Scott Lee Cohen planning run for governor - Former Democratic lieutenant governor nominee set to take on Quinn, Brady
By David Heinzmann and Rick Pearson
Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune
April 24, 2010
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/elections/ct-met-scott-lee-cohen-0425-20100424,0,5783159.story
Scott Lee Cohen, the pawnbroker who flamed out of Illinois politics just days after voters nominated him as the Democratic lieutenant governor candidate, is making plans to run for governor.
Cohen last weekend told House Speaker Michael Madigan, who doubles as state Democratic Party chairman, that he intends to mount an independent run for governor, Madigan's spokesman said. In addition, a Cohen adviser confirmed Friday that Cohen plans to announce his candidacy this week and is trying to find a suitable running mate.
"He came in, in the morning (April 17), and told Madigan he was running for governor as an independent," said Madigan spokesman Steve Brown. Madigan replied he would be supporting the Democratic ticket, Brown said.
Cohen would have a steep climb to redefine himself in the eyes of Illinois voters, even by the standards of this state's tainted political culture. During his primary campaign, the 43-year-old political novice ran on notions of integrity and business acumen. But scrutiny of Cohen's background after the election revealed troubling facts and false statements.
The most salacious revelation surrounded his 2005 domestic battery arrest, in which his convicted prostitute girlfriend alleged he put a knife to her throat. The case was dropped when she didn't show up in court, but in explaining his side of the story, Cohen made statements that turned out to be false. He said he had met the woman in a bar, but later acknowledged that he met her when he was a patron at the massage parlor where she was arrested for performing sex acts for money. Cohen also said the woman would vouch for his character, but she issued a statement through a lawyer saying he was not fit to hold office.
Cohen also said he had paid off hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal tax liens, but public records showed he still owed money. During his campaign he downplayed his pawn business, instead calling himself a "green entrepreneur." But the manufacturer of the products he claimed to distribute said the business had no relationship with Cohen.
And while Cohen spent a purported $2 million of his own money to finance his campaign for the oft-ignored and arguably inconsequential lieutenant governor's post, court records showed his ex-wife was suing him for $54,000 in unpaid child support.
The political outcry over Cohen sharing the top of the Democratic ticket with Gov. Pat Quinn finally pressured him to bow out.
Just weeks later, rumors began to circulate that Cohen was conducting polling to determine what voters thought of him. Officials at Grainger Terry, a consulting firm that helped run Cohen's lieutenant governor campaign, confirmed Friday that Cohen paid them $30,000 to do the polling in March.
Cohen would need 25,000 registered voters to sign petitions to get on the ballot, submitted by June 21.
dheinzmann@tribune.com
rap30@aol.com
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Florida's Charlie Crist could use a hug - The GOP's handling of Florida's governor says more about the party than the man.
Florida's Charlie Crist could use a hug - The GOP's handling of Florida's governor says more about the party than the man.
By Dana Milbank
Copyright by The Washington Post
Friday, April 23, 2010
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/23/AR2010042302026.html
What is it about a man crush that is incompatible with the two-party system?
When a Democrat, Sen. Joe Lieberman, was kissed by George W. Bush on the House floor, the smooch became the symbol of Lieberman's embrace of the Bush war policies, and he was drummed out of the party.
This time, it's a Republican, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, who was hugged by Barack Obama; the hug has become the symbol of Crist's embrace of the Obama economic policies, and he's being drummed out of the party.
Crist has until April 30 to decide if he's going to abandon his hopeless Republican primary bid and instead run for the Senate as an independent. Those of us who still hope that some measure of sanity can be restored to our absurdly polarized political system must wrap our arms around Crist -- metaphorically, of course -- and encourage him to run as an independent.
The crucifixion of Crist by Republican leaders says less about him than it does about the party. Both parties have been undergoing ideological cleansing, as Sens. Arlen Specter (forced out of the GOP in Pennsylvania) and Blanche Lincoln (facing a Democratic primary challenge in Arkansas) can attest. But the Crist crisis is a whole new level of Jacobin excess; in the case of Lieberman, Democrats at least waited until he lost the primary to purge him.
Not so the Republicans, who are in a dogmatic race to the bottom as they drop Crist for his far-right challenger, Marco Rubio. Sen. John McCain, who defied the Viet Cong but cowers before the wing nuts, had this to say in 2007: "Gov. Crist has set an example for the rest of the party in a variety of ways, but certainly in bipartisanship." In 2008, McCain, who probably owed the Republican presidential nomination to Crist's endorsement in the Florida primary, hailed Crist's "principled, conservative leadership."
But now McCain has nothing supportive to say about his "dear friend" Charlie. "I support Republicans," he told the Hill's Molly Hooper when asked if he would back an independent Crist.
Second prize in the craven contest goes to Sen. John Cornyn, head of the Senate GOP campaign committee, who early on endorsed Crist as "one of only three governors who earned an 'A' from the Cato Institute for his efforts to restrain spending and cut taxes."
Now, Cornyn's National Republican Senatorial Committee has essentially rescinded its endorsement, suggesting that a good course of action for Crist would be to "drop out of the race and wait for another day." Senate Republican leaders have similarly tiptoed away from their earlier Crist endorsements.
There's also Mitt Romney's Naked Opportunist wing of the party, which endorsed the Rubio challenge only after his victory in the primary became inevitable. Eric Cantor, the No. 2 House Republican, now bravely proclaims that Crist isn't somebody who "keeps his word."
Cantor's got that exactly backward: Crist is saying and doing what he always has done; it's GOP leadership that has changed.
From the start of his tenure as governor, Crist developed a reputation for bipartisan work, appointing Democrats to top jobs and sharing credit with them for accomplishments. His agenda was relatively conservative -- reduce property taxes, cut the state budget -- but his style, long before the Obama hug, was to embrace the opposition. "We need to do it in a bipartisan way," he said in a February 2009 speech about the economic stimulus. This "is about helping our country. This is not about partisan politics." It was then that Crist received Obama's hug of death.
Practical Republicans would realize that Crist offers them the best hope of retaining the Florida Senate seat. A Quinnipiac University poll this month found that Crist would fare far better than Rubio against the likely Democratic nominee, Kendrick Meek, a lackluster candidate (and one who Obama was very careful not to hug on his recent Florida trip). Crist leads Meek 48 percent to 34 percent, but Rubio's lead is just 42-38.
The only reason a far-right candidate such as Rubio is competitive at all is because this year heavily favors Republicans. In a normal election year -- 2012, perhaps -- Republicans will rue their purging of the Crists and Specters who could have kept them competitive.
Win or lose, an independent Crist candidacy would remind Republican leaders that ideological cleansing has a cost. That's why Crist should be encouraged to run. Hug him if you wish, kiss him if you must, but show Charlie Crist some love.
danamilbank@washingtonpost.com
Dana Milbank was online today to chat with readers. Read the Q&A transcript.
By Dana Milbank
Copyright by The Washington Post
Friday, April 23, 2010
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/23/AR2010042302026.html
What is it about a man crush that is incompatible with the two-party system?
When a Democrat, Sen. Joe Lieberman, was kissed by George W. Bush on the House floor, the smooch became the symbol of Lieberman's embrace of the Bush war policies, and he was drummed out of the party.
This time, it's a Republican, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, who was hugged by Barack Obama; the hug has become the symbol of Crist's embrace of the Obama economic policies, and he's being drummed out of the party.
Crist has until April 30 to decide if he's going to abandon his hopeless Republican primary bid and instead run for the Senate as an independent. Those of us who still hope that some measure of sanity can be restored to our absurdly polarized political system must wrap our arms around Crist -- metaphorically, of course -- and encourage him to run as an independent.
The crucifixion of Crist by Republican leaders says less about him than it does about the party. Both parties have been undergoing ideological cleansing, as Sens. Arlen Specter (forced out of the GOP in Pennsylvania) and Blanche Lincoln (facing a Democratic primary challenge in Arkansas) can attest. But the Crist crisis is a whole new level of Jacobin excess; in the case of Lieberman, Democrats at least waited until he lost the primary to purge him.
Not so the Republicans, who are in a dogmatic race to the bottom as they drop Crist for his far-right challenger, Marco Rubio. Sen. John McCain, who defied the Viet Cong but cowers before the wing nuts, had this to say in 2007: "Gov. Crist has set an example for the rest of the party in a variety of ways, but certainly in bipartisanship." In 2008, McCain, who probably owed the Republican presidential nomination to Crist's endorsement in the Florida primary, hailed Crist's "principled, conservative leadership."
But now McCain has nothing supportive to say about his "dear friend" Charlie. "I support Republicans," he told the Hill's Molly Hooper when asked if he would back an independent Crist.
Second prize in the craven contest goes to Sen. John Cornyn, head of the Senate GOP campaign committee, who early on endorsed Crist as "one of only three governors who earned an 'A' from the Cato Institute for his efforts to restrain spending and cut taxes."
Now, Cornyn's National Republican Senatorial Committee has essentially rescinded its endorsement, suggesting that a good course of action for Crist would be to "drop out of the race and wait for another day." Senate Republican leaders have similarly tiptoed away from their earlier Crist endorsements.
There's also Mitt Romney's Naked Opportunist wing of the party, which endorsed the Rubio challenge only after his victory in the primary became inevitable. Eric Cantor, the No. 2 House Republican, now bravely proclaims that Crist isn't somebody who "keeps his word."
Cantor's got that exactly backward: Crist is saying and doing what he always has done; it's GOP leadership that has changed.
From the start of his tenure as governor, Crist developed a reputation for bipartisan work, appointing Democrats to top jobs and sharing credit with them for accomplishments. His agenda was relatively conservative -- reduce property taxes, cut the state budget -- but his style, long before the Obama hug, was to embrace the opposition. "We need to do it in a bipartisan way," he said in a February 2009 speech about the economic stimulus. This "is about helping our country. This is not about partisan politics." It was then that Crist received Obama's hug of death.
Practical Republicans would realize that Crist offers them the best hope of retaining the Florida Senate seat. A Quinnipiac University poll this month found that Crist would fare far better than Rubio against the likely Democratic nominee, Kendrick Meek, a lackluster candidate (and one who Obama was very careful not to hug on his recent Florida trip). Crist leads Meek 48 percent to 34 percent, but Rubio's lead is just 42-38.
The only reason a far-right candidate such as Rubio is competitive at all is because this year heavily favors Republicans. In a normal election year -- 2012, perhaps -- Republicans will rue their purging of the Crists and Specters who could have kept them competitive.
Win or lose, an independent Crist candidacy would remind Republican leaders that ideological cleansing has a cost. That's why Crist should be encouraged to run. Hug him if you wish, kiss him if you must, but show Charlie Crist some love.
danamilbank@washingtonpost.com
Dana Milbank was online today to chat with readers. Read the Q&A transcript.
Freedom to discriminate
Freedom to discriminate
By Christopher Caldwell
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010
Published: April 23 2010 20:30 | Last updated: April 23 2010 20:30
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/dfff4764-4f03-11df-b8f4-00144feab49a.html
It is a bad sign when a court case that seems likely to set precedent is based on a bizarre controversy. This week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Christian Legal Society v Martinez, which revolves around the question of whether a Christian group violates anti-discrimination law if it insists that its leaders be Christians (as it understands the term). The case has generated 40 friend-of-the-court briefs, a sure sign of brewing political controversy. There has always been a contradiction at the heart of anti-discrimination statutes. The rights they confer are bought at the cost of other people’s right of freedom of association. As the US emerged from racial segregation, it considered that cost worth paying. But as more groups claim anti-discrimination protection, the right of freedom of association gets narrower. Anti-discrimination law can become a tool for protecting powerful elites, not endangered minorities.
An evangelical group called the Christian Legal Society has long existed at Hastings College of Law in San Francisco, the oldest law school in the western US. Anyone can attend the group’s meetings. But since 2004, the CLS has been part of a national organisation of the same name that requires a statement of faith from officers and those who lead Bible studies. They must profess belief in the virgin birth and in the Bible as the word of God. More controversially, the group believes that, “in view of the clear dictates of scripture, unrepentant participation in and advocacy of a sexually immoral lifestyle is inconsistent with an affirmation of the statement of faith”. The group disapproves of extramarital sex of any kind, including homosexuality. Hastings, believing the group thereby runs afoul of its rules against discrimination by sexual orientation, withdrew recognition from it.
The university defends its conduct by saying that the group can do whatever it wants on its own time, but must abide by the school’s rules if it wants to claim the school’s resources and sponsorship. This seems to be common sense, but the court has a hair-trigger sensitivity to universities’ using neutral-seeming pretexts to stifle civil rights. A long line of case law protects unpopular minorities against being silenced by powerful majorities and university administrators. CLS relies on Healy v James, a 1972 case involving the expulsion of the Vietnam-era radical group SDS from a campus, and Gay & Lesbian Student Association v Gohn, a 1988 speech case involving a gay student group.
It is a curious case: Christians are taking on the mantle of a despised minority, while gay rights is the ideology of an entrenched institutional power. What this shift means is open to debate: is homosexuality gaining special protection as conduct that must be accepted, the beneficiary of a sort of post-modern blasphemy law? Or is the US simply moving towards a more “French” separation of church and state, whereby the expressive rights of religions take a back seat to secular groups’ expressive rights?
It weakens the law school’s case considerably that it has permitted other student groups to engage in discrimination at the same time it was disciplining CLS, and only CLS. Many other groups claim the right to limit their leadership to like-minded members. For example, the bylaws of the campus chapter of La Raza restricted voting membership to students “of Raza background”. (“Raza” is Spanish for race.) The university says the group has since amended its bylaws.
Another confusing aspect to the case is that the college has a second, unwritten, anti-discrimination policy in addition to the written one. According to this second policy, all organisations must admit “all comers”. The idea that every group must admit “all comers” was held up to ridicule by almost all Supreme Court justices on left and right. But one justice, Samuel Alito, raised a more serious objection. It subjects any small and unpopular group (consider a Muslim Students’ Association after September 11 2001, perhaps, or a gay group in a different era) to entryism: being joined by more numerous enemies who vote to disband it.
The disturbing thing about this case is that it shows the basis for neutral principles of anti-discrimination law to be eroding. In years past, when anti-discrimination clashed with freedom of association, its defenders took refuge in the concept of “diversity”. But this case shows how lame and arbitrary that rationale is. In another case against CLS litigated in Illinois, Diane Wood, considered a likely nominee to the Supreme Court, dissented from a decision that backed CLS’s right to be selective about its officers. “Given that universities have a compelling interest in obtaining diverse student bodies,” she wrote, “requiring a university to include exclusionary groups might undermine their ability to attain such diversity.”
This is poor reasoning. There are arguments in favour of diversity (varied viewpoints), and there are arguments in favour of uniformity (esprit de corps). But in the Hastings case and similar ones, there can be no doubt that it is the college taking the side of uniformity, and the CLS the side of diversity. Ms Wood is simply assigning the label of “diversity” to the side she thinks most virtuous. The administrators at Hastings, like Ms Wood, are frozen in time. For them, “minority” is not a descriptive noun. It is a government-conferred status, a guarantee of special protection that can be bestowed on the powerful as well as the downtrodden. No neutral principles here: just the interests of an “out” group that used to be an “in” group pitted against those of an “in” group that used to be an “out” group.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
More columns at www.ft.com/caldwell
By Christopher Caldwell
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010
Published: April 23 2010 20:30 | Last updated: April 23 2010 20:30
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/dfff4764-4f03-11df-b8f4-00144feab49a.html
It is a bad sign when a court case that seems likely to set precedent is based on a bizarre controversy. This week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Christian Legal Society v Martinez, which revolves around the question of whether a Christian group violates anti-discrimination law if it insists that its leaders be Christians (as it understands the term). The case has generated 40 friend-of-the-court briefs, a sure sign of brewing political controversy. There has always been a contradiction at the heart of anti-discrimination statutes. The rights they confer are bought at the cost of other people’s right of freedom of association. As the US emerged from racial segregation, it considered that cost worth paying. But as more groups claim anti-discrimination protection, the right of freedom of association gets narrower. Anti-discrimination law can become a tool for protecting powerful elites, not endangered minorities.
An evangelical group called the Christian Legal Society has long existed at Hastings College of Law in San Francisco, the oldest law school in the western US. Anyone can attend the group’s meetings. But since 2004, the CLS has been part of a national organisation of the same name that requires a statement of faith from officers and those who lead Bible studies. They must profess belief in the virgin birth and in the Bible as the word of God. More controversially, the group believes that, “in view of the clear dictates of scripture, unrepentant participation in and advocacy of a sexually immoral lifestyle is inconsistent with an affirmation of the statement of faith”. The group disapproves of extramarital sex of any kind, including homosexuality. Hastings, believing the group thereby runs afoul of its rules against discrimination by sexual orientation, withdrew recognition from it.
The university defends its conduct by saying that the group can do whatever it wants on its own time, but must abide by the school’s rules if it wants to claim the school’s resources and sponsorship. This seems to be common sense, but the court has a hair-trigger sensitivity to universities’ using neutral-seeming pretexts to stifle civil rights. A long line of case law protects unpopular minorities against being silenced by powerful majorities and university administrators. CLS relies on Healy v James, a 1972 case involving the expulsion of the Vietnam-era radical group SDS from a campus, and Gay & Lesbian Student Association v Gohn, a 1988 speech case involving a gay student group.
It is a curious case: Christians are taking on the mantle of a despised minority, while gay rights is the ideology of an entrenched institutional power. What this shift means is open to debate: is homosexuality gaining special protection as conduct that must be accepted, the beneficiary of a sort of post-modern blasphemy law? Or is the US simply moving towards a more “French” separation of church and state, whereby the expressive rights of religions take a back seat to secular groups’ expressive rights?
It weakens the law school’s case considerably that it has permitted other student groups to engage in discrimination at the same time it was disciplining CLS, and only CLS. Many other groups claim the right to limit their leadership to like-minded members. For example, the bylaws of the campus chapter of La Raza restricted voting membership to students “of Raza background”. (“Raza” is Spanish for race.) The university says the group has since amended its bylaws.
Another confusing aspect to the case is that the college has a second, unwritten, anti-discrimination policy in addition to the written one. According to this second policy, all organisations must admit “all comers”. The idea that every group must admit “all comers” was held up to ridicule by almost all Supreme Court justices on left and right. But one justice, Samuel Alito, raised a more serious objection. It subjects any small and unpopular group (consider a Muslim Students’ Association after September 11 2001, perhaps, or a gay group in a different era) to entryism: being joined by more numerous enemies who vote to disband it.
The disturbing thing about this case is that it shows the basis for neutral principles of anti-discrimination law to be eroding. In years past, when anti-discrimination clashed with freedom of association, its defenders took refuge in the concept of “diversity”. But this case shows how lame and arbitrary that rationale is. In another case against CLS litigated in Illinois, Diane Wood, considered a likely nominee to the Supreme Court, dissented from a decision that backed CLS’s right to be selective about its officers. “Given that universities have a compelling interest in obtaining diverse student bodies,” she wrote, “requiring a university to include exclusionary groups might undermine their ability to attain such diversity.”
