Looking Ahead

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis Quo vadis, President Obama? What was President Obama doing, breaking his campaign earmark elimination promises, an action that has driven his Republican opponents crazy? Why did he approve a year-old pending $410B spending bill with $7.1 B of earmarks? Well, it fits with his confidence building plan, the idea of not letting the constituency get so scared that all general spending stops and having people stuff those marginal discretionary funds in mattresses, with our and the world’s economies consequently ceasing to roll on and dying down. Anyway, call it “don’t sweat the small stuff.” Why then is he not really attacking the bank and credit system collapse, maybe letting the bad ones die, be nationalized , let GM and AIG go, as Senators Schumer and Graham had recommended? My personal opinion about the collapse of Wall Street stock prices is that greedy moneybag speculators were short-selling equities to the max early in March, with DOW down to the 6,000s, waiting to lower the bottom as much as possible before cashing in, and that the President and the Treasury Secretary are letting them do so, to shorten the period of pain and to expedite the stock markets’ recoveries. That is called “letting the market forces operate,” something that the conservatives applaud. Recover they must. As is, vultures (see ex-Countryside CEO Stanford Kurland, now heading PennyMac) are already snapping up mortgages from the government at 38 cents on the dollar, at the taxpayers’ expense, painful to us , but that is precisely what we need, helping to set a price and a bottom. There are billions of dollars abroad and here, and ready speculators, who pushed the oil prices to $150 a barrel before letting them collapse to $40, and making their scores, the same people who are torturing us now. Let the market bottom out soon, asap, let the pain be brief, and may the shorts roast in fires of hell. The idea that the market is ready to recover bears out when a mid-March internal memo at Citicorp announcing a small last quarter banking profit had the DOW jump nearly 400 dollars, with some minor other good news causing the week’s total rise of 9%, now up to mid-7,000s, worth trillions in market values. Or was it another trick of the shorts, leading to the next see-saw phase? The bank collapse revealed a lot of shameful things about more people and institutions. Switzerland is a country that lives on banking for people with secrets, and its UBS, Switzerland’s flagship bank, has 52,000 US clients , corporate and individual, 17,000 of them suspected of evading taxes. The bank will not divulge the names. To save that country’s raison d’etre, the UBS CEO, Peter Kurer, was fired, and a former Minister of Finance with international reputation, Kaspar Villiger, replaced him, to carry more weight in international negotiations. UBS agreed to pay $780M in fines to avert indictment to the charge that it had defrauded the US of tax revenue on some $20B of deposits. That is only a fraction of the tax havens worldwide. Someone figure out how to divert that into recovery measures, please? The market uptick also related to the Bernard Madoff jailing. This brings up the question of his 14,000 victims. It is hard to believe that so many rich business people, accustomed to evaluate, could succumb to a belief in the magical superpowers of a stock market operator. More likely, the belief was in Madoff’s ability to perform shenanigans of which one would be better off not knowing the details, sort of “teflonize yourself” don’t as questions about the sources of wealth rolling in. Regrettably, many ignorant widows who trusted their neighbors were caught up as well. The lesson is to diversify, although it should be “honesty is the best policy,” if you’ll pardon my quaint language. So, what is President Osama doing to lighten our lives and propagate jobs? Why generate an outrageous $3.55T budget for 2010, with health programs, clean energy and education, and not concentrate on the banks and the market? Well, for one he is sort of putting the fulfillment of his campaign promises, of health programs for everybody etc etc etc, back on Us the People, the Congress of the US. The Clintons tried using force in 1992, and failed. The budget seems to be what we in business call “exposure draft” a.k.a. “run it up the flagpole and see who’ll salute it.” Many health, environmental and education ideas, and “buy American” will definitely be dropped, although the anti-tax and anti-government people are in retreat, in the furor of the popular outrage over the bonus/retention payments for bailout recipient fat cats. We wish President Obama the best of success. And bad cess to Rush Limbaugh and his sorry pol GOP cohorts for wanting him to fail, and for shaming Michael Steele. Look, elephant clan, Democrats swallowed their pride and backed Bush in 2003, when they perceived the country to be in danger; these times may be even more crucial. People in the glue factory, we must stick together.

