposed having companies list nonproprietary ingredients and concentrations on FracFocus.org, a national website created by two intergovernmental agencies. The rule was proposed to take effect Feb. 1, but commission staff recommended delaying that until April 1 to give drillers more time to comply. “I think we’ve reached the fairest and most transparent rules on the transparency of frack fluids of any state in the country,” Hickenlooper said afterward. “I think this will likely become a national model that if other states they don’t copy it, they will certainly use it as a touch point.” Commission staff said a survey of Colorado disclosures on FracFocus.org shows a small percentage claim trade secrets, though the website includes only voluntary disclosures. Companies on the website say the fluid is mostly water mixed with sand and small percentages of petroleum chemicals and alcohols such as Isopropanol, which is used in rubbing alcohol, while some contain hydrochloric acid. Freeman said some fracking fluids also might contain diesel fuel, benzene and other chemicals commonly found in gasoline. The database will be searchable by company, well location and type of chemical used. The Environmental Protection Agency last week found a possible link between groundwater pollution and hydraulic fracturing beneath Pavillion, Wyo. The EPA found compounds likely associated with fracking chemicals in the groundwater beneath the small central Wyoming community where residents complain their well water smells like chemicals. Health officials last year advised residents not to drink their well water after the EPA found low levels of hydrocarbons. Industry officials pointed out that the EPA announcement didn’t focus on the domestic water wells but two wells drilled somewhat deeper into the aquifer specifically to test for pollution. The owner of the Pavillion gas field, Calgary, Alberta-based Encana, said the compounds could have had other origins not related to gas development. Commission Director Dave Neslin said the commissioners are reviewing the draft EPA report but Colorado already has implemented regulations meant to protect groundwater. Those regulations include how to properly encase and cement walls, clean up spills and properly dispose of waste. “Disclosure is important for transparency and public education, but it’s not our first line of defense,” he said.

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What God Told Bachmann In Vision About Her Husband

December 3, 2011

ON THE ROAD TO ESTHERVILLE, Iowa — The cornfields edging two-lane Iowa Highway 9 fade to a sunbaked blur as Rep. Michele Bachmann’s blue-and-white campaign coach rolls on, bound for a “town hall” meeting with voters in the basement of a public library 25 minutes down the road. Inside the bus – which four years ago was chartered by John McCain and whose odometer now has 460,000 miles to show for it – the candidate folds her feet underneath her on a blue velour bench, answering questions with variations of the sound bites she’s repeated for months across this critical first-to-vote state. She pauses just once for a query that seems to catch her by surprise: What’s the public’s biggest misconception about her? “Oh, that’s a good question,” she says, the brassiness in her voice softening as she looks to a pair of campaign aides. “One thing people will say to me at these town hall conventions … they’ll say `the media doesn’t tell the story of who you are. They make you two-dimensional, a caricature.’” Bachmann has a point. The choreographed repetition of modern presidential campaigns can turn the most personable candidate into an endless loop of talking points. But any close observer of Bachmann’s political career would be hard-pressed to dismiss her as two-dimensional. At a time when voters accuse politicians of being difficult to pin down on issues, Bachmann proudly draws herself with hard lines and sharp edges. First in Minnesota and later in Washington, Bachmann has alienated some members of her own party nearly as much as Democrats. On this trip through a conservative corner Bachmann must win to resuscitate her candidacy in Iowa’s January caucus, she has another chance to make her case and offer voters a window into a political life that, now clouded by time and rhetoric, remains a singular story. Bachmann calls herself an accidental politician. But both supporters and critics say that’s selling her short. ___ Campaigning across Iowa, Bachmann frequently reminds voters she is a native. But that does not explain the route she has traveled: from Waterloo, a manufacturing city of 68,000 where she was born 55 years ago in a Democratic-voting family with union roots, to congresswoman from St. Paul’s exurbs whose personal and political life have been shaped by her embrace of evangelical Christianity and later, a highly combative brand of conservatism. Bachmann’s family left Iowa when she was 12 and her father, an engineer, took a job in Minnesota. Her parents divorced two years later. Bachmann’s father moved to California. Her mother found work as a store clerk and bank teller, but money was tight. The family managed by rigorously watching spending and relying on the generosity of relatives, says Bachmann’s brother, Paul Amble, a Connecticut psychiatrist six years her junior. “I just remember taking trips down to Iowa where my grandmother lived and we’d come back with huge Tupperware things full of food,” Amble says. The family attended a Lutheran church. But Bachmann says her life was transformed at 16 by a religious awakening. In a speech this year at Liberty University, Bachmann recalled entering church one night with three friends after mistakenly hearing there was a party inside. “When we got up to the front of the church, all of us under the power of the Holy Spirit, were called to our knees and we knelt in front of the altar and we started in prayer and the Holy Spirit convicted me and touched my heart and that of my three friends and one thing that I understood at that moment is that I didn’t know Jesus,” she said. In college, Bachmann met husband Marcus (in a vision, God told her to marry him, she says). After law school, the Bachmanns returned to Minnesota, eventually settling in Stillwater, whose historic downtown along the St. Croix River is a popular shopping and dining destination. Marcus opened a Christian mental health counseling practice nearby. Michele Bachmann tells audiences she began working as a “tax litigation attorney.” But the outspoken critic of big government avoids talking about the specifics of her job as an Internal Revenue Service lawyer pursuing people who did not pay their taxes. The couple sent their five children to a private Christian school. But over the years their colonial became home to 23 foster children who attended public schools. Bachmann says she became dismayed by one girl’s high school math assignment to color a poster. In 1993, Bachmann joined a group starting one of Minnesota’s first publicly funded charter schools. But it immediately became the center of controversy, with some parents and teachers complaining founders were trying to incorporate religious teachings. Bob Beltrame, a member of the school’s parental advisory board, says teachers complained that Bachmann and another school board member were sitting in on classes and questioning them about their methods. He recalls a phone conversation with Bachmann that fall discussing the school’s approach. “I remember one thing she said. I’ll never forget it. She said, `You know, if you really read the scientific literature you’ll find that today there’s a lot more evidence of creationism than there is the theory of evolution,’” Beltrame says. The controversy peaked that December, when the school’s CEO and board members including Bachmann resigned. But her interest in education and policy was far from over. ___ Icicle lights twinkle from the ceiling of the Rock Rapids Community Center when Bachmann steps before about 60 people on a Friday afternoon, betraying the Rotary Room’s usual function as a rental wedding hall. On the way to the podium, she works her way diligently around the room, always smiling and spending a few seconds with each person, being sure to ask their names and to make contact with her deep aquamarine eyes. “Hi, I’m Michele,” she sometimes offers. “A couple of Lyon County facts for you,” says Cody Hoefert, a chiropractor and chairman of the local Republican party, in his introduction of the candidate. In 2004, the county gave George W. Bush the third largest margin of victory of any in Iowa, he tells Bachmann. What’s more, Rep. Steve King – generally considered one of the most conservative members of Congress – gets 80 percent of Lyon’s vote. “Oh, man,” Bachmann replies. The diminutive politician beams up at Hoefert, more than a foot taller. “This is it! This is the center of the universe.” Bachmann assures the audience that together they will take their country back. “This will be a miracle from God for us to be able to repeal `Obamacare,’” she says, inviting questions. The last comes from Hoefert, who asks if Bachmann understands what it’s like to spend hours on the phone trying to get an answer from federal tax officials. “Yes, I have called the IRS because my background is I’m a federal tax litigation attorney,” replies Bachmann, not mentioning that she worked for the very agency being criticized. “So, yes, I have called them. I’ve called them and been rerouted 19 times.” ____ In Minnesota, Bachmann attacked state education standards called Profile of Learning, warning church audiences the guidelines were dumbing down lessons. She railed against federal involvement in schools. “My clearest memory is people saying `amen, amen,’ often,” said Mary Cecconi, then a Stillwater school board member who attended one of Bachmann’s presentations. “It had a true sense of a revival meeting.” One presentation impressed Bill Pulkrabek, a county commissioner and chair of the district Republican Party, who found Bachmann articulate, smart and attractive. “I said you’re too good of a candidate to be sitting on the sidelines,” Pulkrabek said. Pulkrabek backed Bachmann’s 1999 run for Stillwater’s school board, atop a slate with four of her friends. But at a candidate forum, Bachmann said she might not serve the full term because she was considering a challenge to state Sen. Gary Laidig, a moderate Republican in the legislature for 28 years. “I tried to present information to Sen. Laidig on the Profile of Learning, he was not interested,” the Stillwater Gazette quoted her as saying. “I told him if he’s not willing to be more responsive to the citizens that I may have to run for his seat or find someone else who would do so.” Bachmann and other Republican board candidates lost, alienating voters accustomed to non-partisan elections. But the turnout tripled from the previous election, raising her profile. Laidig said he arranged for Bachmann to meet legislators, but was one of just two Republicans who voted to retain state education standards. Still, he was surprised the following April at the district Republican convention, when she was nominated to oppose him. Bachmann has said she came to the convention without makeup and in a sweatshirt, not expecting to be nominated. But Bill McCallum, a party official responsible for counting votes, said he saw printed signs supporting Bachmann when he walked in the door. Bachmann won the nomination by two votes. Her candidacy caused a Republican rift, with the Senate minority leader backing Laidig in the primary. But Bachmann blanketed the district in yard signs and sent out mass mailings, including a letter promising to defend the Second Amendment in which she called a Washington rally for gun control, “the Misinformed Mom March.” And she won. In the state Senate, Bachmann led a campaign to ban gay marriage. Some Republicans saw the issue as needlessly distracting and gay rights activists called for a boycott of stores in Bachmann’s hometown. But Bachmann urged 3,000 supporters at a 2004 rally at the Capitol to “storm the doors.” Her push came despite divisions within her own family. One of the most notable opponents of the gay marriage ban was Bachmann’s stepsister, Helen LaFave, a lesbian who came to the Capitol with her partner to “bear witness on what she’s doing that’s so personally hurtful to me and to so many others.” ___ The campus center at Dordt College in Sioux Center is packed at lunch hour as Bachmann takes the stage. When rivals Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain spoke here last summer, Bachmann was on her way to victory in an August straw poll. But ever since Texas Gov. Rick Perry entered the race the same day, Bachmann has struggled to reclaim the mantle as the field’s conservative champion. Today, Bachmann wins the loudest applause for statements against abortion and defending traditional marriage. But she speaks mostly about her distaste for big government. “I want to close down the federal Department of Education – turn off the lights, lock the doors and keep that money here in Iowa,” she says. Afterward, standing before TV cameras in the parking lot, Bachmann briefly commends Perry for announcing an energy plan similar to hers, before tarring him as a politician too willing to ignore the Constitution. “We’ve seen President Obama do that by putting into place EPA regulations through the executive order. That’s a misuse of power and authority. Unfortunately we’ve seen Gov. Perry have a pattern of that in Texas,” Bachmann says. “But I do thank him and welcome him for endorsing my energy plan today.” ___ When Bachmann ran for a House seat in 2006, she drew criticism after a video surfaced in which she told worshippers at a church in her district that God “has focused like a laser beam in his reasoning on this race,” and had instructed her to run. But in a year when Democrats took control of the House, Bachmann won handily. “I’m coming here as a conservative,” she told reporters. “I’m not coming here for the purpose of controversy.” In Washington, Bachmann emerged as one of the most outspoken members of Congress, criticizing Obama’s “anti-American views” during the 2008 presidential campaign. Republican leaders kept her at arm’s length, despite her fundraising prowess, supporting a rival’s bid for a House leadership role. Bachmann, though, found her own soapbox, embracing the tea party movement and delivering a response on its behalf to Obama’s State of the Union address in January, moments after the Republican Party’s official response. And when conservative commentator Glenn Beck staged a “Restoring Honor” rally on the National Mall in August 2010 but did not invite Bachmann, she staged her own rally immediately afterward. It was a reminder of Bachmann’s fierce will, says Ron Carey, a former chair of the Minnesota Republican Party who served as Bachmann’s chief of staff in 2010. Carey – the fifth chief of staff in four years – quit after five months. He says he left because Bachmann repeatedly refused to listen to her staff’s advice. The last straw, he said, was a disagreement over paying a campaign contractor. Carey says Bachmann believed the contractor was not fulfilling its duty, and while he agreed, he pointed out that she was bound by a contract. She ordered him not to pay the company anyway. “She wanted what she wanted the way she wanted it and even though the facts said she couldn’t have it, she was just adamant she was going to have it her way,” Carey said. ___ On the road, Bachmann tells voters she will push to elect “13 like-minded senators,” giving her a filibuster-proof majority to push through changes as president. As her bus nears Estherville, she is asked what that says about her vision of leadership for a country whose increasingly fractured politics have left many voters mourning the seeming inability of leaders to find compromise. “My plan is not to fail. My plan is to succeed,” Bachmann says. Later, about 60 voters fill the basement of the Estherville library to hear the candidate and ask for autographs. “It’s going to be a lot of tough love,” Bachmann promises if she’s elected president. “You’re going to be hearing screaming and crying and gnashing of teeth from Washington, D.C. all the way to Estherville.” Afterward in the library’s lobby, Bachmann rushes over to hug Stacie Seckinger, a long-ago friend from Stillwater. It’s been years, the women tell each other, and so much has changed. Seckinger’s daughter, Erin, recalls how Bachmann gave her class a tour of the state capitol after her election to the Minnesota Senate. Then Bachmann dashes for the bus. This, Seckinger says, was the same strong woman she knew as a school activist. “She knows what she wants,” Seckinger says. “And she doesn’t waver.”

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Auto Dealers Want In On Black Friday Action

November 23, 2011

DETROIT — Last year, shoppers spent around $45 billion at retail outlets during Black Friday weekend, a National Retail Federation study showed. Now auto dealers are looking to get in on the action, some experts say. “Black Friday has become the shopping-Mecca day,” said Marc Cannon, spokesman for AutoNation Inc., the nation’s largest dealership group. “Obviously auto retailers are now looking at it and saying, ‘How can I get a piece of that retail activity?’”

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Occupy Seattle Protester Alleges Miscarriage After Pepper Spray Incident

November 23, 2011

NEW YORK — In recent weeks, the repeated use of pepper spray by police officers against Occupy Wall Street protesters has elicited widespread criticism. (CLICK HERE OR SCROLL DOWN FOR LATEST UPDATES ) Whether it’s September’s use of pepper spray against young demonstrators in New York’s Union Square or last weekend’s forceful confrontation with seated student protesters at the University of California, Davis campus , many critics have questioned the deployment of such tactics against a largely peaceful and nonviolent movement. Meanwhile, in Seattle, a recent crackdown against Occupy protesters may have claimed its latest victim . On Monday, The Stranger , a Seattle-based alternative weekly newspaper, reported that one Occupy Seattle protester allegedly suffered a miscarriage. She said police used pepper spray and hit her in the stomach . “I was standing in the middle of the crowd when the police started moving in,” Jennifer Fox, 19, told The Stranger . “I was screaming, ‘I am pregnant, I am pregnant. Let me through. I am trying to get out.’” Fox is reportedly homeless, living in the Occupy Seattle encampment in Westlake Park without a working cellphone. The Stranger reported that immediately following last week’s incident , Fox was rushed to the Harborview Medical Center in downtown Seattle , where Fox said doctors performed a routine ultrasound and didn’t discover any evidence for alarm. But on Monday, after experiencing cramping and nausea, The Stranger reported that Fox returned to Harborview Medical Center, where she was later diagnosed as having suffered a miscarriage once the fetus’ heartbeat was no longer detected . As of Tuesday evening, Fox had neither provided medical records to substantiate her claim, nor filed a formal complaint with the Seattle Police Department. But despite the lack of a formal complaint, a Seattle Police Department spokesman confirmed to HuffPost that police are launching a formal investigation into the matter. “We are aware of a claim that a pregnant woman who attended the Nov. 15 Occupy Seattle march has been treated for a miscarriage,” said the SPD spokesman. “Consistent with standard procedure, the Office of Professional Accountability has initiated an internal investigation to look into the matter further.” In the coming days, investigators will be actively searching for information to support Fox’s claim, the spokesman confirmed. Until more information is made available, Kathleen Taylor, executive director of the ACLU of Washington, told HuffPost that she remains troubled by what she perceives as an uptick of pepper spray use by members of law enforcement against the movement’s protesters nationwide. “The police have the authority to use force when it’s necessary to prevent physical harm, but the use of pepper spray against non-violent protesters raises very serious questions,” said Taylor, who highlighted the Seattle Police Department’s policy of not using pepper spray and tasers as a first line of defense. “We condemn police violence in other countries,” Taylor said. “Let’s first be sure our own house is in order.”

