Archive for September, 2008
September 30th, 2008
As a public service, I’m posting my thrice-weekly columns on the blog. Here’s the Sept. 30 column on the failed bailout bill in the House:
There are times when a congressman has to ignore his constituents’ wishes and vote according to deeply held principles that go against their views.
Monday was not one of those times for U.S. Rep. Don Manzullo, R-Egan, who concluded that what residents of the 16th district were telling him only reinforced his strongly held view that taxpayers not be handed the bill for the failures of Wall Street high rollers and subprime mortgage riverboat gamblers who played Texas Hold ‘Em and lost ‘em.
And residents back home in northern Illinois have been furious as they phoned and e-mailed Manzullo about the $700 billion rescue plan hammered out among House and Senate leaders and the Bush Administration over the weekend. By 870 to 14, they told Manzullo, “Vote no!”
“The message is loud and clear,” Manzullo said by phone from Washington minutes after helping vote down the economic stimulus plan, which failed 228 to 205. Two-thirds of Republicans and 40 percent of Democrats voted no. Manzullo said he’s confident he did the right thing.
“This bill was wrong because it slapped $700 billion in debt on the back of the taxpayers. I could not in good conscience vote to place a mortgage on the future of my constituents, their kids and grand kids,” Manzullo said. “There were no reforms in the package, and foreign banks could have cashed in their bad U.S. debt, including the Bank of China. There were no changes in the lending practices. This simply was an incredible amount of money to be infused into the system, with nothing to ensure it can’t happen again. The people responsible for this would still be in control, and it would have shifted the burden to the taxpayer. It was a bad bill.”
The congressman believes that taxpayer cash isn’t needed to stimulate banks so they can resume lending. He supports an alternate House GOP plan to create incentives to the private sector to help troubled institutions bail themselves out instead of putting taxpayers at risk.
House GOP members have talked to numerous economists who said there are other, better ways to stabilize the financial system, Manzullo said.
“The plan we favor would not make taxpayers the ultimate goat,” he said. In the Republican Study Committee plan, the government would work with institutions to place a value on bad debts, “so that instead of being marked down to zero, they could be marked at their true value.”
In other words, instead of saying a foreclosed mortgage is worth nothing, you instead assign it the value the property is actually worth. The government would stand behind the property’s true value, Manzullo said. “This would create private capital to pump into the system.”
The Republican Study Committee plan outlines a dozen ways to stimulate the flow of private capital into the financial system. Included are a two-year suspension of the capital gains tax and repatriation of profits from income earned overseas by U.S. companies.
Whether the House leadership will let this plan be considered isn’t known. Regardless, Manzullo said Congress “should not go out of session.”
And it appeared late Monday that the session will continue. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, called a two-day recess so that Jewish members could observe Rosh Hashana. Work on a financial package is expected to resume Thursday.
September 28th, 2008
Well, that was fun. No, really it was. Our whirlwind trip to New Orleans and back was worthwhile in gauging voter attitudes toward this important presidential election that’s coming up Nov. 4.
From what people from all walks of life and quite a few states told Scott Morgan and me, this election, if it were held now, would be a nail-biting stay-up-all-nighter.
But a lot can change in a month. Indeed, who can predict what crazy turn this campaign season will take next? Will Joe Biden be rushed to the hospital for emergency foot-in-mouth surgery? Will Sarah Palin attempt to prove her knowledge of foreign policy by inviting Vladimir Putin to a moose-hunting expedition in Alaska? Wouldn’t surprise me.
I found near-universal disgust over the supposed financial crisis our leaders tell us we are in. Some, however, were resigned to a federal bailout, believing the alternative – letting banks fail – would be worse.
I had never been to New Orleans before, and I was surprised at the large crowds of tourists in the city, the parades in the French Quarter, the art fair near the Audubon Zoo that we saw, and most of all, the friendliness of people we met. One waitress asked me to tell you this: “Y’all come see us, now.”
Most importantly, I could see post-Katrina reconstruction going on everywhere we went in the city they call the Big Easy. A one-day visit doesn’t make anyone an expert, and I did not have time to tour the infamous Lower 9th ward, where recovery progress is slow. And from reading the local paper, the Times-Picayune, it’s obvious that local government corruption continues unabated. The infrastructure needs hundreds of millions of dollars worth of improvement.
