Isaac Laquedem

The Oregonian slants one for the Mayor

Yesterday the Portland City Council voted to approve a new Interstate Bridge with 12 lanes, on the condition that local governments create a regional commission to see that the bridge doesn't cause urban sprawl.  The Oregonian describes this vote as "a win for embattled Mayor Sam Adams."

I don't know whether the regional commission is a win for Mayor Adams -- it's not something that was in the mix before -- but it's hard for me to see that the City voting to endorse 12 lanes is a win for the mayor.  Just over six weeks ago, the Oregonian described him as a proponent of 8 lanes who could, in the Mayor's words, "maybe stretch" to approve 10 lanes.  He came close, the Oregonian said, to ruling out ever endorsing 12 lanes.  Just over six months ago, Mayor Adams (then a commissioner) joined the rest of the Council in voting for a 6-lane bridge.  I see yesterday's vote as a victory for road users and businesses, but it's not a victory for the Mayor or the City Council.

His constituents took money out of banks; Congressman Capuano won't put his in

Michael Capuano, a congressman from Massachusetts, let loose a few days ago on the heads of some of the banks that got us into the current financial mess.  The evening news has carried excerpts of his speech.  You should see and hear his full speech: here's the YouTube video.  Kris Broughton at TalkingPointsMemo transcribed his talk here (and thanks to her for the transcription, though no transcription without audio could do his stemwinder justice).

My three favorite parts of Mr. Capuano's speech are these.  In the first excerpt, he talks about how some of his constituents interacted with those banks:

But basically, you come to us today, on your bicycles, after buying Girl Scout cookies, and helping out Mother Teresa, telling us 'we're sorry, we didn't mean it, we won't do it again. Trust us.'

Well, I have some people in my constituency that actually robbed some of your banks, and they say the same thing. 'They're sorry, they didn't mean it, they won't do it again. Just let 'em out.'

Do you understand that this is a little difficult for my constituents to take, that you 'learned your lesson?'  * * *

I for one, between myself and my various campaigns and my own personal business stuff, I get a lot of money to put in banks. I don't have one single penny in any of your banks.

The second part I was taken with is toward the end, when he gives the bank presidents some personnel advice:

I don't want my money put into CDO's and credit default swaps and making humongous bonuses - me personally. Until that changes, none of us really believe - I don't believe - anything will change.

Until you change the people who brought you into SIV's - who was the brilliant person who came and said 'let's do credit default swaps?'

Find him.  Fire him.  Tell me you fired him.

Get out of CDO's. Start loaning the money that we gave you. Get it on the street. And don't say 'oh well, we're not using that money for bonuses.' Come on! Money's all of a sudden not fungible in your entities. It's fungible everywhere else, but not in your entity.

Get our money out on the street. And if you don't want to give it back, don't come here and tell me that you can't.

And the third part I especially liked was in the middle of his speech, between the two parts I quoted, when Mr. Capuano acknowledged that he wasn't asking a question:

I don't really have a question, but I was told I can use the five minutes, 'cause the questions I have, you've answered them, and you're going to continue to answer them.

The fox was guarding the peanuthouse

The salmonella outbreak, tied to contaminated peanut products from a Georgia processing plant owned by Peanut Corporation of America, has produced one delicious irony.  In 2005, the Bush administration appointed the owner and president of the company, a man from Lynchburg, Virginia named Stewart Parnell, to serve on the Peanut Standards Board.  The Peanut Standards Board is part of the Department of Agriculture that advises the USDA on how to grade and classify peanuts.  It also helps set quality-control and safe-handling standards for peanuts.  Mr. Parnell must have done well, because the Bush administration reappointed him in 2008 to serve another three-year term.  Things work differently in the current administration; Tom Vilsack, the new Secretary of Agriculture, removed Mr. Parnell from the Board on Thursday, and banned his company from receiving any more federal contracts.

The company's website, which used to describe the company's history and included quotations from Mr. Parnell, has been revamped.  As of this morning it includes only the press releases about the contamination and the recall.  Actually it includes one more practical bit of information: the name and address of the company's agent for service of process in Georgia -- the address where, if you are suing the company, you're to send the summons and complaint.

Captain Sullenberger was a hero. LaGuardia's ATC was pretty special too.

This is what it sounds like in an airport control tower when a pilot radios that his plane has lost power and is going to land in a river.

It's also why we don't subcontract air traffic control to the lowest bidder.

President Obama makes a Laquedem Plan more generous

Back on November 19, I proposed that if the government were to assist the automakers, it should put strict conditions on how much any recipient of the public largesse could pay its executives until it paid the government back.  A figure of $400,000 a year seemed reasonable to me; it's what we pay the nation's president.  My logic was that a company receiving a multi-billion dollar bailout should be willing to follow the federal pay scale.

I doubt that President Obama got the idea from this blog (although I mentioned it to Mr. Emanuel when I had the good fortune to sit next to him on an airplane in December), but I'm pleased that he is proposing to limit executive compensation to $500,000/year at firms that accept "extraordinary assistance" from the government. 

Last week I praised Cascade Bancorp, a Bend bank holding company, for announcing that it would not pay bonuses for 2008 or raise executive salaries for 2009.  Today's Wall Street Journal reports on another community banker who understands the message that the government and the public are sending.  His name is Chevis C. Swetman and he is the president of The People's Bank in Biloxi, Mississippi, a community bank with about $900 million in assets (about half the size of Bank of the Cascades and West Coast Bank) which hasn't signed up for the government bailout.  Mr. Swetman, the Journal says, is angered by reports of the perks and lavish trips at some large banks that took the TARP money, and says simply about those bankers, "These people ain't got a clue."