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis


What was President Obama doing, breaking his campaign earmark elimination promises, an action that has driven his Republican opponents crazy? Why did he approve a year-old pending $410B spending bill with $7.1 B of earmarks? Well, it fits with his confidence building plan, the idea of not letting the constituency get so scared that all general spending stops and having people stuff those marginal discretionary funds in mattresses, with our and the world’s economies consequently ceasing to roll on and dying down. Anyway, call it “don’t sweat the small stuff.”

Why then is he not really attacking the bank and credit system collapse, maybe letting the bad ones die, be nationalized , let GM and AIG go, as Senators Schumer and Graham had recommended? My personal opinion about the collapse of Wall Street stock prices is that greedy moneybag speculators were short-selling equities to the max early in March, with DOW down to the 6,000s, waiting to lower the bottom as much as possible before cashing in, and that the President and the Treasury Secretary are letting them do so, to shorten the period of pain and to expedite the stock markets’ recoveries. That is called “letting the market forces operate,” something that the conservatives applaud. Recover they must. As is, vultures (see ex-Countryside CEO Stanford Kurland, now heading PennyMac) are already snapping up mortgages from the government at 38 cents on the dollar, at the taxpayers’ expense, painful to us , but that is precisely what we need, helping to set a price and a bottom. There are billions of dollars abroad and here, and ready speculators, who pushed the oil prices to $150 a barrel before letting them collapse to $40, and making their scores, the same people who are torturing us now. Let the market bottom out soon, asap, let the pain be brief, and may the shorts roast in fires of hell. The idea that the market is ready to recover bears out when a mid-March internal memo at Citicorp announcing a small last quarter banking profit had the DOW jump nearly 400 dollars, with some minor other good news causing the week’s total rise of 9%, now up to mid-7,000s, worth trillions in market values. Or was it another trick of the shorts, leading to the next see-saw phase?

The bank collapse revealed a lot of shameful things about more people and institutions. Switzerland is a country that lives on banking for people with secrets, and its UBS, Switzerland’s flagship bank, has 52,000 US clients , corporate and individual, 17,000 of them suspected of evading taxes. The bank will not divulge the names. To save that country’s raison d’etre, the UBS CEO, Peter Kurer, was fired, and a former Minister of Finance with international reputation, Kaspar Villiger, replaced him, to carry more weight in international negotiations. UBS agreed to pay $780M in fines to avert indictment to the charge that it had defrauded the US of tax revenue on some $20B of deposits. That is only a fraction of the tax havens worldwide. Someone figure out how to divert that into recovery measures, please?

The market uptick also related to the Bernard Madoff jailing. This brings up the question of his 14,000 victims. It is hard to believe that so many rich business people, accustomed to evaluate, could succumb to a belief in the magical superpowers of a stock market operator. More likely, the belief was in Madoff’s ability to perform shenanigans of which one would be better off not knowing the details, sort of “teflonize yourself” don’t as questions about the sources of wealth rolling in. Regrettably, many ignorant widows who trusted their neighbors were caught up as well. The lesson is to diversify, although it should be “honesty is the best policy,” if you’ll pardon my quaint language.

So, what is President Osama doing to lighten our lives and propagate jobs? Why generate an outrageous $3.55T budget for 2010, with health programs, clean energy and education, and not concentrate on the banks and the market? Well, for one he is sort of putting the fulfillment of his campaign promises, of health programs for everybody etc etc etc, back on Us the People, the Congress of the US. The Clintons tried using force in 1992, and failed. The budget seems to be what we in business call “exposure draft” a.k.a. “run it up the flagpole and see who’ll salute it.” Many health, environmental and education ideas, and “buy American” will definitely be dropped, although the anti-tax and anti-government people are in retreat, in the furor of the popular outrage over the bonus/retention payments for bailout recipient fat cats.

We wish President Obama the best of success. And bad cess to Rush Limbaugh and his sorry pol GOP cohorts for wanting him to fail, and for shaming Michael Steele. Look, elephant clan, Democrats swallowed their pride and backed Bush in 2003, when they perceived the country to be in danger; these times may be even more crucial. People in the glue factory, we must stick together.