But my ride-by observation via streetcar convinced me to take with a grain of salt the doom-and-gloom scenarios about New Orleans that I see on cable TV news. Certainly the city is not going to be abandoned. There’s another side of the Woe Thy Name is New Orleans story, but you have to use your own eyes to find it because it won’t be on TV. This is the story of sweat equity, private money, hometown pride, the love of a city among the most unique in North America, one with its own culture, music and cuisine.
Our return trip on Amtrak’s City of New Orleanswas uneventful. Again, the crew members did a great job working under slashed budgets, aging equipment and fewer services than they’ve had in the past. The menu features some regional cuisine from New Orleans, and the food is very good.
Amtrak could run the trains on faster schedules if the freight railroads they run on would adhere to the law that gives Amtrak trains priority over freights. We really need to get serious about bringing our rail system up to par with Europe’s fast-growing system of 200 mph trains. It was embarrassing to hear Anna Olsen, the journalist from Denmark on our train, talk about her encounters with our inferior public transportation and compare our trains and buses to those in Europe. “I took a Greyhound once,” she said. “Never again.”
I’ll remember most the young people on the New Orleans streetcar. They were from Pass Christian, Miss., and their town suffered greatly from Katrina. Although they are at the rebellious ages of 19, 18 and 17, all three were polite in that charming Southern way that continues on through the generations. I actually enjoyed having my questions answered with “yes, sir” or “no, sir.” And I liked the fact that they wanted me to know that their town is being rebuilt.
Politically, here’s a digest of what I heard: People who like John McCain tend to talk about his military service, especially his prisoner-of-war experience in the Vietnam War. His refusal to accept an offer to be released unless other U.S. prisoners couldn’t go with him gives his supporters reassurance that he a strong character, a sense of fair play.
But they didn’t have much of an idea what McCain would do as president, except try to end earmarks, which he can’t do because it would be like trying to ban Christmas, Easter and the Fourth of July. Congress wouldn’t stand for it.
People who back Barack Obama believe him when he says he’ll bring change to Washington. They interpret that as change that will bring a better quality of life and more money in their pockets. His voters tend to be young, lower middle class people. The question is, will their enthusiasm for Obama carry over to the voting booth?
Sarah Palin did not seem to have much support, even among McCain supporters. For them it was more like, “Well, McCain picked her, and I like McCain, so I guess she’ll do.”
And the name Biden didn’t come up much.
Our train was a bit late, but not much.
September 28th, 2008
Turns out we were not the only reporters on the train back to Chicago. Anna Olsen, who writes for the Sjaellandske Media group in Denmark, was also on board — in coach class.
Olsen, 31, covered Friday’s presidential debate in Oxford, Miss., for her newspaper and was traveling from Mississippi to Carbondale to catch a bus to St. Louis for Thursday’s vice presidential debate at Washington University.
In addition to covering politics, Olsen also writes about transportation and infrastructure issues, “so my objective is to use only trains and buses, and no cars.” This can be cumbersome, and sometimes impossible, in car-crazy America, as she learned when trying to find a bus or train to get from Memphis to Oxford. There are none. “I was forced to rent a car,” she said. As for the debate?
“I think it was a tie,” she said of the match-up between Barack Obama and John McCain.
”I would have liked more dialogue between the candidates and less posturing. It was not so much a debate as two men bickering at each other. They should have been confronting each other, and they didn’t. For instance, McCain talked about a spending freeze, but Obama didn’t pay any attention to it. That is a major difference between them,” she said.
Olsen said the debate did highlight some major differences between the two men, “and I didn’t expect McCain to do as well as he did, considering he cancelled it once.”
On the mortage meltdown crisis, “the major difference between the two is that McCain doesn’t want to do any regulation on the financial institutions – until he changed his mind last week — while Obama has six guidelines for the institutions to follow.”
Europeans are paying close attention to this presidential election, Olsen said, because “the last four to eight years have been catastrophic for U.S. cooperation with Europe, and the world in general. I completely agreed with Obama, you need to sit down and talk to leaders that you don’t necessarily like, or who have a different kind of government than yours.”
In the debate, McCain “wanted to make sure that the American people knew of his experience in foreign policy, and he threw a lot of strange names of world leaders out there. He made it clear he knew what he was talking about, and he was trying to diminish Obama. But Obama never retaliated. He should have.”
Olsen is in the U.S. through mid-November.