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Perry’s Political Rise Began With Opposition To Pesticide Regulations

October 10, 2011

Jason Cherkis contributed reporting to this story. WASHINGTON — More than two decades ago, there was a bitter fight within Texas’ agricultural community, one that pitted low-wage farm workers and their advocates against large growers and chemical companies. The dispute was over how much field workers should know about the often-dangerous pesticides they were handling. And there are those in Texas who believe Gov. Rick Perry wouldn’t now be a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination had he not taken up the cause of the growers and sprayers in this fight. “This became how Perry rises in politics,” claims Jim Harrington, director of the Texas Civil Rights Project , a public interest law group. “Perry is the weathervane, pure and simple. He saw where the money was and where the politics were drifting.” In the 1980’s, agricultural workers in Texas didn’t enjoy many of the workplace protections that were taken for granted in other industries. So in 1987, after Harrington’s group had sued the state on behalf of farm workers, the Texas agriculture department developed a law called the Agricultural Hazards Communications Act , known colloquially as Right to Know. In addition to requiring that field workers be trained on the dangers of pesticides, the law required farmers to maintain a list of the chemicals they used on their crops — known as the “crop sheet” — and to provide it to farm workers, along with a notice of their rights as workers. The law also stated that workers couldn’t be forced to handle chemicals that came unlabeled, nor could they be fired or disciplined for filing a complaint against an employer with regards to Right to Know. The crop sheet was important because Texas’ heavily Latino farm workforce tends to migrate, handling different crops in different regions during different seasons. A detailed listing of chemicals used and their dangers could help workers pinpoint the cause of an illness. According to Vaughn Cox, who worked in the agriculture department in the late 80’s, Right to Know was a sensible law designed specifically to help the farm worker and the doctors in the event of a pesticide-related emergency. “If it says cabbage in South Texas is treated with these chemicals this time of year, then the doctor can say, ‘Oh, they used this kind of chemical.’ It could speed up the process of treating them,” says Cox. “So many farm workers were being exposed to chemicals in unsafe ways. They had no training, no protective clothing or anything that common sense would say you should have.” Right to Know was one step in a string of farm worker protections advanced during the late 80’s, according to Nora Linares-Moeller, who also worked in the agriculture department at the time. “It was an incredibly nasty fight with the ranchers and growers,” Linares-Moeller says. “It all had to do with the ability for farm workers to be safe in the field. They were literally being sprayed with pesticides.” Despite its relatively modest requirements, many growers and chemical companies weren’t fans of Right to Know, which would bring more transparency to the effects of pesticides and potentially slow down production when farm workers raised concerns. The agriculture department had long borne a reputation for being laissez-faire on regulatory matters, and opponents of Right to Know argued that such new regulations were burdensome, costly, and paternalistic. “The farm bureau and the chemical industry in particular, which is a very powerful lobby, went apoplectic and just fought the regulations tooth and nail,” recalls Harrington. “They didn’t want to have any accountability.” The state’s then-agriculture commissioner, populist Democrat Jim Hightower , says he faced pushback from corporate interest groups and their allies in the state legislature as he tried to craft an enforcement program. The way Hightower remembers it, one of his fiercest opponents on the pesticide matter was Rick Perry. As a state representative who was then a Democrat, Perry had already demonstrated what some considered an ambivalence toward farm workers’ rights. In 1985, lawmakers and worker advocates had pushed a bill that would bring agricultural workers into the state’s workers compensation system, after a state judge had deemed their exclusion a denial of equal protection under the law. Like the growers’ lobby, Perry opposed the bill. It eventually passed. That same year, Perry had supported an unsuccessful bill that would have stripped the agriculture commissioner of much of his regulatory power as it pertained to pesticides. That support had put him in the camp of trade groups representing farmers, cotton growers, cattlemen, and chemical producers. “He was pretty much a preacher [for] the chemical lobby,” says Hightower, an outspoken Perry critic. Perry’s stance on the pesticide issue revealed “a willingness … in fact, an eagerness” to shill for the industry, he says. Perry’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment for this article. Perry apparently had no more allegiance to his Democratic Party than he did to farm workers. In 1989, he declared himself a Republican in order to challenge Hightower for the agriculture commissioner seat, Perry’s first crack at statewide office. (“I intend to vote the same convictions,” Perry said of his political conversion. “The only difference is there will be an R beside my name.”) None other than renowned Republican strategist and Texas political operative Karl Rove claimed at least partial credit for Perry’s party switch. “Perry had planned to retire from the legislature until his best friend, David Weeks, and I talked him into switching parties and running for the GOP nomination for agriculture commissioner,” Rove wrote in his memoir , published in 2010. With Rove’s help, Perry won the election, bringing an end to Hightower’s eight-year tenure as commissioner. According to Rove, “Perry swept rural counties because, as a rancher, he actually knew something about agriculture; he won the suburbs because of his marquee good looks and conservative values.” Perry was the son of a cotton farmer and had majored in animal science at Texas A&M University . Others argue that Perry’s victory had less to do with his ranching knowledge or appearance than with the robust financial backing he received from corporate interests, many of whom wanted to see Hightower unseated. Indeed, campaign contribution records from the 1990 race, provided to The Huffington Post by the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, indicate that Perry routed Hightower in the weeks leading up to the election, his war chest bolstered by donations from farmers, ranchers, developers, and oil and gas executives. But Gene Hall, current spokesman and longtime official at the Texas Farm Bureau, says the role that pesticide regulations played in Perry’s support during the 1990 campaign has been overstated. “It would be inaccurate to say it was all about pesticides,” says Hall, noting that Perry and the bureau didn’t always agree on matters. He says Perry enjoyed wide support among the bureau because Hightower’s vision of small, organic farms was “so clearly at odds with farmers and ranchers.” “We were determined to defeat him,” Hall says of Hightower. “I’ve heard some describe it as a holy war. He had to be beaten. We allied with Rick Perry.” “I think it would be unfair to say that Rick won that campaign because of pesticides,” adds Ken Luce, who worked on Perry’s campaign for agriculture commissioner. “There was a hugely dissatisfied electorate within the agriculture community … Hightower and his people, they underestimated him.” Whatever the reason, the money poured in from deep-pocketed donors. In a one-month period just before voters headed to the polls, Perry raised $318,454.92, while Hightower’s committee netted a mere $108,802.57, according to records. (Some Hightower aides were later indicted for allegedly using state money for political purposes.) Many of Perry’s larger checks came courtesy of donors who owned large farms or had ties to groups like the Rio Grande Valley Sugar Growers. On the expenditures side, Perry’s camp made payments to a PAC affiliated with the Cattle Feeders Association, for money apparently spent on campaign events. They also made large advertising buys and sent at least $39,000 to Karl Rove & Co. for “printing” expenses, according to the disclosure forms. On the campaign trail, Perry flayed Hightower for his endorsement of Jesse Jackson in his 1988 presidential bid. Hightower also claims that Perry’s camp also ran attack ads on Texas television. It didn’t take long after the election for department employees to realize that the agency was about to change under Perry, particularly with the work related to pesticide regulation, according to Vaughn Cox. It had been Cox’s job to inform farmers about Right to Know and to “slap you on your hand” in cases of non-compliance, he says. “Soon after the election results were clear, his local campaign manager made a visit to the local office where I was working,” Cox recalls. “He explained in very clear terms that there were a list of folks that should be gone by the time the commissioner took office in January. Dang if my name wasn’t at the top of the list. They made it clear to a pretty large segment of the workforce that they were no longer welcome. All Hightower people.” A few months after the election, Perry let 52 department employees go, including Dale Burnett, the head of pesticide enforcement and a career agriculture department employee, according an Austin American-Statesman article at the time. Rebecca Flores, the former longtime head of the United Farm Workers union in Texas, says the enforcement of pesticide regulations changed with the personnel. Whereas the union had met routinely with Hightower to voice workers’ concerns, she found it nearly impossible to get the ear of Perry or his staff. “He got rid of all the staff that was doing the educating and training,” she says. “He didn’t enforce one thing.” “Rick Perry is no friend of farm workers,” she goes on. “He’s an opportunistic parasite.” But Hall says that pesticide enforcement by no means disappeared under Perry, though as commissioner he seemed to have a lighter regulatory touch than his predecessor. “The rules were not then and not now lax,” says Hall. Under Perry they were “not prohibitive, not onerous, which was the direction Hightower was moving in.” Within ten months of Perry taking office, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had to order the agriculture department to reduce its backlog of pesticide enforcement cases. The backlog had reached 300. The EPA attributed the problem to excessive vacancies in the area of enforcement, according to the American-Statesman . Perry’s team partly blamed Hightower for the pileup of cases; Hightower attributed it to Perry firing knowledgeable officers and replacing them with what Hightower described as political appointees. The department had had a similar backlog under Hightower years earlier, the article noted. By 1995, the farm workers union — along with seven environmental organizations — went so far as to ask the EPA to strip Perry of his pesticide regulation powers, citing a serious drop in enforcement. In a letter to the agency, the groups said that fines related to pesticide use had slid from $61,000 in 1989 under Hightower to $31,000 in 1994 under Perry, according to a Houston Chronicle story at the time. Though Perry dismissed the claims as “outrageous,” he had carved out a reputation as a lax enforcer catering to growers rather than workers, with little political price to pay. As the Chronicle story noted, “Perry’s farmer-friendly agency is sailing through the Legislature with hardly a note of controversy.”

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Facebook Looking To Hire Hollywood Insider

September 20, 2011

By Alexei Oreskovic SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Facebook is looking to hire a big-name executive to cultivate relationships and strike deals with the film and music industries to bolster its media offerings. In recent months, Facebook had discussions with former MySpace co-President and former MTV executive Jason Hirschhorn about a job spearheading the company’s outreach to media companies, according to several people familiar with the situation. While the talks do not appear to have gone anywhere, and it wasn’t clear whether Facebook had approached others about the position, the efforts signal Facebook’s intention to take a more hands-on approach in helping media companies bring their content to the social network. “They had held the media industry at arm’s length for a while. It was: ‘We are a platform, come use us all you want but we don’t necessarily need to partner with you.’ But now the attitude has changed,” said one of the people familiar with the situation. “They realize that one of the next phases in its evolution is to work with the media companies,” the person added. Facebook and Hirschhorn both declined to comment. Facebook’s media push comes as the company faces fresh competition from Google Inc, which launched a rival social networking service in June. Twitter recruited former Creative Artists Agency executive Omid Ashtari to be its “L.A. person” last November, according to a report in AllThingsD.com, and the company recently appointed Chloe Sladden to a new role overseeing content and programing efforts. “The view is they’re looking at Twitter and Google and their outreach to the media community and they don’t want to fall behind the curve,” the source said. “They don’t want the media companies to think they’re uninterested.” Facebook has gradually gotten closer to the media world, with Chief Operating Office Sheryl Sandberg joining the Walt Disney Co board of directors in December 2009, and Netflix Inc Chief Executive Reed Hastings taking a seat on Facebook’s board in June. Several movie studios have released movies that can be rented and viewed on Facebook this year, including Warner Brothers’ “Dark Knight” and Universal Pictures’ “Big Lebowski.” Facebook was aggressively exploring recruiting a media point-person a few months ago, but has since shifted its attention to other strategic priorities, the sources said. But with the company increasingly interested in making media a key part of the social network, people expect the search to pick up again soon. THE GAMING LESSON Facebook’s media ambitions will be on display on Thursday at its annual developer conference in San Francisco, where the company is expected to unveil new music features. The music platform will integrate streaming music services from companies including Spotify, Rhapsody and Rdio, directly into users’ home pages, said several other people familiar with the situation. Facebook users who subscribe to the music services will be able to share songs and playlists with each other and see what their friends are listening to, the people said. Facebook will also unveil new flavors of its “Like” button at the event, allowing users to flag Web pages or other online content with specific recommendations, such as “Read,” “Watched” or “Listened,” according to a source with knowledge of the matter. For Facebook, building a deeper integration with music, movies and other media into its service makes it more likely that users will spend more time on its site, allowing the company to generate more advertising dollars. Media also fits well with Facebook Credits, the payment system that Facebook has introduced for its users to buy digital goods on its site. Facebook takes a 30 percent cut of transactions using Facebook Credits. The template for Facebook’s media push is social games, which more than 200 million of its users play on the website every month. Companies like Zynga and Electronic Arts Inc’s Playfish have built successful businesses developing social games that can be played on Facebook. But recreating that magic with the media industry could be trickier. While technology-savvy social game companies are adept at quickly creating products that shine on various “platforms,” such as social networks or smartphone applications, traditional content providers don’t possess the same kinds of expertise, said another person familiar with the situation. “You can’t just drop platforms in Hollywood,” the person said. “They make content well,” he said. But, he noted, creating media that really shines on a social networking platform requires hand-holding. (Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; Additional reporting by Peter Lauria and Yinka Adegoke in New York; Editing by Richard Chang) Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions

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Under Rick Perry, Former Staffers Raked In Millions As Lobbyists