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis

The local preservationists, flush with success, with landmarking of the ConEd building, the former Bauman Brothers Department Store and Guardian Annex are expressing a renewed interest in obtaining the designation for the former Tammany Hall building, at 100 East 17th Street, on the southeast corner of Union Square and Park Avenue South. Busy at the task are the Municipal Arts Society, the Historic Districts Council, Union Square Community Coalition and several NYC Council, and NYS Assembly and Senate members, as reported by Jack Taylor of the USCC>It is an important former institutional building, once the headquarters of New York City's Democratic Party political machine. In the fall of 1927, the Society of Tammany sold its headquarters on East 14th Street and announced the construction of a new Tammany Hall. Plans for the new building were to be made public in January 1928. The building was to be a Colonial Revival structure built of red Harvard brick with granite trim (limestone was later substituted). The Real Estate Record described the design as "a dignified architectural treatment, one of the chief motifs of which are the severe Colonial columns in the centers of the Union Square and the Seventeenth-street facades which recall the days of early American architecture."
The building, as completed in 1929, included commercial space facing Union Square (originally occupied by a branch of the Manufacturers Trust Company), a large public meeting hall on the east side of the first floor, offices for the Democratic County Committee, and a series of committee and meeting rooms. In 1943, the building was sold to the International Ladies Garment Workers Union; the main meeting hall, named Roosevelt Auditorium, became one of the most important centers for union activities in New York City. In 1984, the hall was renovated for use as an Off-Broadway theater (Roundtable, remember?). In 2001 it was sold to Liberty Theater, and is the home of Union Square Theatre. Another important tenant is the New York Academy of Film, whose Film School was founded in 1992.

Tammany Hall, originally Tammany Society, was the Democratic Party political structure that played a major role in controlling New York City's politics and helped the mostly immigrant working class New Yorkers (notably the Irish) rise in American politics, from 1790 on. Starting with the victory of Fernando Wood as Mayor in 1854, it controlled most Democratic nominations and patronage, until the election of Fiorello LaGuardia on a Fusion ticket of Republicans, reform -minded Democrats and Independents in 1934. Tammany Hall was permanently weakened, and, despite resurgence in the 1950s, with County Leader Carmine DeSapio, it ceased to exist in the 1960s, as the Reform Democrats took over. I wrote a catch-as-catch- can personal history of the Reform days, as a member of the late maverick Murray Hill Reform Democratic Club, helped along by the recollections of Charles Kinsolving, Lou Sepersky, Ken Mills, Bea Dolan, Maureen Lynch, Irene Shea, Carol Greitzer, Louise Dankberg and a hundred others whom you may recognize as the story moves along. The six articles, dated 2004 (actually published in 1996) can be found by googling Wally Dobelis & Tammany Hall.
Kinsolving dates the early start of reform to 1946, the beginning of the Mayoralty of William O'Dwyer, or, more likely, to 1949 when Lexington, the first Reform Democratic club, was organized. That was the year when Courtland Nichols ran for the Assembly with the aid of various mainstream Penn and Columbia Law graduates, and when Franklin Roosevelt was elected to Congress from the Upper West Side district of the late Sol Bloom, against the opposition of the regular old line Democratic organization. Reform grew stronger in 1951, when Vincent M.Impellitteri was Mayor and Carmine DeSapio chaired the New York County Democratic organization. The articles progress to the 1970s.

As for history of the various Tammany wigwams, the Tammany Society (named for a Lenape Indian chief) emerged as the center of the Democratic-Republican politics in the early 1800s.The first "wigwam" serving as its headquarters was on Spruce Street, where Pace University now stands, moving to Frankfort and Nassau Streets (now Brooklyn Bridge ramp) in 1812. It shifted uptown as the city grew and in 1868 the Hall (now torn down) was on East 14th Street, west of 3rd Avenue. In 1943, as Tammany lost power, and the party offices were moved to a modest uptown environment, as the NY County Democrat headquarters, the 17th Street Hall was sold to the ILGWU, Local 91, and its Roosevelt Auditorium served as a meeting space for union events. Particularly memorable for us locals were the newspaper deliverers' annual elections, with the entire block filled with union members, as though for a party, the campaigning officials' vehicles serving as bars and election quarters.