September 27th, 2008
SCOTT MORGAN | ROCKFORD REGISTER STAR
Sleeping Car Attendant Larry Myers on the City of New Orleans Amtrak train bound for Chicago on Saturday, Sept. 27, 2008, getting ready to leave New Orleans, La.
Larry Myers, 35, is our sleeping car attendant on the up train back to Chicago. He’s following the election with great interest — his job may be on the line depending on who is elected.
John McCain is a persistent foe of Amtrak. Barack Obama supports the government-created passenger rail system, and his vice presidential pick, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, rides Amtrak trains every day from Wilmington, Del., to Washington, D.C. and back. Biden wants to greatly expand the rail network.
“I watched the debate. I liked it,” Myers said about the first presidential debate Friday night, staged at Ole Miss in Oxford.
“On the economy, I liked what Obama said. He was talking about balancing the budget, and of the different plans on the bailout. I was trying to figure that out. Some people say that Bush messed up on his watch. I don’t really know.”
Myers talked about service cutbacks on Amtrak trains. The City of New Orleans, on which we’re riding, used to have an observation car that served drinks and snacks. Now that’s gone and there’s just a dining car, called the “Cross Country Cafe.” Sleeping car passengers don’t get the amenities they used to, said Myers, who is based out of New Orleans.
“Maybe if the right person gets in (as president), we’ll get more jobs here. They’ve been cutting back all through the four years I’ve been here. I think we have more managers than on-board staff.”
One thing in Amtrak’s favor is its growing popularity — the national rail company is enjoying record ridership and could handle more customers if it could afford to purchase more rolling stock. Faced with $4 gasoline, more people are choosing to ride trains. But they can’t always book a seat. Amtrak can’t buy new coaches because Congress gives it just enough money every year to limp along. No form of transportation makes money, and all require government subsidies, but Amtrak is last on the totem pole after airports, airlines, autos and rivers.
Myers, who provided exemplary service throughout our journey, said that in nearby Mississippi, where he lives, he knows a lot of people who have never voted in their lives but are determined to vote this year.
“Most of them are saying they’re going to vote for Obama. They don’t understand about hockey moms and all that, and I don’t, either. I’m worrying about how to put more money in my pocket.”
Myers, a widower, was a barber for 12 years before he went to work on the railroad. “I wanted to try something different. Now, this is my regular route. It’s a great job. I used to work The Crescent, from New Orleans to New York.”
September 27th, 2008
SCOTT MORGAN | ROCKFORD REGISTER STAR
Lauren Williamson, 18, and Patrick O’Neill, 19, of Pass Christian, Miss. ride the St. Charles Ave. street car Saturday, Sept. 27, 2008, in New Orleans, La.
ON THE ST. CHARLES AVE. STREETCAR — When Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005, Pass Christian, Miss., was among the hardest hit areas. “I’d say our town was 90 percent destroyed,” said Patrick O’Neill, 19, a student at Jefferson Davis Community College in Pass Christian.
He was visiting New Orleans with his friends Lauren Williamson, 18, and Madeline Carter, 17. Patrick and his family spent six months living in a tent after the hurricane destroyed their home. Then they moved up a notch to a Gulfstream trailer. Only in the last six months has his family moved back into their rebuilt home.
“We were hit pretty hard by Camille, and then Katrina came and it was worse. But we are rebuilding Pass Christian,” Carter said, with emphasis. She said the three of them had come to New Orleans to tour the campus of Tulane University, which is on the St. Charles line.
Carter has a scholarship to attend the school to major in Latin American studies and pursue a career in international development. “I might delay it for a year to serve in AmeriCorps,” Carter said.
The vintage 1920s streetcar made its way past the grand monument to Robert E. Lee (something you won’t see in Chicago) and along the St. Charles Avenue boulevard featuring posh houses and mansions, churches and synagogues, Loyola and Tulane universities and the Audubon Zoo.
I asked my traveling streetcar companions if they’d seen Friday night’s presidential debate. Three heads nodded in the affirmative. (Patrick and Lauren will be voting in their first election. Carter is 17 and can’t vote yet.)
“I think McCain did pretty well at first, but he started to slip later on. Obama was much better at the end,” Lauren said.
“McCain did great, and I had heard that McCain was an awful debater. I didn’t see the flaws that others have seen,” said Patrick, adding that he’s “leaning toward Obama but still undecided.”
Both Lauren and Patrick said they believe America should continue to be a world leader but set a better example than it has been recently.
“I don’t’ think we should be a super police force,” Patrick said. “I do think we meddle too much in other countries,” Lauren added.