This is poor reasoning. There are arguments in favour of diversity (varied viewpoints), and there are arguments in favour of uniformity (esprit de corps). But in the Hastings case and similar ones, there can be no doubt that it is the college taking the side of uniformity, and the CLS the side of diversity. Ms Wood is simply assigning the label of “diversity” to the side she thinks most virtuous. The administrators at Hastings, like Ms Wood, are frozen in time. For them, “minority” is not a descriptive noun. It is a government-conferred status, a guarantee of special protection that can be bestowed on the powerful as well as the downtrodden. No neutral principles here: just the interests of an “out” group that used to be an “in” group pitted against those of an “in” group that used to be an “out” group.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
More columns at www.ft.com/caldwell
Greece grasps for €30bn rescue packag/Eurozone’s landmark moment: Greece appeals for emergency aid
Greece grasps for €30bn rescue package
By Tony Barber in Brussels and Kerin Hope in Athens and Gerrit Wiesmann in Frankfurt
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010
Published: April 23 2010 12:07 | Last updated: April 23 2010 19:36
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/35fe6cfe-4ec7-11df-abb5-00144feab49a.html
Greece bowed to overwhelming pressure from financial markets on Friday and appealed for emergency eurozone loans in what will be the first rescue of a euro area country.
Greece’s socialist government said the prospect of financial collapse had forced it to ask for the activation of a €30bn ($40bn) lifeline that could ultimately be worth €45bn once a contribution from the International Monetary Fund is included.
The request marked a defining moment for the European Union, whose ambitions to play a more prominent role in world affairs rest partly on a claim of successful economic integration that the Greek debt crisis has thrown into doubt.
“We believe our European partners will act decisively and provide Greece with a safe haven to rebuild our ship of state with strong and reliable materials,” George Papandreou, prime minister, told the Greek nation in a live televised address from the Aegean island of Kastellorizo.
Athens is expected to spell out how much it wants from its 15 eurozone partners in a letter to the European Commission and the European Central Bank, which will assess if the request is valid. Eurozone finance ministers will then study the request and, if satisfied, approve the aid.
Greece must refinance €8.5bn in bonds that mature on May 19, and interest rates on Greek debt reached cripplingly high levels on Thursday. They remained high in spite of some market relief that Greece had requested the bail-out.
Negotiations with a team from the Commission, ECB and IMF are due to be completed on May 6 but much uncertainty surrounds the disbursement of the loans. Germany’s centre-right coalition government faces a difficult state election in North Rhine-Westphalia on May 9 and is sensitive to the risk of a backlash from voters angry that German taxpayers should bail out profligate Greeks.
Some German politicians said that it was therefore possible that the first tranche of aid might come from the IMF rather than Germany, whose final contribution could go as high as €8.4bn.
Angela Merkel, the chancellor, said any aid would be tied to “very strict conditions”, which would force Athens to present “an absolutely credible savings programme”, and allow the IMF, EU Commission and ECB to determine that a rescue was “needed for the euro’s stability”.
“Only when these two conditions are met, can we talk about specific aid, including the kind of aid and the amount,” Ms Merkel said.
The IMF is likely to demand tougher austerity measures than Mr Papandreou adopted in his 2010 budget.
Greek trade union leaders warned that they would strike in early May to protest against any new measures that threatened salaries, pensions and employment rights. “This mechanism adds to the threat that workers’ rights are about to be overturned. We will take the road of social resistance and increased mobilisation,” said Spyros Papaspyros, head of Adedy, the public sector union.
SINK OR SWIM . .
George Papandreou, Greece’s prime minister, chose to announce his decision to activate the eurozone rescue package from the remote and picturesque Aegean island of Kastellorizo, 2km off the coast of Turkey, writes Kerin Hope in Athens.
Rather than staying in the capital to address the nation, he took time out from his trip to Kastellorizo and Rhodes to make a five-minute live broadcast from a picture-postcard harbour overlooked by colourfully painted neo-classical mansions.
One aide said the prime minister “saw no reason” to change his plans for the weekend after discussing Greece’s worsening economic plight at an emergency cabinet meeting on Thursday.
The aide said Mr Papandreou wanted to go to Greece’s farthest-flung island before next month’s visit to Athens by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister.
Kastellorizo’s residents – fewer than 500 – are largely dependent on Turkish services and supplies because of the island’s isolated position. By boat, the island is five hours from Rhodes in good weather. There are no direct flights to Athens and those to Rhodes are irregular, say residents.
Mr Papandreou promised, in last year’s election campaign, to continue travelling round the country if he became prime minister, to discuss the problems of small communities in isolated regions.
Anna Diamantopoulou, the education minister and former European commissioner for social affairs, and Louka Katseli, economic development minister, helped persuade the prime minister to make his broadcast outside in a stunning setting that would partly offset his gloomy message.
Eurozone’s landmark moment: Greece appeals for emergency aid
by Tony Barber
April 23, 2010 11:35am
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010
http://blogs.ft.com/brusselsblog/2010/04/eurozones-landmark-moment-greece-appeals-for-emergency-aid/
George Papandreou, Greece’s socialist prime minister, is an honourable and courageous politician who has done a great deal in his career to improve his country’s image in the eyes of its European Union partners. So it cannot have been easy for him to announce today that he was requesting the activation of the €40bn-€45bn eurozone-International Monetary Fund financial rescue package for Greece.
No eurozone member-state has suffered such a humiliation since the euro’s launch in January 1999. But Papandreou must have feared, as soon as he took office after last October’s election, that emergency foreign assistance was going to be necessary.
The Greek public finances were in even more desperate condition than anyone could have guessed. The 2009 budget deficit, it was revealed on Thursday, was 13.6 per cent of gross domestic product - and may turn out to have been even higher. The 2009 public debt amounted to a colossal 115.1 per cent of GDP, up sharply from 99.2 per cent in 2008.
The fundamental causes of this mess lie in Greece itself, and it is to Papandreou’s credit that he has not been afraid to say this to his countrymen in one public appearance after another since he took over as premier. He also won the respect of his fellow EU leaders by acknowledging frankly at a summit in December that corruption was at the core of Greece’s problems.
As Papandreou knows, this is where Greeks really need to take a hard look at themselves and the way they have behaved, especially in matters of taxation, public sector contracts and employment in the state administration, for many decades. His government has introduced severe austerity measures, and it can now count on massive financial support from Europe and the IMF. But all this will count for nothing if Greeks don’t make an honest effort at cleaning up their act.
And the truth is, this is a challenge that will last an entire generation.
By Tony Barber in Brussels and Kerin Hope in Athens and Gerrit Wiesmann in Frankfurt
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010
Published: April 23 2010 12:07 | Last updated: April 23 2010 19:36
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/35fe6cfe-4ec7-11df-abb5-00144feab49a.html
Greece bowed to overwhelming pressure from financial markets on Friday and appealed for emergency eurozone loans in what will be the first rescue of a euro area country.
Greece’s socialist government said the prospect of financial collapse had forced it to ask for the activation of a €30bn ($40bn) lifeline that could ultimately be worth €45bn once a contribution from the International Monetary Fund is included.
The request marked a defining moment for the European Union, whose ambitions to play a more prominent role in world affairs rest partly on a claim of successful economic integration that the Greek debt crisis has thrown into doubt.
“We believe our European partners will act decisively and provide Greece with a safe haven to rebuild our ship of state with strong and reliable materials,” George Papandreou, prime minister, told the Greek nation in a live televised address from the Aegean island of Kastellorizo.
Athens is expected to spell out how much it wants from its 15 eurozone partners in a letter to the European Commission and the European Central Bank, which will assess if the request is valid. Eurozone finance ministers will then study the request and, if satisfied, approve the aid.
Greece must refinance €8.5bn in bonds that mature on May 19, and interest rates on Greek debt reached cripplingly high levels on Thursday. They remained high in spite of some market relief that Greece had requested the bail-out.
Negotiations with a team from the Commission, ECB and IMF are due to be completed on May 6 but much uncertainty surrounds the disbursement of the loans. Germany’s centre-right coalition government faces a difficult state election in North Rhine-Westphalia on May 9 and is sensitive to the risk of a backlash from voters angry that German taxpayers should bail out profligate Greeks.
Some German politicians said that it was therefore possible that the first tranche of aid might come from the IMF rather than Germany, whose final contribution could go as high as €8.4bn.
Angela Merkel, the chancellor, said any aid would be tied to “very strict conditions”, which would force Athens to present “an absolutely credible savings programme”, and allow the IMF, EU Commission and ECB to determine that a rescue was “needed for the euro’s stability”.
“Only when these two conditions are met, can we talk about specific aid, including the kind of aid and the amount,” Ms Merkel said.
The IMF is likely to demand tougher austerity measures than Mr Papandreou adopted in his 2010 budget.
Greek trade union leaders warned that they would strike in early May to protest against any new measures that threatened salaries, pensions and employment rights. “This mechanism adds to the threat that workers’ rights are about to be overturned. We will take the road of social resistance and increased mobilisation,” said Spyros Papaspyros, head of Adedy, the public sector union.
SINK OR SWIM . .
George Papandreou, Greece’s prime minister, chose to announce his decision to activate the eurozone rescue package from the remote and picturesque Aegean island of Kastellorizo, 2km off the coast of Turkey, writes Kerin Hope in Athens.
Rather than staying in the capital to address the nation, he took time out from his trip to Kastellorizo and Rhodes to make a five-minute live broadcast from a picture-postcard harbour overlooked by colourfully painted neo-classical mansions.
One aide said the prime minister “saw no reason” to change his plans for the weekend after discussing Greece’s worsening economic plight at an emergency cabinet meeting on Thursday.
The aide said Mr Papandreou wanted to go to Greece’s farthest-flung island before next month’s visit to Athens by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister.
Kastellorizo’s residents – fewer than 500 – are largely dependent on Turkish services and supplies because of the island’s isolated position. By boat, the island is five hours from Rhodes in good weather. There are no direct flights to Athens and those to Rhodes are irregular, say residents.
Mr Papandreou promised, in last year’s election campaign, to continue travelling round the country if he became prime minister, to discuss the problems of small communities in isolated regions.
Anna Diamantopoulou, the education minister and former European commissioner for social affairs, and Louka Katseli, economic development minister, helped persuade the prime minister to make his broadcast outside in a stunning setting that would partly offset his gloomy message.
Eurozone’s landmark moment: Greece appeals for emergency aid
by Tony Barber
April 23, 2010 11:35am
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010
http://blogs.ft.com/brusselsblog/2010/04/eurozones-landmark-moment-greece-appeals-for-emergency-aid/
George Papandreou, Greece’s socialist prime minister, is an honourable and courageous politician who has done a great deal in his career to improve his country’s image in the eyes of its European Union partners. So it cannot have been easy for him to announce today that he was requesting the activation of the €40bn-€45bn eurozone-International Monetary Fund financial rescue package for Greece.
No eurozone member-state has suffered such a humiliation since the euro’s launch in January 1999. But Papandreou must have feared, as soon as he took office after last October’s election, that emergency foreign assistance was going to be necessary.
The Greek public finances were in even more desperate condition than anyone could have guessed. The 2009 budget deficit, it was revealed on Thursday, was 13.6 per cent of gross domestic product - and may turn out to have been even higher. The 2009 public debt amounted to a colossal 115.1 per cent of GDP, up sharply from 99.2 per cent in 2008.
The fundamental causes of this mess lie in Greece itself, and it is to Papandreou’s credit that he has not been afraid to say this to his countrymen in one public appearance after another since he took over as premier. He also won the respect of his fellow EU leaders by acknowledging frankly at a summit in December that corruption was at the core of Greece’s problems.
As Papandreou knows, this is where Greeks really need to take a hard look at themselves and the way they have behaved, especially in matters of taxation, public sector contracts and employment in the state administration, for many decades. His government has introduced severe austerity measures, and it can now count on massive financial support from Europe and the IMF. But all this will count for nothing if Greeks don’t make an honest effort at cleaning up their act.
And the truth is, this is a challenge that will last an entire generation.
Moody’s chief admits failure over crisis
Moody’s chief admits failure over crisis
By Stephanie Kirchgaessner in New York and Kevin Sieff in Washington
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010
Published: April 23 2010 19:20 | Last updated: April 24 2010 00:55
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9456f280-4f03-11df-b8f4-00144feab49a.html
The chief executive of Moody’s admitted to a Senate panel on Friday that the US credit rating agency failed to anticipate the severe deterioration in the US housing market that led to the financial crisis and was “not satisfied” with its performance.
However, Raymond McDaniel defended the the credit agencies’ dependence on fees paid by Wall Street firms, claiming that “potential conflicts exist regardless of who pays”.
But evidence presented at a hearing before the Senate detailed how some senior managers at Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s suppressed internal concerns about the securities they rated due to pressure from the banks that paid their fees.
Eric Kolchinsky, a former managing director of a Moody’s unit, believed that he had saved the agency from committing fraud in 2007 when he insisted that it change the way it rated the instruments because of deterioration in the housing market.
When it emerged that Moody’s had seen a slight drop in market share, Mr Kolchinsky was berated by a manager.
Friday’s hearing before the Senate subcommittee on investigations, as well as a hearing on Tuesday that will centre on Goldman Sachs, are being held as senators negotiate a bill to reform financial regulation. Senators are expected to vote on Monday to begin formal debate on the controversial measure.
On Moody’s ratings of Goldman’s Abacus product, at the centre of allegations against the bank, Mr Kolchinsky said that he would have wanted to know that hedge fund manager Paulson & Co was making bets against the security.
He said neither he nor his staff had been aware of Paulson’s involvement in their rating of the transaction. “It just changes the whole dynamic – if the person choosing it, wants it to blow up,” he said.
Staff at Moody’s and S&P described a fraught relationship with investment banks, which put pressure on the agencies to deliver triple A ratings.
“There has always been pressure from banks, and it is quite common for banks to ask for analysts to be removed,” said Yuri Yoshizawa, a senior managing director at Moody’s.
However, she denied that pressure from banks influenced ratings in the run-up to the financial crisis. Carl Levin, the Democratic senator who chairs the panel said: “In the end, the banks got their way.”
By Stephanie Kirchgaessner in New York and Kevin Sieff in Washington
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010
Published: April 23 2010 19:20 | Last updated: April 24 2010 00:55
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9456f280-4f03-11df-b8f4-00144feab49a.html
The chief executive of Moody’s admitted to a Senate panel on Friday that the US credit rating agency failed to anticipate the severe deterioration in the US housing market that led to the financial crisis and was “not satisfied” with its performance.
However, Raymond McDaniel defended the the credit agencies’ dependence on fees paid by Wall Street firms, claiming that “potential conflicts exist regardless of who pays”.
But evidence presented at a hearing before the Senate detailed how some senior managers at Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s suppressed internal concerns about the securities they rated due to pressure from the banks that paid their fees.
Eric Kolchinsky, a former managing director of a Moody’s unit, believed that he had saved the agency from committing fraud in 2007 when he insisted that it change the way it rated the instruments because of deterioration in the housing market.
When it emerged that Moody’s had seen a slight drop in market share, Mr Kolchinsky was berated by a manager.
Friday’s hearing before the Senate subcommittee on investigations, as well as a hearing on Tuesday that will centre on Goldman Sachs, are being held as senators negotiate a bill to reform financial regulation. Senators are expected to vote on Monday to begin formal debate on the controversial measure.
On Moody’s ratings of Goldman’s Abacus product, at the centre of allegations against the bank, Mr Kolchinsky said that he would have wanted to know that hedge fund manager Paulson & Co was making bets against the security.
He said neither he nor his staff had been aware of Paulson’s involvement in their rating of the transaction. “It just changes the whole dynamic – if the person choosing it, wants it to blow up,” he said.
Staff at Moody’s and S&P described a fraught relationship with investment banks, which put pressure on the agencies to deliver triple A ratings.
“There has always been pressure from banks, and it is quite common for banks to ask for analysts to be removed,” said Yuri Yoshizawa, a senior managing director at Moody’s.
However, she denied that pressure from banks influenced ratings in the run-up to the financial crisis. Carl Levin, the Democratic senator who chairs the panel said: “In the end, the banks got their way.”
Companies Feeling More Pressure to Cut Iran Ties
Companies Feeling More Pressure to Cut Iran Ties
By PETER BAKER
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/world/middleeast/24sanctions.html?hp
WASHINGTON — While President Obama struggles to negotiate United Nations sanctions with teeth against Iran, a parallel campaign to turn up the heat is gaining momentum by pressuring American and foreign corporations individually to cut their business ties there.
Two giant American accounting firms, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ernst & Young, disclosed this week that they no longer had any affiliation with Iranian firms, becoming the latest in a string of companies to publicly shun the Islamic republic. After a similar decision by KPMG this month, that leaves none of the Big Four audit firms with any ties to Iran.
In recent months, other companies have announced that they would stop sales, cut back business or end affiliations with Iranian firms, including General Electric, Huntsman, Siemens, Caterpillar and Ingersoll Rand. Daimler said it would sell a minority share in an Iranian engine maker. An Italian firm said it would pull out after its current gas contracts ended. And the Malaysian state oil company cut off gasoline shipments to Iran, following similar moves by Royal Dutch Shell and trading giants like Vitol, Glencore and Trafigura.
The tangible impact of these moves varies depending on the firm. After three decades of sanctions, American companies have relatively little business in Iran at this point, while foreign and multinational companies often find ways to circumvent measures intended to sever ties with Iran. China has become an increasingly robust partner.
But current and former American officials said the recent announcements would further isolate Iran as it pursued its nuclear program in defiance of international pressure.
“No one of these actions is that significant,” said Stuart Levey, the Treasury under secretary who has led the American effort to persuade firms to abandon Iranian ties first under President George W. Bush and now under Mr. Obama. “But the overall trend, if you analyze it with the increasing political isolation of Iran, could be very significant.”
Mark D. Wallace, a former ambassador under Mr. Bush and now president of an advocacy group called United Against Nuclear Iran, said the growing trend could undercut the Tehran government. “This is a sort of tipping point,” he said. “You’re seeing the regime standing at the precipice and if a few more companies pull out and they don’t have the ability to access international services and goods and capital, they’re in real trouble.”
Foreign businesses have been an important source of support for Iran in recent years. In the last five years, 41 foreign companies have helped Iran develop its oil and gas sector, which accounts for more than half of the Tehran government’s income, the General Accountability Office reported this week.
None of those companies were American, but an analysis by The New York Times last month showed that the federal government had awarded more than $107 billion in contract payments, grants and other benefits over the past decade to foreign and multinational American companies doing business in Iran.
The campaign to pressure companies to give up Iranian business began a few years ago under Mr. Bush even as three successive rounds of United Nations sanctions failed to stop Iran from enriching uranium.
The American government initially focused pressure on international banks and financial institutions, but the recent announcements show that it is extending well beyond that sector to manufacturers, insurers and service providers.