September 16, 2011

WASHINGTON — Texas Governor and Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry has been good for the Austin lobbying business. Forty Perry aides have either left the governor’s administration to become registered state lobbyists or gone from the lobby into Perry’s inner circle, some of them making multiple trips through the revolving door, according to state lobbying disclosure filings and a review of staff records obtained by The Huffington Post through public records requests. Among Perry’s closest campaign aides, at least five have been registered lobbyists, including his communications director, his spokesperson and his political director. Two other ex-staffers who are current lobbyists head Super PACs organized to elect Perry. These lobbyists have done good work for their clients, winning lucrative state contracts for everything from private toll roads to a nuclear waste dump to the now infamous HPV vaccine mandate. A review of financial disclosures filed with the Texas Ethics Commission shows that during the past 10 years, former Perry staffers have raked in tens of millions of dollars in lobbying contracts. Perry, vying for the support of the Tea Party base, has been slammed by rivals Sarah Palin and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) for “crony capitalism.” If crony capitalism describes a situation where contracts are won by private companies who’ve hired close associates of the governor, then Texas records show the charge could stick. The pay-to-play allegations against Perry have become an Austin cliche. “The revolving door turns at torrential speeds in Texas,” explained Andrew Wheat, research director for the non-partisan watchdog group Texans for Public Justice . “It’s like it’s driven by a hurricane and Perry’s office has been part and parcel of it.” Perhaps no one has benefited more from his Perry connection than Mike Toomey . He had been a Perry confidant during their time in the state legislature in the ’80s before becoming a successful lobbyist. In 2002, Toomey became Perry’s chief of staff, a job he held until 2004 when he returned to the lobby. Texas financial disclosure records show Toomey secured lobbying contracts from government supplicants worth between $9 million and $17.5 million during the Perry years. Toomey’s lobbying success has not been free from controversy. In the race to win the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, it has become a lightening rod. During Monday’s Republican primary debate, Bachmann attacked Perry for issuing an executive order mandating sixth-grade girls receive a vaccination against the sexually-transmitted disease HPV, which, studies show, can lead to cervical cancer. That vaccination is manufactured by pharmaceutical company Merck, which employed Toomey as one of only three lobbyists during the mandate controversy. Bachmann excoriated Toomey’s role in the issuance of the executive order: “What I’m saying is that it’s wrong for a drug company — because the governor’s former chief of staff was the chief lobbyist for this drug company. The drug company gave thousands of dollars in political donations to the governor, and this is just flat-out wrong. The question is, is it about life, or was it about millions of dollars, and potentially billions, for a drug company?” Merck began a state-by-state push to get governments to adopt HPV vaccine mandates after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the vaccine for use in 2006. The company stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars if its mandate drive succeeded. They hired top lobbyists in a number of states. In Texas, Merck naturally came to Toomey. “Absolutely Mike [Toomey] convinced [Perry] on that,” Bill Miller, a founding partner of the Austin lobbying powerhouse HillCo Partners told HuffPost. The firm has done work on behalf of top-tier conservative donors, such as Houston construction mogul and swift-boat funder Bob Perry (no relation) and Koch Industries. “Maybe he personally believes in that … Mike played an influential role. It’s just the way I read it, the nature of the deal.” Amid widespread outrage over Toomey’s lobbying — and fervent opposition from religious conservatives who opposed the order on the belief that it encouraged promiscuity among young teens — the Texas legislature repealed Perry’s order in a near unanimous vote. Despite the ultimate failure to enact the vaccine mandate, Merck still retains Toomey as a lobbyist and has paid him contracts worth between $250,000 and $560,000 from 2004 through 2011. * * * * * It’s not difficult to see the allure of joining the lobbyist ranks for those coming out of the Perry administration. The governor’s influence has been vast; he has roughly 4,000 appointments to various boards, commissions and task forces. Real or perceived closeness to the governor — not to mention being on a first-name basis with his scheduler — is an asset for any lobbying firm or corporation seeking influence. “If you are going to be a top-tiered lobbyist, you almost have to have worked for him,” explained one veteran Austin-based lobbyist, “because that means you’re part of the team.” Perry, the lobbyist added, places a premium on the inner circle — especially his former chiefs of staff. “I’d say he only listens to those guys,” he said. The 26 ex-Perry staffers currently registered as lobbyists will take in a combined total of between $6.37 and $11.6 million this year, government disclosure records show. (The disclosure forms only list the ranges of the contracts, making a precise calculation impossible.) Former Perry insiders admit a tour of duty in the administration can be a plus. There are practical advantages: “I understand what the internal office processes are,” explained Victoria Ford, a lobbyist who worked as a health care policy director and deputy legislative director under Perry early in his administration. “If I have a problem, I already know how to work through it. It’s been helpful.” But, Ford told HuffPost, it’s no easy gravy train. “It’s been neutral to favorable to me, although I’m not as aggressive about it as some of the other folks who left the office,” she said. Records show Ford has 25 clients on her current roster, including eBay, a car manufacturer alliance, GlaxoSmithKline, Methodist Healthcare Ministries, a transportation authority and Boeing. This year, Ford’s contracts pay out between $235,000 and $650,000. Ford said she doesn’t walk into a prospective client’s office and play up her Perry cred. But there are other lobbyists that do. “There are others that take a different approach — that walk in with their resume first,” she said. If there were behind-the-scenes deals made, Ford added, she didn’t see them when she worked for Perry. “I never felt like when I worked in his office, I was told by anyone to favor anyone else,” she said. “I never experienced the things that they talked about. That’s all I know. I was never involved in those kinds of things. To me it seems like it’s all overblown speculation.” Miller, the Austin super lobbyist, explained that Perry’s close ties to lobbyists are simply a product of the governor’s longevity; he has held state-wide office for more than two decades. Staffs turn over. Many former staffers inevitably get into the political consulting business or join a lobbying firm. “He’s given birth on both sides of the deal — on the government side and the political side,” Miller said of Perry. “He’s fertile. He’s very fertile.” “Maybe they did have an advantage,” Miller said. “I always felt like we got a fair shake in the deals we worked on.” Reggie Bashur, a Perry campaign adviser and lobbyist, told HuffPost there is no pay-to-play scheme. “It’s just utter nonsense,” he said. “The advantage is to know a very fine person with a tremendous sense of humor who is dedicated to the public good.” In describing Perry, Bashur was short and sweet. “He likes people,” he said. “He likes the grassroots.” When HuffPost called Cliff Johnson, a lobbyist and former senior Perry adviser who is known to be a member of Perry’s inner circle, we were told that Johnson wasn’t giving interviews. His receptionist said that Johnson was referring press calls to Bashur. Perry has appointed six secretaries of state during his tenure. Half have gone on to work as lobbyists. The majority of Perry’s most trusted cabinet officials have lobbying backgrounds. Five out of eight Perry chiefs of staff have either left and immediately joined the lobby or come into the COS role from the lobby. Along with Toomey, these include Barry McBee, Michael McKinney, Brian Newby and Ray Sullivan. Sullivan is now the communications director for the Perry campaign. The campaign did not return calls for comment. Robert Black, a former Perry director of communications , also worked as a lobbyist before recently becoming a spokesman for the campaign. When asked about his relationship to Perry and the potential benefit to his own lobbying work, Black hung up on a HuffPost reporter. Chris Cronn, another former staffer turned lobbyist, also refused to comment. When asked about his lobbying work and whether his Perry ties are an advantage, Cronn replied: “I’d much rather have you talk to the campaign.” * * * * * The main concern among the public about the revolving door, as evidenced by the HPV vaccine mandate outcry, is that companies can afford well-connected lobbyists to set policy, to the detriment of the public interest. These polices were often privatization efforts, brought to the governor’s attention by connected companies, that became controversial when those lobbying connections became public. “When you look at the privatization schemes that come along, I don’t think Perry and his office are sitting around and dreaming up these schemes,” Texans for Public Justice’s Wheat explained. “It tends to work the other way around: The lobbyists come to Perry with these schemes.” In 2002, Perry announced a plan to build a 4,000-mile stretch of toll roads, rail lines and utility lines. The Trans-Texas Corridor, as it came to be known, was an attempt by Perry to raise revenue through fees the toll roads would collect. The Spanish company Cintra, then seeking to run the toll roads, employed Dan Shelley, a Perry insider, as a consultant. Shelley did not register to lobby at the time. “Here was Dan Shelley, he was working for Cintra, the major Trans-Texas Corridor contractor, but he didn’t bother to register as a lobbyist. What kind of consulting was Shelley doing for a Spanish highway company?” Wheat said. “Was he consulting on the proper asphalt and concrete to lay in Texas?” In 2004, the Texas Transportation Commission awarded Cintra the contract to run the toll roads and Perry hired Shelley as his new legislative director. By 2006, Shelley was back out the revolving door and raking in money with a lobbying contract from Cintra that totaled between $275,000 and $470,000 from 2006 through 2011. Shelley denied that there was any undue influence in his work for Cintra. “I lobbied for them. They were from Spain. They had no contracts. No business in the United States,” Shelley told HuffPost. “Texas seemed to be further advanced before they arrived on trying to promote public-private partnerships. I introduced them to the policymakers to explain what it is you’re trying to do in Texas.” Shelley said he set up meetings for Cintra with various Perry officials — including Ric Williamson, an old college buddy of Perry’s who headed the state transportation department at the time. Shelley said he knew Williamson. “I know people in Austin,” he said. By 2006, the Trans-Texas Corridor had attracted serious opposition from all corners of Texas politics. The Texas Farm Bureau was calling the project a disaster and residents in areas that could have faced eminent domain seizure were packing forums held by the Transportation Commission. Cintra did win contracts for three toll roads — one in Forth Worth, one in Dallas and one currently being built in central Texas, Shelley explained. After the first contract was awarded, Shelley said the company was introduced to Perry for the first time. “He might have come by to say ‘thank you,’” he recalled. Shelley currently operates two Super PACs — Veterans for Perry and Jobs for Vets — to support Perry’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination. In early 2011, after years of criticism, the toll road proposal was officially shelved, but other parts of the highway building plan are moving forward. The Trans-Texas Corridor lobbying was not limited to Shelley and Cintra. HTNB Corporation, an engineering company, was the general consultant for the Department of Transportation’s work on the corridor and employed Ray Sullivan as its lead lobbyist from 2003 to 2009. Sullivan, Perry’s current communications director, has worked for the governor in multiple capacities over the years, including as his chief of staff. When Sullivan joined the Perry administration in 2009, the HNTB contract transferred to Bashur. Sullivan reported the HNTB contract to be worth between $450,000 and $750,000 over seven years. During the same period, Sullivan worked as the chief lobbyist for UBS Securities, the Swiss financial services company that counts Perry’s political mentor, former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, as a vice chairman. With Sullivan as its lobbyist, UBS made several plays at setting administration policy. Beginning in 2003, the Perry administration pursued a policy presented by UBS to profit off life insurance polices for dead teachers. HuffPost previously reported on this scheme in August. UBS, with Sullivan as its lobbyist, also sought to privatize the state lottery. This effort began in 2006, when then-Perry adviser Phil Wilson, who is also a former Gramm staffer and would later become a lobbyist in his own right, discussed the possibility of a sale or lease of the state lottery with Gramm. In September of that year, UBS submitted the first proposal to sell or lease the lottery to the governor’s office and hired Sullivan as its chief lobbyist in the state. In his 2007 State of the State address, Perry called for selling the state lottery — an idea he would later say came from Wilson — in an effort to raise $14 billion in revenue to invest in education and cancer research. What Perry didn’t mention was that the UBS proposal noted Texas would have to legalize a number of other gambling activities, including interactive television and Internet gambling, in order to increase the sales and profitability of the lottery for a private company. Other financial companies submitted proposals to the governor’s office, including Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and the now-defunct Lehman Brothers. These companies also hired ex-Perry staffers to push their efforts in Austin. Merrill Lynch retained former Perry general counsel Bill Jones, and Lehman Brothers hired former Perry campaign manager and staffer Luis Saenz. Gaming companies that had long sought to legalize slot machines and other electronic games got into the act as well. Aces Wired, an electronic gaming company, employed Shelley as a lobbyist. It submitted multiple proposals to the governor’s office, seeking to purchase the lottery with a hypothetical consortium of gaming interests. The lottery privatization plan, like the Trans-Texas Corridor, ran into significant opposition in the legislature and in communities opposed to legalizing gambling and selling state assets. So far, the plan has stalled, but the lobbying continues. Another policy adopted by the Perry administration found more success than the Trans-Texas Corridor and the lottery privatization plan, but it, too, came from a major Perry donor employing members of Perry’s inner circle as lobbyists. Beginning in 2003, Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons sought to expand his fortune through the company Waste Control Specialists. Simmons’ plan was to obtain permits from the government to operate a nuclear waste disposal site. Simmons was aided by Perry insiders Bashur and Johnson, both hired to lobby for Waste Control Specialists, and massive campaign contributions. Simmons is one of Perry’s biggest financial backers, having donated $1.12 million to Perry’s gubernatorial campaigns and another $700,000 to the Republican Governors Association during Perry’s two stints as chairman of the group. After the legislature approved Simmons’ bill, the permits required approval from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, a three-member board appointed by Perry. Despite a review by Texas Water Board geologists and engineers determining that the permit should not be approved, the commission voted 2-1 to support it. Another permit sought by Simmons moved forward earlier this year. The Texas House approved a bill that would subsidize the importation of out-of-state nuclear waste to a new dump site by waiving regulatory fees for importation for Simmons’ company. Simmons’ nuclear waste dump was the only successful mega-project pushed by Perry’s lobbyist pals. Yet no one has reaped more financial benefit from his Perry ties than Toomey — the lobbyist at the center of the HPV vaccine scandal. Toomey’s most successful lobbying effort centered on tort reform on behalf of Texans for Lawsuit Reform, a business group funded by major Perry donors Bob Perry and James Leininger. The group was a client of Toomey’s before he joined Perry’s administration. In 2003, with Toomey in the Perry administration, the legislature passed, and Perry signed, a major tort reform bill. After Toomey left the administration in 2004, he re-signed Texans for Lawsuit Reform as a client. In 2011, Perry signed another major tort reform bill. Toomey also held Texans for School Choice as a client while Perry pushed, unsuccessfully, for school vouchers, another favorite issue of Leininger’s. He also lobbied for Corrections Corporation of America, the biggest private prison operator in the state of Texas, as they sought to privatize prison health care. Toomey also works with AT&T, the third highest-grossing company in the state, holding a contract that has at times been worth between $150,000 and $200,000 per year. Toomey is currently operating the Make Us Great Again super PAC that is solely dedicated to getting Perry elected as the next president of the United States. His plans for the PAC include raising $55 million by next spring . Robert Howden, a former senior Perry advisor turned lobbyist, knows the relationship between the power broker and the governor well. “Nobody cares more about Rick Perry than Mike Toomey,” he said.

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Rick Perry, Donald Trump Meet

September 15, 2011

Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry met with Donald Trump at Jean-Georges, an upscale restaurant in New York City, on Wednesday night, according to multiple reports . Prior to the meeting, Trump spokesman Michael Cohen told CBS News and National Journal , “It’s obviously about the presidency” and added, “Everyone wants Mr. Trump’s support.” Just weeks after the Texas governor announced his candidacy for president of the United States last month, Trump said during an appearance on “Fox & Friends” that Perry has called him and that they’ve “had great conversations.” The real estate mogul added at the time, “I’m sort of proud of him.” CBS News reports that when asked how Wednesday night’s meeting went, Trump said, “Excellent, excellent.” Perry also signaled that it went well and suggested that Trump “knows his restaurants.” Before the pair met, Trump came to Perry’s defense when it comes to where the Texas governor stands on contentious political issues during an appearance on CNN: On the executive order Perry signed requiring a vaccine for girls in Texas schools that guards against HPV, a virus that can cause cervical cancer, Trump said he’s “not sure if [Perry] would have done it again,” and the Texas chief executive “made a poignant statement, that he believes in saving lives,” when he spoke of the decision during CNN’s Tea Party Republican Debate Monday. Trump also signaled he sees no problem with Perry’s characterization of Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme.” Earlier this year, Trump opted against running for the Republican presidential nomination after sparking speculation that he could jump into the GOP primary mix. More recently, however, he’s teased that it’s still possible he could mount a campaign as an independent candidate. Below, video of what Trump had to say on CNN. WATCH:

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WATCH: Rick Perry Stands By Shocking Remarks

September 13, 2011

Texas Governor Rick Perry stood by eyebrow-raising remarks he made last month about Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke during Monday night’s Republican presidential debate . HuffPost’s Ryan Grim reports : Perry stood by his controversial Fed comments from earlier in the campaign, when he said that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke would be treated “ugly” in Texas and that his monetary policy was “almost treasonous.” Perry slightly softened the charge, saying that Bernanke himself wasn’t a traitor, but that using the Fed for political purposes was “almost treasonous.” Bernanke is a Republican. After initially igniting controversy with the comments, the Texas governor stood by his choice of words. During a stop in New Hampshire, he did say , however, “I got in trouble talking about the Federal Reserve” and added, “I got lectured about that.” Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman used Perry’s own words against him in a joke he made during Monday night’s debate. HuffPost’s Amanda Terkel reports : “For Rick to say you can’t secure the border, I think, is pretty much a treasonous comment,” said Huntsman, apparently joking, eliciting “Ooos” from the audience and a chuckle from Perry. His comment came after Perry discussed signing legislation giving some undocumented immigrants in-state tuition at Texas colleges and universities.

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U.S. Credit Card Debt Grows Despite Desire To Control Personal Finances

September 12, 2011

Consumers would like to spend less, but they are falling further into credit card debt. Two-thirds of Americans say that the financial crisis has fundamentally changed their view of debt, making them less likely to borrow or spend, according to a new report by Absolute Strategy Research. A third of respondents to the survey said they plan to pay down their debt in the coming year, and another third said they plan not to take on any new debt. But even as consumers have become more debt-averse, they have plunged more into debt to pay for essentials. Indeed, credit card debt has been growing at an increasingly higher rate. The rate of increase for credit card debt has risen two-thirds compared to the same period last year, and it has increased 368 percent since two years ago. Earlier in 2011, Americans started to climb out of the vicious cycle of borrowing and spending, as credit card debt stopped increasing after two consecutive years, but they seem to be falling back into more credit card debt, even as they seem to want to borrow and spend less. Policymakers hope that consumers will start spending again, so that businesses will be confident enough to invest in new products and hire more workers, bringing the unemployment rate down and spurring economic growth. But a double-dip recession has become increasingly likely , with Paul Krugman putting the likelihood of global recession at 50 percent, as ordinary consumers avoid buying the big-ticket items that could jumpstart the economy. Recent volatility in the stock market has played some role in shattering consumer confidence, which has plunged to its lowest level in a year and a half. As consumers’ retirement accounts have taken a hit because of recent plunges in the stock market, consumers have reportedly felt less wealthy and thus have been less likely to buy expensive products like furniture, appliances, and cars. Since spending fuels 70 percent of the economy, economists are worried about a negative feedback loop in which less consumer spending and stock market plunges continue to reinforce each other. “We’ll just scare ourselves into a recession,” David Kelly, chief market strategist with J.P. Morgan Funds, told the Associated Press. Nonetheless, since many consumers took on too much debt before the financial crisis, which overburdened them as the economy cratered, it may be a positive sign that consumers have become more watchful of their savings. While 28 percent of Americans in 2009 said that their income did not cover their spending, now only 13 percent of Americans said that their spending exceeded their earnings, according to the Absolute Strategy Research report . Similarly, 51 percent of Americans now said they were making ends meet, compared to 35 percent in 2009, and a third of Americans said that their income exceeded their spending.

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Perry Attempts To Clarify Stance On Controversial Issue

September 12, 2011

In a USA Today op-ed published online on Monday, Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry seeks to clarify his position on Social Security. The Texas governor writes that he believes current recipients of Social Security benefits should be protected from potential reforms to the entitlement program. For younger Americans, however, he says, “We must consider reforms to make Social Security financially viable.” Perry explains, “For too long, politicians have been afraid to speak honestly about Social Security.” He adds, “We must have the guts to talk about its financial condition if we are to fix Social Security and make it financially viable for generations to come.” The attempt from Perry to outline his position on Social Security comes one week after the Republican hopeful raised eyebrows with harsh language he used in addressing the issue during last week’s GOP presidential debate in California. During the forum, Perry didn’t run from his past characterization of Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme.” He also repeated his criticism of the entitlement program as a “monstrous lie.” The Texas governor, however, did abandon his use of the questionable choice of words in Monday’s op-ed. HuffPost’s Jon Ward reported last week: Indeed, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney — who was the frontrunner until Perry entered the race — has gone for Perry’s jugular, painting the Texan as wanting to “end” or “abolish” Social Security. Perry could have countered that charge by saying Romney was mischaracterizing his position. But he and his staff have been slow to do so, raising questions about how exactly Perry wants to deal with the program. Meanwhile, the Washington Examiner reports that U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann is preparing to take aim at Perry over the issue during a presidential debate being held in Florida on Monday night. “Bernie Madoff deals with Ponzi schemes, not the grandparents of America,” an adviser to the conservative congresswoman tells the Examiner . “Clearly [Bachmann] feels differently about the value of Social Security than Gov. Perry does. She believes Social Security needs to be saved, that it’s an important safety net for Americans who have paid into it all their lives.” A CNN/ORC poll released on Monday shows Perry to be running at the front of the GOP presidential pack. Below, video of what Perry had to say about Social Security during last week’s debate. WATCH:

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AT&T Countersues U.S. Department Of Justice

September 10, 2011

WASHINGTON — AT&T is countering the U.S. government’s attempt to block its $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile by depicting the deal as a way to provide consumers with better cell phone service at lower prices. The argument, submitted in a Friday court filing, is AT&T Inc.’s first legal response to a lawsuit that the Department of Justice filed last week in an effort to ensure T-Mobile remains independent. AT&T’s 25-page document echoed the company’s previous contention that buying rival T-Mobile will enable it to expand its mobile communications network so there are fewer dropped connections in a world where constant online access is becoming the norm. The Justice Department believes there wouldn’t be enough competition if AT&T devours T-Mobile, creating a void that would increase prices and reduce the incentive to develop new technology. AT&T’s lawyers contend that the Justice Department’s analysis reflects a misunderstanding of the market. They say T-Mobile, the fourth largest cell phone carrier with 33.6 million customers, isn’t a significant competitive threat to AT&T, the No. 2 carrier with nearly 100 million customers. T-Mobile has been losing market share in recent years, a trend that AT&T argues will discourage its German parent, Deutsche Telekom, from investing to improve its own wireless network. In contrast, AT&T says it spent more than $30 billion in network upgrades from 2008 through 2010, yet still can’t keep up with customers’ growing demand to transfer data over phones and other wireless devices, according to the court documents. But if it can snap up T-Mobile, AT&T believes the added capacity will put it in a better position to deliver better services. AT&T already has pledged to invest at least $8 billion and transfer 5,000 jobs currently in overseas call centers back to the U.S. if the T-Mobile purchase goes through. The court filing also seeks to counter the Justice Department’s theory that the U.S. cell phone market would be dominated by just three carriers – AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel Corp, if T-Mobile disappears from the market. AT&T’s filing cites “innovative upstarts” MetroPCS and Leap/Cricket and regional carriers such as US Cellular and Cellular South as viable alternatives for most consumers. “The (Justice) Department does not and cannot explain how, in the face of all these aggressive rivals, the combined AT&T/T-Mobile will have any ability or incentive to restrict output, raise prices, or slow innovation,” the AT&T’s lawyers wrote. It’s unusual for the Justice Department to challenge a proposed acquisition in court. Most companies back out of deals to avoid tangling with the government. But AT&T has a huge incentive to fight: It will have to pay a $3 billion termination fee if its agreement with T-Mobile unravels. The first hearing in the case is set for Sept. 21 in Washington before U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle. AT&T, which is based in Dallas, is seeking a quick resolution to the case.