September 27th, 2008
ON BOARD THE CITY OF NEW ORLEANS — A year ago homebuilder Joel Smith from Lexington, Miss., was going strong. The president and part owner of Safeway Homes, Smith managed 150 workers who built affordable, modular houses that could withstand 160 mph. winds. There’s a big market for this sort of house in the Gulf Coast areas of Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana.
Safeway decided to take advantage of a government program to provide provided incentives to companies to construct affordable or “workforce” housing so that average folks could afford to move back to the Gulf Coast as the area rebuilt from Hurricane Katrina.
Joel’s company signed up for the program and built 200 modular homes to be shipped to sites in southern Mississippi, believing he’d be helped. But Gov. Haley Barbour decided to use the federal money — $600 million worth – to rebuilding the state’s seaports, Smith said. Long story short: Safeway had to close its factory. It is now in the process of filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
So, Joel and wife Adriana had gone to New Orleans for a few days to de-stress a little. Yes, he told me, he watched part of Friday’s presidential debate. But he was not impressed.
“If you’ve seen one debate you’ve seen them all,” he said. He’s not enthused about politics, and who could blame him after what he’s been through.
But Smith, 66, will vote, as he always has.
“I’ve been a Republican for 40 years, and I think I’m at a place where I have no choice as to who I’ll vote for. I won’t vote for Obama, and not because he’s black. I just feel his philosophy of government would set this country back 50 years. I feel like McCain is the only chance we have of stopping all he pork barrel spending, and the programs that cause us to go deeper in debt.”
His first choice for president would have been Mike Huckabee, “who has good morals and a conscience. I think he understands the problems we have in America, and when you get down to it, we have a spiritual problem. Just walk down Bourbon Street. It’s so degrading to the female gender.”
He wishes McCain would have picked Huckabee as his running mate, but he concedes that if McCain had to pick a woman, “Sarah Palin is a good choice. She has moral fiber.”
Smith reluctantly supports a bailout for the financial industry, but only because “I don’t know how they can survive without it. It’s a band aid, though. They’ll print more money to lend to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and J.P. Morgan. They’ll print it, and you and I will have to pay it back, if it gets paid at all.”
Part of America’s problem, Smith says, is that we’ve become an “I’m going to have it now, I don’t care if I lose it tomorrow” society. Both the Republicans and the Democrats buy into this warped philosophy, he says, “and they’re both wrong.”
Smith says “fruitcakes who don’t want to drill for oil” have made us beholden to foreign and often hostile oil producing countries that wish us harm. “T. Boone Pickens has a good idea. We’ve got billions and billions of cubic feet of natural gas and we don’t have to go anywhere to get it.”
As the Smiths prepared to leave the train at Jackson, I wished them well. I meant it.
Reach Political Editor Chuck Sweeny at 815-987-1372 or csweeny@rrstar.com.
SCOTT MORGAN | RRSTAR.COM
Joel and Adriana Smith of Lexington, Miss., wait for the train Saturday, Sept. 27, 2008, in New Orleans, La. Smith’s modular home company, Safeway Homes, went bankrupt after the State of Mississippi redirected $600 million to rebuild ports instead of building homes.
September 27th, 2008
Scott Morgan and I arrived in New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal yesterday at 4 p.m., within minutes of our scheduled arrival. That means we made up for almost all the delays caused by freight trains. Freight railroads, on which most Amtrak trains travel, are required to give priority to Amtrak trains and make their freights wait. But they often — some say usually – ignore that requirement.
The trip was pleasant, our crew was friendly, helpful and fun. The food was good — it was included in our ticket price. So, a 2,000 mile round trip from Chicago to New Orleans and back, with a roomette and complementary meals, can be had for $400 round trip. If you’d rather travel by coach class, where you’ll find wide, comfortable reclining seats, the round trip fare is $216. You could bring your own food on board or buy it in the dining car. So, kudos to Amtrak for the service on the down train. At 1:45 p.m. today, our “up” train journey begins.
Last night, Scott and I had a look-see around the French Quarter, which is literally around the corner from our hotel on St. Charles. The famed St. Charles Ave. Line streetcars go right past our front door. The 80-year old cars survived the 2005 hurricane and flood. We crossed Canal Street and walked down Chartres Street, where we saw the famed restaurant K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen, opened in 1979 by Chef Paul Prudhomme and his wife, K, hence, K-Paul. K died a few years back, but Paul continues on. I said to Scott, “hey, I’ve heard of that,” and we decided to stop in. Though the place was busy and we had no reservations, we were cheerfully and quickly accommodated with a table on the second floor veranda of the 1834 building. The food — we both had the blackened drum fish — was wonderful, and surprisingly affordable.