The pressure comes not just from Mr. Levey and his team, who present firms with evidence showing how other companies have run afoul of sanctions rules because of Iranian subterfuge. It also comes from Congress, where both the Senate and the House have passed bills limiting the government’s ability to do business with companies that contribute to Iran’s development of petroleum resources. The two chambers must reconcile separate versions before sending a bill to Mr. Obama.
And then there is Mr. Wallace’s group, which was formed in 2008 by a group of prominent Republicans and Democrats, including some now in the Obama administration, to focus public attention on Iran’s nuclear program. The group has tried to shame companies with ties to Iran by posting a list on its Web site. Among those it has cited have been KPMG, Caterpillar and Ingersoll Rand. .
This week, Mr. Wallace’s group received letters from both PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ernst & Young assuring the group that they had cut ties with Iranian firms. PricewaterhouseCoopers wrote that the Middle East member of the company’s global network had had a “cooperating firm relationship” with Agahan & Company, an Iranian firm, but that it expired last year. Ernst & Young said it cut its ties in 2001 to the Tadvin Company, one of Iran’s largest accounting firms, even though Tadvin was still listed on its Web site this year.
Mr. Wallace called that a breakthrough because by publicly avoiding Iran, the American accounting firms that audit so many other companies send an important signal. “What it says is if it’s too risky for the Big Four accounting firms,” he said, “it should be too risky for other companies.”
By PETER BAKER
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/world/middleeast/24sanctions.html?hp
WASHINGTON — While President Obama struggles to negotiate United Nations sanctions with teeth against Iran, a parallel campaign to turn up the heat is gaining momentum by pressuring American and foreign corporations individually to cut their business ties there.
Two giant American accounting firms, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ernst & Young, disclosed this week that they no longer had any affiliation with Iranian firms, becoming the latest in a string of companies to publicly shun the Islamic republic. After a similar decision by KPMG this month, that leaves none of the Big Four audit firms with any ties to Iran.
In recent months, other companies have announced that they would stop sales, cut back business or end affiliations with Iranian firms, including General Electric, Huntsman, Siemens, Caterpillar and Ingersoll Rand. Daimler said it would sell a minority share in an Iranian engine maker. An Italian firm said it would pull out after its current gas contracts ended. And the Malaysian state oil company cut off gasoline shipments to Iran, following similar moves by Royal Dutch Shell and trading giants like Vitol, Glencore and Trafigura.
The tangible impact of these moves varies depending on the firm. After three decades of sanctions, American companies have relatively little business in Iran at this point, while foreign and multinational companies often find ways to circumvent measures intended to sever ties with Iran. China has become an increasingly robust partner.
But current and former American officials said the recent announcements would further isolate Iran as it pursued its nuclear program in defiance of international pressure.
“No one of these actions is that significant,” said Stuart Levey, the Treasury under secretary who has led the American effort to persuade firms to abandon Iranian ties first under President George W. Bush and now under Mr. Obama. “But the overall trend, if you analyze it with the increasing political isolation of Iran, could be very significant.”
Mark D. Wallace, a former ambassador under Mr. Bush and now president of an advocacy group called United Against Nuclear Iran, said the growing trend could undercut the Tehran government. “This is a sort of tipping point,” he said. “You’re seeing the regime standing at the precipice and if a few more companies pull out and they don’t have the ability to access international services and goods and capital, they’re in real trouble.”
Foreign businesses have been an important source of support for Iran in recent years. In the last five years, 41 foreign companies have helped Iran develop its oil and gas sector, which accounts for more than half of the Tehran government’s income, the General Accountability Office reported this week.
None of those companies were American, but an analysis by The New York Times last month showed that the federal government had awarded more than $107 billion in contract payments, grants and other benefits over the past decade to foreign and multinational American companies doing business in Iran.
The campaign to pressure companies to give up Iranian business began a few years ago under Mr. Bush even as three successive rounds of United Nations sanctions failed to stop Iran from enriching uranium.
The American government initially focused pressure on international banks and financial institutions, but the recent announcements show that it is extending well beyond that sector to manufacturers, insurers and service providers.
The pressure comes not just from Mr. Levey and his team, who present firms with evidence showing how other companies have run afoul of sanctions rules because of Iranian subterfuge. It also comes from Congress, where both the Senate and the House have passed bills limiting the government’s ability to do business with companies that contribute to Iran’s development of petroleum resources. The two chambers must reconcile separate versions before sending a bill to Mr. Obama.
And then there is Mr. Wallace’s group, which was formed in 2008 by a group of prominent Republicans and Democrats, including some now in the Obama administration, to focus public attention on Iran’s nuclear program. The group has tried to shame companies with ties to Iran by posting a list on its Web site. Among those it has cited have been KPMG, Caterpillar and Ingersoll Rand. .
This week, Mr. Wallace’s group received letters from both PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ernst & Young assuring the group that they had cut ties with Iranian firms. PricewaterhouseCoopers wrote that the Middle East member of the company’s global network had had a “cooperating firm relationship” with Agahan & Company, an Iranian firm, but that it expired last year. Ernst & Young said it cut its ties in 2001 to the Tadvin Company, one of Iran’s largest accounting firms, even though Tadvin was still listed on its Web site this year.
Mr. Wallace called that a breakthrough because by publicly avoiding Iran, the American accounting firms that audit so many other companies send an important signal. “What it says is if it’s too risky for the Big Four accounting firms,” he said, “it should be too risky for other companies.”
Rating Agency Data Aided Wall Street in Mortgage Deals
Rating Agency Data Aided Wall Street in Mortgage Deals
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON and LOUISE STORY
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: April 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/business/24rating.html?hp
One of the mysteries of the financial crisis is how mortgage investments that turned out to be so bad earned credit ratings that made them look so good.
One answer is that Wall Street was given access to the formulas behind those magic ratings — and hired away some of the very people who had devised them.
In essence, banks started with the answers and worked backward, reverse-engineering top-flight ratings for investments that were, in some cases, riskier than ratings suggested, according to former agency employees.
The major credit rating agencies, Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch, drew renewed criticism on Friday on Capitol Hill for failing to warn of the dangers posed by complex investments like the one that has drawn Goldman Sachs into a legal whirlwind.
But while the agencies have come under fire before, the extent to which they collaborated with Wall Street banks has drawn less notice.
The rating agencies made public computer models that were used to devise ratings to make the process less secretive. That way, banks and others issuing bonds — companies and states, for instance — wouldn’t be surprised by a weak rating that could make it harder to sell the bonds or that would require them to offer a higher interest rate.
But by routinely sharing their models, the agencies in effect gave bankers the tools to tinker with their complicated mortgage deals until the models produced the desired ratings.
“There’s a bit of a Catch-22 here, to be fair to the ratings agencies,” said Dan Rosen, a member of Fitch’s academic advisory board and the chief of R2 Financial Technologies in Toronto. “They have to explain how they do things, but that sometimes allowed people to game it.”
There were other ways that the models used to rate mortgage investments like the controversial Goldman deal, Abacus 2007-AC1, were flawed. Like many in the financial community, the agencies had assumed that home prices were unlikely to decline. They also assumed that complex investments linked to home loans drawn from around the nation were diversified, and thus safer.
Both of those assumptions were wrong, and investors the world over lost many billions of dollars. In that Abacus investment, for instance, 84 percent of the underlying bonds were downgraded within six months.
But for Goldman and other banks, a road map to the right ratings wasn’t enough. Analysts from the agencies were hired to help construct the deals.
In 2005, for instance, Goldman hired Shin Yukawa, a ratings expert at Fitch, who later worked with the bank’s mortgage unit to devise the Abacus investments.
Mr. Yukawa was prominent in the field. In February 2005, as Goldman was putting together some of the first of what would be 25 Abacus investments, he was on a panel moderated by Jonathan M. Egol, a Goldman worker, at a conference in Phoenix.
The next month, Mr. Yukawa joined Goldman, where Mr. Egol was masterminding the Abacus deals. Neither was named in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s lawsuit, nor have the rating agencies been accused of wrongdoing related to Abacus.
At Goldman, Mr. Yukawa helped create Abacus 2007-AC1, according to Goldman documents. The safest part of that earned an AAA rating. He worked on other Abacus deals.
Mr. Yukawa, who now works at PartnerRe Asset Management, a money management firm in Greenwich, Conn., did not return requests for comment.
Goldman has said it will fight the accusations from the S.E.C., which claims Goldman built the Abacus investment to fall apart so a hedge fund manager, John A. Paulson, could bet against it. And in response to this article, Goldman said it did not improperly influence the ratings process.
Chris Atkins, a spokesman for Standard & Poor’s, noted that the agency was not named in the S.E.C.’s complaint. “S.& P. has a long tradition of analytical excellence and integrity,” Mr. Atkins said. “We have also learned some important lessons from the recent crisis and have made a number of significant enhancements to increase the transparency, governance and quality of our ratings.”
David Weinfurter, a spokesman for Fitch, said via e-mail that rating agencies had once been criticized as opaque, and that Fitch responded by making its models public. He stressed that ratings were ultimately assigned by a committee, not the models.
Officials at Moody’s did not respond to requests for comment.
The role of the rating agencies in the crisis came under sharp scrutiny Friday from the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Members grilled representatives from Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s about how they rated risky securities. The changes to financial regulation being debated in Washington would put the agencies under increased supervision by the S.E.C.
Carl M. Levin, the Michigan Democrat who heads the Senate panel, said in a statement: “A conveyor belt of high-risk securities, backed by toxic mortgages, got AAA ratings that turned out not to be worth the paper they were printed on.”
As part of its inquiry, the panel made public 581 pages of e-mail messages and other documents suggesting that executives and analysts at rating agencies embraced new business from Wall Street, even though they recognized they couldn’t properly analyze all of the banks’ products.
The documents also showed that in late 2006, some workers at the agencies were growing worried that their assessments and the models were flawed. They were particularly concerned about models rating collateralized debt obligations like Abacus.
According to former employees, the agencies received information about loans from banks and then fed that data into their models. That opened the door for Wall Street to massage some ratings.
For example, a top concern of investors was that mortgage deals be underpinned by a variety of loans. Few wanted investments backed by loans from only one part of the country or handled by one mortgage servicer.
But some bankers would simply list a different servicer, even though the bonds were serviced by the same institution, and thus produce a better rating, former agency employees said. Others relabeled parts of collateralized debt obligations in two ways so they would not be recognized by the computer models as being the same, these people said.
Banks were also able to get more favorable ratings by adding a small amount of commercial real estate loans to a mix of home loans, thus making the entire pool appear safer.
Sometimes agency employees caught and corrected such entries. Checking them all was difficult, however.
“If you dug into it, if you had the time, you would see errors that magically favored the banker,” said one former ratings executive, who like other former employees, asked not to be identified, given the controversy surrounding the industry. “If they had the time, they would fix it, but we were so overwhelmed.”
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON and LOUISE STORY
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: April 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/business/24rating.html?hp
One of the mysteries of the financial crisis is how mortgage investments that turned out to be so bad earned credit ratings that made them look so good.
One answer is that Wall Street was given access to the formulas behind those magic ratings — and hired away some of the very people who had devised them.
In essence, banks started with the answers and worked backward, reverse-engineering top-flight ratings for investments that were, in some cases, riskier than ratings suggested, according to former agency employees.
The major credit rating agencies, Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch, drew renewed criticism on Friday on Capitol Hill for failing to warn of the dangers posed by complex investments like the one that has drawn Goldman Sachs into a legal whirlwind.
But while the agencies have come under fire before, the extent to which they collaborated with Wall Street banks has drawn less notice.
The rating agencies made public computer models that were used to devise ratings to make the process less secretive. That way, banks and others issuing bonds — companies and states, for instance — wouldn’t be surprised by a weak rating that could make it harder to sell the bonds or that would require them to offer a higher interest rate.
But by routinely sharing their models, the agencies in effect gave bankers the tools to tinker with their complicated mortgage deals until the models produced the desired ratings.
“There’s a bit of a Catch-22 here, to be fair to the ratings agencies,” said Dan Rosen, a member of Fitch’s academic advisory board and the chief of R2 Financial Technologies in Toronto. “They have to explain how they do things, but that sometimes allowed people to game it.”
There were other ways that the models used to rate mortgage investments like the controversial Goldman deal, Abacus 2007-AC1, were flawed. Like many in the financial community, the agencies had assumed that home prices were unlikely to decline. They also assumed that complex investments linked to home loans drawn from around the nation were diversified, and thus safer.
Both of those assumptions were wrong, and investors the world over lost many billions of dollars. In that Abacus investment, for instance, 84 percent of the underlying bonds were downgraded within six months.
But for Goldman and other banks, a road map to the right ratings wasn’t enough. Analysts from the agencies were hired to help construct the deals.
In 2005, for instance, Goldman hired Shin Yukawa, a ratings expert at Fitch, who later worked with the bank’s mortgage unit to devise the Abacus investments.
Mr. Yukawa was prominent in the field. In February 2005, as Goldman was putting together some of the first of what would be 25 Abacus investments, he was on a panel moderated by Jonathan M. Egol, a Goldman worker, at a conference in Phoenix.
The next month, Mr. Yukawa joined Goldman, where Mr. Egol was masterminding the Abacus deals. Neither was named in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s lawsuit, nor have the rating agencies been accused of wrongdoing related to Abacus.
At Goldman, Mr. Yukawa helped create Abacus 2007-AC1, according to Goldman documents. The safest part of that earned an AAA rating. He worked on other Abacus deals.
Mr. Yukawa, who now works at PartnerRe Asset Management, a money management firm in Greenwich, Conn., did not return requests for comment.
Goldman has said it will fight the accusations from the S.E.C., which claims Goldman built the Abacus investment to fall apart so a hedge fund manager, John A. Paulson, could bet against it. And in response to this article, Goldman said it did not improperly influence the ratings process.
Chris Atkins, a spokesman for Standard & Poor’s, noted that the agency was not named in the S.E.C.’s complaint. “S.& P. has a long tradition of analytical excellence and integrity,” Mr. Atkins said. “We have also learned some important lessons from the recent crisis and have made a number of significant enhancements to increase the transparency, governance and quality of our ratings.”
David Weinfurter, a spokesman for Fitch, said via e-mail that rating agencies had once been criticized as opaque, and that Fitch responded by making its models public. He stressed that ratings were ultimately assigned by a committee, not the models.
Officials at Moody’s did not respond to requests for comment.
The role of the rating agencies in the crisis came under sharp scrutiny Friday from the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Members grilled representatives from Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s about how they rated risky securities. The changes to financial regulation being debated in Washington would put the agencies under increased supervision by the S.E.C.
Carl M. Levin, the Michigan Democrat who heads the Senate panel, said in a statement: “A conveyor belt of high-risk securities, backed by toxic mortgages, got AAA ratings that turned out not to be worth the paper they were printed on.”
As part of its inquiry, the panel made public 581 pages of e-mail messages and other documents suggesting that executives and analysts at rating agencies embraced new business from Wall Street, even though they recognized they couldn’t properly analyze all of the banks’ products.
The documents also showed that in late 2006, some workers at the agencies were growing worried that their assessments and the models were flawed. They were particularly concerned about models rating collateralized debt obligations like Abacus.
According to former employees, the agencies received information about loans from banks and then fed that data into their models. That opened the door for Wall Street to massage some ratings.
For example, a top concern of investors was that mortgage deals be underpinned by a variety of loans. Few wanted investments backed by loans from only one part of the country or handled by one mortgage servicer.
But some bankers would simply list a different servicer, even though the bonds were serviced by the same institution, and thus produce a better rating, former agency employees said. Others relabeled parts of collateralized debt obligations in two ways so they would not be recognized by the computer models as being the same, these people said.
Banks were also able to get more favorable ratings by adding a small amount of commercial real estate loans to a mix of home loans, thus making the entire pool appear safer.
Sometimes agency employees caught and corrected such entries. Checking them all was difficult, however.
“If you dug into it, if you had the time, you would see errors that magically favored the banker,” said one former ratings executive, who like other former employees, asked not to be identified, given the controversy surrounding the industry. “If they had the time, they would fix it, but we were so overwhelmed.”
New York Times Editorial: The Court and Free Speech
New York Times Editorial: The Court and Free Speech
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/opinion/24sat1.html?th&emc=th
When the Supreme Court ruled 8-to-1 this week that a federal law banning the sale of animal-cruelty videos violates the First Amendment, it reaffirmed the right to engage in even highly unpopular speech. And it wisely declined to create another category of expression outside of the First Amendment’s protection.
With this case and the court’s earlier Citizens United decision on corporate speech and political campaign contributions, this could be one of the most important terms in years for defining the constitutional scope of freedom of expression — for better or for worse.
Taken together, the rulings give freedom of speech a wide berth in two directions. The animal-cruelty ruling takes a strong and welcome stand that there should be only very narrow exceptions to the general rule that almost all content of speech is protected. That view is broadly accepted by most judges and constitutional scholars, and was reflected in the fact that eight justices from across the political spectrum joined the majority.
The campaign finance ruling, regrettably, gave a particular kind of speaker — corporations — a more expansive free speech right to spend than the court has ever acknowledged. The break there with the nation’s legal traditions was sharp, and opened the floodgates for big business and special-interest dollars to overwhelm American politics. That was delivered by a bitterly divided 5-to-4 court.
The animal-cruelty case involved Robert Stevens, who ran a business that sold disturbing, even disgusting, videos of pit bulls fighting and attacking other animals. Mr. Stevens was convicted under a federal law that criminalizes the sale of depictions of animal cruelty if the acts are illegal in the state where the depiction is sold.
The Supreme Court ruled, in United States v. Stevens, that Mr. Stevens’s conviction violated the First Amendment. It declined to add animal cruelty to the short list of forms of expression — including obscenity, incitement and defamation — that are not protected by the Constitution.
It then went on to rule that the federal law was overly broad, since it swept within its coverage many sorts of images that should be considered core protected speech. For example, hunting is illegal in the District of Columbia, and under the law, selling hunting magazines there would also be illegal.
The majority opinion, by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., was a strong affirmation of the importance of freedom of expression, even in the face of substantial societal condemnation of the horrific nature of some of the speech involved. It was gratifying that the court recognized that the right way to protect animals from abuse is through laws aimed at the abuse itself, not at free expression.
The court has two more important free speech cases coming up. One raises the question of whether people have a right to keep their identities secret if they signed a petition to put a referendum against same-sex marriage on the ballot. Putting an initiative on the ballot is an important governmental act, and we hope the court does not decide that there is a right to do so anonymously.
The court has already heard arguments in a challenge to a federal law barring material support to terrorists, which prohibits some kinds of speech in support of controversial causes. We hope it narrows the statute’s scope, carefully sorting through what kinds of assistance are protected speech, and what are the sorts of aid the government can properly prohibit.
That respectful treatment of the First Amendment, also reflected in the Stevens case, is what the nation needs from this court — not the recklessness of the ruling in the Citizens United case.