So much history revolves around the old Tammany Hall that it richly deserves to be designated as a landmark.

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis

Florida Bay Outfitters runs kayak tours, rents kayaks out of 104050 Oh 305-451-3018.
For the middle- to older kayak person who has let a few years of inactivity pass by, guide David C. Williams, a former NY Port Authority supervisor is the guy. He took early buyout, just before 9/11/2001, having lost a friend in the 1993 bombing, whick killed a friend. Leading kayak tours in the Keys in winter anf at Bar Harbor in Maine during the summer months, he knows the scene
Enr at Garden Cove Road, we kayaked across the Intercostal Waterway/ North Sound Creek to Rattlesnake Key, watching for fast moving fishermen in speed boats in the deep channel – the crossing is shallow, and unless you move well right, you can run into seagrass; guides are advised.
Moving through a mangrove alley (whay doesn’t Jimmy Buffet mention them in songs), we circled the Key and , back on the Creek, continued to the Eights, a passage through really quiet romantic mangrove creeks, sweet and shady, wonderful reflections, a few snappers and snakes and herons to disturb you. Mangrove survived because there are so few storms that tear up the island-building red mangrove colonies – their seedlings drop in the water as fully developed little trees, floating upright to find an anchoring place. The same reason makes for the sandsdune absence, not enough wave action to gtind up the rocks.


Kayaking through the Ratlesnake

To keep up to snuff -learn the truth about Florida, this writer has , over the years, developed a faith in Floridian fiction writers. Starting with John D. MacDonald the Harvard MBA (1916-86) whose Robin Hood-ish salvage consultant Travis McGee in 22 books exposed real estate tycoons, agricultute exploiters, ecology narural resource wasters, medical frauds and stock market manipulators. His successor, Miami Herald writer Carl Hiassen continued with the themes.

In The Green Ripper (1979) McGee’s sidekick, the economist Meyer (G. Ludwig Meyer, PHD), owner of the boat named John Maynard Keynes expressed despair about the world’s economy, observing that a debt of about $2T, owed from government to government and banks, with no chance that it will ever be paid back. There is not enough productive capacity in the world, plus enough raw materials to provide maintenance of plant plus enough coverage to even to keep up with mounting interest. Asked whether the debt can be written off, he offered that all the major world currencies would collapse, trade will cease and without the mechanical-scientific apparatus running, the Earth would not support its four billion people. Hydrocarbon utilization heats , houses and clothes the people. There will be fear, hate, ange, death, the new barbarians, plague and poison and the New Dark Ages. Sane people and sane governments are trying to scuffle a little more time and breathing space, and if no one pushes the wrong button, we have at worst five, at best twelve more years . Allover the world people are suddenly coming to realize the fact of reduced expectations, that their children and grandchildren will have it worse than they did , and want to blame somebody, hoot and holler. Pearl Harbor again.
This Club of Rome doomsday scenario , with growth of population of a million and a third every week, came during the Carter inflation, and is raising its ugly head ever since. The populatin growth estimate is nearly correct, to our current 6.5B. The miracle of China and new oil finds have postponed doomsday but the trade imbalance deepens.

The rest of The Green Ripper prophesies a rise of domestic terrorists, with a religious ideology and foreign participants, and Travis McGee uncharacteristically executes all of them, perpetuating the author’s theory that the justice sytem is to slow, and vigilantism is a necessity. This is not too far from the 21st Century.

Carl Hiaasen is in the same territory, with his hero Skink a marsh-dwelling ex-Florida governor. Phony repairmen frofiting fron the hurricanes are his targets. John W. Hall’s Thorn is another environmentalist hero, fighting phosphate factoties destroying Tampa Bay area. Sugar and Everglades everyone knows, but the little recornized Crgill and IML Agrico conglomeration product, Mosaic, generates ¾ of US and and ¼ of the world’s phosphate and potash. They may have stopped in the Peaace River area, concentrating on Argentina.

Travis McGee’s boat is Busted Flush and it resides in Slip F-18 in the Bahia del Mar marina in fort Lauderdale. We will catch up with Jonathon King and other ecoterrorists later.