AIG: a new way to spell ripoff?

AIG says that it was contractually bound to give large “bonuses” to a few select salaried employees out of government bailout money. While these are apparently not bonuses as most people think of them, i.e., rewards for doing things exceptionally well, it still seems unconscionable for AIG to make these payments with tax money, especially considering that they likely could have never made the payments any other way.

But contracts for basic pay [never mind bonuses] with many wage employees are overlooked all the time. Wilson Foods started this modern era of using bankruptcy and Hormel used those ensuing pay reductions to start its 1980s war with their employees even though they were not losing money. Recently Northwest Airlines has used similar tactics to abrogate some of its contracts.

Go figure!

If money is a reflection of our values, we need to get a better mirror

Maybe I do not have enough perspective since I just did my jury service this week [probably more on that later], but the announcement in this morning’s paper that we are going to slash juror pay in Minnesota in half starting in August really riles me.

Jury duty is a form of conscription. Like the draft, it is not administered fairly. And like military pay during the days of the draft, the compensation sucks.

This slashing of pay just makes things worse.

We all want to keep our society functioning democratically and fairly. Yet we seem to treat with contempt some of those folks who are especially necessary to keep things going.

We operate our society with minimum wage election judges and poor per diem jurors and while we may have a professional military now, we still treat our veterans like charity cases [which we indeed make many of them become].

Let’s keep that in mind when we vote in September or October or the next time we read of what we think is an errant jury.

It’s Alive

Well, it was a ray of hope. Pawlenty’s veto on train funding had given a ray of hope, one of the few rays of hope possible while he is governor.

Unfortunately, the train is alive again. There are still hurdles to jump, but it’s still alive.

And just to make things worth, keep this in mind: Our local politicos had to give him something in exchange. We may never be sure what it was, but it seems almost certain that it would have had to have been something better. It could hardly have been something worse.

Another Voice on Central Corridor

Sometimes as this "Central Corridor" has moved on towards its seemingly inevitable and certainly destructive end, I have felt like the only person concerned with the “little person” on University Avenue, the only one who was thinking on the right track about light rail on that street. Even Governor Pawlenty's veto [referred to in Grounds for Hope on Central Corridor? 4/7/08] seemed to be only a minor impediment.

I just read an article by kitkat on mnblue which helps make some of that sense of loneliness evaporate.

I don’t want to get too carried away with agreement. Kitkat seems to be a believer in transit which I still believe a tool of economic segregation [Cf. Transit and Taxes, 12/7/07] but he/she does see the injustices of the University Avenue proposal and points out its anti-progressive nature.

Kitkat notes that business ownership is one of the few means through which poor people can accumulate wealth and that University Avenue provides three things which can lead to profits for people who don’t have wealth to start out with – high traffic, affordable rent, and frequent public transit which comes within a block of the business.

Bringing through a train which stops at one-mile intervals and cutting busses back to half-hour intervals would damage those business not near the stations severely and make rents or purchase prices near the stops prohibitive, kitkat notes.

Making the neighboring businesses and residents suffer for some planner’s idea of progress still does not seem fair. As I noted in another December post, [Moving the Train, 12/16/07]

It beats me how a train that doesn’t stop and pick up people can have more riders than one which does, but leave the wonks [who, of course won’t be riding the thing themselves or trying to run businesses on University Avenue, or sleep in a house on Sherburne or Aurora] to come up with some kind of explanation.

Kitkat has put more work actual footwork into this matter than I have and seems to have reached similar conclusions on this particular project and I commend his/her post [which will be seen by a lot more people than the dozen or so who look here] to your attention.

Norm Coleman disappointed by Central Corridor veto, Pawlenty backpedaling?

Please make no mistake. I did not approve of Pawlenty’s massive, wholesale quantity, hostile anti-urban line item vetoes made so vindictively Monday. The man is evil and an enemy of the city! [Actually, it is not my role to proclaim him any more evil than we all are, but he brings about evil deeds. And he may not be any more an enemy of the city than other suburbanites, but he is in a position to make this more manifest.]

I did note the veto of Central Corridor rail funding and quoted Representative Hausman as saying that the veto had single-handily killed the boondoggle [mournful for her, joyful for those of us who have been trying to save our city and University Avenue].

Although, I had suggested that there might be hyperbole involved, it was a time for hope. Sometimes even bad people can do good things for bad reasons.

Today we learn in an AP story carried by the DPP that Norm is not happy about this veto of a boondoggle he has supported for 20 years, but the official gubernatorial spokesperson Brian McClung says that Pawlenty still has the “utmost respect” for our senior Senator.

