Government – Page 96 – artdiamondblog.com

Fannie Mae Execs “Resorted to Ad Hominem Attacks” When They Vilified the “Economic Pencil Brains”

Source of book image: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited below.

(p. C6) Although the financial crisis of 2008 has left a long trail of casualties, one group has benefited from the cataclysm: financial journalists. Several have already published books shedding light on the unprecedented events that caused investment banks to fail, global stock markets to plummet and borrowers to lose their homes. “Reckless Endangerment,” by Gretchen Morgenson, assistant business and financial editor and a columnist at The New York Times, and the financial analyst Joshua Rosner, is a worthy addition to the genre.
. . .
The book begins in 1994 with President Bill Clinton’s kicking off a public-private partnership to extend homeownership to more Americans. . . .
. . .
. . . the institution to which the authors devote the most ink is Fannie Mae, the government-supported enterprise created in 1938 to make home loans more accessible. And the person they hold most accountable is someone whose role in the “mortgage maelstrom” has until now “escaped scrutiny”: James A. Johnson, Fannie Mae’s chief executive from 1991 to 1998. Mr. Johnson was the “anonymous architect of the public-private homeownership drive that almost destroyed the economy in 2008,” the authors assert. “He was especially adept at manipulating lawmakers, eviscerating regulators and leaving taxpayers with the bill.”
The description of Mr. Johnson’s role is damning — and although the account lacks his perspective, it is thoroughly supported through scores of interviews with academics, government officials and industry executives, some of whom are granted anonymity. While Mr. Johnson didn’t respond to interview requests over five months, according to the authors, they overcome this obstacle with impressive use of public records and secondary sources, carefully attributed in the text or described in a two-page “Notes on Sources.”
. . .
A particular strength of this book is the number of doubters the authors unearthed: the unsung government analysts, public lawyers and private researchers who dared to question policy decisions and stand up to the formidable “housers,” as the true believers in government subsidies for home ownership are called.
The reader has a sickening sense of missed opportunity as these prophets are ignored or, worse, vilified, by those in a position to halt the mania. When a Congressional Budget Office researcher in 1995 reveals the multibillion-dollar extent of the government’s subsidy to Fannie Mae and its brother institution, Freddie Mac (and that one-third of these benefits never reached borrowers), he suggests that “Congress may want to revisit the special relationship.” Unable to assail the merits of his analysis, outraged Fannie Mae executives resorted to ad hominem attacks, calling budget office officials “digit-heads” and “economic pencil brains.”

For the full review, see:
PAM LUECKE. “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Nation Goes on Its Merry Way to Ruin.” The New York Times (Tues., June 28, 2011): C6.
(Note: the online version of the review was dated June 27, 2011.)
(Note: ellipses added.)

Book being reviewed:
Morgenson, Gretchen, and Joshua Rosner. Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon. New York: Times Books, 2011.

Findings “Strongly Suggest” Cholera in Haiti Due to United Nations

(p. 5A) PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — Scientists have presented the strongest evidence yet that U.N. peacekeepers imported the cholera strain that has killed more than 5,500 people in Haiti.
A report published in the July issue of the Emerging Infectious Diseases journal says research findings “strongly suggest” that the U.N. contingent from Nepal contaminated a Haitian river because of poor sanitation at a base. Author Renaud Piarroux had previously blamed peacekeepers. This study is more complete and its methodology was reviewed by other scientists.

Source:
AP. “U.N. may have brought cholera strain to Haiti.” Omaha World-Herald (Thursday, June 30, 2011): 5A.

Technology as an Enabler of Free Speech

“Volunteers have built a wireless Internet around Jalalabad, Afghanistan, from off-the-shelf electronics and ordinary materials.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

The main point of the passages quoted below is to illustrate how, with the right technology, we can dance around tyrants in order to enable human freedom.
(But as a minor aside, note in the large, top-of-front-page photo above, that Apple once again is visibly the instrument of human betterment—somewhere, before turning to his next challenge, one imagines a fleeting smile on the face of entrepreneur Steve Jobs.)

(p. 1) The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.

The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”
Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.

For the full story, see:
JAMES GLANZ and JOHN MARKOFF. “U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., June 12, 2011): 1 & 8.

Source of graphic: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Bricks-and-Mortar Restaurants Use Police (Instead of Better Food) to Beat Food Trucks

“Kim Ima and Kenny Lao parked their food trucks on Front Street in Dumbo.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D4) FOOD trucks, those rolling symbols of New York City’s infatuation with haute casual food, are suddenly being chased from Midtown Manhattan. In the last 10 days, the Treats Truck, which has sold cookies and brownies for four years during lunchtime at West 45th Street near Avenue of the Americas, has been told by police officers that it is no longer welcome there, nor at its late-afternoon 38th Street and Fifth Avenue location. The Rickshaw Dumpling truck, a presence for three years at West 45th Street near the Treats Truck, has been shooed away as well.