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/opinion/24sat1.html?th&emc=th
When the Supreme Court ruled 8-to-1 this week that a federal law banning the sale of animal-cruelty videos violates the First Amendment, it reaffirmed the right to engage in even highly unpopular speech. And it wisely declined to create another category of expression outside of the First Amendment’s protection.
With this case and the court’s earlier Citizens United decision on corporate speech and political campaign contributions, this could be one of the most important terms in years for defining the constitutional scope of freedom of expression — for better or for worse.
Taken together, the rulings give freedom of speech a wide berth in two directions. The animal-cruelty ruling takes a strong and welcome stand that there should be only very narrow exceptions to the general rule that almost all content of speech is protected. That view is broadly accepted by most judges and constitutional scholars, and was reflected in the fact that eight justices from across the political spectrum joined the majority.
The campaign finance ruling, regrettably, gave a particular kind of speaker — corporations — a more expansive free speech right to spend than the court has ever acknowledged. The break there with the nation’s legal traditions was sharp, and opened the floodgates for big business and special-interest dollars to overwhelm American politics. That was delivered by a bitterly divided 5-to-4 court.
The animal-cruelty case involved Robert Stevens, who ran a business that sold disturbing, even disgusting, videos of pit bulls fighting and attacking other animals. Mr. Stevens was convicted under a federal law that criminalizes the sale of depictions of animal cruelty if the acts are illegal in the state where the depiction is sold.
The Supreme Court ruled, in United States v. Stevens, that Mr. Stevens’s conviction violated the First Amendment. It declined to add animal cruelty to the short list of forms of expression — including obscenity, incitement and defamation — that are not protected by the Constitution.
It then went on to rule that the federal law was overly broad, since it swept within its coverage many sorts of images that should be considered core protected speech. For example, hunting is illegal in the District of Columbia, and under the law, selling hunting magazines there would also be illegal.
The majority opinion, by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., was a strong affirmation of the importance of freedom of expression, even in the face of substantial societal condemnation of the horrific nature of some of the speech involved. It was gratifying that the court recognized that the right way to protect animals from abuse is through laws aimed at the abuse itself, not at free expression.
The court has two more important free speech cases coming up. One raises the question of whether people have a right to keep their identities secret if they signed a petition to put a referendum against same-sex marriage on the ballot. Putting an initiative on the ballot is an important governmental act, and we hope the court does not decide that there is a right to do so anonymously.
The court has already heard arguments in a challenge to a federal law barring material support to terrorists, which prohibits some kinds of speech in support of controversial causes. We hope it narrows the statute’s scope, carefully sorting through what kinds of assistance are protected speech, and what are the sorts of aid the government can properly prohibit.
That respectful treatment of the First Amendment, also reflected in the Stevens case, is what the nation needs from this court — not the recklessness of the ruling in the Citizens United case.
Jon Stewart’s Punching Bag, Fox News
Jon Stewart’s Punching Bag, Fox News
By BRIAN STELTER
copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/arts/television/24stewart.html?th&emc=th
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are long gone. Fox News Channel is Jon Stewart’s new enemy No. 1.
Last week that comedian did something that the hosts of “Fox & Friends,” the morning show on Fox News, did not do: he had his staff members call the White House and ask a question.
It may have been in pursuit of farce, not fact, but it gave credence to the people who say “The Daily Show” is journalistic, not just satiric. “Fox & Friends” had repeatedly asked whether the crescent-shaped logo of the nuclear security summit was an “Islamic image,” one selected by President Obama in his outreach to the Muslim world. The White House told “The Daily Show” that the logo was actually based on the Rutherford-Bohr model of the atom.
“This is how relentless Fox is” in savaging President Obama, Mr. Stewart said.
On the subject of Fox, Mr. Stewart is pretty relentless too. As demonstrated by that crescent segment and dozens of others since Mr. Obama took office, he may well be television’s pre-eminent fact-checker of Fox News, the nation’s highest-rated cable news channel.
It has been noticed by, among other people, the Fox host Bill O’Reilly, who called Mr. Stewart a “devoted critic” of Fox News and said “his influence is growing.”
Separately, this week Mr. Stewart’s contract was renewed by Comedy Central into 2013. Combining the earnestness of a journalism professor and the sarcasm of a satirist, Mr. Stewart routinely charges that Fox’s news anchors and commentators distort Mr. Obama’s policies and advance a conservative agenda. He reminds some viewers of the left-wing group Media Matters but much funnier.
“Stewart does a great job of using comedy to expose the tragedy that is Fox News, and he also underscores the seriousness of it,” said Eric Burns, the president of Media Matters.
The segments about Fox are often replayed hundreds of thousands of times on blogs and other Web sites, amplifying their significance. “Media criticism has become part of his brand,” said Mark Jurkowitz, the associate director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, who noted that Mr. Stewart had also dissected CNN and CNBC in lengthy segments in the past.
It is true that the often-left-leaning “Daily Show” deals with a wide array of topics, but Fox is one that Mr. Stewart is overtly passionate about; he said on the show this week that he criticizes the network a lot because it is “truly a terrible, cynical, disingenuous news organization.”
According to “The Daily Show” Web site, thedailyshow.com, Fox News has been a subject of 24 segments so far this year, including eight in the month of April. The lower-rated news channel CNN, by contrast, has been a subject of five segments this year.
In many of the segments, Mr. Stewart questions Fox’s journalistic practices. He noted that Fox had hired former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska to be a political analyst in a January segment he called “News of the Weird.” But he wasn’t laughing when he asserted that Fox is “functioning as her de-facto rapid response media arm, and they’re paying her for the privilege of doing it.”
In February he noted that Fox News had stopped showing President Obama’s widely praised meeting with Republican leaders while CNN and MSNBC had carried it start to finish. Mimicking a Fox anchor, Mr. Stewart said, “We’re gonna cut away because” — humorous pause — “this is against the narrative that we present.”
In March he ridiculed the news anchor Megyn Kelly for lining up guests who were opposed to the Democratic health care overhaul and citing polls that claimed the American people were opposed to it. Then he played a clip from October 2008, when Mr. Obama was leading in most polls, of Ms. Kelly’s saying “don’t trust the polls.”
In the past week and a half he found himself in a fight with Bernie Goldberg, the Fox News contributor, after suggesting that Mr. Goldberg and others were hypocritical for having bemoaned generalizations about the Tea Party while having demonized liberals.
As Fox’s ratings have surged, so too has the amount of criticism, particularly surrounding its combination of news programs and conservative opinion programs. Asked on Friday about Mr. Stewart’s criticism, a Fox spokeswoman, Loren Hynes, said the channel would pass on an opportunity to comment.
Mr. O’Reilly responded to Mr. Stewart on his Fox program on Wednesday, calling “The Daily Show” a “key component of left-wing television” and concluding: “Here, we have all kinds of views, all kinds of debates, and we’re not boring. That’s why Jon Stewart loves us, and, yes, needs us, especially Bernie Goldberg.”
Mr. Stewart and his executive producers usually let their segments speak for themselves, and they declined interview requests about Fox this week. Friends and colleagues of Mr. Stewart say privately that he cares deeply about media issues and happens to be in a position to talk about them.
His staff members regularly dismiss claims that “The Daily Show” is a form of journalism. “I have not moved out of the comedian’s box into the news box,” Mr. Stewart said on the show on Tuesday, adding, “The news box is moving toward me.”
But there he was, checking in with the White House when Fox didn’t. The inspiration for the “Fox & Friends” segment about the “Islamic image” came from The New York Post, which, like Fox News, is owned by the News Corporation. Mr. Stewart cut up the clips of the co-hosts Brian Kilmeade and Gretchen Carlson reckoning that the flags of Muslim nations look a lot like the summit logo — followed by Ms. Carlson’s saying “you be the judge” — before letting rip.
“Yeah, you be the judge,” Mr. Stewart said, hurling an expletive and continuing, “We’re just curious citizens, wondering if we put that logo up with four Muslim flags, whether you’ll have a visceral reaction that our president is perhaps Muslim.”
He concluded: “Anyway, what do you think? We’re just doing the math and then giving you the answer, and then asking you to check our work.”
By BRIAN STELTER
copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/arts/television/24stewart.html?th&emc=th
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are long gone. Fox News Channel is Jon Stewart’s new enemy No. 1.
Last week that comedian did something that the hosts of “Fox & Friends,” the morning show on Fox News, did not do: he had his staff members call the White House and ask a question.
It may have been in pursuit of farce, not fact, but it gave credence to the people who say “The Daily Show” is journalistic, not just satiric. “Fox & Friends” had repeatedly asked whether the crescent-shaped logo of the nuclear security summit was an “Islamic image,” one selected by President Obama in his outreach to the Muslim world. The White House told “The Daily Show” that the logo was actually based on the Rutherford-Bohr model of the atom.
“This is how relentless Fox is” in savaging President Obama, Mr. Stewart said.
On the subject of Fox, Mr. Stewart is pretty relentless too. As demonstrated by that crescent segment and dozens of others since Mr. Obama took office, he may well be television’s pre-eminent fact-checker of Fox News, the nation’s highest-rated cable news channel.
It has been noticed by, among other people, the Fox host Bill O’Reilly, who called Mr. Stewart a “devoted critic” of Fox News and said “his influence is growing.”
Separately, this week Mr. Stewart’s contract was renewed by Comedy Central into 2013. Combining the earnestness of a journalism professor and the sarcasm of a satirist, Mr. Stewart routinely charges that Fox’s news anchors and commentators distort Mr. Obama’s policies and advance a conservative agenda. He reminds some viewers of the left-wing group Media Matters but much funnier.
“Stewart does a great job of using comedy to expose the tragedy that is Fox News, and he also underscores the seriousness of it,” said Eric Burns, the president of Media Matters.
The segments about Fox are often replayed hundreds of thousands of times on blogs and other Web sites, amplifying their significance. “Media criticism has become part of his brand,” said Mark Jurkowitz, the associate director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, who noted that Mr. Stewart had also dissected CNN and CNBC in lengthy segments in the past.
It is true that the often-left-leaning “Daily Show” deals with a wide array of topics, but Fox is one that Mr. Stewart is overtly passionate about; he said on the show this week that he criticizes the network a lot because it is “truly a terrible, cynical, disingenuous news organization.”
According to “The Daily Show” Web site, thedailyshow.com, Fox News has been a subject of 24 segments so far this year, including eight in the month of April. The lower-rated news channel CNN, by contrast, has been a subject of five segments this year.
In many of the segments, Mr. Stewart questions Fox’s journalistic practices. He noted that Fox had hired former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska to be a political analyst in a January segment he called “News of the Weird.” But he wasn’t laughing when he asserted that Fox is “functioning as her de-facto rapid response media arm, and they’re paying her for the privilege of doing it.”
In February he noted that Fox News had stopped showing President Obama’s widely praised meeting with Republican leaders while CNN and MSNBC had carried it start to finish. Mimicking a Fox anchor, Mr. Stewart said, “We’re gonna cut away because” — humorous pause — “this is against the narrative that we present.”
In March he ridiculed the news anchor Megyn Kelly for lining up guests who were opposed to the Democratic health care overhaul and citing polls that claimed the American people were opposed to it. Then he played a clip from October 2008, when Mr. Obama was leading in most polls, of Ms. Kelly’s saying “don’t trust the polls.”
In the past week and a half he found himself in a fight with Bernie Goldberg, the Fox News contributor, after suggesting that Mr. Goldberg and others were hypocritical for having bemoaned generalizations about the Tea Party while having demonized liberals.
As Fox’s ratings have surged, so too has the amount of criticism, particularly surrounding its combination of news programs and conservative opinion programs. Asked on Friday about Mr. Stewart’s criticism, a Fox spokeswoman, Loren Hynes, said the channel would pass on an opportunity to comment.
Mr. O’Reilly responded to Mr. Stewart on his Fox program on Wednesday, calling “The Daily Show” a “key component of left-wing television” and concluding: “Here, we have all kinds of views, all kinds of debates, and we’re not boring. That’s why Jon Stewart loves us, and, yes, needs us, especially Bernie Goldberg.”
Mr. Stewart and his executive producers usually let their segments speak for themselves, and they declined interview requests about Fox this week. Friends and colleagues of Mr. Stewart say privately that he cares deeply about media issues and happens to be in a position to talk about them.
His staff members regularly dismiss claims that “The Daily Show” is a form of journalism. “I have not moved out of the comedian’s box into the news box,” Mr. Stewart said on the show on Tuesday, adding, “The news box is moving toward me.”
But there he was, checking in with the White House when Fox didn’t. The inspiration for the “Fox & Friends” segment about the “Islamic image” came from The New York Post, which, like Fox News, is owned by the News Corporation. Mr. Stewart cut up the clips of the co-hosts Brian Kilmeade and Gretchen Carlson reckoning that the flags of Muslim nations look a lot like the summit logo — followed by Ms. Carlson’s saying “you be the judge” — before letting rip.
“Yeah, you be the judge,” Mr. Stewart said, hurling an expletive and continuing, “We’re just curious citizens, wondering if we put that logo up with four Muslim flags, whether you’ll have a visceral reaction that our president is perhaps Muslim.”
He concluded: “Anyway, what do you think? We’re just doing the math and then giving you the answer, and then asking you to check our work.”
Add Gay Spirit to Taste, Then Stir
Add Gay Spirit to Taste, Then Stir
By DAVE ITZKOFF
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/theater/24leslie.html?th&emc=th
How at ease is Leslie Jordan with himself these days? Comfortable enough that when he was hired to perform on a recent Alaska-bound cruise, he invited his mother to take the extra stateroom he was offered.
Mr. Jordan, 55, the flamboyant 4-foot-11 Emmy Award-winning actor and author, did not have to tell his mother explicitly that this was a gay cruise. But she may have gleaned as much when she received its schedule of fetish- and underwear-theme events.
“The phone rang,” he recalled in an interview last week, “and Mother said, ‘I tell you what I’m not going to do.’ ”
Mr. Jordan’s face hung like a hound dog’s jowls in anticipation of her reaction. “I said, ‘Oh, boy.’ She said, ‘I’m not going to go ice fishing.’ ”
This particular episode is not recounted in “My Trip Down the Pink Carpet,” Mr. Jordan’s one-man play about how he learned to embrace his sexuality as a young man in Chattanooga, Tenn., and as a performer striving for success in Hollywood.
The scene could easily fit into Mr. Jordan’s show, which opened Monday at the Westside Theater in Manhattan and is adapted from his book of the same title. But it is simply one more moment from a life that constantly reminds Mr. Jordan how far he has come.
Mr. Jordan expects his tale to be familiar to some theatergoers. “Gay people are like, ‘Oh, yeah, her,’ ” he said, his voice soaked in Tennessee twang. “ ‘There’s no new news here. How many coming-out stories can you have?’ ”
“But,” he added, “it is my story. And it’s entertaining.”
It is hard to imagine people being uncertain about Mr. Jordan’s sexual identity if they are familiar with the showy, self-obsessed Southerners Mr. Jordan has made a career of playing: a cross-dressing country music fan in the independent film “Sordid Lives”; the tart-tongued socialite Beverley Leslie on the comedy “Will & Grace,” for which he won an Emmy Award in 2006.
Nor has his being gay ever been a question in his own mind. As Mr. Jordan likes to say, he went directly from his mother’s womb into her high heels, and has been “on the prance ever since.”
But as an adolescent, Mr. Jordan was at odds with his Southern Baptist upbringing and the therapists and psychiatrists who told him his urges were “the voice of the Prince of Darkness.” That conflict was compounded in 1982, when Mr. Jordan arrived in Hollywood, where homosexuality was not much tolerated, on screen or off.
“The fact that I had a gay agent was good,” Mr. Jordan said, “because he could say: ‘Honey, you’ve got an audition today. Keep your feet on the ground, O.K.?’ ” The bit parts he was up for were usually coded with terms like nebbishy, “minty” or fey. “You could take it to a point,” Mr. Jordan said, “but you couldn’t take it any further.”
His ascent through minor roles in short-lived television series, opposite sympathetic future stars like Mark Harmon and George Clooney, makes up one strain of Mr. Jordan’s show. Another is his quest, begun in 1997, to kick his addictions to alcohol and crystal methamphetamine and learn how to be a gay man while sober.
“Here was somebody who was the life of the party for 33 years,” Mr. Jordan said. “All of a sudden I was 42, and all my medicine was taken away.”
Friends and colleagues say Mr. Jordan gives up these kinds of confessions regularly, without any prompting.
“He dispenses it so casually,” said the television producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, who cast Mr. Jordan in the early-’90s sitcom “Hearts Afire.” Stories about man trouble may come up, as might sudden visits to California penitentiaries.
She recalled: “He might go, ‘I’m going to be a little late tomorrow, because I have to go up to Lompoc to see my boyfriend. Unfortunately he got shot with a crossbow.’ And you go, ‘O.K.,’ and he’s not kidding.”
Mr. Jordan can be just as quick with his tongue when he believes he has been wronged by the entertainment industry. Two years on, he is still stung by his experience on “12 Miles of Bad Road,” a comedy that Ms. Bloodworth-Thomason created for HBO, in which he starred with Lily Tomlin and Mary Kay Place as the black-sheep member of an already eccentric family of Texas real estate magnates.
In 2008 HBO canceled the show after six episodes were shot but before any were broadcast, a result for which Mr. Jordan blames his controversial character — a hustler-chasing gay man named Kenny Kingman — and the conservative attitudes of HBO executives.
“I thought, ‘Why can’t you have a gay character that likes hustlers?’ ” Mr. Jordan said. “I stood in that room with HBO and said: ‘What is the problem? Just because he’s not muscle-bound and adopting a Chinese baby?’ ”
HBO said at the time that the show did not fit its overall creative vision, but that it supported the efforts of producers to place it at another network.
But beneath his off-the-wall and sometimes angry anecdotes, Mr. Jordan’s friends say he is sincere in his desire to provide a younger generation of gay men with the peer group that he never had.
“I didn’t think anyone else had my story,” said Levi Kreis, who plays Jerry Lee Lewis in the Broadway musical “Million Dollar Quartet,” and who met Mr. Jordan after he came to Los Angeles from Tennessee.
Like Mr. Jordan, Mr. Kreis was raised a Baptist; he also underwent several years of so-called reparative therapy meant to change him from gay to straight.
What Mr. Jordan offered him and other new arrivals to Hollywood, Mr. Kreis said, was the feeling that “we had a place to belong, regardless of sexuality or religious past.”
“As crazy as one might think Leslie seems,” Mr. Kreis said, Mr. Jordan has also been an inspiration as a performer.
“There’s not a week that goes by,” he said, “that I’m not right in the middle of a performance and I don’t think, ‘O.K., what would Leslie do?’ It’s kind of replaced ‘What would Jesus do?’ in my life.”
Ms. Tomlin, who, with her partner, Jane Wagner, signed on to present the Off Broadway run of “Pink Carpet” after its debut in 2008 at their namesake Lily Tomlin/Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Center in Los Angeles, said the show had the potential to reach gay and straight audiences alike.