And it reports that on his radio show this morning that Pawlenty said about the project, “It may come back, we'll see,"

Somehow, it just won’t die.

Grounds for Hope on Central Corridor?

Governor Pawlenty has vetoed $70,000,000 for Central Corridor funding,

Representative Alice Hausman is quoted as saying,

"In my opinion the governor single-handedly killed the central corridor,"

[from Minnesota Daily:]


I don’t know enough to know if this will actually kill the train or not. There may be some hyperbole here or it may be just that somehow this will go through anyway with costs being shifted to local taxpayers.

But we can hope.

It would be overly simple to note that His Excellency is from Eagan and that people who live in Eagan and other suburbs live in those places because they are the enemies of city people and that Governor Plenty’s dislike of us combined with the absence of any Republicans in our city’s legislative delegation does not make it the easiest to obtain any funding for our interests, so I will likely be putting more up about the governor’s line-item vetoes announced today most of the news does sound like bad news to city people, but I want to examine things more first.

Westover: The Vandals have sacked Rome

I’ve railed about transit before and continue to be amazed at how the phony ideas behind it seem to have been elevated to some kind of generally accepted, almost Biblical truth.

I comment Craig Westover’s column in today’s DPP to everybody’s attention.

I have excerpted the last paragraph as a teaser:

[C]urrent transit planning is not being done for the benefit of the public. The transportation policy being railroaded through the Legislature is about convenience for the well-connected and a legacy for the legislative elite for which everyone else pays. It's cool. The current dust-up among the Met Council, the Legislature and the counties is just more of the $6.6 billion entertainment value of the "historic" transportation bill, which is the best most of us can hope for.

In combination with Dave Orrick’s article on the front page of the Local section [“Draft of a Dream”] about how the manipulators hope to redesign University Avenue with little concern for what happens to the present residents and business people along the Avenue, we all ought to be just a tad scared. [WARNING: Open House tomorrow, 10 am to 1 pm. 1080 University, aka the Old Library]

Previous posts:

http://ccmusings.blogspot.com/2008/03/county-now-deeper-in-transit-ripoff.html [3/26/08]
http://ccmusings.blogspot.com/2007/12/moving-train.html [12/16/07]
http://ccmusings.blogspot.com/2007/12/big-lake-ripoff.html [12/13/07]
http://ccmusings.blogspot.com/2007/12/transit-and-taxes.html [12/7/08]

County Now Deeper in Transit Ripoff

Although, transit continues to be as phony as a smile in Williams’ Arena in March, our County Commissioners today decided to make us pay a sales tax to fund it. And the proceeds from this theft cannot be used for busses, only for trains.

This action was made possible by the legislature in the veto-overidden Transportation bill from earlier this year's session. [To avoid giving His Excellency the Governor too much credit, it seems highly unlikely that this tax was the reason for the veto.]

In relative silence and without a public hearing, six commissioners [including all who represent the Capitol City] signed on to this new ripoff.

Note: Earlier posts mentioning transit can be found by clicking on the label “transit” on the right. The first one “Transit and Taxes” [12/7/07] is probably the most oriented to the theories supporting transit.

Sales tax is mentioned in Pawlenty and LeVander: Republican Governors and Sales Tax [3/7/08]

Mike Ciresi and Norm Coleman, some observations

Midway Barb left a comment to my post ["Ciresi Out” 3/10/08] ago to which I have responded.

It occurs to me that perhaps the whole matter really merits being a post of its own, so I am excerpting her [or his] question and my reply here.

Midway Barb said

Isn't it true that your dislike of Ciresi comes from his role in the tobacco suit? If he had saved us from some other community nusance wouldn't you like him?

This is my response:

I think that Mr. Ciresi’s opportunistic exploitation of the cigarette industry is not the reason I could never support him for anything.

And it would not be because he is a trial lawyer. A lot of lawyers do good things and working on contingency is often the only way some litigation could be brought about.

Poor people or people of moderate means often hire attorneys on contingency when they have wrongs that need addressing. On big successful cases the attorneys make a real bundle, but it is often the only way that poor folks have access to the court system for redress for real wrongs.

But if I am to choose between Ciresi and Norm, there really isn’t much choice. One is a lawyer who used his profession to make a lot of money which should have belonged to either the stockholders of the tobacco companies or the taxpayers of Minnesota, depending on how you view the merits of the case. Norm worked for a salary for the attorney general’s office.