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Christine Bader: Is Steve Jobs the Next John Browne?

September 8, 2011

Environmental damage threatens another CEO’s otherwise successful legacy. Steve Jobs is one of the most admired CEOs of all time. He transformed his company from a middling player into one of the world’s largest and most successful businesses. He transcended mere leadership of his industry to transform the way we interact with information and with each other. But following fast on the heels of Jobs’s announcing his retirement was the latest in a series of revelations of how Apple has inflicted serious harm on people and the environment. Last week, renowned Chinese environmentalist Ma Jun released another damning report on pollution by Apple suppliers. In May, three workers died and 16 were injured by an explosion at a factory where iPads are manufactured, the latest in a string of deaths and labor abuses associated with Foxconn , one of Apple’s major suppliers. Last year, in spite of documentation of numerous problems, Jobs said its factory in China “is not a sweatshop. ” Pollution and human rights abuses cannot be offset by great products. Steve Jobs — and all other CEOs — must be judged on how they affect people and planet as much as how they affect the company’s share price. An increasing number of investors agree . Those who doubt that business success can be overshadowed by social and environmental issues need look no further than another once-revered CEO: John Browne of BP. By taking over Amoco and Arco, Browne transformed the former British Petroleum from a “two-pipeline company” (with major assets only in the North Sea and Alaska) to a true supermajor. In 1997, he earned praise from environmentalists and the wrath of his oil titan peers by becoming the first head of a major energy company to acknowledge the realities of climate change and urge action. Browne was anointed “The Sun King” by the media, frequently voted Britain’s most-admired chief executive, and even knighted with the honorific “Lord” by the Queen of England. But then came the Texas refinery explosion that killed 15 people in 2005, followed by the rupture of a pipeline the following year that oozed 200,000 gallons of oil into the Alaskan tundra. Both occurred on Browne’s watch. And of course, last spring saw the Deepwater Horizon rig explode to such disastrous effect in the Gulf of Mexico. Browne had stepped down by then, but some speculate that he created the cost-cutting and risk-taking culture that led to the Gulf disaster. Browne’s achievements are no less historic. He shifted the global debate about climate change. He created new models for resource development in Azerbaijan , Indonesia , and elsewhere, in which the company partnered with human rights groups and grassroots organizations to ensure that local communities benefited from the company’s presence. (I worked on such projects for BP under Browne’s tenure.) Yet those acts weren’t enough to prevent major harm elsewhere — harm that permanently defined BP in the eyes of many. While Apple may not be able to wreak damage on the same scale as BP, it is not too much to ask any company to take responsibility for safety and environmental standards in its supply chain. Apple is making efforts in this area, but they seem to be coming up short: The company earned a mediocre “Room for Improvement” from the Enough Project in its study of the 21 largest electronics companies to assess progress toward conflict-free supply chains. It earned a similarly lackluster 4.9 out of 10 in Greenpeace’s Guide to Greener Electronics , primarily for its lack of disclosure about its supply chain. In his new role as chairman, Jobs should start by announcing that henceforth Apple will be as much of a leader on social and environmental issues as it has in every other aspect of its performance. He should set up a task force of external experts including Ma Jun, give them free reign to inspect Apple’s supply chain, and have them publish regular reports on their findings. Apple should also catch up with the rest of the business world and publish its suppliers list. HP has been publishing its list since 2008. Nike began doing so in 2005 after similar criticism to what Apple is facing, and is still doing so today without the negative repercussions that they claimed would ensue. There is no question that Jobs’s leadership of Apple gifted us with beautiful products that have revolutionized how we interact with information and each other. But worker deaths, factory pollution, and lack of disclosure are not the hallmarks of a great company, nor of a great leader. Steve Jobs needs to tackle those issues with the same relentless focus that has made Apple such a success — so far.

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Halliburton Sues BP Over Deepwater Crisis

September 2, 2011

NEW ORLEANS — BP PLC has engaged in a “cover up scheme” to hide its culpability for the deadly rig explosion that spawned last year’s massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, one of the oil giant’s partners in the drilling project claims in a newly filed lawsuit. Halliburton Energy Services Inc.’s suit, the latest of several that the project’s partners have filed against each other, accuses BP of concealing critical information about the deepwater well that blew out on April 20, 2010. Halliburton, which did cement work on BP’s Macondo well, claims in Thursday’s suit that BP provided false information about the location of pockets of oil and gas around the well before the blowout. Halliburton says knowing the location of those zones is critical for a cementing job. “Profit and greed” were BP’s motives for concealing the information, the lawsuit alleges. Halliburton says it likely would have insisted on redesigning the well’s production casing if it had known about an additional hydrocarbon zone that BP allegedly failed to disclose. “Such changes would have cost BP millions of dollars on a well that was already painfully over budget and behind schedule,” says the suit, filed in a Harris County, Texas, state court. In response to the suit, which seeks unspecified monetary damages, BP spokesman Scott Dean accused Halliburton of trying to deflect blame and divert attention from its role in the disaster. Dean said “multiple independent investigations” have identified “serious problems” with the cementing of the well. “BP has accepted its responsibility for responding to the spill and is accordingly paying costs and compensation,” Dean said in a statement. “In contrast, Halliburton has refused to accept any responsibility or accountability. As BP has said repeatedly, it expects other parties to accept their responsibilities and bear their share of the costs.” Halliburton’s suit accuses BP of intentionally omitting information about the location of hydrocarbon zones from its own report on the causes of the blowout. Halliburton also claims BP withheld the same information from government investigators. In addition to suing BP in the Texas state court, Halliburton also said Friday that it is amending existing claims against BP in federal court to include fraud allegations. U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier in New Orleans is presiding over tens of thousands of claims resulting from the oil spill, including the suits that companies filed against each other.

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Halliburton Sues BP Over Deepwater Well Blowout

September 2, 2011

NEW ORLEANS — BP PLC has engaged in a “cover up scheme” to hide its culpability for the deadly rig explosion that spawned last year’s massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, one of the oil giant’s partners in the drilling project claims in a newly filed lawsuit. Halliburton Energy Services Inc.’s suit, the latest of several that the project’s partners have filed against each other, accuses BP of concealing critical information about the deepwater well that blew out on April 20, 2010. Halliburton, which did cement work on BP’s Macondo well, claims in Thursday’s suit that BP provided false information about the location of pockets of oil and gas around the well before the blowout. Halliburton says knowing the location of those zones is critical for a cementing job. “Profit and greed” were BP’s motives for concealing the information, the lawsuit alleges. Halliburton says it likely would have insisted on redesigning the well’s production casing if it had known about an additional hydrocarbon zone that BP allegedly failed to disclose. “Such changes would have cost BP millions of dollars on a well that was already painfully over budget and behind schedule,” says the suit, filed in a Harris County, Texas, state court. In response to the suit, which seeks unspecified monetary damages, BP spokesman Scott Dean accused Halliburton of trying to deflect blame and divert attention from its role in the disaster. Dean said “multiple independent investigations” have identified “serious problems” with the cementing of the well. “BP has accepted its responsibility for responding to the spill and is accordingly paying costs and compensation,” Dean said in a statement. “In contrast, Halliburton has refused to accept any responsibility or accountability. As BP has said repeatedly, it expects other parties to accept their responsibilities and bear their share of the costs.” Halliburton’s suit accuses BP of intentionally omitting information about the location of hydrocarbon zones from its own report on the causes of the blowout. Halliburton also claims BP withheld the same information from government investigators. In addition to suing BP in the Texas state court, Halliburton also said Friday that it is amending existing claims against BP in federal court to include fraud allegations. U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier in New Orleans is presiding over tens of thousands of claims resulting from the oil spill, including the suits that companies filed against each other.

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Rev. Jesse Jackson: They Hate Government — Until They Need It

August 30, 2011

Irene has hit, leaving destruction in its wake. We could track Irene and prepare for it; we could not stop it. And now, states and localities, despite the secessionist mumblings of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, cannot pay to repair the damage. Representatives from North Carolina to Virginia to New Jersey, even those most vocal about slashing government spending, now call on Washington for help. Conservatives scorn government until they need it. The economic disaster is a manmade — not a natural — disaster. Some economists, mostly ignored, warned about it, but could not stop it. And now, it will take federal action to repair the damage. Some 25 million Americans are in need of full-time work. Poverty is spreading, particularly among children. The hardest hit include what was an emerging middle class of African-Americans, Latinos and other minorities. Men and women who worked hard, got an education, found a good job, bought a house or a condominium, and were capturing a piece of the American Dream. Then came the housing bust, and what Paul Krugman now calls the ‘Lesser Depression.’ Suddenly and shockingly, teachers, accountants, store managers, construction workers, nurses, state and local employees find themselves losing almost everything. The Obama administration stanched the free fall of the economy. But even as the weather experts overestimated Irene’s destructiveness, the economic experts, as Fed Chair Ben Bernanke just admitted, underestimated the scope of the economic damage. Now the economy is stalled. President Barack Obama has announced that he will release a jobs agenda in September, a range of ideas that will include extending the payroll tax cut, extending unemployment insurance and investing in infrastructure. Republicans have already called those ideas dead on arrival. Conservatives embrace federal help after natural disasters, but scorn it in the wake of the manmade economic calamity. Little is likely to happen — unless people get in motion. Those at the top need to hear from those suffering at the bottom. The unemployed need to march on Washington to demand work. People of faith need to protest against children without adequate food or shelter. Some are conflicted. They fear that protest conflicts with politics. That protesting the lack of action will help elect Republicans who seem to be competing in a race to the bottom. But that is not our history. In 1960, Martin Luther King supported Kennedy instead of Nixon to prevent America from going backward. Then he marched in the streets of Birmingham to pass the Civil Rights Act to move the nation ahead. In 1964, Martin Luther King supported Johnson instead of Goldwater to prevent America from going backward. Then he marched in Selma to pass the Voting Rights Act to move the nation ahead. For Dr. King, there was no conflict between voting strategically to prevent the triumph of reaction and leading a nonviolent mass movement to pressure a president to achieve profound social change. When we in the movement struggled for social justice, we helped weak presidents become stronger. When we in the movement struggled for social justice, we helped good presidents become great. Americans are sensibly dismayed at Washington’s corruption. The banks get bailed out, while homeowners go under. The entrenched interests like Big Oil keep their subsidies; the unemployed go without work. Dr. King understood how formidable entrenched power is, but he also understood the power of democracy. Only the people can break the logjam of powerful interests. Change comes not from the bottom up. The pundits and the politicians are waiting for Obama. They will then report on the Republican reaction. The lobbyists will weigh in. Obstruction is the likely outcome. This will change only when people are, in the words of Fannie Lou Hamer, “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” The ‘Lesser Depression’ will not be solved from above. It will be solved when we overcome the depression of our spirit with the assertion of our humanity. As we honor the life and legacy of Dr. King and enshrine his likeness on the Mall, let us dream again, hope again, march again. The 1963 jobs and justice coalition, labor, civil rights activists, the religious — as well as youths — must reconvene for a summit and then nonviolently and massively take thousands of resumes to Washington. Put a real face on real needs. We can change the course to inclusion again. As Dr. King would often say, what makes America great is that although America is not always right, we have the right to fight for the right. That is a special genius of our free and open democracy.

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Ron Paul: Federal Response To Hurricane Unnecessary

August 27, 2011

Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul told NBC News on Friday that “there’s no magic about” the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). He said that he doesn’t see the need for a federal response to Hurricane Irene as the powerful storm makes its way up the east cost. “We should be like 1900, we should be like 1940, 1950, 1960,” said the Texas congressman in weighing in on the matter during a stop in New Hampshire. He regarded FEMA as a “great contribution to deficit financing.” The presidential contender explained that he lives on the Gulf Coast back in the Lone Star State. He said, “We deal with hurricanes all the time. Galveston is in my district.” The Hill notes : A catastrophic storm hit Galveston in 1900 , killing thousands. “We should be coordinated, but coordinated voluntarily with the states,” Paul explained. “A state can decide. We don’t need somebody in Washington.” Click here for the latest updates on Hurricane Irene. Below, a clip of Paul’s remarks. WATCH: Visit msnbc.com for breaking news , world news , and news about the economy

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Another Rick Perry Staffer Ensnared In Teacher Death Bond Scheme

August 26, 2011

WASHINGTON — Texas Governor Rick Perry’s ties to Swiss banking giant UBS go beyond his relationship with former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas). Perry’s current chief of staff and top press person for his campaign, Ray Sullivan, spent five years as a lobbyist for UBS in Texas — a tenure that began the same year Gramm made his macabre pitch for Perry to enable Wall Street gambling on the deaths of Texas teachers . Sullivan reaped between $300,000 and $600,000 lobbying for UBS between 2003 and 2008, according to data compiled by Texans for Public Justice, a nonpartisan government transparency group. Disclosure forms only require lobbyists to indicate a salary range, not a specific salary. Sullivan had several other lobbying clients during those same years. He has been described in the local Texas press as a member of Perry’s trusted inner circle . Sullivan worked for Perry both in the governor’s mansion and in the late 1990s when Perry was then lieutenant governor. Sullivan started working for UBS in May 2003. That November, Perry aggressively pushed the Texas teacher pension fund and state teacher associations to sign off on a UBS plan to take out life insurance policies and annuities on retired Texas teachers — an elaborate scheme in which the state of Texas would serve as a something of a bookie, setting up Wall Street bets on how long those teachers would live. According to confidential notes obtained by the Huffington Post , the Perry administration had been elaborately briefed on details of the plan and was making a “hard sell” to teacher groups in behind-the-scenes meetings. When the plan leaked to the press in December 2003, however, the Perry camp claimed to have had only tangential involvement after receiving an inquiry from Gramm. The deal soon fell apart. Gramm, a chief architect of the scheme, drew the critical attention of several Texas newspapers at the time, but Sullivan’s involvement received much less scrutiny, though his longstanding ties to Perry create the same appearance of corruption and cronyism. “Sullivan is classic example of the way Perry works,” explained Andrew Wheat, research director with Texans for Public Justice. “There’s a coterie of insiders that move back and forth between the governor’s office, the governor’s campaign and the corporate lobby. … It’s a beautiful relationship for everybody except the public.” Sullivan and Perry and did not respond to requests for comment for this story, nor did UBS representatives.

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Rick Perry Heckled

August 18, 2011

(AP/The Huffington Post) PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — Presidential hopeful Rick Perry got his first brush with New Hampshire protesters. Democratic protesters waved signs and chanted “Go Back To Texas” outside Popovers Bakery & Cafe on Thursday morning as the newcomer to the Republican presidential field tried to meet voters. “Hands off our Medicare,” the demonstrators chanted, according to CNN. One man reportedly shouted, “Stop attacking middle class families Rick Perry.” It was the first stop on Perry’s third day in New Hampshire since the Texas governor launched his campaign Saturday. He ignored the protest and briefly walked through the coffee shop, shaking hands. The chanting and large media contingent following made for a chaotic atmosphere. Perry didn’t make any formal remarks or answer questions about details of his policies. Former Democratic State Sen. Burt Cohen was among those shouting. He calls Perry a threat to America.