“I think everybody in the world would like to know that they can be that free and open with an audience, whatever they might identify as,” Ms. Tomlin said, “and to know that people would laugh and embrace them.”
The ultimate test of this will be when Mr. Jordan’s 75-year-old mother sees “My Trip Down the Pink Carpet” in New York.
On a scale of filthiness, Mr. Jordan said: “My show is a 5, but I can go to a 10. That can also be remedied.” For example, he said he once hired people to sit in his audience and cough simultaneously to prevent his mother from hearing a vulgar punch line.
“To this day,” Mr. Jordan said, “my mother says, ‘Well, I missed the big laugh, but I don’t want to know what it was.’ ”
By DAVE ITZKOFF
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/theater/24leslie.html?th&emc=th
How at ease is Leslie Jordan with himself these days? Comfortable enough that when he was hired to perform on a recent Alaska-bound cruise, he invited his mother to take the extra stateroom he was offered.
Mr. Jordan, 55, the flamboyant 4-foot-11 Emmy Award-winning actor and author, did not have to tell his mother explicitly that this was a gay cruise. But she may have gleaned as much when she received its schedule of fetish- and underwear-theme events.
“The phone rang,” he recalled in an interview last week, “and Mother said, ‘I tell you what I’m not going to do.’ ”
Mr. Jordan’s face hung like a hound dog’s jowls in anticipation of her reaction. “I said, ‘Oh, boy.’ She said, ‘I’m not going to go ice fishing.’ ”
This particular episode is not recounted in “My Trip Down the Pink Carpet,” Mr. Jordan’s one-man play about how he learned to embrace his sexuality as a young man in Chattanooga, Tenn., and as a performer striving for success in Hollywood.
The scene could easily fit into Mr. Jordan’s show, which opened Monday at the Westside Theater in Manhattan and is adapted from his book of the same title. But it is simply one more moment from a life that constantly reminds Mr. Jordan how far he has come.
Mr. Jordan expects his tale to be familiar to some theatergoers. “Gay people are like, ‘Oh, yeah, her,’ ” he said, his voice soaked in Tennessee twang. “ ‘There’s no new news here. How many coming-out stories can you have?’ ”
“But,” he added, “it is my story. And it’s entertaining.”
It is hard to imagine people being uncertain about Mr. Jordan’s sexual identity if they are familiar with the showy, self-obsessed Southerners Mr. Jordan has made a career of playing: a cross-dressing country music fan in the independent film “Sordid Lives”; the tart-tongued socialite Beverley Leslie on the comedy “Will & Grace,” for which he won an Emmy Award in 2006.
Nor has his being gay ever been a question in his own mind. As Mr. Jordan likes to say, he went directly from his mother’s womb into her high heels, and has been “on the prance ever since.”
But as an adolescent, Mr. Jordan was at odds with his Southern Baptist upbringing and the therapists and psychiatrists who told him his urges were “the voice of the Prince of Darkness.” That conflict was compounded in 1982, when Mr. Jordan arrived in Hollywood, where homosexuality was not much tolerated, on screen or off.
“The fact that I had a gay agent was good,” Mr. Jordan said, “because he could say: ‘Honey, you’ve got an audition today. Keep your feet on the ground, O.K.?’ ” The bit parts he was up for were usually coded with terms like nebbishy, “minty” or fey. “You could take it to a point,” Mr. Jordan said, “but you couldn’t take it any further.”
His ascent through minor roles in short-lived television series, opposite sympathetic future stars like Mark Harmon and George Clooney, makes up one strain of Mr. Jordan’s show. Another is his quest, begun in 1997, to kick his addictions to alcohol and crystal methamphetamine and learn how to be a gay man while sober.
“Here was somebody who was the life of the party for 33 years,” Mr. Jordan said. “All of a sudden I was 42, and all my medicine was taken away.”
Friends and colleagues say Mr. Jordan gives up these kinds of confessions regularly, without any prompting.
“He dispenses it so casually,” said the television producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, who cast Mr. Jordan in the early-’90s sitcom “Hearts Afire.” Stories about man trouble may come up, as might sudden visits to California penitentiaries.
She recalled: “He might go, ‘I’m going to be a little late tomorrow, because I have to go up to Lompoc to see my boyfriend. Unfortunately he got shot with a crossbow.’ And you go, ‘O.K.,’ and he’s not kidding.”
Mr. Jordan can be just as quick with his tongue when he believes he has been wronged by the entertainment industry. Two years on, he is still stung by his experience on “12 Miles of Bad Road,” a comedy that Ms. Bloodworth-Thomason created for HBO, in which he starred with Lily Tomlin and Mary Kay Place as the black-sheep member of an already eccentric family of Texas real estate magnates.
In 2008 HBO canceled the show after six episodes were shot but before any were broadcast, a result for which Mr. Jordan blames his controversial character — a hustler-chasing gay man named Kenny Kingman — and the conservative attitudes of HBO executives.
“I thought, ‘Why can’t you have a gay character that likes hustlers?’ ” Mr. Jordan said. “I stood in that room with HBO and said: ‘What is the problem? Just because he’s not muscle-bound and adopting a Chinese baby?’ ”
HBO said at the time that the show did not fit its overall creative vision, but that it supported the efforts of producers to place it at another network.
But beneath his off-the-wall and sometimes angry anecdotes, Mr. Jordan’s friends say he is sincere in his desire to provide a younger generation of gay men with the peer group that he never had.
“I didn’t think anyone else had my story,” said Levi Kreis, who plays Jerry Lee Lewis in the Broadway musical “Million Dollar Quartet,” and who met Mr. Jordan after he came to Los Angeles from Tennessee.
Like Mr. Jordan, Mr. Kreis was raised a Baptist; he also underwent several years of so-called reparative therapy meant to change him from gay to straight.
What Mr. Jordan offered him and other new arrivals to Hollywood, Mr. Kreis said, was the feeling that “we had a place to belong, regardless of sexuality or religious past.”
“As crazy as one might think Leslie seems,” Mr. Kreis said, Mr. Jordan has also been an inspiration as a performer.
“There’s not a week that goes by,” he said, “that I’m not right in the middle of a performance and I don’t think, ‘O.K., what would Leslie do?’ It’s kind of replaced ‘What would Jesus do?’ in my life.”
Ms. Tomlin, who, with her partner, Jane Wagner, signed on to present the Off Broadway run of “Pink Carpet” after its debut in 2008 at their namesake Lily Tomlin/Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Center in Los Angeles, said the show had the potential to reach gay and straight audiences alike.
“I think everybody in the world would like to know that they can be that free and open with an audience, whatever they might identify as,” Ms. Tomlin said, “and to know that people would laugh and embrace them.”
The ultimate test of this will be when Mr. Jordan’s 75-year-old mother sees “My Trip Down the Pink Carpet” in New York.
On a scale of filthiness, Mr. Jordan said: “My show is a 5, but I can go to a 10. That can also be remedied.” For example, he said he once hired people to sit in his audience and cough simultaneously to prevent his mother from hearing a vulgar punch line.
“To this day,” Mr. Jordan said, “my mother says, ‘Well, I missed the big laugh, but I don’t want to know what it was.’ ”
Learning How to Fight the Collector
Learning How to Fight the Collector
By ANDREW MARTIN
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/business/24collection.html?th&emc=th
Among debt collectors, Steven Katz is known as a “credit terrorist.” For years, he has run what he calls the Steven Katz School of Bill Collector Education, otherwise known as the “credit terrorist training camp.”
Mr. Katz, a 58-year-old accountant in suburban Tucson, spends his free time schooling debtors on the finer points of consumer protection law to help them turn the tables on debt collectors. On occasion, he thumbs his own nose at them too.
“How many times can I sue you? Let me count the ways,” he wrote under his pseudonym, Dr. Tax, in a March posting on Inside ARM, a debt collectors’ Web site.
A former bill collector himself, Mr. Katz rebelled after a debt buyer damaged his credit score with what he says was a bogus bill. Mr. Katz sued, and in 2003 he collected his first damage award, a $1,000 check that he now keeps framed behind his desk.
“The bill collectors, when they call, make you feel like the only option you have is to lay down and play dead. That’s not true,” said Mr. Katz said, who does not charge for his advice. “Nothing validates this more than getting a check.”
Call this movement revenge of the (alleged) deadbeats. Even as collectors try to recoup debts from millions of Americans struggling to pay their bills, a small but growing number of lawyers and consumers are fighting back against what they describe as harassment, unscrupulous practices — and, most important to their litigiousness, violations of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.
In fact, 8,287 federal lawsuits were filed citing violations of the act in 2009, a 60 percent rise over the previous year, according to WebRecon, a site that tracks collection-related litigation and the most litigious consumers and lawyers on behalf of debt collectors.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court made it even easier for consumers to use the courts to fight debt collectors, ruling that collectors cannot be shielded from suits by claiming they made a mistake in interpreting the law.
When a consumer stops paying a bill, creditors often try to collect on their own for a few months. In many instances, the creditor hires another company to collect the debt. In other cases, they may dispose of the debt by selling it to a debt buyer for a steep discount.
Debt collectors and debt buyers are the targets of litigious consumers, since the debt collection law primarily applies to third-party collectors.
Peter Barry, a Minneapolis trial lawyer, is so bullish on the future of debt collection litigation that he holds several “boot camps” each year to share his secrets with other lawyers who want in on the action. If the debtor wins a court case under the act, the debt collector must pay the lawyer’s fees.
The next boot camp is being held in early May in San Francisco, at a cost of $2,495 a person for two and a half days of instruction.
“I can’t sue every illegal debt collector in America, although I’d like to try,” Mr. Barry said.
Mr. Katz can also claim some credit for the increase in lawsuits. For six years, he has run a free Web site called Debtorboards.com, where people share tips on topics like keeping a paper trail and recording calls from collectors.
He said the site received two million hits in 2009, a 60 percent increase over the previous year.
“Debtorboards is geared to help people use the laws as they are on the books as both a shield and a sword,” said Mr. Katz, who says he has won $36,000 from his own litigation against collection agencies. (Since many of the settlements are confidential, it is difficult to prove the claims of Mr. Katz and others).
Of course, debt collectors are hardly pleased with the litigation trend.
Rozanne M. Andersen, chief executive of ACA International, a trade association for the debt collection industry, said she was “extremely concerned” about the increase in lawsuits, which she said cost her industry hundreds of millions of dollars a year. She said much of the increase was the result of ambiguous language in the Fair Debt Collection Act.
Debt collectors are required, for example, to identify themselves on a voice message left for a consumer, she said. But they are also prohibited from telling a third party — including someone who might overhear a phone message — about a consumer’s debt.
“We are between a rock and a hard place,” Ms. Andersen said.
Ms. Andersen said she had little patience for Web sites that encouraged consumers to thwart debt collectors.
“We believe those types of Web sites are encouraging people to not take responsibility for just debt,” she said.
Jack Gordon, who runs the fee-based WebRecon site, said it was no wonder lawsuits were increasing, because consumers were being bombarded with ads from lawyers when they searched online for information on debt collection. He said the proliferation of discussion sites like Mr. Katz’s had, to a lesser extent, also contributed to the trend.
On the boards, he said, “There’s a lot of hot air, a lot of people who overinflate their accomplishments.”
Regardless, Mr. Gordon’s database has become a badge of honor among the devotees of Debtorboards.com. As Brandon Scroggin, a 37-year-old from Little Rock, Ark., puts it, “That’s one list I’m a proud card-carrying member of.”
Mr. Scroggin, who provides price estimates at a body shop, said he was the type of person who refused to be taken advantage of, even for petty offenses. For instance, years ago, he said he joined in the class-action suit against the pop group Milli Vanilli, accused of lip synching, and collected a $1.25 check.
After a messy divorce, Mr. Scroggin was stuck with a $7,000 bill that he said belonged to his ex-wife. Instead of paying it, he began researching the law and stumbled on Debtorboards.com.
Armed with lessons he learned on the site, he demanded proof of the debt from the collection agency, and the calls stopped. But two and a half years later, they started up again so he sued the collection agency, National Loan Recoveries, for failing to provide proof of the debt, among other things.
The case was settled in 2008. The terms were confidential, but he says he never paid National Loan a dime. “Let’s just say I’m a very happy person,” he said. A lawyer for National Loan, Kathryn Bridges, did not return messages seeking comment.
Mr. Katz said his Web site was not intended to help people avoid paying legitimate debts. But if they do so, so be it — he feels no need to apologize.
He said Congress gave consumers certain rights, and he is simply making people aware of them, sometimes colorfully.
As Mr. Katz says at the bottom of each Dr. Tax posting, “A telephone in the hands of a collector is like a crowbar — it can be used to pry a mouth open wide enough to insert a foot.”
Barbara Thompson, 46, of Atlanta, said she challenged $11,000 in credit card debt using online research about collection laws. She does not dispute the debts but reasons that the credit card company wrote off her charges long ago. By her account, she owes the credit card company, not the debt collector.
“The credit card company, they sell it off, they charge it off, it’s just business as usual,” she said, adding, “I’m adamant about not paying a collection agency.”
By ANDREW MARTIN
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/business/24collection.html?th&emc=th
Among debt collectors, Steven Katz is known as a “credit terrorist.” For years, he has run what he calls the Steven Katz School of Bill Collector Education, otherwise known as the “credit terrorist training camp.”
Mr. Katz, a 58-year-old accountant in suburban Tucson, spends his free time schooling debtors on the finer points of consumer protection law to help them turn the tables on debt collectors. On occasion, he thumbs his own nose at them too.
“How many times can I sue you? Let me count the ways,” he wrote under his pseudonym, Dr. Tax, in a March posting on Inside ARM, a debt collectors’ Web site.
A former bill collector himself, Mr. Katz rebelled after a debt buyer damaged his credit score with what he says was a bogus bill. Mr. Katz sued, and in 2003 he collected his first damage award, a $1,000 check that he now keeps framed behind his desk.
“The bill collectors, when they call, make you feel like the only option you have is to lay down and play dead. That’s not true,” said Mr. Katz said, who does not charge for his advice. “Nothing validates this more than getting a check.”
Call this movement revenge of the (alleged) deadbeats. Even as collectors try to recoup debts from millions of Americans struggling to pay their bills, a small but growing number of lawyers and consumers are fighting back against what they describe as harassment, unscrupulous practices — and, most important to their litigiousness, violations of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.
In fact, 8,287 federal lawsuits were filed citing violations of the act in 2009, a 60 percent rise over the previous year, according to WebRecon, a site that tracks collection-related litigation and the most litigious consumers and lawyers on behalf of debt collectors.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court made it even easier for consumers to use the courts to fight debt collectors, ruling that collectors cannot be shielded from suits by claiming they made a mistake in interpreting the law.
When a consumer stops paying a bill, creditors often try to collect on their own for a few months. In many instances, the creditor hires another company to collect the debt. In other cases, they may dispose of the debt by selling it to a debt buyer for a steep discount.
Debt collectors and debt buyers are the targets of litigious consumers, since the debt collection law primarily applies to third-party collectors.
Peter Barry, a Minneapolis trial lawyer, is so bullish on the future of debt collection litigation that he holds several “boot camps” each year to share his secrets with other lawyers who want in on the action. If the debtor wins a court case under the act, the debt collector must pay the lawyer’s fees.
The next boot camp is being held in early May in San Francisco, at a cost of $2,495 a person for two and a half days of instruction.
“I can’t sue every illegal debt collector in America, although I’d like to try,” Mr. Barry said.
Mr. Katz can also claim some credit for the increase in lawsuits. For six years, he has run a free Web site called Debtorboards.com, where people share tips on topics like keeping a paper trail and recording calls from collectors.
He said the site received two million hits in 2009, a 60 percent increase over the previous year.
“Debtorboards is geared to help people use the laws as they are on the books as both a shield and a sword,” said Mr. Katz, who says he has won $36,000 from his own litigation against collection agencies. (Since many of the settlements are confidential, it is difficult to prove the claims of Mr. Katz and others).
Of course, debt collectors are hardly pleased with the litigation trend.
Rozanne M. Andersen, chief executive of ACA International, a trade association for the debt collection industry, said she was “extremely concerned” about the increase in lawsuits, which she said cost her industry hundreds of millions of dollars a year. She said much of the increase was the result of ambiguous language in the Fair Debt Collection Act.
Debt collectors are required, for example, to identify themselves on a voice message left for a consumer, she said. But they are also prohibited from telling a third party — including someone who might overhear a phone message — about a consumer’s debt.
“We are between a rock and a hard place,” Ms. Andersen said.
Ms. Andersen said she had little patience for Web sites that encouraged consumers to thwart debt collectors.
“We believe those types of Web sites are encouraging people to not take responsibility for just debt,” she said.
Jack Gordon, who runs the fee-based WebRecon site, said it was no wonder lawsuits were increasing, because consumers were being bombarded with ads from lawyers when they searched online for information on debt collection. He said the proliferation of discussion sites like Mr. Katz’s had, to a lesser extent, also contributed to the trend.
On the boards, he said, “There’s a lot of hot air, a lot of people who overinflate their accomplishments.”
Regardless, Mr. Gordon’s database has become a badge of honor among the devotees of Debtorboards.com. As Brandon Scroggin, a 37-year-old from Little Rock, Ark., puts it, “That’s one list I’m a proud card-carrying member of.”
Mr. Scroggin, who provides price estimates at a body shop, said he was the type of person who refused to be taken advantage of, even for petty offenses. For instance, years ago, he said he joined in the class-action suit against the pop group Milli Vanilli, accused of lip synching, and collected a $1.25 check.
After a messy divorce, Mr. Scroggin was stuck with a $7,000 bill that he said belonged to his ex-wife. Instead of paying it, he began researching the law and stumbled on Debtorboards.com.
Armed with lessons he learned on the site, he demanded proof of the debt from the collection agency, and the calls stopped. But two and a half years later, they started up again so he sued the collection agency, National Loan Recoveries, for failing to provide proof of the debt, among other things.
The case was settled in 2008. The terms were confidential, but he says he never paid National Loan a dime. “Let’s just say I’m a very happy person,” he said. A lawyer for National Loan, Kathryn Bridges, did not return messages seeking comment.
Mr. Katz said his Web site was not intended to help people avoid paying legitimate debts. But if they do so, so be it — he feels no need to apologize.
He said Congress gave consumers certain rights, and he is simply making people aware of them, sometimes colorfully.
As Mr. Katz says at the bottom of each Dr. Tax posting, “A telephone in the hands of a collector is like a crowbar — it can be used to pry a mouth open wide enough to insert a foot.”
Barbara Thompson, 46, of Atlanta, said she challenged $11,000 in credit card debt using online research about collection laws. She does not dispute the debts but reasons that the credit card company wrote off her charges long ago. By her account, she owes the credit card company, not the debt collector.
“The credit card company, they sell it off, they charge it off, it’s just business as usual,” she said, adding, “I’m adamant about not paying a collection agency.”