The police “have told us they no longer want food trucks in Midtown,” said Kim Ima, the owner of the Treats Truck, a pioneer of the city’s new-wave food-truck movement, who began cultivating customers on West 45th Street in 2007.
. . .
Mr. Lao and other food-truck operators said they suspect that the police are responding to complaints by brick-and-mortar businesses that resent competition. Such was the case last year, when store merchants on the Upper East Side complained about Patty’s Taco Truck, which sold tortas, tacos de lengua and cemitas on Lexington Avenue. The truck was towed several times and the operator arrested, prompting the Street Vendor Project, an advocate for vendors based at the Urban Justice Center, to file the lawsuit that resulted in Judge Wright’s ruling, which said food is merchandise that can be regulated.

For the full story, see:
GLENN COLLINS. “Food Trucks Shooed From Midtown.” The New York Times (Weds., June 29, 2011): D4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated June 28, 2011.)

$130,000 Federal Stimulus Used by Omaha Public Schools for Manual Attacking American Institutions

(p. 1A) The Omaha Public Schools used more than $130,000 in federal stimulus dollars to buy each teacher, administrator and staff member a manual on how to become more culturally sensitive.
The book by Virginia education consultants could raise some eyebrows with its viewpoints.
The authors assert that American government and institutions create advantages that “channel wealth and power to white people,” that color-blindness will not end racism and that educators should “take action for social justice.”
The book says that teachers should acknowledge historical systemic oppression in schools, including racism, sexism, homophobia and “ableism,” defined by the authors as discrimination or prejudice against people with disabilities.
The authors argue that public school teachers must raise their cultural awareness to better serve minority students and improve academic achievement.

For the full story, see:
Joe Dejka. “OPS Says It Won’t Go totally by the Book.” Omaha World-Herald (Sunday, July 10, 2011): 1A & 2A.
(Note: the online version of the article has the title “OPS buys 8,000 diversity manuals.”)

Feds Protect Us from “Older Tasty Tomato Varieties”

(p. C3) Historically, when a farmer has learned to grow a tasty variety, that farmer has actually been scorned and prevented from shipping it.

“Regulations actually prohibit growers in the southern part of Florida from exporting many of the older tasty tomato varieties because their coloration and shape don’t conform to what the all-powerful Florida Tomato Committee says a tomato should look like,” Mr. Estabrook writes.

For the full review, see:
DWIGHT GARNER. “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; That Perfect Florida Tomato, Cultivated for Bland Uniformity.” The New York Times (Weds., July 6, 2011): C3.
(Note: the online version of the review is dated July 5, 2011.)

The web site of the Florida Tomato Committee describes its Federal mandate:

The Florida Tomato Committee is a Federal Marketing Order that was established pursuant to Federal Marketing Agreement and Order No. 966 as amended regulating the handling of tomatoes and has authority over the tomatoes grown in Florida’s production area comprising the counties of Pinellas, Hillsborough, Polk, Osceola, Brevard and all counties situated south. It affects tomatoes that are shipped outside the regulated area, which includes that portion of the state of Florida situated east of the Suwanee River and south of the Georgia border.

The Committee funds research and development projects and marketing promotions that focus on maximizing Florida tomato movement, including consumer and marketing research and customized marketing programs.

Florida Tomatoes … quality you can trust. Each Florida field-grown tomato shipped out of Florida is regulated by a Federal Marketing Order that controls grade, size, quality and maturity. The standards are the toughest in the world and ensure that Florida tomatoes are the best you can buy.

Source:
http://www.floridatomatoes.org/AboutUs.aspx
(Note: ellipsis in original.)

The book under review is:
Estabrook, Barry. Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit. Kansas City, Missouri: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2011.

Katrina Was Less a Natural Disaster, and More an Artificial One Caused by Government

“Harry Shearer in the documentary “The Big Uneasy.”” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B6) . . . Mr. Shearer is serious about his reasons for adding to a Katrina genre that includes two documentaries by Spike Lee (“When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts” and “If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise”), another about custody battles over pets lost in the storm (“Mine”), and Werner Herzog’s reinterpretation of “Bad Lieutenant” (“Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans”).

“What they are missing is why it happened, why people suffered,” said Mr. Shearer, who spoke last week from his home in New Orleans.
At one-day screenings in about 160 theaters around the country on Monday, “The Big Uneasy” will fill in the blanks with a feature-length description of what it sees as failings by the Army Corps of Engineers and others.
Mr. Shearer said he was inspired to make the film last year, after hearing President Obama refer to the hurricane as a “natural disaster.” Mr. Shearer argues there was nothing natural about the breakdown of systems that were supposed to protect the city.

For the full story, see:
MICHAEL CIEPLY. “Katrina Film Takes Aim at Army Corps of Engineers.” The New York Times (Mon., August 30, 2010): B6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated August 29, 2010.)

Italian “Legal System Barely Functions”

(p. B4) The Italy that Mr. Severgnini describes seethes with frustration. Government works poorly. The legal system barely functions. Too many Italians are crowded into too little space. Fear of failure stymies innovation. Mr. Severgnini is dismayed at the national genius for enjoyment and the Italian inability to plan for the future. “Our sun is setting in installments,” he writes. “It’s festive and flamboyant, but it’s still a sunset.”