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Oil falls on concern about Germany economy

August 17, 2011

(MENAFN – Saudi Press Agency) Oil fell Tuesday on renewed concerns about Europe’s biggest economy, AP reported. Benchmark West Texas Intermediate crude for September delivery gave up $1.23 to …

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WATCH: Starbucks CEO Discusses His Boycott On Campaign Contributions

August 17, 2011

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz spoke to CNN Money on Tuesday about what he hopes to accomplish with his recently announced boycott on political contributions. As reported by The Huffington Post’s Dan Froomkin , Schultz is calling on Americans and fellow business leaders to halt all campaign donations until politicians stop squabbling and demonstrate a capacity to work toward compromise on long-term fiscal issues. New York Times columnist Joe Nocera recently wrote in an op-ed : In effect, Schultz thinks the country should go on strike against its politicians. “The fundamental problem,” he said, “is that the lens through which Congress approaches issues is re-election. The lifeblood of their re-election campaigns is political contributions.” The message from the Starbucks CEO comes on the heels of the protracted debate over raising the nation’s debt ceiling. He reiterated the sentiment on Tuesday. “All it seems people are interested in is re-election,” Schultz explained. “And that re-election — the lifeblood of it is fundraising.” He urged employers to “grow their companies, start hiring and stop waiting for Washington.” He added, “We can spread a felling of confidence in America.” WATCH (via CNN): RELATED VIDEO:

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HuffPost TV: WATCH: Zach Carter Discusses Controversial Panama Trade Deal With Dylan Ratigan

August 17, 2011

HuffPost’s Zach Carter appeared on MSNBC’s ‘The Dylan Ratigan Show’ to discuss the controversial trade agreement between the U.S. and Panama. Carter recently reported that the deal could provide wealthy Americans with a tax loophole by allowing them to “hide” their money in Panama-based companies and banks. “It’s just very easy to set up an offshore corporation and bank account in Panama,” he said. “It only costs about $2000 and it takes about three or four days for that process to be complete.” Criticizing the trade agreement as irresponsible, he said, “Panama’s got some of the most secretive and restrictive bank secrecy laws in the world and … a very long history of refusing to cooperate with tax authorities in the U.S. so it’s very perplexing that you’d want to even engage with this country in a trade deal to begin with.” WATCH (via MSNBC ): Visit msnbc.com for breaking news , world news , and news about the economy

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Jared Bernstein: Rick Perry, Ben Bernanke, and the Middle Class

August 16, 2011

Just when you thought our politics couldn’t get any weirder, I think Texas Governor Rick Perry just threatened to beat up Ben Bernanke for suggesting another round of quantitative easing. Responding to a question about the Federal Reserve at a campaign event in Cedar Rapids, Perry said: “If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I don’t know what y’all would do to him in Iowa, but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas. I wish I was making this stuff up, folks… I really do… but I’m not. (Does this mean the Fed research team needs to add a new variable into their impact models?… i.e., the estimate of the impact of monetary easing on long-term rates, conditional on the Chairman getting a fat lip.) Perhaps Gov. Perry is just looking over his shoulder at Ron Paul, who’s always bashing the Fed (and was a close second to Rep. Bachmann in the Iowa poll), but let’s take a look at the economics in play here. Quantitative easing (QE) is when the Fed “prints money” — really just bytes in Fed and Treasury electronic bank accounts — to buy longer term bonds, either Treasuries or mortgage bonds with the goal of lowering interest rates and stimulating more economic activity. They’ve done two rounds so far and estimates suggest they lowered long term interest rates by somewhere between 60 basis points (0.60 of a percentage point) to more than 1%. (Scholars of intermediate macro: they’re pushing out the LM curve!) Perry went on to complain about “devaluing the dollar in your pocket” based on the notion that if you’re printing money, you’re creating inflation. And as I and others — most notably Ken Rogoff — have argued recently, that would help right now. First off, faster inflation lowers the real interest rate — that’s the nominal rate minus inflation. So if a business is thinking of building a new factory, and the interest rate on the loan it needs is 4% and inflation is 3%, then the real rate faced by the borrower is 1%. That’s especially germane right now with corporations sitting on fat cash reserves. A little more inflation in the system could nudge them off of the sidelines. More inflation also speeds up the ongoing deleveraging cycle by eroding the real value of households’ debt burdens. That said, a commenter the other day raised a good question about this: how can I, as someone who actively worries about real wage losses, advocate higher inflation, which all else equal, means lower real wages? It’s the “all else equal” part — lower real rates and more deleveraging means faster growth and lower unemployment, which itself should help boost job and wage growth. Here’s the punchline of all this — and be clear that I’m not talking about very high inflation, which hurts everyone. I have no idea if this is where Gov. Perry is coming from, but what’s really behind conservatives’ view on this issue is that the wealthy get hurt a lot more by inflation than by unemployment, and visa-versa for the middle class. (Remember, I’m talking 2-4% inflation here, nothing higher.) For those living off of capital (versus labor) income, inflation erodes their assets, their wealth, their capital. So lower real interest rates, faster growth, lower unemployment ain’t what gets them out of bed in the morning. That’s also why the editorial page of the WSJ, for example, permanently campaigns against anything that would “weaken” the dollar. Why just last night, I was on the Kudlow show arguing against someone who wanted us back on a the gold standard (!!), the natural conclusion of sentiments like Gov Perry’s, and a fine way to cut the Fed off at the knees and ensure deflation at a time like this. And, of course, the other “punch”line: Ben, you might want to let things settle down a bit before you mosey on down to Texas. This post originally appeared at Jared Bernstein’s On The Economy blog.

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WATCH: Rick Perry Goes After Fed Chairman

August 16, 2011

Texas Governor Rick Perry, who recently announced that he is running for president in 2012, had some harsh words for Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Monday. ThinkProgress has video of Perry in Iowa explaining that if Bernanke “prints more money between now and the election, I don’t know what y’all would do to him in Iowa, but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas.” Perry went on to say that if Bernanke printed more money, the act would be “almost treasonous in my opinion.” ABC News has more on Perry’s comments: He added, “We’ve already tried this. All it’s going to be doing is devaluing the dollar in your pocket and we cannot afford that. We have to learn the lessons of the past three years that they’ve been devastating. The President of the United States has conducted an experiment on the American economy for almost the last three years, and it has gone tragically wrong and we need to send him a clear message in November of 2012 that new leadership is coming.” Perry, who officially entered the presidential race on Saturday, was responding to a question from a member of the audience at a backyard county Republican Party fundraiser here who asked him what he would do with the Federal Reserve. Politico reports that NYU economics professor Nouriel Roubini tweeted of Perry’s comments: “Perry’s Remarks on Bernanke are criminal. This Texan thug is making murder threats on the Fed Chairman.” Perry’s jump into the presidential contest has generated a fair amount of buzz. Former President Bill Clinton recently remarked that he was “tickled” to see Perry enter the race. WATCH PERRY’S COMMENTS BELOW ( via ThinkProgress ):

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Denise Bode: After a Scorching Week, Wind Power Lessons From the Texas Heat Wave

August 11, 2011

It’s over, for the moment — Electricity Reliability Council of Texas( ERCOT), the company that manages the Texas utility system, said Monday that it doesn’t expect peak electricity demand this week to surpass last week’s record levels. As he did after a sudden freeze stressed the Texas system in February, ERCOT CEO Trip Doggett credited wind power with a critical contribution during last week’s power emergency. Doggett said electricity from wind farms recently installed along Texas’ Gulf Coast began flowing at just the right time to help meet peak demand in the late afternoons. With that in mind, some lessons from the week’s real-world experience with substantial amounts of installed wind generating capacity on a large utility system: Adding wind power makes a utility system more reliable, not less. Balancing electricity supply and demand is a complex task, and utility system operators are used to turning various types of power plants on or off to match demand as it rises and falls throughout the day. Even though wind energy is variable, it varies slowly — unlike conventional power plants, which can fail instantaneously — and can be a critical component in times of need. For three straight days in the real world last week, wind made the difference between keeping the lights on and the air conditioners running — and rolling blackouts. No power plant runs 100 percent of the time. Throughout last week’s heat wave, as in February’s freeze, the Texas utility system was bedeviled by outages of conventional power plants due to extreme weather. According to an Aug. 2 blog article by Elizabeth Souder of the Dallas Morning News, “The high temperatures also caused about 20 power plants to stop working, including at least one coal-fired plant and natural gas plants.” Souder noted that a spokesman for ERCOT, “said such outages aren’t unusual in the hot summer…” This is fascinating, since the rap on wind is that it’s not dependable because “sometimes the wind stops blowing.” In the real world, sometimes it also gets too hot or too cold for the supposedly dependable fueled peaking power plants to operate properly. Geographic dispersal of wind farms makes their electricity production more dependable. This is something that seems intuitively obvious — the wind is usually blowing someplace — and has been predicted by a host of studies. Last week, it became crystal clear, as the Gulf Coast wind farms, which provide some 13 percent of Texas’s overall wind generation, accounted for as much as 70 percent of the wind-generated electricity being provided during peak hours. The reason for this is that winds are often low in west Texas, where most of the state’s wind farms are located, on very hot days, while ocean breezes blow more strongly. Generation from offshore and coastal land-based wind matches up well with summer demand peaks. Again, this is a phenomenon that has been predicted by studies. During a heat wave in the Northeast in July, Cape Wind, the company that hopes to install a large offshore wind farm off Cape Cod in Massachusetts, said its meteorological data showed the project would have been producing at full capacity during peak demand hours. The Texas experience bears that out, with ERCOT CEO Doggett telling the Austin American-Statesman , “We’d love to have more development of coastal wind. And we’re hoping their ability to generate during the peak hours may encourage more development in that area.”

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Whole Foods Responds To Ramadan Marketing Controversy

August 9, 2011

Whole Foods is the object of a growing controversy about the popular grocery chain’s treatment of Ramadan , the holy month of fasting for Muslims that started Aug. 1. On July 27, the retailer introduced a special promotion for the month of Ramadan on their blog, Whole Story , featuring special recipes and product giveaways for the month. This promotion also coincided with the introduction of a new halal-certified product line in Whole Foods stores. A day later, Fast Company posted an article highlighting Whole Foods’ online Ramadan campaign as a first for a major American food chain. The article presciently stated that although no major in-store promotions were planned, the Web and social media efforts were a bit of a risk in a U.S. marketplace that is often hostile to Islam. Unsurprisingly, the campaign garnered the notice of right-wing bloggers who promptly branded Whole Foods as “jihadist” and “anti-Israel.” The absurdity of this position may have been easily dismissed if not for the subsequent reaction by leadership at the company. On Tuesday, the Houston Press published a report revealing the text of an internal email circulated by Whole Foods executives to the chain’s stores. “It is probably best that we don’t specifically call out or ‘promote’ Ramadan … We should not highlight Ramadan in signage in our stores as that could be considered ‘Celebrating or promoting’ Ramadan.” The email went on to explain that the promotion previously announced on the company’s blog should not be misinterpreted to mean that the chain was celebrating or promoting Ramadan, saying, “The misinterpretation has generated some negative feedback from a small segment of vocal and angry consumers and bloggers.” Whole Foods’ apparent capitulation to an extremely vocal minority of Islamophobes has already drawn significant ire from bloggers and on Twitter . What’s your reaction to this story? Will this lead to significant trouble for the chain? UPDATE: Shortly after the publication of this story, Whole Foods publicly responded to the controversy on their Twitter feed , indicating the instruction to de-emphasize Ramadan was an isolated response by one of the company’s 12 operating regions and not indicative of company-wide policy. We are still carrying and promoting halal products for those that are celebrating Ramadan this month. We never sent a communication from our headquarters requesting stores take down signs or remove parts from this promotion. We have 12 different operating regions and unfortunately, one region reacted by sending out directions to promote halal and not specifically Ramadan after some negative online comments.

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Obama Adviser Points Fingers At Tea Party

August 7, 2011

WASHINGTON — A top White House adviser is blaming the downgrade of the U.S. credit rating on Tea Party Republicans, whom he says were unwilling to compromise on how to reduce the federal debt. The adviser to President Barack Obama, David Axelrod, tells CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday that the decision by the Standard & Poor’s credit agency to downgrade the U.S. from AAA to AA+ for the first time was strongly influenced by weeks of standoff between Democrats and Republicans over the debt. Axelrod calls the action, in his words, “a Tea Party downgrade” and says it’s clearly on the backs of lawmakers who were willing to see the country default to get their way. Axelrod also criticized GOP presidential candidates for not speaking up in favor of compromise. The Hill reported on Saturday on growing frustration among progressives over the president’s soft response to the role of the Tea Party in the deficit debate: Republicans and Democrats have unleashed fusillades of attack against each other in the wake of the announcement but Obama has stayed quiet, frustrating his party’s base. Howard Dean, former chair of the Democratic National Committee, didn’t hold back in taking aim at the conservative coalition of activists during an appearance on “Face the Nation” on Sunday morning. “This is a Tea Party problem,” he said on the program. “They are totally unreasonable and doctrinaire and not founded in reality. I think they’ve been smoking some of that tea, not just drinking it.”

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Texas Governor’s ‘Texas Miracle’ Creates Crowded Shelters, Budget Deficit, and Low-Wage Jobs

August 3, 2011

AUSTIN, Texas — It was 105 degrees outside late last week when Vanessa Surita, 24, planted herself on the sidewalk and stretched her legs. Her young daughter sat in a stroller within arms length, outside the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless . Her needs were great: housing, a job, a high school diploma. She could mark progress in job applications filled out. A local pizza chain, a Pizza Hut, a local grocery chain, a Family Dollar — each the equivalent of a professional lottery ticket. “I just recently tried to apply at Whataburger,” Surita said. “It’s been like two weeks … I’ve been calling them. They still haven’t had a chance to look at my application. They still haven’t had a chance to look at my application. They’re like 2,000 people that apply every month, so I don’t know.” Surita said she and her 21-month-old daughter crash at her sister’s place with her two children. “We’ve been on the waiting list for housing since she was born,” she said. A few days earlier, Kelly Johnson waited patiently in a corner by ARCH’s entrance. She sat hugging her backpack. She had lost her job at Subway a month ago. She found temp work sticking price tags on clothes in a warehouse. It was two days a week, and neither day was a sure thing. It did little to prevent her from ending up homeless. Last week was her first without a roof over her head. “It feels helpless. It feels horrible,” Johnson, 31, said. She had a series of jobs she wanted in mind. “I’m looking for customer service, call center, housekeeping like in hotels at the Marriott or “maybe the Omni.” One day, she said, she dreams of working in an office, maybe as a paralegal. Surita and Johnson do not fit in the prevailing narrative about the Lone Star state. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Texas has created more jobs in the last year than any other state. These job openings have become known as the much-hyped, “Texas Miracle.” In his February 2011 state-of-the-state address , Governor Rick Perry boasted: “Our economic strength is no accident. It’s a testimony to our people, our entrepreneurs, and, yes, to the decisions made in this building. Employers from across the country and around the world understand that the opportunity they crave can be found in Texas, and they’re headed our way, with jobs in tow.” Should he ultimately choose to run for the White House, Perry will be spending a lot of his time on the stump repeating those lines. Dig beneath the talking points and you find a more troubling picture: rising unemployment, a glut of low-wage jobs without benefits, overcrowded homeless shelters and public schools facing billions in budget cuts. Surita and Johnson have been airbrushed from the miracle. But they still can be found on the housing waiting lists and shelter entrances. “If you want a bad job, go to Texas,” said Texas Rep. Garnet Coleman (D), who represents a district in Houston, in an interview with The Huffington Post. “If you want to work at Carl’s Jr., our doors are open, and if you want to go to a crumbling school in a failing school system, this is the place to come.” The state capital, with its expanded skyline and renovated office parks, will surely be b-roll in any Perry campaign ad. But Austin — like many across the country — simply hasn’t witnessed across-the-board job stability. There’s a crowd outside the ARCH no matter the heat. The building was designed for 100 dormitory beds, but now sleeps 215 — including 115 men sleeping on mats on the a second floor dining room and a conference room floor. Even then, Mitchell Gibbs, the director of development and communications, said they are turning away 15 to 50 men a night. “Austin is supposed to be ground zero of the Texas Miracle,” explained Doug Greco, lead organizer with Austin Interfaith , a nonpartisan group of some 30 congregations, schools and unions. “But we have the higher poverty rate and higher child poverty rate–nearly one in three children.” He added that the need for shelter, food and clothing has spiked in the city. “It doesn’t take much to pierce through the rhetoric,” he said. Texas is struggling right along with every other state. According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics , Texas had recently bumped up to 8.2 percent unemployment in June which puts it below the national average. Still plenty of states without miracles posted lower unemployment rates; New York, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Wisconsin, among others are all out performing Texas. Drill down even further into the numbers and there are plenty of residents that haven’t felt the miracle. In May, job growth slowed statewide . According to a recent report in the Houston Chronicle , Houston’s not seasonally adjusted unemployment rate jumped to 9 percent. The unemployment rate has hit double digits in the Rio Grande Valley. In Hildago County, it’s 12 percent . Quality of life indexes like child poverty rates put Texas further behind. State Sen. Judith Zaffirini (D) told The Huffington Post her state ranks 48th in teen birth rates, 50th in prenatal care and 46th in income disparity — and 50th in the number of persons who receive a high school diploma by age 25. With Texas’ minimal regulation and low taxes — and Perry’s cheerleading — a spike in job growth during the past few years became known as the Texas Miracle. The rise in oil and gas prices, as well as a long-time state law protecting homeowners, helped stave off the recession for a while. And as a result, a miracle myth was created, with little exploration as to what impact Perry’s policies actually had on the economic picture. The miracle is that anyone would call minimum-wage jobs a miracle. Of the all the jobs in Texas created last year, 37 percent paid at or below minimum wage — and the state leads the nation in total minimum wage workers , according to a recent New York Times report . “The important thing to do is not to just count jobs but to look at what kinds of jobs are being created in Texas,” explained Dick Lavine, a Senior Fiscal Analyst with the Center for Public Policy Priorities . “Texas is tied for last with Mississippi for the highest percentage of minimum wage jobs and Texas is by far the leader of residents who don’t have health insurance. It’s low wage jobs without any benefits.” This resonates with Gibbs at the ARCH, which created a 100-bed unit on the third floor for homeless night-shift workers who needed a place to sleep during the day. These workers, Gibbs said, included bakers from downtown hotels who simply couldn’t afford Austin rents. The ARCH may want to think about expanding its homeless worker unit. If there is continued job growth in Texas, the trend continues to point toward the low-skilled, low-wage variety. According to a just-released Georgetown University study , Texas ranks 41 among all 50 states in the percentage of jobs requiring post-secondary education. HuffPost readers: If you’ve become recently unemployed in Texas or struggle with a low-wage job in the Lone Star State, we want to hear from you. Tell us your stories by emailing jason.cherkis@huffingtonpost.com. Please include your phone number if you’re willing to do an interview. When it comes to budget gaps, Texas is just like much of the rest of the country. This year, the state faced a projected budget shortfall totaling as much as $27 billion; the legislature also had to contend with a $4.3 billion deficit in its current budget . The state made massive across-the-board cuts to state agencies — including $4 billion in public school cuts over two years. Perry and the state legislature also ended up closing out funding for pre-kindergarten programs for roughly 100,000 low-income children . Mass layoffs of public sector workers is expected. The Texas Miracle may become part of Perry’s national pitch, but it’s nonsense to state Sen. Zaffrini. “Talking about the so-called ‘Texas Miracle,” she said in an emailed statement, “is at best disingenuous because it ignores the state’s shameful national standing in terms of supporting education and helping the neediest of the needy.” Nor has there been much in the way of adequate job protections. Texas still ranks as the most dangerous state for worker safety. An April study [ PDF ] produced by the University of Texas and the Workers Defense Project stated that one in five construction workers were injured on the job, while only 45 percent had workers’ compensation. The study also noted that a worker dies every 2.5 days and the state sees 16,900 job-related accidents annually. Emily Timm, a policy analyst with the Workers Defense Project , said that roughly 45 percent of the more than 300 workers surveyed reported being paid wages below the federal poverty line. And one in five workers complained that their employers had paid them less than what they were owed. Being allowed adequate drinking water is even an issue. Nearly a third of the workers surveyed reported that their employers did not provide them with access to drinking water. Timm said her organization has only seen a further rise in worker problems. “We’re seeing more complaints of wage theft than we ever have before,” she said. “We’re also seeing more and more workers being misclassified as independent contractors.” That distinction can be crucial, she said, as it allows the construction companies to not deduct taxes from their paychecks as well as skirt minimum wage and overtime requirements. In Austin, that lack of income growth has been met with increasing rents and state cuts to safety-net services. This past year, rents have gone up by more than 4 percent. Fred Krebs, a pastor with the Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in central Austin, said he’s noticed an increasing number of his congregants are having trouble keeping up. “People’s economic level in my congregation has clearly gone down in the last few years,” he said. “That’s been very clear … We’ve had to help our members with meals. Sometimes just $20 to make sure they have milk and eggs and bread … We just helped a member buy glasses. It was either the glasses or their place to live.” Every Saturday morning, Pastor John Elford serves a free breakfast at University United Methodist Church for Austin’s neediest. The number of residents waiting in line, he said, has recently shot up from from 375 to 500. Elford remembered one family that stuck out. They had left California in the hopes of finding their own piece of the Texas Miracle in Austin. They were in their mid-to-late ’30 with two elementary-school aged kids. Things didn’t work out so much. “They ran out of money,” he said. “They came to us.” Elford’s church collected enough money to put the family up in a motel for week. “When I talked with them, they were just worn out from living here and there,” he said. At the end of the week, the family moved back to California to live with relatives.