NATO Backs Plan to Give Command to Afghans
NATO Backs Plan to Give Command to Afghans
By MARK LANDLER
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/world/asia/24diplo.html?th&emc=th
TALLINN, Estonia — Setting the stage for a gradual withdrawal from Afghanistan, the United States and other NATO countries adopted a plan here Friday that sets conditions for beginning to remove troops from a lead role in Afghan provinces by the end of this year.
The plan, which NATO hopes to turn into a formal agreement with the Afghan government in July, would transfer authority to Afghans when they have met three criteria: a competent local police force, a durable civilian government and signs of reconciliation with the Taliban insurgency.
NATO’s goal is to announce in November that it has begun to hand over authority in a cluster of provinces, most likely in Afghanistan’s relatively stable north and west, officials said. If successful, the plan would help President Obama meet his deadline of starting to pull out American troops by July 2011. But American officials cautioned that the timetable could slip if security remained poor or if the insurgents proved resilient.
At a meeting of NATO foreign ministers here, the alliance received an update on the progress in the war from Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top military commander in Afghanistan, and Ambassador Mark Sedwill, NATO’s recently appointed senior civilian representative.
As the American-led coalition prepares for its next big operation, in the southern Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, Mr. Sedwill said it had learned valuable lessons from the recent campaign to stabilize Marja — namely, that achieving a rough balance of power among competing tribal groups was critical to restoring order.
The Marja campaign, he said, had been hampered because some landowners amassed so much power that they had co-opted the local police force, transforming it into a militia used against the people.
“The big lesson we learned in Marja, which we’re taking to Kandahar, is that you got to get the politics right,” Mr. Sedwill told reporters. “Balanced access to political and economic power is vital.”
Britain’s onetime ambassador to Afghanistan, Mr. Sedwill has emerged as a major figure in the Western effort in the country. Since his arrival, the United States has stopped calling for the appointment of a high-level coordinator who would function as a civilian counterpart to General McChrystal.
NATO’s progress report was welcomed here, since the emphasis in many war-weary alliance members has shifted from the combat mission to turning Afghanistan back to its own people.
Still, the Danish secretary general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, pledged that foreign troops would continue to support Afghan soldiers long after they relinquished command. “It will not be a pullout; it will not be a run for the exit,” he said at a news conference.
NATO’s commitment to the war has come under question in recent weeks. The alliance has fallen 450 people short of a goal to supply 2,000 trainers for the Afghan national police force by October. Afghanistan wants to expand its police force to 134,000 by October 2011, from 103,000 now.
“The gap matters,” Mr. Sedwill said. “We’ve got 100,000 troops there; we ought to be able to find 450.”
The shortfall has been whittled down steadily, Mr. Rasmussen said, with Canada pledging to send 90 additional trainers. He said he was confident that NATO would be able to staff its training mission fully. The United States still supplies the large majority of police trainers.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the Obama administration was satisfied with NATO’s contribution, which now comprises 10,000 soldiers, trainers and so-called mentors.
“We started off with a significant gap and we have narrowed it considerably,” she said.
Mrs. Clinton said she was optimistic that with the proper training, the Afghan security forces and the police could be counted on to take control.
“Does that mean it will be smooth sailing?” she said of the transfer. “I don’t think so. Look at Iraq.”
Mrs. Clinton went out of her way to praise President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, with whom Washington’s relations have recently been turbulent. She said he had an impossible job, and that his successes, like the greater number of Afghan girls now in school, were not as widely reported as his failures.
Mr. Sedwill also defended Mr. Karzai, saying that his recent anti-Western outbursts reflected frustration with what Mr. Karzai viewed as the West’s disregard for Afghanistan’s sovereignty.
“They didn’t invite us in,” he said. “To many Afghans, this is essentially us fighting our war for our reasons on their soil.”
By MARK LANDLER
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/world/asia/24diplo.html?th&emc=th
TALLINN, Estonia — Setting the stage for a gradual withdrawal from Afghanistan, the United States and other NATO countries adopted a plan here Friday that sets conditions for beginning to remove troops from a lead role in Afghan provinces by the end of this year.
The plan, which NATO hopes to turn into a formal agreement with the Afghan government in July, would transfer authority to Afghans when they have met three criteria: a competent local police force, a durable civilian government and signs of reconciliation with the Taliban insurgency.
NATO’s goal is to announce in November that it has begun to hand over authority in a cluster of provinces, most likely in Afghanistan’s relatively stable north and west, officials said. If successful, the plan would help President Obama meet his deadline of starting to pull out American troops by July 2011. But American officials cautioned that the timetable could slip if security remained poor or if the insurgents proved resilient.
At a meeting of NATO foreign ministers here, the alliance received an update on the progress in the war from Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top military commander in Afghanistan, and Ambassador Mark Sedwill, NATO’s recently appointed senior civilian representative.
As the American-led coalition prepares for its next big operation, in the southern Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, Mr. Sedwill said it had learned valuable lessons from the recent campaign to stabilize Marja — namely, that achieving a rough balance of power among competing tribal groups was critical to restoring order.
The Marja campaign, he said, had been hampered because some landowners amassed so much power that they had co-opted the local police force, transforming it into a militia used against the people.
“The big lesson we learned in Marja, which we’re taking to Kandahar, is that you got to get the politics right,” Mr. Sedwill told reporters. “Balanced access to political and economic power is vital.”
Britain’s onetime ambassador to Afghanistan, Mr. Sedwill has emerged as a major figure in the Western effort in the country. Since his arrival, the United States has stopped calling for the appointment of a high-level coordinator who would function as a civilian counterpart to General McChrystal.
NATO’s progress report was welcomed here, since the emphasis in many war-weary alliance members has shifted from the combat mission to turning Afghanistan back to its own people.
Still, the Danish secretary general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, pledged that foreign troops would continue to support Afghan soldiers long after they relinquished command. “It will not be a pullout; it will not be a run for the exit,” he said at a news conference.
NATO’s commitment to the war has come under question in recent weeks. The alliance has fallen 450 people short of a goal to supply 2,000 trainers for the Afghan national police force by October. Afghanistan wants to expand its police force to 134,000 by October 2011, from 103,000 now.
“The gap matters,” Mr. Sedwill said. “We’ve got 100,000 troops there; we ought to be able to find 450.”
The shortfall has been whittled down steadily, Mr. Rasmussen said, with Canada pledging to send 90 additional trainers. He said he was confident that NATO would be able to staff its training mission fully. The United States still supplies the large majority of police trainers.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the Obama administration was satisfied with NATO’s contribution, which now comprises 10,000 soldiers, trainers and so-called mentors.
“We started off with a significant gap and we have narrowed it considerably,” she said.
Mrs. Clinton said she was optimistic that with the proper training, the Afghan security forces and the police could be counted on to take control.
“Does that mean it will be smooth sailing?” she said of the transfer. “I don’t think so. Look at Iraq.”
Mrs. Clinton went out of her way to praise President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, with whom Washington’s relations have recently been turbulent. She said he had an impossible job, and that his successes, like the greater number of Afghan girls now in school, were not as widely reported as his failures.
Mr. Sedwill also defended Mr. Karzai, saying that his recent anti-Western outbursts reflected frustration with what Mr. Karzai viewed as the West’s disregard for Afghanistan’s sovereignty.
“They didn’t invite us in,” he said. “To many Afghans, this is essentially us fighting our war for our reasons on their soil.”
Are Catholics in denial as much as The Church?
Are Catholics in denial as much as The Church?
Carlos T Mock, MD
Copyright by The Reader
21 April 2010
http://readersupportednews.org/pm-section/165-religion/1541-are-catholics-in-denial-as-much-as-the-church
I had a very troubling interchange with my sister, who is a practicing a Puerto Rican Catholic in Connecticut. The conversation started because a bill in Connecticut's legislature that would remove the statute of limitations on child sexual abuse cases has sparked a fervent response from the state's Roman Catholic bishops, who released a letter to parishioners Saturday imploring them to oppose the measure. My sister is strongly opposed to the law and, as we talked, she accused The New York Times of starting a smear campaign against the Catholic Church. I pointed out to her that this was not a vendetta from the NYT against the church. The article that talked about the law in CT was written by CNN News. I even brought up an editorial from the Financial Times which stated: “The response of the Roman Catholic Church to the wave of shameful child abuse revelations engulfing it across Europe and the US is ‘hopelessly inadequate’. That is the view of Diarmuid Martin, Archbishop of Dublin, who has worked courageously to bring the history of abuse in the Irish Church into the open. It is also the view of the Financial Times. Serious sexual crimes against defenseless children by priests entrusted with their care are an outrageous crime. The betrayal is deepened by a pattern of covering up for these child molesters, who were in some instances left free to keep preying on their charges. The responsibility for this goes to the top: not only of local hierarchies but to the Vatican itself.”
I tried to appeal to her motherly instincts — ”you have young children, don’t you want them protected from pedophiles?” Her answer was that: “If you go to the Bridgeport website (her parish) and look under ‘safe environments’ you will see exactly how the Connecticut church is protecting our children.”
I pointed out to her that rules have been in place for many years but that they don’t get enforced — she went ballistic: “How quickly you dismiss the efforts of others. And how harsh is your sentence. The Church is not perfect and the people in it are not either. But, from my perspective, I believe their effort is sincere. Connecticut is a very liberal state and the legislature has a slant specifically against the Catholic Church. The state has no business in meddling with the ‘sanctity’ of The Church”
I am still baffled by her response. When Catholics are willing to put the welfare and reputation of the Church ahead of their own children — does this constitute brainwashing? I am a Christian, not a Catholic — I was tortured by The Church for my sexual views. As I grew up in San Juan, I saw them abuse children in my Catholic High School and was always too afraid to talk for fear of being expelled.
When I came out as a gay adult, this same pious sister asked me to give up homosexual sex because Christ died on the cross for my sins. My mother disowned me, I’m no longer in her will. Yet, my mother married a divorced man, so she lived in adultery most of her adult life, and my sister married while pregnant. See a pattern?
Unfortunately I grew up with the Catholic Church's values, so I can only feel remorse as I watch the spectacle of the hypocrisy in which The Church finds itself embroiled. As a gay man, I strongly believe that the cover-up of child molester priests — either heterosexual or homosexual — has no place in The Church.
True, Pope Benedict last month issued an unprecedented apology in a letter to the Irish Church. I find the letter to be as hollow as the institution of The Church itself. The letter promised an investigation, it stopped substantially short of a mea culpa. Instead, it appeared to blame “secularism” for the phenomenon of child abuse. This is intellectually dishonest. The pattern of abuse was detectable in Ireland long before an identifiably secular lifestyle took hold — and when Church authority went virtually unquestioned. The Vatican is in denial, denouncing what is in their view an attempt to discredit the Church and to smear the Pope.
To put it in simple to understand words: “This is an authoritarian isolation in which Benedict and his predecessor, John Paul II, have lived, surrounded by like-minded dogmatics possessed of their infallible truth. They have rolled back the reform process set in train by the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965. With flinty doctrinal rigidity they have shut down debate on married priests and celibacy, the ordination of women, sexual relations outside marriage and homosexuality — all issues germane to the scandal in which they are now enveloped. They expect unquestioned obedience to their authority, and in the case of these crimes, they imposed absolute secrecy and resisted co-operation with the properly constituted civil authorities. In practice, that means being accountable to no one — at least on earth.”
At first, I was puzzled by Pope Benedict’s response. Now, I think I understand. The pontiff is a globalizer. He can feel the world’s geopolitical plates shifting. The dismal reality is that the Pope does not care. If the eventual choice is one between the implosion of the church in the west and a dilution of the blind obedience he sees as an anchor of papal authority, Pope Benedict is ready to stand in the ruins. The thread that runs through all this — the reactionary dogma and the refusal to admit any complicity in the cover-ups — is a willingness to sacrifice truth to an unthinking, and futile, defense of the authority of the church. It is my condemnation for being a practicing gay against Church doctrine, and my sister’s salvation, because she confessed her premarital sex and got absolution.
Catholicism is booming in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Europeans and North Americans now number only 350m in a church of some 1.2bn. About two-thirds of Catholics live in what is the emerging world — about 400m of them in Latin America. Brazil boasts twice as many communicants as Italy. Mexico and the Philippines have larger congregations than Germany or France.
This perhaps is where Pope Benedict’s gaze is fixed. Catholics in the emerging nations, after all, have been largely untroubled by the scandal that has rocked his authority in the west. They are less inclined to challenge the pontiff’s moral absolutism and his demand for unquestioning obedience to Rome — just look at my mother and sister.
The future lies beyond the decadent materialism and moral bankruptcy of the richest societies. In the manner of a corporate executive reaping the rewards of globalization, the pontiff is gathering new recruits in the spiritual markets of the emerging world. The pews may gather dust in Europe and the US, but elsewhere — albeit for a few skeptics — the future of The Church is secure and untouched by any laws of man. If they have to sacrifice a few children, so be it!
Dr. Mock is the author of Mosaic Virus, Floricanto Press 2007 — a thriller that deals with Church’s pedophilia cover ups. His views have been published in The Chicago Tribune and many gay and lesbian periodicals. He was inducted in the Chicago GLBT Hall of Fame in 2007. He can be reached at: http://www.carlostmock.com/
Carlos T Mock, MD
Copyright by The Reader
21 April 2010
http://readersupportednews.org/pm-section/165-religion/1541-are-catholics-in-denial-as-much-as-the-church
I had a very troubling interchange with my sister, who is a practicing a Puerto Rican Catholic in Connecticut. The conversation started because a bill in Connecticut's legislature that would remove the statute of limitations on child sexual abuse cases has sparked a fervent response from the state's Roman Catholic bishops, who released a letter to parishioners Saturday imploring them to oppose the measure. My sister is strongly opposed to the law and, as we talked, she accused The New York Times of starting a smear campaign against the Catholic Church. I pointed out to her that this was not a vendetta from the NYT against the church. The article that talked about the law in CT was written by CNN News. I even brought up an editorial from the Financial Times which stated: “The response of the Roman Catholic Church to the wave of shameful child abuse revelations engulfing it across Europe and the US is ‘hopelessly inadequate’. That is the view of Diarmuid Martin, Archbishop of Dublin, who has worked courageously to bring the history of abuse in the Irish Church into the open. It is also the view of the Financial Times. Serious sexual crimes against defenseless children by priests entrusted with their care are an outrageous crime. The betrayal is deepened by a pattern of covering up for these child molesters, who were in some instances left free to keep preying on their charges. The responsibility for this goes to the top: not only of local hierarchies but to the Vatican itself.”
I tried to appeal to her motherly instincts — ”you have young children, don’t you want them protected from pedophiles?” Her answer was that: “If you go to the Bridgeport website (her parish) and look under ‘safe environments’ you will see exactly how the Connecticut church is protecting our children.”
I pointed out to her that rules have been in place for many years but that they don’t get enforced — she went ballistic: “How quickly you dismiss the efforts of others. And how harsh is your sentence. The Church is not perfect and the people in it are not either. But, from my perspective, I believe their effort is sincere. Connecticut is a very liberal state and the legislature has a slant specifically against the Catholic Church. The state has no business in meddling with the ‘sanctity’ of The Church”
I am still baffled by her response. When Catholics are willing to put the welfare and reputation of the Church ahead of their own children — does this constitute brainwashing? I am a Christian, not a Catholic — I was tortured by The Church for my sexual views. As I grew up in San Juan, I saw them abuse children in my Catholic High School and was always too afraid to talk for fear of being expelled.
When I came out as a gay adult, this same pious sister asked me to give up homosexual sex because Christ died on the cross for my sins. My mother disowned me, I’m no longer in her will. Yet, my mother married a divorced man, so she lived in adultery most of her adult life, and my sister married while pregnant. See a pattern?
Unfortunately I grew up with the Catholic Church's values, so I can only feel remorse as I watch the spectacle of the hypocrisy in which The Church finds itself embroiled. As a gay man, I strongly believe that the cover-up of child molester priests — either heterosexual or homosexual — has no place in The Church.
True, Pope Benedict last month issued an unprecedented apology in a letter to the Irish Church. I find the letter to be as hollow as the institution of The Church itself. The letter promised an investigation, it stopped substantially short of a mea culpa. Instead, it appeared to blame “secularism” for the phenomenon of child abuse. This is intellectually dishonest. The pattern of abuse was detectable in Ireland long before an identifiably secular lifestyle took hold — and when Church authority went virtually unquestioned. The Vatican is in denial, denouncing what is in their view an attempt to discredit the Church and to smear the Pope.
To put it in simple to understand words: “This is an authoritarian isolation in which Benedict and his predecessor, John Paul II, have lived, surrounded by like-minded dogmatics possessed of their infallible truth. They have rolled back the reform process set in train by the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965. With flinty doctrinal rigidity they have shut down debate on married priests and celibacy, the ordination of women, sexual relations outside marriage and homosexuality — all issues germane to the scandal in which they are now enveloped. They expect unquestioned obedience to their authority, and in the case of these crimes, they imposed absolute secrecy and resisted co-operation with the properly constituted civil authorities. In practice, that means being accountable to no one — at least on earth.”
At first, I was puzzled by Pope Benedict’s response. Now, I think I understand. The pontiff is a globalizer. He can feel the world’s geopolitical plates shifting. The dismal reality is that the Pope does not care. If the eventual choice is one between the implosion of the church in the west and a dilution of the blind obedience he sees as an anchor of papal authority, Pope Benedict is ready to stand in the ruins. The thread that runs through all this — the reactionary dogma and the refusal to admit any complicity in the cover-ups — is a willingness to sacrifice truth to an unthinking, and futile, defense of the authority of the church. It is my condemnation for being a practicing gay against Church doctrine, and my sister’s salvation, because she confessed her premarital sex and got absolution.
Catholicism is booming in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Europeans and North Americans now number only 350m in a church of some 1.2bn. About two-thirds of Catholics live in what is the emerging world — about 400m of them in Latin America. Brazil boasts twice as many communicants as Italy. Mexico and the Philippines have larger congregations than Germany or France.
This perhaps is where Pope Benedict’s gaze is fixed. Catholics in the emerging nations, after all, have been largely untroubled by the scandal that has rocked his authority in the west. They are less inclined to challenge the pontiff’s moral absolutism and his demand for unquestioning obedience to Rome — just look at my mother and sister.
The future lies beyond the decadent materialism and moral bankruptcy of the richest societies. In the manner of a corporate executive reaping the rewards of globalization, the pontiff is gathering new recruits in the spiritual markets of the emerging world. The pews may gather dust in Europe and the US, but elsewhere — albeit for a few skeptics — the future of The Church is secure and untouched by any laws of man. If they have to sacrifice a few children, so be it!
Dr. Mock is the author of Mosaic Virus, Floricanto Press 2007 — a thriller that deals with Church’s pedophilia cover ups. His views have been published in The Chicago Tribune and many gay and lesbian periodicals. He was inducted in the Chicago GLBT Hall of Fame in 2007. He can be reached at: http://www.carlostmock.com/
$18.5 Million in Liability for Scouts in Abuse Case
$18.5 Million in Liability for Scouts in Abuse Case
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
Copyright by the Associated Press
Published: April 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/us/24scouts.html?th&emc=th
PORTLAND, Ore. — The Boy Scouts of America were ordered Friday to pay $18.5 million in a lawsuit that has focused new attention on the secret files the Scouts keep to document claims of sexual abuse by troop leaders and volunteers.