For the full review, see:
WILLIAM GRIMES. “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; An Insider Explains Italy, Land of Cheery Dysfunction.” The New York Times (Weds., August 23, 2006): B1 & B4.

Book under review:
Severgnini, Beppe. La Bella Figura; a Field Guide to the Italian Mind. Translated by Giles Watson. pb ed. New York: Broadway Books, 2006.

“A Tax on Air and Light”

(p. 11) Paxton was very lucky in his timing, for just at the moment of the Great Exhibition glass suddenly became available in a way it never had before. Glass had always been a tricky material. It was not particularly easy to make, and really hard to make well, which is why for so much of its history it was a luxury Item. Happily, two recent technological breakthroughs had changed that. First, the French invented plate glass–so called because the molten glass was spread across tables known as plates. This allowed for the first time the creation of really large panes of glass, which made shop windows possible. Plate glass, however, had to be cooled for ten days after being rolled out, which meant that each table was unproductively occupied most of the time, and then each sheet required a lot of grinding and polishing. This naturally made it expensive. In 1838, a cheaper refinement was developed–sheet glass. This had most of the virtues of plate glass, but ¡t cooled faster and needed less polishing, and so could be made much more cheaply. Suddenly glass of a good size could be produced economically In limitless volumes.

Allied with this was the timely abolition of two long-standing taxes: the window tax and glass tax (which, strictly speaking, was an excise duty). The window tax dated from 1696 and was sufficiently punishing that (p. 12) people really did avoid putting windows in buildings where they could. The bricked-up window openings that are such a feature of man period
buildings in Britain today were once usually painted to look like windows. (It Is sometimes rather a shame that they aren’t still.) The tax, sorely resented as “a tax on air and light,” meant that many servants and others of constrained means were condemned to live In airless rooms.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

Some New York Public School Teachers Still Well Paid to Do Busy Work

(p. A1) For her first assignment of the school year, Verona Gill, a $100,000-a-year special education teacher whom the city is trying to fire, sat around education offices in Lower Manhattan for two weeks, waiting to be told what to do.

For her second assignment, she was sent to a district office in the Bronx and told to hand out language exams to anyone who came to pick them up. Few did.

Now, Ms. Gill reports to a cubicle in Downtown Brooklyn with a broken computer and waits for it to be fixed. Periodically, her supervisor comes by to tell her she is still working on the problem. It has been this way since Oct. 8.

“I have no projects to do, so I sit there until 2:50 p.m. — that’s six hours and 50 minutes,” the official length of the teacher workday, she said. “And then I swipe out.”

When Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg closed the notorious reassignment centers known as rubber rooms this year, he and the city’s teachers’ union announced triumphantly that one of the most obvious sources of (p. A3) waste in the school system — $30 million a year in salaries being paid to educators caught up in the glacial legal process required to fire them — was no more.

No longer would hundreds of teachers accused of wrongdoing or incompetence, like Ms. Gill, clock in and out of trailers or windowless rooms for years, doing nothing more than snoozing or reading newspapers, griping or teaching one another tai chi. Instead, their cases would be sped up, and in the meantime they would be put to work.

While hundreds of teachers have had their cases resolved, for many of those still waiting, the definition of “work” has turned out to be a loose one. Some are now doing basic tasks, like light filing, paper-clipping, tracking down student information on a computer or using 25-foot tape measures to determine the dimensions of entire school buildings. Others sit without work in unadorned cubicles or at out-of-the-way conference tables.

For the full story, see:
SHARON OTTERMAN. “For New York, Teachers Still in Idle Limbo.” The New York Times (Weds., December 8, 2010): A1 & A3.
(Note: the online version of the commentary is dated December 7, 2010 and has the title “New York Teachers Still in Idle Limbo.”)

Moral: In a Crisis You Need Resilience and the Ability to Improvise More than You Need Detailed Advance Plans

(p. D1) When the Three Mile Island nuclear generating station along the Susquehanna River seemed on the verge of a full meltdown in March 1979, Gov. Richard L. Thornburgh of Pennsylvania asked a trusted aide to make sure that the evacuation plans for the surrounding counties would work.

The aide came back ashen faced. Dauphin County, on the eastern shore of the river, planned to send its populace west to safety over the Harvey Taylor Bridge.

“All well and good,” Mr. Thornburgh said in a recent speech, “except for the fact that Cumberland County on the west shore of the river had adopted an evacuation plan that would funnel all exiting traffic eastbound over — you guessed it — the same Harvey Taylor Bridge.”

. . .
(p. D4) Brian Wolshon, the director of the Gulf Coast Center for Evacuation and Transportation Resiliency, said that he was analyzing one county’s emergency plans that seemed to have every detail covered.

“It was a wonderful report, with plans to move senior citizens out of care facilities and even out of hospitals, and they had signed contracts with bus and ambulance providers,” said Dr. Wolshon, who is also a professor at Louisiana State University. “But that same low-cost provider had the same contract with the county next door, and they had the capacity to evacuate only one of these counties.”

For the full story, see:
GARDINER HARRIS. “Dangers of Leaving No Resident Behind.” The New York Times (Tues., March 22, 2011): D1 & D4.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated March 21, 2011.)