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This Year’s Total Bank Failures Rises

July 23, 2011

WASHINGTON — Regulators on Friday shut down two small banks in Florida and one in Colorado, bringing to 58 the number of U.S. bank failures this year, well behind last year’s pace. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. seized Southshore Community Bank in Apollo Beach, Fla., LandMark Bank of Florida in Sarasota, Fla., and Bank of Choice in Greeley, Colo. Southshore Community Bank had about $46.3 million in assets and $45.3 million in deposits. LandMark Bank had about $275 million in assets and $246.7 million in deposits. That lifts to nine the number of lenders to collapse this year in Florida. American Momentum Bank, based in Tampa, Fla., agreed to assume all of the deposits from the two banks and to buy essentially all of their assets. In Colorado, Bank of Choice had roughly $1.07 billion in assets and $924.9 million in deposits. It is the fifth bank to fail this year in Colorado. Bank Midwest, N.A., based in Kansas City, Mo., agreed to assume all of Bank of Choice’s deposits and buy roughly $853 million of its assets. The failures are expected to cost the deposit insurance fund $331.4 million, combined. Southshore Community Bank had two branches, LandMark Bank of Florida had six, and Bank of Choice had 17. The pace of bank failures has slowed this year as lenders work their way through piles of bad debt. A slow, but improving U.S. economy also has helped stem the number of bank casualties. By July 23 of last year, regulators had closed 103 banks. In all of 2010 regulators seized 157 banks, the most in a year since the savings-and-loan crisis two decades ago. The FDIC has said 2010 likely marked the peak for bank failures from the Great Recession. There were 140 bank failures in 2009, costing the insurance fund about $36 billion. The failures last year cost around $21 billion, a lower price tag because the banks involved were smaller on average. Twenty-five banks failed in 2008, the year the financial crisis struck with force; only three were closed in 2007. From 2008 through 2010, bank failures cost the fund $76.8 billion. The deposit insurance fund fell into the red in 2009. With failures slowing, the FDIC’s deficit narrowed in the first quarter of this year; it stood at about $1 billion as of March 31. Depositors’ money – insured up to $250,000 per account – is not at risk, with the FDIC backed by the government. That insurance cap was made permanent in the financial overhaul law enacted last July.

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Rejected Dodd-Frank Rule Means Less Control For Shareholders

July 22, 2011

(Sarah N. Lynch) – A U.S. appeals court has rejected a new Securities and Exchange Commission rule intended to make it easier for shareholders to nominate directors to corporate boards. In a major blow to the SEC, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said the SEC’s rule was “arbitrary and capricious” and that the agency had failed to properly weigh the economic consequences. Friday’s ruling marks the first successful legal challenge to a provision in last year’s Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law which was intended to curb Wall Street excesses leading up to the global financial crisis. The SEC rule, which had been put on hold pending the outcome of this case, would have required companies to include a shareholder candidate on corporate ballots known as proxies — provided that the nominating shareholders held at least 3 percent of the voting power in the corporate stock for three years. SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro had pushed for a rule on proxy access since the early days of her tenure at the SEC, saying the rule would give long-term shareholders greater voice by making it easier for them to nominate directors to the boards of the companies they own. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, who filed the lawsuit challenging the rule, feared it would give minority shareholders too much power and could have cost companies millions of dollars in contested board elections. To fight the rule, they hired Eugene Scalia, a partner at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher and the son of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. WAKE-UP CALL FOR REGULATORS Judge Douglas Ginsburg, who wrote the opinion for the court, said the SEC “inconsistently and opportunistically framed the costs and benefits of the rule; failed adequately to quantify the certain costs or to explain why those costs could not be quantified; neglected to support its predictive judgments; contradicted itself; and failed to respond to substantial problems raised by commenters.” Although the court threw out the rule, the SEC could try to revive it. To do so, however, the agency would have to start the rule-writing process from scratch. Scalia, in a statement to reporters, said the court’s ruling on Friday will “likely to give the SEC serious pause before revisiting proxy access.” “We are reviewing the decision and considering our options,” said SEC spokesman Kevin Callahan. David Hirschmann, the president and CEO of the chamber’s Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness, said the court’s decision should serve “as a reminder” to all federal financial regulators as they work to implement hundreds of new rules required by Dodd-Frank. “They have an obligation to do a cost-benefit (analysis) and they have an obligation to look at alternatives,” he told Reuters in an interview. “Ultimately, we need to implement regulations in a way that achieves a clear purpose and in a way that maximizes the benefits while minimizing the costs.” SEC’s TROUBLED TRACK RECORD This is not the first time the SEC has lost a court challenge to its rule-making procedures in the D.C. circuit. The SEC previously lost to the chamber on a case challenging a rule on mutual fund director independence. It also lost in 2009 on a rule that would have regulated indexed annuities as securities. All of those challenges were successfully argued by Scalia. The SEC had anticipated business groups would sue over proxy access after the groups expressed fears it would give activist shareholders, including union pension funds, undue influence over corporate boards, and would trample state laws on corporate governance. To protect them, Congress granted the agency authority to write proxy access rules in Dodd-Frank. That provision, however, does not protect the SEC from challenges to its rule-making process. Most experts felt the SEC faltered in its defense of the rule at an April hearing, with the judges appearing skeptical about the agency’s estimates for how many contested board elections would result. Nevertheless, supporters of the rule had still hoped it would prevail. “The court’s decision is deeply disappointing to long-term shareholders,” said Ann Yerger, the executive director for the Council of Institutional Investors. “We will continue to advocate for proxy access and will encourage the SEC to promptly address the court’s concerns.” (Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch, editing by Matthew Lewis) Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions .

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Bishop Pierre Whalon: Is Capitalism Moral? Wrong Question…

July 22, 2011

André Comte-Sponville is a popular French philosopher. When I say “popular” I mean that his writing sells books. One of his bestsellers is entitled Is Capitalism Moral? In a nutshell, he says that capitalism cannot be an activity constrained by anything other than the laws of the market, which are not moral but technical. Not your stereotypical French leftie spouting warmed-over Marxism, certainly, but much too glib nevertheless. Michael Moore, in his film Capitalism: A Love Story , posits that Americans have been sold a bill of goods — so to speak — concerning capitalism, uncritically accepting that market forces dictate life and if you play along, sooner or later you’ll get rich. Too bad that Mr. Moore makes his point with heavy-handed theatrics, in effect creating propaganda. As we contemplate the inability of the American economy to lift itself out of the depression that has devastated our common life, there is a temptation to say that capitalism is all wrong, immoral. However, alternatives were tried in the twentieth century, and they failed. The bloodbaths that drowned communist and national-socialist economies ended them (hard to remember that the Nazis were economically at least socialistic…) Or else to insist that the market will make all things right again, if only we lower taxes , get rid of government regulations, red tape, blah-blah-blah. Reaganomics ending up requiring the largest peacetime tax increases in history in order to avoid bankrupting the country. Now we’re almost there again… Complex economies are, well, complex, with all kinds of actors, including government, finance, manufacturers, service providers, and of course, millions of consumers. And it seems to be a tried-and-true fact that across all sorts of human differences, the best way to distribute goods and services is market capitalism. So is capitalism going to come to the rescue? No. Because what we are living under is not market capitalism, but something else. Market capitalism does work according to the laws of supply and demand, and markets need to be regulated to the extent that they remain open to all. The stock markets should be sources of capital, investors willing to place their surplus money (capital) into ventures that will have a reasonable chance of returning a profit. Those markets need regulation as well, since boom-bust cycles result from unbridled speculation. Of course, anyone investing in a business, whether directly or through stock ownership, is taking a risk — speculating. But there is a second level in which the instruments of speculation — stocks and bonds — become themselves marketed commodities. Mutual funds, which hedge risks by owning a spread of different financial instruments, are perhaps the simplest example of these. Those companies that go to the capital markets for investments become responsible to their shareholders. Being publicly traded means that corporate managers need to keep the stock value and dividends in mind as they make decisions in their particular markets. Now it used to be that if you wanted to get into the stock market, you would go to an investment counselor, a broker who had trading rights in the stock market, and after selecting what you wanted, you became part of a partnership of brokers all of whom had their own money invested as well. Things changed in the 80s, as brokerages became more and more aggressive and finally became publicly-traded themselves. For more, read Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker and his much more recent The Big Short . The minute a company is publicly traded, it loses some control, because it becomes responsible not only to its clients — who are the true source of corporate profits — but also to its shareholders, who deserve a return on their investments that underwrite the company’s expansions. Nothing wrong with that, or is there? Not if you are Alcoa or Pepsico. However, if a brokerage firm, whose clients are investors, is itself owned by investors, which investors should the firm favor? In the normal course of things, traders want to limit risk and maximize profits for their clients. I have mentioned the mutual fund, for example. The markets become themselves sources of profits. Commissions aren’t enough for your shareholders, however, because the richer you can make them the more likely they are going to keep you and pay you well. Options and futures aren’t profitable enough, we need other instruments to trade, other markets to create. The firm becomes not a partner with its clients but something else entirely. There is a straight line from this development to Goldman Sachs and other investment banks selling financial instruments to their clients while themselves betting that these instruments would lose money . They sold their own clients short, figuratively and literally. And don’t get me started on the credit rating agencies … Is this capitalism moral? Wrong question, because this ain’t capitalism. This is oligarchy, a few very rich and powerful firms not only selling for their clients but also buying for themselves in the financial markets. And that IS immoral. It excludes most of us, until we end up having to inject our tax dollars — or more exactly, until we borrow those dollars — in order to avoid a complete financial collapse. You and I can’t play their game, but we must certainly keep the people who cause the disaster in business so as to avoid abject poverty, roughly on the order of the Bronze Age. That is profoundly immoral. It is time to get real. In fact, it’s long past time. America needs to create new capital to invest in productive enterprises that will employ people, growing food, inventing new commodities and services, and improving the classic ones. We are not going to do that by selling each other our houses, or opening more fast-food outlets. We need a diversified economy based on market capitalism, not on oligarchs enriching themselves in gigantic shell games played with trillions of dollars. We need to rebuild the intellectual and physical infrastructures that undergird such an economy. That requires taxation. And it also requires regulation of markets. Any politician who will not level with the people about this daunting task has to be voted out. Bring capitalism back! should be our slogan. That is a tall order, because the so-called Masters of the Universe can threaten to destroy the banking system the world depends upon if we touch the source of their strength, namely, the so-called shadow banking system. If you remember Frank Herbert’s novel Dune , you will recall its salient point: the ability to destroy something is in fact to control it. The mountain of money spent to influence governments around the world, starting with the United States, is also a giant obstacle. If we continue down the primrose path of tax reduction, deficit increases, and oligarchical manipulation of capital markets, there will be a much greater depression . The Arab Spring should be teaching a lesson: “tipping points” happen, and suddenly the game changes, taking everyone by surprise. The scales will fall from the people’s eyes. A strongman will arise to “save” us, at the cost of our republic. History does repeat itself — Ave Caesar, Heil Hitler, Stalin Save Us … sound familiar? Finally, we need an economy that allows each person to be not only a consumer but an actor in it. The source of America’s wealth has never been finance, but in those goods and services that entrepreneurs make available to the widest possible audience, er, market. Anyone remember Charles Ives? Yes, the Charles Ives, considered to be America’s greatest composer of music. What does he have to do with this? In his lifetime, Ives was known not for his music but for his knack for taking something and making a lot of people wealthy by making it available to the masses. Life insurance for everyone was one of his dreams. If you have such a policy, it is because Ives felt that they were not just for rich people. When President Wilson wanted to raise money for World War I, he asked Ives to take it on. Ives promptly created bonds denominated so that the most ordinary patriot — economically speaking — could own at least one. It was a howling success. There have been huge numbers of examples since. There can be plenty more. But only if we break up the oligarchies and start practicing real capitalism again. A place to start: if you want to buy a stock, make sure your broker doesn’t have shareholders to answer to. Better yet, make sure she’s invested too. This didn’t answer the question I started with, I know. I think a morality of capitalism can be defined and defended, and that capitalist immorality therefore can be described in principle. It has to do with the notion of the common good. But that is for another day. Meanwhile, bring back capitalism!