Known variously as the “perversion files,” the “red flag files” and the “ineligible volunteer files,” the documents have been maintained for more than 70 years at the Scouts’ national office in Texas. Yet even after scores of abuse cases against the Scouts in recent decades, the case here is one of the few times that substantial portions of the files have been made accessible to a jury.
In Multnomah County Circuit Court on Friday, a jury found the Scouts liable for $18.5 million in punitive damages in a case brought by a man who was sexually abused by an assistant troop leader in the early 1980s, when the man was about 12. The verdict was by far the largest ever against the Scouts in a jury trial. The jury could have ordered the Scouts to pay up to $25 million. The same jury last week awarded the man, Kerry Lewis, $1.4 million in compensatory damages.
Most abuse cases involving the Scouts have ended in private settlements, and it is unknown how much the group has paid to victims.
In the Oregon case, about 1,000 files, from the years 1965 to 1984, were included as evidence, though the judge, John A. Wittmayer, allowed only the jury and lawyers involved to view them.
Lawyers for Mr. Lewis, who is now 37, said in court that the files detailed many instances across the country in which troop leaders or volunteers were allowed to continue working with children even after the Scouts had received complaints that they had committed sexual abuse.
“They hid the problem,” Paul Mones, a lawyer for Mr. Lewis, said in closing arguments on Thursday, “and by hiding the problem, more abuse happened.”
In the Oregon case, a former assistant troop leader, Timur Dykes, had admitted to molesting Mr. Lewis. Evidence has shown that Mr. Dykes, who has since been convicted in child-molesting cases, was allowed to interact with scouts even after leaders learned he had abused children.
Mr. Mones said in court that Mr. Lewis might not have been abused had the Scouts reported the information they collected. He said releasing the files would help deter abuse and show that the Scouts are confronting the issue at a national level.
Lawyers for the Scouts have argued that the files should be kept confidential to protect victims and wrongly accused adults. They also dispute the claim that the files have caused harm.
Chuck Smith, a lawyer for the Scouts, told jurors that the files proved that the Scouts were ahead of their time in tracking child sexual abuse, even if the system was “not foolproof.”
“Hopefully, if their name’s in this file and there’s a file on them, they can never be involved in the Boy Scouts again,” Mr. Smith told the jury. “I ask you folks, what is wrong with that? What’s wrong with trying to maintain that kind of control?”
Several news organizations, including The New York Times, have filed a motion to gain access to the files.
The Scouts, based in Irving, Tex., would not discuss the case.
“Access to the file is kept private to protect accusers from retaliation and to protect the privacy of victims,” Deron Smith, a spokesman for the Scouts, wrote in an e-mail message. “And, since B.S.A. acts on suspicion, not proof, to guard against liability to those who may have been accused in error.”
Patrick Boyle, whose 1994 book “Scout’s Honor” drew in part from access he gained to about 2,000 files kept by the Scouts, said releasing the files even in redacted form would benefit the public and the Scouts.
“The astonishing thing about this for the Scouts is how something that was so good turned out so bad for them,” said Mr. Boyle, who is editor of Youth Today, which covers the youth service industry. “This started out as a valuable system for child protection and it’s turned into a major headache, largely because of the way they’ve handled it.”
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
Copyright by the Associated Press
Published: April 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/us/24scouts.html?th&emc=th
PORTLAND, Ore. — The Boy Scouts of America were ordered Friday to pay $18.5 million in a lawsuit that has focused new attention on the secret files the Scouts keep to document claims of sexual abuse by troop leaders and volunteers.
Known variously as the “perversion files,” the “red flag files” and the “ineligible volunteer files,” the documents have been maintained for more than 70 years at the Scouts’ national office in Texas. Yet even after scores of abuse cases against the Scouts in recent decades, the case here is one of the few times that substantial portions of the files have been made accessible to a jury.
In Multnomah County Circuit Court on Friday, a jury found the Scouts liable for $18.5 million in punitive damages in a case brought by a man who was sexually abused by an assistant troop leader in the early 1980s, when the man was about 12. The verdict was by far the largest ever against the Scouts in a jury trial. The jury could have ordered the Scouts to pay up to $25 million. The same jury last week awarded the man, Kerry Lewis, $1.4 million in compensatory damages.
Most abuse cases involving the Scouts have ended in private settlements, and it is unknown how much the group has paid to victims.
In the Oregon case, about 1,000 files, from the years 1965 to 1984, were included as evidence, though the judge, John A. Wittmayer, allowed only the jury and lawyers involved to view them.
Lawyers for Mr. Lewis, who is now 37, said in court that the files detailed many instances across the country in which troop leaders or volunteers were allowed to continue working with children even after the Scouts had received complaints that they had committed sexual abuse.
“They hid the problem,” Paul Mones, a lawyer for Mr. Lewis, said in closing arguments on Thursday, “and by hiding the problem, more abuse happened.”
In the Oregon case, a former assistant troop leader, Timur Dykes, had admitted to molesting Mr. Lewis. Evidence has shown that Mr. Dykes, who has since been convicted in child-molesting cases, was allowed to interact with scouts even after leaders learned he had abused children.
Mr. Mones said in court that Mr. Lewis might not have been abused had the Scouts reported the information they collected. He said releasing the files would help deter abuse and show that the Scouts are confronting the issue at a national level.
Lawyers for the Scouts have argued that the files should be kept confidential to protect victims and wrongly accused adults. They also dispute the claim that the files have caused harm.
Chuck Smith, a lawyer for the Scouts, told jurors that the files proved that the Scouts were ahead of their time in tracking child sexual abuse, even if the system was “not foolproof.”
“Hopefully, if their name’s in this file and there’s a file on them, they can never be involved in the Boy Scouts again,” Mr. Smith told the jury. “I ask you folks, what is wrong with that? What’s wrong with trying to maintain that kind of control?”
Several news organizations, including The New York Times, have filed a motion to gain access to the files.
The Scouts, based in Irving, Tex., would not discuss the case.
“Access to the file is kept private to protect accusers from retaliation and to protect the privacy of victims,” Deron Smith, a spokesman for the Scouts, wrote in an e-mail message. “And, since B.S.A. acts on suspicion, not proof, to guard against liability to those who may have been accused in error.”
Patrick Boyle, whose 1994 book “Scout’s Honor” drew in part from access he gained to about 2,000 files kept by the Scouts, said releasing the files even in redacted form would benefit the public and the Scouts.
“The astonishing thing about this for the Scouts is how something that was so good turned out so bad for them,” said Mr. Boyle, who is editor of Youth Today, which covers the youth service industry. “This started out as a valuable system for child protection and it’s turned into a major headache, largely because of the way they’ve handled it.”
Bishop, 73, in Belgium Steps Down Over Abuse
Bishop, 73, in Belgium Steps Down Over Abuse
By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: April 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/world/europe/24vatican.html?th&emc=th
ROME — The longest-serving bishop in Belgium resigned Friday after admitting to sexually abusing “a boy in my close entourage” many years ago, becoming the latest cleric to quit in a spreading abuse scandal.
The development added to a corrosive catalog of disclosures that has damaged the credibility of the Roman Catholic Church and shaken the trust of many believers in their spiritual leaders.
In a statement issued by the Vatican on Friday, Roger Vangheluwe, 73, the bishop of Bruges since 1985, said that the abuse had occurred “when I was still a simple priest and for a while when I began as a bishop.”
“This has marked the victim forever,” he said.
The bishop said that he had asked the victim and his family several times to forgive him, but that the wound had not healed, “neither in me nor the victim.” A recent media storm merely deepened the trauma, he said. “I am profoundly sorry,” he said.
This week, in a rare public comment directly addressing the issue of abuse, Pope Benedict XVI promised that the church would take action to deal with the crisis.
Bishop Vangheluwe is the first Belgian bishop to step down since the abuse scandal began to erupt in recent months in several European countries. Bishops elsewhere have resigned, though. On Thursday the church authorities in Germany said that Bishop Walter Mixa, one of the country’s most prominent and outspoken conservative clerics, had tendered his resignation after being accused of beating children decades ago.
On the same day, the Vatican said the pope had accepted the resignation of Bishop James Moriarty of Kildare and Leighlin, Ireland. Bishop Moriarty had been cited in an Irish government report on the mishandling and concealment of cases of priestly abuse.
Most bishops who have quit have done so because they were accused of covering up accusations against priests under their authority. While not as common, several bishops before Bishop Vangheluwe have been personally accused of abuse.
Several American bishops have stepped down in the wake of allegations of sexual abuse or assault. So have a Norwegian bishop, Georg Mueller, who resigned last May, and an Austrian cardinal, Hans Hermann Groer, who resigned in 1998.
Bishop Vangheluwe’s statement was also read to reporters at a news conference in Brussels by Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard, who called Bishop Vangheluwe a “generous and dynamic bishop,” but said that his transgression would shock many.
“We are aware of the crisis of confidence his resignation will set in motion,” Archbishop Léonard said. But he stressed that the Catholic Church in Belgium was determined to “turn over a leaf from a not-very-distant past when such matters would pass in silence or be concealed.”
The resignation came 10 years after the church in Belgium set up a commission to look into complaints of abuse that frequently seemed at loggerheads with the church leadership.
Archbishop Léonard acknowledged in an Easter homily this year that as the Vatican leadership confronted persistent accusations of abuse, “the reputation of church leaders was given a higher priority than that of abused children,” The Associated Press reported.
Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Paris.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 23, 2010
An earlier version of this article misstated the year in which Roger Vangheluwe became bishop of Bruges. He became bishop in 1985, not 1984.
By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: April 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/world/europe/24vatican.html?th&emc=th
ROME — The longest-serving bishop in Belgium resigned Friday after admitting to sexually abusing “a boy in my close entourage” many years ago, becoming the latest cleric to quit in a spreading abuse scandal.
The development added to a corrosive catalog of disclosures that has damaged the credibility of the Roman Catholic Church and shaken the trust of many believers in their spiritual leaders.
In a statement issued by the Vatican on Friday, Roger Vangheluwe, 73, the bishop of Bruges since 1985, said that the abuse had occurred “when I was still a simple priest and for a while when I began as a bishop.”
“This has marked the victim forever,” he said.
The bishop said that he had asked the victim and his family several times to forgive him, but that the wound had not healed, “neither in me nor the victim.” A recent media storm merely deepened the trauma, he said. “I am profoundly sorry,” he said.
This week, in a rare public comment directly addressing the issue of abuse, Pope Benedict XVI promised that the church would take action to deal with the crisis.
Bishop Vangheluwe is the first Belgian bishop to step down since the abuse scandal began to erupt in recent months in several European countries. Bishops elsewhere have resigned, though. On Thursday the church authorities in Germany said that Bishop Walter Mixa, one of the country’s most prominent and outspoken conservative clerics, had tendered his resignation after being accused of beating children decades ago.
On the same day, the Vatican said the pope had accepted the resignation of Bishop James Moriarty of Kildare and Leighlin, Ireland. Bishop Moriarty had been cited in an Irish government report on the mishandling and concealment of cases of priestly abuse.
Most bishops who have quit have done so because they were accused of covering up accusations against priests under their authority. While not as common, several bishops before Bishop Vangheluwe have been personally accused of abuse.
Several American bishops have stepped down in the wake of allegations of sexual abuse or assault. So have a Norwegian bishop, Georg Mueller, who resigned last May, and an Austrian cardinal, Hans Hermann Groer, who resigned in 1998.
Bishop Vangheluwe’s statement was also read to reporters at a news conference in Brussels by Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard, who called Bishop Vangheluwe a “generous and dynamic bishop,” but said that his transgression would shock many.
“We are aware of the crisis of confidence his resignation will set in motion,” Archbishop Léonard said. But he stressed that the Catholic Church in Belgium was determined to “turn over a leaf from a not-very-distant past when such matters would pass in silence or be concealed.”
The resignation came 10 years after the church in Belgium set up a commission to look into complaints of abuse that frequently seemed at loggerheads with the church leadership.
Archbishop Léonard acknowledged in an Easter homily this year that as the Vatican leadership confronted persistent accusations of abuse, “the reputation of church leaders was given a higher priority than that of abused children,” The Associated Press reported.
Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Paris.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 23, 2010
An earlier version of this article misstated the year in which Roger Vangheluwe became bishop of Bruges. He became bishop in 1985, not 1984.
Chinese Military Seeks to Extend Its Naval Power
Chinese Military Seeks to Extend Its Naval Power
By EDWARD WONG
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: April 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/world/asia/24navy.html?th&emc=th
YALONG BAY, China — The Chinese military is seeking to project naval power well beyond the Chinese coast, from the oil ports of the Middle East to the shipping lanes of the Pacific, where the United States Navy has long reigned as the dominant force, military officials and analysts say.
China calls the new strategy “far sea defense,” and the speed with which it is building long-range capabilities has surprised foreign military officials.
The strategy is a sharp break from the traditional, narrower doctrine of preparing for war over the self-governing island of Taiwan or defending the Chinese coast. Now, Chinese admirals say they want warships to escort commercial vessels that are crucial to the country’s economy, from as far as the Persian Gulf to the Strait of Malacca, in Southeast Asia, and to help secure Chinese interests in the resource-rich South and East China Seas.
In late March, two Chinese warships docked in Abu Dhabi, the first time the modern Chinese Navy made a port visit in the Middle East.
The overall plan reflects China’s growing sense of self-confidence and increasing willingness to assert its interests abroad. China’s naval ambitions are being felt, too, in recent muscle flexing with the United States: in March, Chinese officials told senior American officials privately that China would brook no foreign interference in its territorial issues in the South China Sea, said a senior American official involved in China policy.
The naval expansion will not make China a serious rival to American naval hegemony in the near future, and there are few indications that China has aggressive intentions toward the United States or other countries.
But China, now the world’s leading exporter and a giant buyer of oil and other natural resources, is also no longer content to trust the security of sea lanes to the Americans, and its definition of its own core interests has expanded along with its economic clout.
In late March, Adm. Robert F. Willard, the leader of the United States Pacific Command, said in Congressional testimony that recent Chinese military developments were “pretty dramatic.” China has tested long-range ballistic missiles that could be used against aircraft carriers, he said. After years of denials, Chinese officials have confirmed that they intend to deploy an aircraft carrier group within a few years.
China is also developing a sophisticated submarine fleet that could try to prevent foreign naval vessels from entering its strategic waters if a conflict erupted in the region, said Admiral Willard and military analysts.
“Of particular concern is that elements of China’s military modernization appear designed to challenge our freedom of action in the region,” the admiral said.
Yalong Bay, on the southern coast of Hainan island in the South China Sea, is the site of five-star beach resorts just west of a new underground submarine base. The base allows submarines to reach deep water within 20 minutes and roam the South China Sea, which has some of the world’s busiest shipping lanes and areas rich in oil and natural gas that are the focus of territorial disputes between China and other Asian nations.
That has caused concern not only among American commanders, but also among officials in Southeast Asian nations, which have been quietly acquiring more submarines, missiles and other weapons. “Regional officials have been surprised,” said Huang Jing, a scholar of the Chinese military at the National University of Singapore. “We were in a blinded situation. We thought the Chinese military was 20 years behind us, but we suddenly realized China is catching up.”
China is also pressing the United States to heed its claims in the region. In March, Chinese officials told two visiting senior Obama administration officials, Jeffrey A. Bader and James B. Steinberg, that China would not tolerate any interference in the South China Sea, now part of China’s “core interest” of sovereignty, said an American official involved in China policy. It was the first time the Chinese labeled the South China Sea a core interest, on par with Taiwan and Tibet, the official said.
Another element of the Chinese Navy’s new strategy is to extend its operational reach beyond the South China Sea and the Philippines to what is known as the “second island chain” — rocks and atolls out in the Pacific, the official said. That zone significantly overlaps the United States Navy’s area of supremacy.
Japan is anxious, too. Its defense minister, Toshimi Kitazawa, said in mid-April that two Chinese submarines and eight destroyers were spotted on April 10 heading between two Japanese islands en route to the Pacific, the first time such a large Chinese flotilla had been seen so close to Japan. When two Japanese destroyers began following the Chinese ships, a Chinese helicopter flew within 300 feet of one of the destroyers, the Japanese Defense Ministry said.
Since December 2008, China has maintained three ships in the Gulf of Aden to contribute to international antipiracy patrols, the first deployment of the Chinese Navy beyond the Pacific. The mission allows China to improve its navy’s long-range capabilities, analysts say.
A 2009 Pentagon report estimated Chinese naval forces at 260 vessels, including 75 “principal combatants” — major warships — and more than 60 submarines. The report noted the building of an aircraft carrier, and said China “continues to show interest” in acquiring carrier-borne jet fighters from Russia. The United States Navy has 286 battle-force ships and 3,700 naval aircraft, though ship for ship the American Navy is considered qualitatively superior to the Chinese Navy.
The Pentagon does not classify China as an enemy force. But partly in reaction to China’s growth, the United States has recently transferred submarines from the Atlantic to the Pacific so that most of its nuclear-powered attack submarines are now in the Pacific, said Bernard D. Cole, a former American naval officer and a professor at the National War College in Washington.
The United States has also begun rotating three to four submarines on deployments out of Guam, reviving a practice that had ended with the cold war, Mr. Cole said.
American vessels now frequently survey the submarine base at Hainan island, and that activity leads to occasional friction with Chinese ships. A survey mission last year by an American naval ship, the Impeccable, resulted in what Pentagon officials said was harassment by Chinese fishing vessels; the Chinese government said it had the right to block surveillance in those waters because they are an “exclusive economic zone” of China.
The United States and China have clashing definitions of such zones, defined by a United Nations convention as waters within 200 nautical miles of a coast. The United States says international law allows a coastal country to retain only special commercial rights in the zones, while China contends the country can control virtually any activity within them.
Military leaders here maintain that the Chinese Navy is purely a self-defense force. But the definition of self-defense has expanded to encompass broad maritime and economic interests, two Chinese admirals contended in March.
“With our naval strategy changing now, we are going from coastal defense to far sea defense,” Rear Adm. Zhang Huachen, deputy commander of the East Sea Fleet, said in an interview with Xinhua, the state news agency.
“With the expansion of the country’s economic interests, the navy wants to better protect the country’s transportation routes and the safety of our major sea lanes,” he added. “In order to achieve this, the Chinese Navy needs to develop along the lines of bigger vessels and with more comprehensive capabilities.”
The navy gets more than one-third of the overall Chinese military budget, “reflecting the priority Beijing currently places on the navy as an instrument of national security,” Mr. Cole said. China’s official military budget for 2010 is $78 billion, but the Pentagon says China spends much more than that amount. Last year, the Pentagon estimated total Chinese military spending at $105 billion to $150 billion, still much less than what the United States spends on defense. For comparison, the Obama administration proposed $548.9 billion as the Pentagon’s base operating budget for next year.