Politicians often try to scare people into helping their careers by citing bogus enemies or crises. [Remember W on Saddam or JFK on the missile crisis?] When Skippy wanted to find a bogus enemy to propel him to the governorship and decided to sue tobacco for wrongs to the citizens of Minnesota, wrongs more detectable from intuition than from any fact that the companies had forced smoke into people’s bodies, he wanted to make a real big splash and get money in ten or eleven digits. He needed to find a way to make billions in punitive damages. He doubted if any of the lawyers in his office could do the job, so he made a deal with Ciresi and his Robbins law firm. He and Ciresi hoped that if they could sue for enough money and tie up the tobacco companies’ law departments long enough that they could pick up a small fortune. Skippy really wasn’t concerned about how much money Ciresi got as long as he could get big headlines about billions scared out of what they called “Big Tobacco.” They had no problem ignoring the inconvenience to the taxpayers paying for the suit or needing the real attention of the Ramsey County courts and the poor people conscripted to be on the jury, pushed their dubious case. Ciresi knew the contingency business and must have liked his chances and Skippy likely was figuring that it was now or never for his gubernatorial dreams so it was time to take the shot.

When tobacco finally surrendered, Ciresi was allowed to walk away with a very big chunk thanks to a wonderful contract he and Skippy had arranged beforehand which sent money the plaintiff [supposedly us] would receive straight to the Robbins firm instead of to the legislature. Other money was diverted to a state foundation instead of the body our constitution charges with deciding how to spend state assets.

I don’t doubt that this was all done legally and I don’t doubt that this was all done ethically when viewed in the narrow perspective of legal ethics [often a lovely oxymoron]. After all, it was written by smart lawyers, at least on Robbins’ end. But it stunk and it still stinks.

Norm Coleman also worked as a lawyer for the state and he prosecuted some really provable enemies of Minnesota while doing so. But Norm only took his salary, which may have been generous, but was never more than the low six figures, if that high.

When Norm has run for office he has had to do it the old-fashioned way by begging contributors for donations. State service had not given him millions in his own private vaults.

While I think that neither way of funding a campaign is the best, Norm’s is surely the better. It is one that you don’t have to be a lawyer to use.

And between the two of them, there would have been no problem for me in deciding whom to support. And I would like to think that I would have taken the same position, no matter what imaginary enemy Ciresi and Skippy had taken on.

With Franken it will be different.

RS

Do we really want to share Governor Plenty with the nation?

Aren’t we glad we have Tim? Are we really sure that we want to share him with the nation?

His Excellency, Timothy Pawlenty, Governor of the once-Great State of Minnesota, has always been against new taxes. [Increased fees are a different thing. Ask anybody who has been tagged for a seat belt violation or tried to buy a pack of cigarettes.]

He even wants to give us a break on our sales taxes, a really big one. It will save one cent every time you spend eight bucks.

But to make up for that he wants to reduce the property tax credit for renters and renters only. [As any GOP insider can tell you, tenants are second class people for the most part, anyway who aren’t going to vote, or if they do, will not vote for people like Governor Plenty, anyway.]

A Minnesota Monitor post today by Jeff Fecke [How Tim Pawlenty's tax cut helps you] gives some more illumination, ending with the following revealing paragraphs:

Yes, if you're the type of consumer that makes big-ticket purchases of electronics -- not to mention yachts, where you could save $250 on a $200,000 purchase -- you might actually see some benefit from Tim Pawlenty's big tax cut.

Incidentally, Pawlenty did call for one tax increase on Friday. Well, not so much an increase, really, but a decrease in the property tax credit for renters, from 19 percent to 16 percent. Now, if you pay $950 a month for your 2-bedroom apartment, that will cost you an extra $342 next year.

Again: Aren’t we glad we have Tim? Are we really sure that we want to share him with the nation?

Observations on the Override

So, everybody is all excited one way or the other because the legislature finally overturned one of Governor Plenty’s vetos.

Much of the attention is being given to the new gasoline tax increase. Somehow a few more cents on a gallon seems minimal when compared with the ups and downs [mainly ups] in gasoline prices brought on by other factors, but we will all notice it a bit, I guess. What we sometimes forget is that all of this increase goes to roads and after seeing a lot of our roads, it is hard begrudge additional funding there, although we may feel that the choice of projects is sometimes dubious. Of course, it would seem that the fact that various others who don’t pay their full load of gasoline taxes [bicyclists, pedestrians, drivers of hybrid cars] will use some of these roads needs to be examined, but that would have continued to be a problem even if this bill had not become law.

The bill should have been defeated because it increases metro sales tax for that old ripoff, transit. But that doesn’t seem to be what motivated the governor or the GOP legislators.

There are 85 members of the DFL in the House, 48 of the GOP, and one without a caucus to belong to. A caucus that wants to be a majority caucus needs to be more inclusive and not take on its own members unless they do something beyond whatever the party’s pale is. With several veteran members about to give up what are not really safe seats, the GOP cannot really afford to lose many more if it wants to make the net gain of 20 seats in November.