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Three Credit Suisse Bankers Indicted For Tax Evasion Services

July 22, 2011

FAIRFIELD, Connecticut (Lynnley Browning) – U.S. authorities indicted three Credit Suisse AG private bankers, one a senior executive, on Thursday, toughening their stance against the bank for allegedly helping wealthy Americans to evade taxes. Federal prosecutors in Alexandria, Virginia, filed criminal charges against Markus Walder, the former head of North America Offshore Banking and a former senior Credit Suisse executive; Susanne D. Rüegg Meier, a former manager; and Andreas Bachmann, a former banker at a subsidiary of the bank. Also charged was Josef Dorig, the founder of a Swiss trust company that worked with the bank. While the charges did not name the bank in question, a government person briefed on the matter identified it as Credit Suisse. Asked about the indictment, Victoria Harmon, a spokeswoman for Credit Suisse, said in a statement that “Credit Suisse is committed to a fully compliant cross-border business. Subject to our Swiss legal obligations and throughout this process we will continue to cooperate with the U.S. authorities in an effort to resolve these matters.” The four individuals were charged with conspiring to defraud the United States, the Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service by helping wealthy Americans to evade taxes. Walder, a managing director, was accused of, among other things, lying to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 2005 and 2007 and to the IRS about the bank’s activities with U.S. customers and on U.S. soil. TOUGHER U.S. LINE The indictment signals an increasingly tough line by U.S. authorities against Credit Suisse, which has been under scrutiny for its tax evasion services for more than a year. Last week U.S. authorities sent a target letter to Credit Suisse formally notifying it that it was under criminal investigation. The charges were filed as a superseding indictment that adds to similar charges filed in February against four other Credit Suisse bankers. The original four are Marco Parenti Adami, Emanuel Agustoni, Michele Bergantino and Roger Schaerer. With the new charges, Credit Suisse thus now has seven bankers who have been indicted. That is far more than Swiss bank UBS, which averted indictment in 2009 by agreeing to pay $780 million, admit to criminal wrongdoing; the bank later agreed to turn over 4,450 client names. Asked whether any of the seven bankers were still employed by Credit Suisse, Harmon, the Credit Suisse spokesman, declined to comment. The defendants charged in the superseding indictment used a representative office in New York to provide unlicensed and unregistered banking services to U.S. clients, according to prosecutors. In addition, the charges said, Walder, Schaerer and others “allegedly made false statements and provided misleading information to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and to the IRS in order to conceal the international bank’s U.S. cross-border banking business and the role of the New York representative office in that business.” Dorig, who ran a trust company called Dorig AG, is accused of being a “preferred provider” for Credit Suisse and helping American bank clients open sham entities in other offshore tax havens to conceal their Credit Suisse accounts. The pressure on Credit Suisse comes amid a collapse of talks between Bern and Washington aimed at resolving the wide-ranging investigation of a number of Swiss and other foreign banks, including HSBC, Europe’s largest bank; Julius Baer, a private bank based in Zurich; and Basler Kantonalbank, a Swiss cantonal bank. Robert Katzberg, a white-collar criminal defense lawyer in New York, said the superseding indictment “is clearly the U.S. government’s response to the recent refusal of the Swiss to enter into a global settlement. Unfortunately for the Swiss, the U.S. is holding some really powerful cards.” The fresh indictment said that as of autumn 2008, the bank “maintained thousands of secret accounts for U.S. customers with as much as $3 billion.” One client out of the 35 cited in the superseding indictment took $250,000 to Switzerland by concealing it in panty hose she wrapped around her body underneath her clothes. (Editing by Howard Goller) Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions .

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Rick Perry Has Some Explaining To Do

July 18, 2011

Gov. Rick Perry’s political stock has soared in recent months as he has traveled the country touting a decade of fiscal restraint in Texas under his leadership.

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HuffPost Radio: Both Sides Now: Conservatives Play Defense on Debt Ceiling and Murdoch

July 18, 2011

By Mark Green Democrats had to lick their wounds after the 2010 mid-terms and regroup. With McConnell and Murdoch both seeming to wave their white flags last week, are conservatives sounding a strategic retreat? Were Cantor’s failure and Murdoch’s peripeteia inevitable? (Listen to show below.) * On the debt ceiling debate. We listen to the President tell CBS’s Scott Pelley that if there’s no increase in the debt ceiling, he can’t guarantee that all Social Security checks will be covered. Mary decries this as fear-mongering and politicking, concluding that payments to bondholders, seniors and soldiers would be paid in such a dire situation. The host asks who should the public believe — Bachmann, Hannity and the Tea Party saying this will be no big deal — or Obama, Bernanke, Geithner, Buffet, Wall Street and Moody’s saying the opposite? Ron tauntingly wonders how a political party could be so whiny after calling Obama a socialist and fascist — and thinks that Obama’s bully pulpit and sheer fiscal necessity mean that he will prevail “although it’s unclear whether Eric Cantor and the Tea Party get that.” But Mary and McConnell do. She agrees that Congress can’t do anything that mars our credit rating and McConnell in effect throws in the towel by telling Laura Ingraham that he won’t help reelect a Democratic president and hurt the GOP “brand” by being played the way Clinton outmaneuvered Gingrich. Game, set… *On the fall of the House of Murdoch. We listen to Carl Bernstein equate Murdoch and Nixon because both created a culture of corruption that they could not escape. Is this Murdoch’s Watergate? Mary argues that this is not a left-right issue since both Labour and Tories played up to Rupert. Ron thinks that News Corp is getting its just desserts because his personal experience with a Murdoch tabloid showed “their scummy ways. He thinks he’s a journalist and newsman but he’s not. He just cares about money and power.” Will his and News Corp’s decline continue now that Brooks/Hanson have quit and a criminal investigation has been opened in the U.S. into the possible hacking of 9/11 families’ phones? And how gutsy is Rep. Peter King, who cares about the New York Post and 9/11 families, to attack Murdoch’s “yellow journalism”? Alot depends on whether the hacking of regular people occurred here, concludes Mary. But there’s a consensus that it will be hard to stop the cancer from metastasizing. “They have no friends anymore to prop them up,” says Ms. Matalin; “he was never loved, only feared,” says Mr. Reagan — and now he is neither. *On 2012 — will Perry enter and can Bachmann finish? Mary thinks that Perry has a real opening because the current f-ield hasn’t set the world on fire and because of “his good record on jobs and good skills set – and he can unite various factions of the party.” What about his comment about Texas and secession? “Didn’t we settle this 150 years ago?” wonders Ron, tongue-in-cheek. “He may be this year’s Fred Thompson.” Bachmann too scores well on candidate skills but our panelists sharply disagree on whether she and her husband “hate homosexuals.” Mary questions these “pejorative attacks” while Ron cites Marcus Bachmann’s reference to gays as “barbarians” and their clinic’s promise of “reparative therapy” to convert gays to straight. They agree that the nomination fight and general election will turn on economic issues rather than “family values” but Ron adds, “She’s dishonest. When she’s asked whether their clinic engages in reparative therapy, she won’t say. The answer is — yes they do !” *Quick Takes: Terrorists. Justices. Women Drivers. Betty Ford. The two worry about suicide-bombers who might surgically implant bombs in their bodies, with Ron joking that this could lead either to rubber gloves at airports or the train, while Mary urges more Israeli-like behaviorial profiling. They concur that the Supreme Court should not have made distinctions between violent videos aimed at children (ok) and pornography aimed at children (not ok). They both laugh off a study showing higher rates of woman-on-woman accidents (“maybe you can show a correlation with tall people” Ron muses; maybe the Nanny State could ban female drivers so “men have to run all the errands” wonders Mary). But they agree that Betty Ford had a “humanity” and candor that enabled others to benefit from her example and life. Mark Green is the creator and host of Both Sides Now, which is powered by the American Federation of Teachers. Send all comments to Bothsidesradio.com , where you can also listen to prior shows. Both Sides Now is available Sat. 5-6 PM EST from Lifestyle TalkRadio Network & Sun. 8-9 AM EST from Business RadioTalk Network.

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Want A Good Job? Study Science

July 14, 2011

As a firestorm of debate rages in Congress over economic stability, the Department of Commerce released a report on Wednesday asserting that jobs in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) play “a key role in the sustained growth and stability of the U.S. economy.” Although science and engineering workers represent a relatively small portion of the labor market, the report projected that between 2008 and 2018, science and technology-focused jobs would grow by 17 percent — nearly twice the 9.8 percent rate of growth for other occupations. “One of the real concerns is, how do you create a competitive economy and workforce?” Acting Deputy Secretary of Commerce Rebecca Blank told HuffPost. “We need to create skills that will keep us at the forefront — and this is a group that is crucial for the country’s long term competitiveness and innovation.” Science-based jobs are not only important for future growth, they have also fared well during the current sluggish economy. According to the report, the unemployment rate for science and engineering degree holders was half the national rate. While STEM workers experienced increased unemployment from 2007 to 2009, their jobless rate in 2010 was at 5.3 percent. The unemployment rate for other sectors was nearly 10 percent. “STEM occupations are really good occupations,” Blank said. “It’s important that people get that message.” The report, which analyzed data from the Census Department’s 2009 American Community Survey and the Bureau of Labor’s Current Population Survey , found that there were 7.6 million STEM workers in the U.S., representing 5.5 percent of the national workforce in 2010. Further making the case for the sciences, the report concluded that STEM-educated graduates at any level — whether high school, college and graduate degrees — make 26 percent more money overall than counterparts who have studied in other fields. And this remains true regardless of the fields STEM degree holders ultimately pursue. Even STEM grads who took jobs in fields unrelated to science, technology, engineering and math were able to command higher salaries on average. In some part, the success of graduates who study the sciences is to be expected. Sixty-eight percent of workers in the sciences have a bachelor’s degree or higher, and income rates tend to rise with additional education. The report noted that other factors independent of focusing on the sciences, including race, age and socioeconomic factors, play a role in determining income. Yet when the authors did a controlled for other factors, STEM workers still enjoyed higher wages, although they did diminished to a degree. Echoing President Obama’s recent push for innovation and greater emphasis on science and math education , Mark Doms, a chief economist at the Department of Commerce, told HuffPost that community colleges and technical colleges play a key role in training — and retraining — skilled workers, as well as preparing Americans for the 21st century jobs market. “A Microsoft-trained engineer does not need to go to four year college,” Doms said. But he cautioned the community colleges, which receive funding from state and local governments, are under threat, as states find ways to cope with diminished revenues. “They are firing staff, shutting offices and cutting budgets,” Doms said. Blank, for her part, spoke to the difficulty facing would-be science graduates — even at four year colleges. “[Those institutions] tend to be much smaller, with lower admission rates, compared to liberal arts schools around the country. So you’re constraining the supply of a group you don’t actually want to constrain.” The question, Blank said, is: “How to bring more people in?” “Perhaps we need more schools to serve people of these backgrounds better,” she said. “It’s something the higher education folks need to be debating.”

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Obama Warns Cantor ‘Don’t Call My Bluff’ As Debt Talks Stall

July 14, 2011

WASHINGTON — Lawmakers and the White House had what nearly every party is describing as a “tough” and “testy” meeting on the debt ceiling Wednesday afternoon, culminating in a stormy exchange between the president and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.). It was the fifth straight day of talks, but the first in which attendees, speaking on background, were willing to admit that steps were taken backwards. According to multiple sources, disagreements surfaced early, in the middle and at the end of the nearly two-hour talks. At issue was Cantor’s repeated push to do a short-term resolution and Obama’s insistence that he would not accept one. “Eric don’t call my bluff. I’m going to the American people on this,” the president said, according to both Cantor and another attendee. “This process is confirming what the American people think is the worst about Washington: that everyone is more interested in posturing, political positioning, and protecting their base, than in resolving real problems.” Cantor, speaking to reporters after the meeting, said that the president “abruptly” walked off after offering his scolding. “I know why he lost his temper. He’s frustrated. We’re all frustrated,” the Virginia Republican said. Democratic officials had a different interpretation. “The meeting ended with Cantor being dressed down while sitting in silence,” one official said in an email. “[The president] said Cantor could not have it both ways of insisting on dollar-for-dollar and still not being open to revenues.” Lost in the rush to frame the dramatic conclusion of Wednesday meetings was word of the actual substance of the talks. According to several attendees, negotiations stalled from the onset over the same issues that have proved irresolvable. Working off of talks that had been spearheaded by Vice President Joseph Biden, the president said he would be comfortable signing off on northward of $1.5 trillion in discretionary spending and mandatory spending cuts. With additional negotiations, he added, he could move that figure up to $1.7 trillion, and with a willingness to consider revenue increases and tax loophole closures, he added, lawmakers could get to over $2 trillion. His preference, he said, was to continue to push for the biggest package possible, so long as it was balanced. Cantor, who has taken over the mantel of chief Republican negotiator from Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), responded by insisting that revenues were off the table and that without steeper cuts, the votes likely didn’t exist to pass anything but a smaller, more temporary package. House Republicans needed the administration to go to a higher number, he added. To which the president responded: “It is easy to get to a higher number when you are not asking anything difficult from yourself. ” From there, the friction remained. When the White House pushed for an extension of unemployment insurance as part of the final package, Republicans objected. The White House was forced to explain that it would be off-setting that extension with cuts elsewhere. When the president pushed to lock in savings from cuts to the Department of Defense, Republicans objected again; this time, they were joined by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who urged (conversely) for the president to go further in pulling savings out of the Pentagon. According to a Democratic official, the most contentious debate came when talks turned to discretionary spending, and, specifically, whether to count long-term savings based on current spending baselines or by tying them to inflation. Republicans wanted the former. It was, the official said, a debate over the “measurements of savings as opposed to the savings themselves.” Talks, from there, turned to how to enforce those savings in the long run. Those discussions, which took place between Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and top economic adviser Gene Sperling, were described as cordial compared to the earlier ones. But lawmakers quickly found themselves back on the same sticking point. Unhappy that negotiators remained at $1.7 trillion-or-so in cuts, Cantor pressed again for a shorter deal or for negotiators to find their way to $2.5 trillion. The president, growing more agitated, argued that attendees where simply looking for ways to say no. “Talk about arbitrary,” he said of Cantor’s figure, according to a Democratic attendee. “I am totally willing to do the hard stuff to get well above what you need and you won’t do it because you can’t put one penny of revenue on the table.” “At least Mitch McConnell, to his credit, was willing to work for a solution,” the president added, acknowledging the proposal by the Senate Minority Leader to, essentially, give him the authority to lift the debt ceiling without passing commensurate cuts. “I have reached the point where I say enough,” Obama concluded, according to Reuters . “Would Ronald Reagan be sitting here? I’ve reached my limit. This may bring my presidency down, but I will not yield on this.” Before Obama left the meeting, he gave lawmakers a directive. By Friday, the president said, the people in the room needed to have figured out what path they were going to pursue so that they could start hammering out the details.

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GAO Report On Proprietary Trading Slammed By Senate Dems As ‘Misleading’

July 14, 2011

A new government report on banks’ controversial practice of trading and investing for their own profit was condemned Wednesday by congressional Democrats who called the practice “woefully incomplete” and “misleading,” adding that it failed to reckon with the risks to the broader financial system. The Volcker Rule, which required banks to sell off their operations that engaged in this so-called proprietary trading, was one of the most contentious elements of financial regulatory reform last year. Proponents argued that the rule was necessary to prevent banks from profiting at the expense of their customers and, ultimately, American taxpayers who stepped in when their complex bets on mortgages went bad. Banks complained that the rule would hurt their profits, while at the same time arguing that the extent of such speculation was not big enough to pose a risk to the financial system. The Government Accountability Office was brought in as something of a referee, commissioned to conduct a study to assess the true extent of such trading practices and whether losses in that area can contribute to the instability of financial institutions. The GAO report released Wednesday appeared to give ammunition to Wall Street by concluding that such trading only constitutes a small share of its revenue and, thus, does not present much of a risk to the financial system. Critics, including the primary authors of the provisions that limit such activity, countered that the study was flawed because it failed to grapple with the full extent of banks’ trading. The report could lead to momentum against enforcing the Volcker rule. Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Carl Levin (D-Mich.) sent a strongly worded letter to the GAO, criticizing the auditor for not looking at the full scope of proprietary trading operations. The report was “woefully incomplete,” said the pair because it only collected data from the six largest banks’ stand-alone units, where only a fraction of such trading occurs, rather than from across all bank divisions. In a statement , Merkley and Levin said: The report reminds us of the story of a man who dropped his keys at night and then began looking for them under a nearby parking lot light, not because he dropped them there but because that was where the light was. GAO missed this opportunity to help shine more light on the high-risk gambles that decimated millions of families and businesses and nearly destroyed our financial system. In the report, the GAO admitted that its information was incomplete but explained that it was not possible to collect information across all bank divisions, since banks “did not separately maintain records on such activities.” The senators were also concerned that the report did not explain how proprietary trading losses pose risks to safety and soundness and contribute to major losses in bank capital. “While we are not surprised that, even with its limited review, the GAO concluded that proprietary trading is riskier than other activities, a complete study of proprietary trading would have been of much greater value to policy makers and regulators,” they said. The head of the GAO, Gene L. Dodaro, fired back, writing in a letter to the senators that he believes “this study fully carries out our responsibilities” under the Dodd-Frank requirement. He claimed that the study wasn’t just limited to stand-alone proprietary trading desks but included “activities at market-making desks, activities related to lending and securitization, particularly of mortgage-related assets, and private equity fund and hedge fund investments.” He admitted that the GAO could not collect data outside of the stand-alone desks because the firms have not historically kept separate records of such activities. But Dodaro said that the GAO “mitigated this limitation” by reviewing other documents such as the banks’ public financial disclosures and bankruptcy documents. Dodaro also claimed that the report provided extensive information on the risks from proprietary trading, adding that the GAO’s work will be supplemented by upcoming studies by the Financial Stability Oversight Council and banking regulators. The GAO report, which only focused on these stand-alone trading desks, found that from June 2006 to December 2010, such trading produced an overall loss of $221 million — $15.6 billion in revenue and $15.8 billion in losses. It also warned that the new regulation may be difficult to enforce since it will be challenging to “best ensure that firms do not take prohibited proprietary positions while conducting their permitted customer-trading activities.”