September 26th, 2008
Derek Boals takes trains for this simple reason: the 38-year old resort owner from Ludington, Mich., doesn’t like to fly. He’s riding The City of New Orleans to catch a cruise ship to Mexico, where he plans to go fishing and scuba diving.
SCOTT MORGAN | RRSTAR.COM
Derek Boals of Ludington, Mich. (left) and Joe Kulesza of Las Vegas, Nev., sit together Friday, Sept. 26, 2008, on the City of New Orleans Amtrak train between Chicago and New Orleans, La.
Boals, who also owns a Dairy Queen in Ludington, joins in a lively conversation in the train’s dining car, which doubles as a bar car; it seems the closer this train gets to New Orleans, the louder the crowd in this car gets. There’s the southern version of the aging hippie, who followed the Allman Brothers around the Southland the way northern-types chased after the Grateful Dead. The minister who wants us to guess that he really looks like Denzel Washington, and the waitress who doesn’t want me to use her name but lets me know she’s for Obama because he supports Amtrak and McCain votes against funding it. “It’s about preserving my job” she says.
But I digress. Back to Derek Boals.
He admires John McCain because he was a POW who turned down a chance to leave prison early because the other prisoners would not be let go, too. Boals said he’s glad that John McCain will be showing up at Ole Miss tonight to debate Barack Obama. McCain had suspended his campaign and suggested postponing the debate because of the financial crisis affecting Wall Street.
“I like McCain but I am not a big fan of Sarah Palin. I don’t think she has any business being vice president. But he might win the presidency because of it.” Boals, who is independent-minded, says he’d rather have Hillary Clinton run for veep.
Boals is our first interviewee who uses alcohol analogies to describe the Wall Street crisis.
“You don’t drink 25 beers and not have a hangover the next day. You can delay the hangover when you wake up by having a bloody Mary.” He’s not a fan of bailouts.
Boals is concerned about Michigan’s economy, which is suffering from the loss of thousands of factory jobs. He reckons his resort’s business is down 5 percent this year.
September 26th, 2008
With a Walgreens springing up just about every week, they’re going to need a slew of pharmacists. That’s what prompts Tenika Murphy of Willowbrook to study at the University of Illinois Chicago for her pharmacological degree, so she can be one of those pharmicists. It’s a big step up from the pharmacy tech position she currently has at a Chicago Walgreens.
Murphy is on The City of New Orleans with her daughter Kalisia, 7, and son Kevin, 11. They’re bound for Vicksburg, Miss., to visit family.
She’ll vote for Obama, “basically because he’ll try to change the economy for the better and provide hope of new jobs.”
While Watkins agrees the economy is hurting, she says blame is often misdirected.
“I think it’s the war. It’s too expensive. We spend billions a month that could have been better used here at home for housing, businesses, health care. Other countries in Europe have health care; why don’t we?
She’s also concerned about education. She’s only lived in Willowbrook four months, and the reason she moved was because of the schools. In Chicago, she had to scrimp and save to afford private school tuition for her kids; “that’s a big reason I moved to the suburbs, to get a better education for my kids.”
SCOTT MORGAN | RRSTAR.COM
Tenika Murphy and her daughter Kalesia Williams, 7, are pictured Friday, Sept. 26, 2008, on the City of New Orleans Amtrak train between Chicago and New Orleans, La.
September 26th, 2008
Amtrak tries hard, but there’s nothing the national passenger train company can do about the Canadian National, which owns the tracks our train runs on.
At the moment we are sitting on a siding somewhere in rural Mississippi while we wait for a northbound CN freight train to pass us. In theory, passenger trains are supposed to have prioritiy over freights. That’s in theory. In practice, it doesn’t happen. The conductor keeps us updated, admitting that “we don’t know where he is” about the freight train. Obviously, we can’t proceed if he’s still on the main line coming our way.
What was supposed to be about a five-minute delay is now a half hour, and no sign of the northbound. You think maybe CN is trying to tell Amtrak something, like scram?
Now we are under way again. Funny, that northbound never did show up. Hope he’s not down the line somewhere. This is only a single track mainline.
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