What I really cannot understand is that Marty Seifert and the Republican House leadership seem determined to punish the six of their number who voted for the override. All six have suffered a loss of committee or leadership assignments. [For a comprehensive list, see this from Minnesota Monitor.]

The GOP leadership is not taking this action against somebody who voted to support organized labor, family farms, progressive taxation, or even abortion rights. They’re taking this action against somebody who supported something being advocated by the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce. Yes, read that again. They supported the Chamber of Commerce, the people whou usually are the supreme arbitrating oracle of right and wrong for their party and they are in trouble for that.

Go figure.

Central Corridor again

Governor Plenty says that we need compromise to reduce the scope of the Central Corridor Light Rail.

We need to eliminate the hookup to the Union Depot or the University campus tunnel or both. And we certainly cannot add stops at places where they might be useful.

I have a suggestion:
Eliminate the whole thing.

Earlier posts: Moving the Train [12/16/07], Transit and Taxes [12/7/07]

Moving the Train

Another truth about Transit that I did not mention in earlier posts.

Transit people believe the stuff they say, that they have a kind of civic morality which justifies any amount of civic iniquity. They believe in the rightness of their cause and their own personal goodness that things like whether right or wrong is done to others do not bother them.

About a dozen years or so ago, these wonderful people who give us our metropolitan transit service conducted a survey about how to make the busses run faster.

After spending a bunch of public dollars the Transit people were given a conclusion which I don’t have the exact word for but which can be reasonably paraphrased as, “Busses will make better time if they don’t have to stop to pick up or drop off passengers.”

You can picture the Metropolitan Council execs slapping their foreheads in amazement. Who would have ever thunk it?

Well, now they’re telling us that to have the University Avenue light rail stop at half-mile intervals instead of one mile intervals will make the train take too long, be too expensive, and reduce ridership. It beats me how a train that doesn’t stop and pick up people can have more riders than one which does, but leave the wonks [who, of course won’t be riding the thing themselves or trying to run businesses on University Avenue, or sleep in a house on Sherburne or Aurora] to come up with some kind of explanation.

University Avenue is under attack and all that our city, county, and state leaders seem to be able or willing to do is to discuss how to carry that attack out. Light rail [also known as street cars without stops] isn’t the only thing attacking the Avenue, but it is one of the biggest and it is one where the role of the state is most evident.

University Avenue is a street. Streets are indeed part of a public transportation system, created to move people and things to and from the private properties which adjoin them or to other streets which do the same thing. Historically, University Avenue has seen horses, locomobiles, street cars, cars, trucks, bicycles, and trucks. It will continue to see most of these later uses even after light rail is built, if it ever happens.

People have bought or rented property along University Avenue to operate business or to live or bought property near University Avenue in Frogtown, Aurora-St. Anthony, Midway, and other places because its proximity of the Avenue brings them commerce or allows them conveniently move about.

The businesses along the Avenue need the traffic lanes and parking the Avenue provides. The Powers That Be seem intent on removing most of this so that people who operate trains can operate trains. They say that this is progress and that in the long run properties along the Avenue will have a greater aggregate value

They fail to consider that an aggregate increase of value does not mean that anything good will happen for the owner of a specific property, that whatever increases in property value do develop are probably going to happen around the stops, because that is where people will be able to get without having to find the elusive parking place.

However, it seems that most of this increase of property value will do nothing for property values and therefore property taxes. Construction, both old and new doesn’t line up with the stops. The Capitol complex doesn’t pay taxes. Rondo Library doesn’t pay taxes. The Wilder Foundation will be occupying a good chunk of Lexington.

I haven’t supported this boondoggle. Previous posts reflect that. [link, link.

So it makes sense that if we can only have stops at one-mile intervals that we move the stops. We don’t need a stop by the Capitol. It’s not going to be taken down anytime soon.

So I have this idea which I haven’t seen posted anyplace: Let’s put the stops at Western, Victoria, Hamline, and Fairview. Let the economy move things there. Target [a company which I personally do not patronize for personal reasons but which is a large Minnesota-based enterprise] recently jumped through a whole lot of hoops to build a new store at Hamline. Probably some of these hoops could have been lessened if there were to be an exit at Hamline. Think of what could happen at Victoria or Western. Perhaps some of the small business there might be able to survive or at least be able to receive just compensation from somebody else who could use the opportunity instead of being left to wither like the present plan calls for.