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Marty Zwilling: Every Startup Needs a Reality Check Now and Then

July 13, 2011

Most of the time, I’m all about providing encouragement and inspiration to entrepreneurs. They need it and they deserve it, because entrepreneurs are the lifeblood of our economy. But every so often, I try to give them a reality check, just to keep their feet on the ground and their nose to the grindstone. Many years ago, I enjoyed one of Guy Kawasaki’s first books, ” Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition.” In his classical humorous and cynical style, he could reset your dreaming in a moment. Here is a sampling of ten themes from the book that I think are just as relevant today as they were then: The reality of starting. It’s not going to get better — it already is. Startup folks are like medieval monasteries: always convinced that paradise is just ahead or that things only recently got worse The reality of raising money. The closest real-world analogy to raising money is speed dating. That’s right: In five minutes, people decide if they are interested in you, just as in bars and nightclubs. This isn’t right, and it isn’t fair, but it is reality The reality of planning and executing. If you think raising money was the hard part, you’re in for a surprise. Raising money is easy and fun. The real work begins when you have to deliver the results you promised The reality of innovating. Many people think that innovation is easy: You sit around with your buddies and magical ideas pop into your head. Or your customers tell you what they need. Dream on. Innovation is a hard, messy process with no shortcuts The reality of marketing. Everybody wants to do the fun stuff: shuck and jive with the beautiful people, and create fun marketing campaigns. More accurately, marketing is the process of convincing people that they need your product. That’s not so easy or fun The reality of communicating. Entrepreneurship is an outward-focused activity. It requires that you communicate with others in all the modern modes. Every one is a skill you need to master. All it takes is reading this book and practicing for twenty years The reality of competing. If you don’t compete with anybody for very long, it may mean that you’re trying to serve a market that doesn’t exist. The question of defensibility is one of the toughest for an entrepreneur to answer. A good answer is not to stop moving The reality of hiring and firing. These are black arts for most people. Few people are trained for either, and most depend on their gut. They believe they won’t make hiring mistakes, so will never have to fire anyone. Wrong; and mistakes hurt people and you The reality of working. In the beginning, startups are like a clean sheet of paper: nothing but opportunity and upside with a chance to make meaning and change the world. Then the reality of work sets in. Building a success is hard — damn hard, actually The reality of doing good. At the end of one’s life, you are measured not by how much money you made, but by how much you’ve made the world a better place. Successful entrepreneurs often switch to non-profits and social entrepreneurship for real impact Of course, there is much more, but I think you get the idea. I also hope these themes don’t send a totally negative message, because the book is funny as well as thought provoking. I do believe we all need reality checks to face our challenges head-on, so that we can deal with them and survive, rather than just float along in the clouds until our dreams evaporate.

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Homeland Security Chair Seeks FBI Probe Of News Corp. Hacking

July 13, 2011

WASHINGTON — The powerful Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee is demanding that the FBI investigate Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. over reports his defunct News of the World tried to hack 9/11 victims’ phones . Murdoch recently closed the popular British Sunday tabloid after revelations the paper had hacked into voicemail accounts of crime victims — including erasing the messages of a slain girl. The fallout cost Murdoch a $12 billion bid for British Sky Broadcasting and sparked a major bribery and hacking probe in England. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) called Tuesday for U.S. authorities to look into the privacy invasions after reports the paper tried to bribe a New York City police officer to get access to the phones of 9/11 victims. Now Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) is demanding that FBI Director Robert Mueller open a probe, becoming the most prominent Republican to demand an investigation into the corporate parent of the conservative-leaning Fox News. King wrote to Mueller Wednesday , ripping the actions of Murdoch’s minions. “It is revolting to imagine that members of the media would seek to compromise the integrity of a public official for financial gain in the pursuit of yellow journalism,” King wrote. “The 9/11 families have suffered egregiously, but unfortunately they remain vulnerable against such unjustifiable parasitic strains.” “I make this request not only as the Chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, but as a Member of Congress who represents a district that lost more than 150 constituents in those terrorist attacks,” he wrote. “It is my duty to discern every fact behind these allegations.” Officials at the Department of Justice and the FBI did not immediately answer requests for comment. Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), the top Democrat on the House Rules Committee, also called for investigations and possibly hearings. “These latest allegations demand a swift and immediate inquiry by the appropriate agencies into whether any U.S. laws were broken,” she said. “All available options should be pursued — including investigations by the Department of Justice and Congressional hearings.” Update — 6:40 p.m.: A Justice Department spokeswoman confirmed that a number of requests from lawmakers were under review, but declined to comment further.

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Bernanke Urges Lawmakers Not To ‘Just Cut, Cut, Cut’

July 13, 2011

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke urged American leaders not to cut spending too aggressively in the short term, warning that a sharp and quick response to the federal budget deficit could imperil the already weakening economic expansion. “We really don’t want to just cut, cut, cut,” Bernanke said Wednesday before the House Committee on Financial Services. “You need to be a little bit cautious about sharp cuts in the very near term because of the potential impact on the recovery. That doesn’t at all preclude — in fact, I believe it’s entirely consistent with — a longer-term program that will bring our budget into a sustainable position.” The chairman’s words, unusually strong for a man whose smallest utterances tend to move markets, appeared to undercut the arguments of some Republican lawmakers, who insist strenuous cutting is required to shrink the federal budget deficit. Overly swift reductions in federal spending could actually worsen the nation’s budget imbalance by weakening economic growth and dampening tax revenues, Bernanke suggested. Lawmakers in Washington are consumed by a struggle to reach a quick budget deal. Republicans have tied the debate over raising the debt ceiling to the debate over how to reduce the federal deficit, refusing to increase borrowing authority unless their demands for spending cuts are met. Economists, financiers and taxpayers the world over are watching the deliberations, with the U.S. government’s credit rating potentially at stake. The government will hit the debt ceiling by Aug. 2 if no deal is reached, the Treasury has said. But Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said he wants a deal even sooner , in the next several days. If no deal is struck and the borrowing limit isn’t raised, the government will be forced to abruptly reduce spending. That could mean halting Social Security payments, or pay to the military. And it could mean defaulting on the nation’s debt, an event without precedent in modern history that economists say would likely send interest rates soaring, induce job cuts and plunge the economy back into recession. But Bernanke warned against acting too hastily to reduce the federal deficit, appearing to echo earlier comments in which he said the debt ceiling was the “wrong tool” for repairing the nation’s budget. Spending cuts, if imposed in the short term, can have the unintended effect of hurting revenue by reducing the nation’s taxable income, he suggested. “I just want to be clear that cutting programs or raising taxes in ways that will reduce aggregate demand, spending and the ability of consumers to meet their bills and purchase goods and services is going to slow the economy,” the chairman said. “That’s in turn going to offset some of the benefits of the cuts,” he continued, “because it will reduce revenues and make the deficit worse on the short term.” Federal spending tends to increase demand in the economy by putting more dollars in people’s wallets, economists say. That spending might include tax incentives for businesses to hire workers, or aid for local governments to help fund projects that repair infrastructure and boost employment. Ideally, government spending yields results in excess of the value of the money spent. Higher employment fosters a general sense of confidence and optimism, which encourages more hiring and investment in a virtuous cycle. With the budget deficit widening and the debt running above $14.3 trillion, most lawmakers agree that spending must be reduced. But the timeline for these cuts, and the specific programs that will be affected, are a subject for contentious debate. The economy is hurting, with the unemployment rate at 9.2 percent, gas prices high and home prices continuing a punishing decline. Bernanke underscored these weaknesses in his testimony, arguing that any budget cutting must be handled with care, so as not to shatter the fragile economic recovery. Still, some lawmakers insist on immediate action. That view was summed up by Rep. Sean Duffy (R-Wis.), who questioned Bernanke during the hearing. “Maybe this is a rhetorical question, but if we’re not going to cut now, I mean, when?” Duffy asked. “At what point is there going to be political courage to get the debt under control if we can’t do it today?” Bernanke resisted wading into a political debate. But on the debt ceiling issue, a case in which a political fight risks inflicting real economic damage, he was firm: The limit must be raised on time. “The right analogy for not raising the debt limit is going out and having a spending spree on your credit card, and then refusing to pay the bill,” he said. “We saw what happened in 2008, 2009, where we had two consecutive quarters of 6 percent negative growth in the economy. I think something on that order of magnitude would be certainly conceivable.”

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Green Jobs Can Bring Home Bigger Paychecks, Report Finds

July 13, 2011

Unemployment remains high. Fossil fuels are under increased scrutiny. Governments are looking to cut costs. These underwhelming realities have shifted America’s attention toward the employment potential of the green community. As local areas continue to ramp up their efforts to save energy, more metrics are becoming available on the people behind those initiatives. The Brookings Institute released a study on Wednesday, profiling a multitude of national and regional trends within the United States’ green workforce. Entitled “Sizing the Clean Economy,” the study found that 2.7 million workers hold professions that qualify as “clean.” Outside of that national figure, Brookings’ Metropolitan Policy Program dove into the local scene. The report compiles statistics for several metro areas, looking at factors such as the quantity of clean jobs, the growth rate at which cities are adding clean jobs, and the wages for employees holding those positions. Leading the way in terms of overall clean economy size was New York, with 152,034 green jobs. Newsday notes that the largest slice of that green pie was transportation, which accounted for nearly 40 percent of those employment positions. In cities like Denver, green jobs are bringing home bigger paychecks . Workers in clean-energy posts within the Mile High City are netting $47,602 in annual pay, which is almost $4,000 more than the medium wage for others working in Colorado’s capital. While the Brookings report notes that the green economy “remains an enigma,” these figures stand to be boosted by the Environmental Protection Agency’s new financial backing of green jobs. EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson introduced that vision on Tuesday , which includes $6.2 million in development and training grants.

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Paul Tullis: What’s the Real Relationship Between Taxes and Jobs?

July 13, 2011

Yesterday I looked at the Republicans’ claim that tax hikes boost economic growth, and tax cuts hinder it. By looking at the actual data, it’s clear that any correlation or causation is spurious at best. Today we’ll look at another Republican talking point in the debate over the federal budget: that tax cuts destroy jobs and tax cuts create jobs . Let’s go to the charts: As you can see, after Ronald Reagan cut taxes in 1981, US non-farm (farms are highly volatile, due to the seasonality of agriculture, and so are excluded when looking at employment trends) payrolls fell every month for about the next year and a half. After he raised taxes — in 1982, 1983, and 1987 — job growth was mostly positive. It’s true that employment is a lagging indicator, meaning it picks up after companies are already earning more, so it could be argued that the 1981 tax increase was responsible for the job growth in late 1983 and beyond. But if you want to argue that, you’d also have to accept that tax increases also resulted in job growth. Take a look at the record of Bush41 and Clinton: Job losses slowed, and job gains hastened, following tax increases. There were also periods of slack growth and loss, so it’s tough to argue for causality in either direction. It’s possible that, with other policies and factors external to government action, the increases or decreases in taxes were a factor, but from Republican claims you’d think there’d be a sharp drop after each of the arrows in this chart. I’m not going to make another chart for Bush43; his appalling record should be fresh enough in our memories that we don’t need to look to know that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts he enacted, which Republicans specifically claimed were intended to motivate hiring — the 2003 tax cut was titled “The Jobs and Growth Tax Relief and Reconciliation Act” — did no such thing. Moreover, Bush43′s tax cuts were targeted toward the wealthy, the excuse being that it’s rich people who do the hiring (which doesn’t quite mesh with claims that small businesses create 2/3 of the jobs, since small business owners’ income is their companies’ profit, not revenue — but never mind). What’s the effect of tax cuts for the rich on job creation? The Congressional Budget Office says little to none. What would help boost the economy? CBO Director Doug Elmendorf says , “A temporary increase in aid to the unemployed would have the largest effect on the economy per dollar of budgetary cost.”

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Josh Sawislak: Are We Farmers, Factory Workers or Ideas People?

July 13, 2011

When I started writing this blog last year, a friend asked me what I was going to say. Of course, I told her I was planning to write about telework. “You know, working from home or someplace other than your office,” I said. It’s becoming a big deal in the government, and lots of private companies are already on-board, I told her. She gave me that smile that friends give when they are happy that you are happy, but they don’t really understand why anyone would pay for whatever it is you are buying or selling. “No, really,” I said, “this is big.” I’m beginning to think I was right, and even my friend is coming around. Why, you say? On the government side, it’s clear that some recent legislation, the Telework Enhancement Act of 2010, had a huge impact on the visibility of telework, but I don’t believe that is the only reason. On the private side, the financial crisis and global economy made finding cost savings ( e.g. , reducing real estate) a major corporate goal, but I don’t think that was the only driver. Both government and corporate organizations are interested in sustainability, retention and recruitment and business continuity, but even so, why have we reached a tipping point on this issue? My theory is that the telework discussion has become a surrogate for a broader conversation on the very nature of work. How we manage knowledge workers is (or should be) very different from how we have done so over the past 200-plus years. When this nation was founded, we were mostly farmers, and family farmers at that. Almost everyone “worked from home,” but it meant something different than it does today. Your boss was your dad, and a conversation about your performance went something like, “Is the far field plowed yet, Son?” As we moved from farming to factory work, we changed where we work and also how we managed that work. We developed the separate concepts of management and labor and their respective roles (on the family farm everyone is labor). Management supervises and leads the workforce to produce better, cheaper and more of whatever it is that we make. Everyone came to the factory to work, and it was easy to measure productivity (quantity of goods – defective goods / time). But today, we don’t make “stuff” much anymore in the U.S.; we make ideas. Our standard of living has grown past the point where anyone other than us would pay the cost of our goods, and even we don’t want to pay that much for most things. This is not necessarily a bad thing (I will leave that discussion to other bloggers), but the simple point is that we are now service workers and knowledge workers. Service workers are a little easier to figure out. If the customer likes the service and the worker is generally efficient, he or she is doing a good job (number of customers – unhappy customers / time). So this is where the wheels come off the bus. How do you measure the effectiveness of knowledge workers? You can build metrics around outcomes, but that requires us to have very good communication between workers and managers. Workers need to understand the goal of the effort and how they fit into that goal. They have to trust their coworkers and managers and get recognized for their contribution to the whole project, even if it’s the idea that started the ball rolling. The good news is that these are things we ought to be talking about and doing no matter where your employees sit. When work is thought of as counting widgets as opposed to creating ideas and finding solutions, we are back in the factory or maybe even the farm. Because telework forces us to break the mold on normal workplace behaviors and norms, it’s a great surrogate for having the broader discussion on the nature of work. We have lost the battle on manufacturing to China and others. We can keep trying to win a game we lost, or start playing the game we know how to win. I am hoping for the latter and believe that discussing the nature of work is a good way to get in the right mindset for success. I am very interested in your feedback on this theory (hint, hint, I want you to comment). Email me at jsawislak@teleworkexchange.com , or check out my blog at TeleworkExchange.com .

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Hedge Fund Manager Pays Back Trading Violation With Penalty

July 8, 2011

BOSTON – Former hedge fund manager Forrest Fontana, who once worked for industry titan Steven A. Cohen’s SAC Capital Advisors, will pay nearly $1 million to resolve claims that he violated a short-selling rule, the Securities and Exchange Commission said on Friday. Financial regulators charged that Fontana, whose Boston-based Fontana Capital LLC traded mostly in financial stocks, helped his investors earn unlawful profits of about $816,184 by having participated in public offerings after having shorted the same securities. According to the government Fontana violated Rule 105 of Regulation M, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said in an order imposing sanctions and a cease and desist order. Fontana broke the rule on three occasions between July 2008 through November 2008 with trades on XL Group PLC, Merrill Lynch, and Wells Fargo, the SEC said. He will now pay a disgorgement of $816,184, prejudgment interest of $3,606 and a civil penalty of $165,000 to the United States Treasury, the SEC said. Fontana’s lawyer was not immediately available for comment. The SEC has brought a number of these types of cases in the last months and only last week settled a similar matter with hedge fund Level Global, which has been embroiled in the government’s insider trading case. Fontana launched his own business in Boston in 2005 with $50 million in start-up capital from his former SAC boss, Cohen, and quickly generated buzz in the local investment community. But by 2010, he was effectively out of business, managing no funds for clients and concentrating on his work as one of five selectmen in the town of Winchester, north of Boston. (Reporting by Svea Herbst-Bayliss) Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions .

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Brokerage Loses CDs Holding Personal Info Of 34,000 Clients

July 7, 2011

Brokerage Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, a joint venture between Morgan Stanley and Citigroup, said personal information of 34,000 investment clients stored on two CDs was lost in transit to a government office last month, the Wall Street Journal reported citing a company spokesman. The CDs were protected by passwords but not encrypted and went missing after the company mailed them to the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, the Journal reported on its website. The package appeared to be intact when it reached the department but the discs were gone by the time the package reached the intended recipient, the Journal cited the spokesman as saying. The information on the CDs included client names, addresses, account and tax identification numbers, the income earned on the investments in 2010 and some clients’ Social Security numbers, the Journal reported. The state office told the company about the missing CDs on June 8th and the company informed clients of the lost CDs in a letter mailed June 24. The brokerage has not seen evidence of criminal intent or misuse of information and will offer a year of credit monitoring services by a third party for clients whose Social Security numbers were on the discs, the Journal reported. Morgan Stanley Smith Barney could not be immediately reached for comment. (Reporting by Abhishek Takle in Bangalore; Editing by Bernard Orr) Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions .

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