The Chinese Navy’s most impressive growth has been in its submarine fleet, said Mr. Huang, the scholar in Singapore. It recently built at least two Jin-class submarines, the first regularly active ones in the fleet with ballistic missile capabilities, and two more are under construction. Two Shang-class nuclear-powered attack submarines recently entered service.
Countries in the region have responded with their own acquisitions, said Carlyle A. Thayer, a professor at the Australian Defense Force Academy. In December, Vietnam signed an arms deal with Russia that included six Kilo-class submarines, which would give Vietnam the most formidable submarine fleet in Southeast Asia. Last year, Malaysia took delivery of its first submarine, one of two ordered from France, and Singapore began operating one of two Archer-class submarines bought from Sweden.
Last fall, during a speech in Washington, Lee Kuan Yew, the former Singaporean leader, reflected widespread anxieties when he noted China’s naval rise and urged the United States to maintain its regional presence. “U.S. core interest requires that it remains the superior power on the Pacific,” he said. “To give up this position would diminish America’s role throughout the world.”
Thom Shanker contributed reporting from Washington.
By EDWARD WONG
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: April 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/world/asia/24navy.html?th&emc=th
YALONG BAY, China — The Chinese military is seeking to project naval power well beyond the Chinese coast, from the oil ports of the Middle East to the shipping lanes of the Pacific, where the United States Navy has long reigned as the dominant force, military officials and analysts say.
China calls the new strategy “far sea defense,” and the speed with which it is building long-range capabilities has surprised foreign military officials.
The strategy is a sharp break from the traditional, narrower doctrine of preparing for war over the self-governing island of Taiwan or defending the Chinese coast. Now, Chinese admirals say they want warships to escort commercial vessels that are crucial to the country’s economy, from as far as the Persian Gulf to the Strait of Malacca, in Southeast Asia, and to help secure Chinese interests in the resource-rich South and East China Seas.
In late March, two Chinese warships docked in Abu Dhabi, the first time the modern Chinese Navy made a port visit in the Middle East.
The overall plan reflects China’s growing sense of self-confidence and increasing willingness to assert its interests abroad. China’s naval ambitions are being felt, too, in recent muscle flexing with the United States: in March, Chinese officials told senior American officials privately that China would brook no foreign interference in its territorial issues in the South China Sea, said a senior American official involved in China policy.
The naval expansion will not make China a serious rival to American naval hegemony in the near future, and there are few indications that China has aggressive intentions toward the United States or other countries.
But China, now the world’s leading exporter and a giant buyer of oil and other natural resources, is also no longer content to trust the security of sea lanes to the Americans, and its definition of its own core interests has expanded along with its economic clout.
In late March, Adm. Robert F. Willard, the leader of the United States Pacific Command, said in Congressional testimony that recent Chinese military developments were “pretty dramatic.” China has tested long-range ballistic missiles that could be used against aircraft carriers, he said. After years of denials, Chinese officials have confirmed that they intend to deploy an aircraft carrier group within a few years.
China is also developing a sophisticated submarine fleet that could try to prevent foreign naval vessels from entering its strategic waters if a conflict erupted in the region, said Admiral Willard and military analysts.
“Of particular concern is that elements of China’s military modernization appear designed to challenge our freedom of action in the region,” the admiral said.
Yalong Bay, on the southern coast of Hainan island in the South China Sea, is the site of five-star beach resorts just west of a new underground submarine base. The base allows submarines to reach deep water within 20 minutes and roam the South China Sea, which has some of the world’s busiest shipping lanes and areas rich in oil and natural gas that are the focus of territorial disputes between China and other Asian nations.
That has caused concern not only among American commanders, but also among officials in Southeast Asian nations, which have been quietly acquiring more submarines, missiles and other weapons. “Regional officials have been surprised,” said Huang Jing, a scholar of the Chinese military at the National University of Singapore. “We were in a blinded situation. We thought the Chinese military was 20 years behind us, but we suddenly realized China is catching up.”
China is also pressing the United States to heed its claims in the region. In March, Chinese officials told two visiting senior Obama administration officials, Jeffrey A. Bader and James B. Steinberg, that China would not tolerate any interference in the South China Sea, now part of China’s “core interest” of sovereignty, said an American official involved in China policy. It was the first time the Chinese labeled the South China Sea a core interest, on par with Taiwan and Tibet, the official said.
Another element of the Chinese Navy’s new strategy is to extend its operational reach beyond the South China Sea and the Philippines to what is known as the “second island chain” — rocks and atolls out in the Pacific, the official said. That zone significantly overlaps the United States Navy’s area of supremacy.
Japan is anxious, too. Its defense minister, Toshimi Kitazawa, said in mid-April that two Chinese submarines and eight destroyers were spotted on April 10 heading between two Japanese islands en route to the Pacific, the first time such a large Chinese flotilla had been seen so close to Japan. When two Japanese destroyers began following the Chinese ships, a Chinese helicopter flew within 300 feet of one of the destroyers, the Japanese Defense Ministry said.
Since December 2008, China has maintained three ships in the Gulf of Aden to contribute to international antipiracy patrols, the first deployment of the Chinese Navy beyond the Pacific. The mission allows China to improve its navy’s long-range capabilities, analysts say.
A 2009 Pentagon report estimated Chinese naval forces at 260 vessels, including 75 “principal combatants” — major warships — and more than 60 submarines. The report noted the building of an aircraft carrier, and said China “continues to show interest” in acquiring carrier-borne jet fighters from Russia. The United States Navy has 286 battle-force ships and 3,700 naval aircraft, though ship for ship the American Navy is considered qualitatively superior to the Chinese Navy.
The Pentagon does not classify China as an enemy force. But partly in reaction to China’s growth, the United States has recently transferred submarines from the Atlantic to the Pacific so that most of its nuclear-powered attack submarines are now in the Pacific, said Bernard D. Cole, a former American naval officer and a professor at the National War College in Washington.
The United States has also begun rotating three to four submarines on deployments out of Guam, reviving a practice that had ended with the cold war, Mr. Cole said.
American vessels now frequently survey the submarine base at Hainan island, and that activity leads to occasional friction with Chinese ships. A survey mission last year by an American naval ship, the Impeccable, resulted in what Pentagon officials said was harassment by Chinese fishing vessels; the Chinese government said it had the right to block surveillance in those waters because they are an “exclusive economic zone” of China.
The United States and China have clashing definitions of such zones, defined by a United Nations convention as waters within 200 nautical miles of a coast. The United States says international law allows a coastal country to retain only special commercial rights in the zones, while China contends the country can control virtually any activity within them.
Military leaders here maintain that the Chinese Navy is purely a self-defense force. But the definition of self-defense has expanded to encompass broad maritime and economic interests, two Chinese admirals contended in March.
“With our naval strategy changing now, we are going from coastal defense to far sea defense,” Rear Adm. Zhang Huachen, deputy commander of the East Sea Fleet, said in an interview with Xinhua, the state news agency.
“With the expansion of the country’s economic interests, the navy wants to better protect the country’s transportation routes and the safety of our major sea lanes,” he added. “In order to achieve this, the Chinese Navy needs to develop along the lines of bigger vessels and with more comprehensive capabilities.”
The navy gets more than one-third of the overall Chinese military budget, “reflecting the priority Beijing currently places on the navy as an instrument of national security,” Mr. Cole said. China’s official military budget for 2010 is $78 billion, but the Pentagon says China spends much more than that amount. Last year, the Pentagon estimated total Chinese military spending at $105 billion to $150 billion, still much less than what the United States spends on defense. For comparison, the Obama administration proposed $548.9 billion as the Pentagon’s base operating budget for next year.
The Chinese Navy’s most impressive growth has been in its submarine fleet, said Mr. Huang, the scholar in Singapore. It recently built at least two Jin-class submarines, the first regularly active ones in the fleet with ballistic missile capabilities, and two more are under construction. Two Shang-class nuclear-powered attack submarines recently entered service.
Countries in the region have responded with their own acquisitions, said Carlyle A. Thayer, a professor at the Australian Defense Force Academy. In December, Vietnam signed an arms deal with Russia that included six Kilo-class submarines, which would give Vietnam the most formidable submarine fleet in Southeast Asia. Last year, Malaysia took delivery of its first submarine, one of two ordered from France, and Singapore began operating one of two Archer-class submarines bought from Sweden.
Last fall, during a speech in Washington, Lee Kuan Yew, the former Singaporean leader, reflected widespread anxieties when he noted China’s naval rise and urged the United States to maintain its regional presence. “U.S. core interest requires that it remains the superior power on the Pacific,” he said. “To give up this position would diminish America’s role throughout the world.”
Thom Shanker contributed reporting from Washington.
Friday, April 23, 2010
Brady paid almost no U.S. taxes in three of past four years
Brady paid almost no U.S. taxes in three of past four years
by Greg Hinz
Copyright by Chicago Business
4/23/2010 2:08 PM CDT
http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/blogs/hinz.pl?plckController=Blog&plckScript=blogScript&plckElementId=blogDest&plckBlogPage=BlogViewPost&plckPostId=Blog%3a1daca073-2eab-468e-9f19-ec177090a35cPost%3a951bf217-54a1-4b2a-807d-87b1e1e84581&plckCommentSortOrder=TimeStampAscending&sid=sitelife.chicagobusiness.com
GOP gubernatorial nominee Bill Brady, facing financial setbacks in his family construction business, paid nothing, or almost nothing, in federal income taxes in three of the past four years, according to a summary released by his office Friday afternoon.
And over the past five years as a whole, Mr. Brady -- a state senator and Bloomington home developer -- paid a relatively modest 20.2% in federal taxes despite a reported total adjusted gross income for those years of more than $1.6 million.
The figures come from a somewhat unusual press release e-mailed to reporters on Friday afternoon by the Brady campaign.
Mr. Brady previously had refused to release his returns, citing personal business concerns. He reversed field earlier in the week after Democratic incumbent Pat Quinn released his returns and indicated he would make Mr. Brady's refusal a major issue in the race.
But despite that promise, Mr. Brady finally decided only to make a copy of his returns available for review for three hours in his Springfield office. Reporters who were not able to go to Springfield on short notice instead were sent the email summary.
In the summary and press release, Mr. Brady alludes to "down years" in the construction business. Because of that "new reality," he said in a statement, the number of employees in the family business has been slashed by half.
That apparently explains some and perhaps all of the wide variation in Mr. Brady's reported income. His spokeswoman did not return calls and emails seeking elaboration.
But the returns also indicate that Mr. Brady has been able to use those setbacks to sharply slash his federal tax liability.
Mr. Brady's income was highest in 2004 and 2005, when according to the summary he had taxable income of $495,000 and $466,000, respectively, and paid a combined $314,000 in federal and state income taxes.
But in 2006, his reported income dropped to $130,326, with federal taxes of $1,228 and state taxes of $3,610.
The home-building business was still booming that year, but Mr. Brady's press release said his family also "began retooling" their company in 2006.
Mr. Brady's income popped back up in 2007 to $372,355 and he paid $42,000 in federal and $11,000 in state taxes that year.
But in 2008, he reported a negative adjusted gross income of $116,679 and paid no taxes. That may because of business losses that were rolled forward but, again, the Brady campaign had no immediate responses to questions.
Mr. Brady's reported gross income in 2009 was a positive $120,000. But his "taxable income" was $49,733, and he paid no federal income tax and $3,309 in state income tax.
The press release says Mr. Brady's 2009 taxable income "came under a provision of the IRS...to help small business fight through and survive by allowing the sales of assets."
As a state senator in both 2008 and 2009, Mr. Brady was paid a base salary of $67,836 in each year, plus a stipend of $10,327 as minority spokesman on the Senate Insurance Committee, according to the Illinois comptroller's office.
Mr. Quinn reported paying $32,000 in taxes in 2009 on income of $157,000 -- almost all of it from his salary as governor.
In the press release, Mr. Brady said his business reverses are a good indication of why Illinois needs a new governor, sensitive to the need to improve the state's economic climate.
In the six years as a whole, he said, the Brady family paid 22% of their income in taxes and contributed more than 6% to charity.
* * * 3:30 p.m. update: The Brady campaign says it will make the candidate's tax lawyer, Jason Barickman, available in a conference call for up to 100 reporters this evening.
And Capitol Fax correctly reminds that, while paying no taxes, Mr. Brady loaned his political campaign $130,000 in the past two years.
* * * 4:30 update: The Quinn campaign is out with its take and, predictably, it's not very nice.
In a statement, if first blames Mr. Brady for not really disclosing the returns as much as giving select reporters "a glimpse of Haley's Comet." Cute.
Then it notes that, in some years, Mr. Brady paid no taxes, even though he clearly earned more than $100,000. "The original Tea Party's rallying cry was 'no taxation without representation'," it adds. "Sen. Brady misinterpreted this line as 'no taxation for elected representatives."
Either way, the Quinn folks clearly are going to make an issue of it. For a change, they have something to go on the offense about.
* * * 5:30 update: Mr. Brady's attorney -- Jason Barickman, who also happens to be the Champaign County GOP chair -- just finished the conference call, and was able to add some light.
According to him, Mr. Brady's income briefly popped up in 2007 when, as part of the retooling that began in 2006, Brady's company sold some assets "probably to raise cash", and then incurred a tax liability.
Losses by Brady companies -- a mix of a Subchapter S firm, an LLC and and a C Corp. are involved -- more than offset Mr. Brady's Senate $75,000 Senate pay in 2008, and a section of Barack Obama's stimulus bill designed to help small companies slashed his liability in 2009, Mr. Barickman said.
All that, if accurate, makes sense. Or at least follows the law.
But, as a matter of practical politics, Mr. Brady still is going to have to explain how he really can make $75,000 a year as a state senator and still pay nothing, or almost nothing, in federal income taxes in three of the past four years.
Mr. Barickman said the typical Illinoisan "can relate" to Brady's financial woes. We'll see.
by Greg Hinz
Copyright by Chicago Business
4/23/2010 2:08 PM CDT
http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/blogs/hinz.pl?plckController=Blog&plckScript=blogScript&plckElementId=blogDest&plckBlogPage=BlogViewPost&plckPostId=Blog%3a1daca073-2eab-468e-9f19-ec177090a35cPost%3a951bf217-54a1-4b2a-807d-87b1e1e84581&plckCommentSortOrder=TimeStampAscending&sid=sitelife.chicagobusiness.com
GOP gubernatorial nominee Bill Brady, facing financial setbacks in his family construction business, paid nothing, or almost nothing, in federal income taxes in three of the past four years, according to a summary released by his office Friday afternoon.
And over the past five years as a whole, Mr. Brady -- a state senator and Bloomington home developer -- paid a relatively modest 20.2% in federal taxes despite a reported total adjusted gross income for those years of more than $1.6 million.
The figures come from a somewhat unusual press release e-mailed to reporters on Friday afternoon by the Brady campaign.
Mr. Brady previously had refused to release his returns, citing personal business concerns. He reversed field earlier in the week after Democratic incumbent Pat Quinn released his returns and indicated he would make Mr. Brady's refusal a major issue in the race.
But despite that promise, Mr. Brady finally decided only to make a copy of his returns available for review for three hours in his Springfield office. Reporters who were not able to go to Springfield on short notice instead were sent the email summary.
In the summary and press release, Mr. Brady alludes to "down years" in the construction business. Because of that "new reality," he said in a statement, the number of employees in the family business has been slashed by half.
That apparently explains some and perhaps all of the wide variation in Mr. Brady's reported income. His spokeswoman did not return calls and emails seeking elaboration.
But the returns also indicate that Mr. Brady has been able to use those setbacks to sharply slash his federal tax liability.
Mr. Brady's income was highest in 2004 and 2005, when according to the summary he had taxable income of $495,000 and $466,000, respectively, and paid a combined $314,000 in federal and state income taxes.
But in 2006, his reported income dropped to $130,326, with federal taxes of $1,228 and state taxes of $3,610.
The home-building business was still booming that year, but Mr. Brady's press release said his family also "began retooling" their company in 2006.
Mr. Brady's income popped back up in 2007 to $372,355 and he paid $42,000 in federal and $11,000 in state taxes that year.
But in 2008, he reported a negative adjusted gross income of $116,679 and paid no taxes. That may because of business losses that were rolled forward but, again, the Brady campaign had no immediate responses to questions.
Mr. Brady's reported gross income in 2009 was a positive $120,000. But his "taxable income" was $49,733, and he paid no federal income tax and $3,309 in state income tax.
The press release says Mr. Brady's 2009 taxable income "came under a provision of the IRS...to help small business fight through and survive by allowing the sales of assets."
As a state senator in both 2008 and 2009, Mr. Brady was paid a base salary of $67,836 in each year, plus a stipend of $10,327 as minority spokesman on the Senate Insurance Committee, according to the Illinois comptroller's office.
Mr. Quinn reported paying $32,000 in taxes in 2009 on income of $157,000 -- almost all of it from his salary as governor.
In the press release, Mr. Brady said his business reverses are a good indication of why Illinois needs a new governor, sensitive to the need to improve the state's economic climate.
In the six years as a whole, he said, the Brady family paid 22% of their income in taxes and contributed more than 6% to charity.
* * * 3:30 p.m. update: The Brady campaign says it will make the candidate's tax lawyer, Jason Barickman, available in a conference call for up to 100 reporters this evening.
And Capitol Fax correctly reminds that, while paying no taxes, Mr. Brady loaned his political campaign $130,000 in the past two years.
* * * 4:30 update: The Quinn campaign is out with its take and, predictably, it's not very nice.
In a statement, if first blames Mr. Brady for not really disclosing the returns as much as giving select reporters "a glimpse of Haley's Comet." Cute.
Then it notes that, in some years, Mr. Brady paid no taxes, even though he clearly earned more than $100,000. "The original Tea Party's rallying cry was 'no taxation without representation'," it adds. "Sen. Brady misinterpreted this line as 'no taxation for elected representatives."
Either way, the Quinn folks clearly are going to make an issue of it. For a change, they have something to go on the offense about.
* * * 5:30 update: Mr. Brady's attorney -- Jason Barickman, who also happens to be the Champaign County GOP chair -- just finished the conference call, and was able to add some light.
According to him, Mr. Brady's income briefly popped up in 2007 when, as part of the retooling that began in 2006, Brady's company sold some assets "probably to raise cash", and then incurred a tax liability.
Losses by Brady companies -- a mix of a Subchapter S firm, an LLC and and a C Corp. are involved -- more than offset Mr. Brady's Senate $75,000 Senate pay in 2008, and a section of Barack Obama's stimulus bill designed to help small companies slashed his liability in 2009, Mr. Barickman said.
All that, if accurate, makes sense. Or at least follows the law.
But, as a matter of practical politics, Mr. Brady still is going to have to explain how he really can make $75,000 a year as a state senator and still pay nothing, or almost nothing, in federal income taxes in three of the past four years.
Mr. Barickman said the typical Illinoisan "can relate" to Brady's financial woes. We'll see.
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