Of course, if they really wanted to get people between the downtowns they would have chosen a different path and left University Avenue to do what it always has done. Alongside the Great Northern [which really should have been the path for I-94] or somehow along the present I-94 would have made more sense.

Big Lake Ripoff

The feds have come up with $157 million for construction for the Big Lake to Minneapolis Commuter Rail line. Add in state costs and the thing gets a little expensive. This is to build rail where there already are railroad tracks. I understand that some track would need to be repaired or bettered and that stations might be needed, but this seems steep. And the thing would still require an operating budget. Yet even Governor “Nonewtaxes” Plenty is in favor.

And it is for a project that the state should be staying out of. There is no constitutional right for somebody who daily goes to somebody else’s city to extract its wealth and bring back to his home city to have the public subsidize the excursion, no matter what level of government is paying for it. [Cf. Transit and Taxes, December 7]

Can anybody spell “ripoff”?

Transit and taxes

The last time I saw Mayor Coleman the Second live and in person was at the sign unveiling for the Phalen Village Cub Store.

A few years ago when Ted Mondale was the Metro Council chairperson, he met with people from East Side organizations in an office at Payne and York, right on what was then the #14 bus line.

They both arrived at these events by car.

Outside of perhaps some kind of publicity shot, has anybody seen Governor Plenty [or his predecessor, Governor Janos] or R.T. Rybak on a bus or light rail?

Ugly Truth about Transit: THOSE WHO PUSH IT THE MOST NEVER PLAN ON USING TRANSIT THEMSELVES. Nor for that matter do most of those whose jobs will come from building new railways or busways.

Another Ugly Truth about Transit and Freeways both: WHATEVER THE INITIAL INTENTION INVOLVED IN THEIR CREATION, THEY FOSTER ECONOMIC SEGREGATION. We should note that there is one notable difference between the road projects and bus/train projects. The former are needed to get people to other of the country’s and the region’s cities. The second cannot do that. We need roads to connect Saint Paul to Minneapolis, Duluth, Chicago, or even Salt Lake City. No MTC bus will do that. Greyhound will, but they need roads. The problem with the way we built our freeways is that we put too many interchanges too close to the city. If 35E had been built with no interchanges between Larpenteur and Forest Lake or 94 with no way to get on or off between McKnight and Bayport, there would have been fewer people finding Vadnais Heights or Woodbury as fit places to live.

We say people drive too much and should use transit more. Americans aren’t about to give up their cars quickly. The car provides us with freedom [as in flexibility] and Americans have come to love that freedom. The answer is not to have us driving less often, just shorter distances. Driving three miles to work uses a lot less energy than driving forty.

Just ponder for a minute: We spend billions of dollars from a variety of taxing jurisdictions building, operating, and maintaining our transit systems. What could we do or could we have done had we spent similar money making all areas fit places for people of all strata to live, work, and recreate?

Big changes in attitude and focus on the part of federal, state, metropolitan, and municipal planners and doers will be required. Money spent on things like housing diversity, local job creation, good schools everywhere, and keeping places of shopping, recreation, and worship nearby will reduce that desire to go forty miles or more each way to work. Money will be needed for things like soil correction and local street improvements.

But continuing to throw money at transit, such as is being proposed in a new sales tax for transit does not seem like the way to a good future.

Some Wednesday Hash

Dr. Robert Cade, the inventor of GatorAde, died of kidney failure. A coincidence?

When did “became missing” or “disappeared” become “went missing”? The use of such an active verb leaves a reader thinking that a person decided to become missing, but the stories this phrase gets used in, when examined, do not usually convey such an intent.

Governor Plenty names his attorney from his 2002 campaign to the Supreme Court. Have we all forgotten that his 2002 campaign was cited for improper collusion with the GOP and that it paid a substantial fine and had its spending limit decreased? That must be good qualification for the Supreme Court.

The December 25 holiday is approaching and all those who hope to make a buck off of unsuspecting saps who feel obligated to observe the birth of the Prince of Peace by targeting suckers are in their usual good form. One of the recurring scams is making its appearance again. You will also find this one for St. Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and other Hallmark Holidays. Did you know you can name a star after somebody?

I have a new scheme, a million dollar idea for somebody. For a modest amount you can name a street after somebody. And when the vendor has sold enough street names, he/she can publish a map, duly registered with the copyright office of some country [maybe even ours] and show people just where the street they have bought is. Of course if you actually drove or otherwise went to it, you wouldn’t see that name on the street sign. The jurisdiction entitled to put the name on signs would never have known to put that name on it and the people who had addresses on the street would have never known to put it on their return address spot of their outgoing mail.

That’s why stars are better. Nobody will be going to them to learn what name is used locally until well after the statute of limitations has taken effect.