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September 1, 2003 Odds and Ends












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Four most curious items from the business pages...
 
Item 1:
 
So I make jokes about the idea of giving control of this state, California, and all its difficulties, to a German-speaking muscle-bound fellow from Austria, Arnold Shwarzenegger, who admits he loves power but refuses to say exactly what he'd do with it.  He just says he will make things better, and to trust him.  Well, we all love powerful leaders we can follow blindly.  Last week I said that perhaps there will be a run on brown shirts out here.  This week I thought I saw the Van Trapp family one night climbing out over the Hollywood Hills on their way to Vermont.

Yeah, cheap Nazi jokes.

But I came across this.  George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, had the assets of the family business seized by the U.S. Government under the Trading With The Enemy Act of 1941.  Much of the Bush family fortune was made by dealing with Nazi Germany - both before and during World War II.
 
The 1941 article with all the facts is here - http://www.unknownnews.net/bush1941.html - but that was a long time ago.
 
Item 2:
 
In the Miami Herald on Tuesday the 26th - Kellogg, Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, Texas-based Halliburton was awarded a no-bid contract to turn the temporary detention cages at Guantánamo in Cuba permanent.  That's where we have detained many hundreds of people since the battles in Afganistan - 660 detainees from 42 countries, including three under the age of thirteen. 
 
The military detention and interrogation camp will go from mesh cages to permanent concrete structures, along with a full courtroom for when these suspected al Qaeda members or Taliban soldiers captured in Afghanistan are tried before a military commission.
 
To review, we are holding these alleged terrorists and supporters in legal limbo, without prisoner-of-war rights.  They are not charged with any crime nor are they considered prisoners of war at all.  We have called them "enemy combatants" - and since the term has no legal precedence, we can keep them forever with naming them or charging them or allowing anyone any access to them.  Very creative. 
 
And now the facility will be a permanent one.  The new face of American justice?  Well, lots of Americans are very angry about what happened two years ago this month.  If they don't play by any rules, neither will we.  And that's being set in concrete, literally.
 
Cheney's Halliburton stock, held in trust, will rise.  Heck, no other company was allowed to bid on this work, at all.  So his policy is paying off, so to speak. 
 
Is this a problem?  We're safer, we get a sense of satisfaction, and we send a message to the world.
 
Another similar business item of note was from the Boston Globe.  Days after Lucent Technologies acknowledged it was being investigated by the Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission for possible violations of federal statute prohibiting bribery of foreign officials, the New Jersey telecom has won a $25 million subcontract from Bechtel to help restore phone service to 240,000 Baghdad households still without dial tones. Lucent will provide thirteen central office switches, optical transport technology and network management capable of handling voice and high-speed data transmissions.
 
Well, perhaps this will help them with their legal fees.  But they did contribute to the Bush election campaign, and are contributing to the 2004 campaign.  As a friend commented, winning a war means those who "chipped in" share the goodies.  Any liberals protesting are just resentful - they didn't like that we won this thing.  Just sour grapes.
 
Item 3:
 
For the environmental bleeding hearts, who this week may have been upset that the administration waived the rule that any power plant upgrading or expanding has to install equipment to reduce pollution. 
 
Hey, California has some pretty strict emissions standards for vehicles. 
 
We have had smog here since we've had cars, and it gets pretty awful.  When I first moved here in the early eighties and was living in the eastern part of the county, in Claremont, the college town, some hot afternoons you could hardly see across the street.  Scary.  So we try to control it.
 
From today's Los Angeles Times (the 31st):
The U.S. Department of Justice has urged the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn regulations established by Southern California's smog-fighting agency to curb pollution from taxis, buses, trash trucks and other fleet vehicles.
 
The government contended in a friend of the court brief filed Friday that the rules are at odds with the federal Clean Air Act because the authority to make such rules is limited to the federal government.
 
The regulations were adopted by the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD) in 2000 and 2001. They require public and private operators of transit buses, school buses, trash trucks, street sweepers, heavy-duty utility trucks, airport shuttles and taxis to buy clean-fuel models when they replace or add to fleets of 15 vehicles or more.
So.  The administration is saying the state shouldn't have stricter standards than the nation as a whole, in spite of the local geography and meteorological situation here. 
 
And I thought the Republican right was big on state's rights.  State's rights were trotted out to stop segregation in the south in the late fifties and most of the sixties.   Strom Thurmond did his number claiming local control and local custom was none of the federal government's business.  I suppose these kinds of arguments don't apply in this case.
 
A psychologist might say this is a control issue concerning some ideologues in Washington.  A cynic might say business interests are paying Republican folks campaign contributions to block this, as it might adversely effect the profits of the manufacturers of these vehicles.  I don't know.  Could be either, or not either.
 
Here's the nub of the matter, in legal terms.
 
The Department of Justice's brief, submitted by United States Solicitor General Theodore Olson, supports reversal of the lower courts' decisions on these the pollution control regulations.  The government contends that the Clean Air Act preempts the regional air quality district's rules because those rules are "related to" emissions standards.  It also states that neither California nor the AQMD has requested a waiver that would permit the state to adopt such controls.
 
The AQMD says it doesn't need a waiver.  They are not creating emission standards that require new trucks and busses and such.  The "clean" vehicles are out there for sale to the public and public agencies already.  They exist.  The AQMD just wants folks to buy them.
 
The feds say no, you cannot have that rule.  Why?  I don't get it.
 
The feds will win, I think.

Item 4:
 
The recall here has started a new trend of using petitions for all sorts of things.  Take the case of small city here called Inglewood, surrounded by the City of Los Angeles, the little city where the Lakers used to play.  You fly right over it just as you're landing at Los Angeles International.
 
This from the Times too:
Wal-Mart Stores is seeking to bypass a hostile Inglewood City Council and take its plans for a giant new store directly to voters.
 
The world's largest retailer began gathering signatures this week to force a popular vote on a shopping center, planned for a dirt lot next to Hollywood Park, where Wal-Mart wants to build its store.
 
Commercial developers have rarely used the initiative process to do an end run around local governments, California planning experts said Friday. More commonly, they said, initiatives are used by homeowner groups to block unwanted development.
 
The Wal-Mart initiative - by a group called the Citizens Committee to Welcome Wal-Mart to Inglewood - calls for building permits for the store to be issued without a public hearing or environmental impact study.
 
"The reviewing official shall be required to issue the requested permit or permits without the exercise of any discretion and no development standards, criteria, requirements, procedures, mitigations or exactions shall be imposed," the initiative says.
 
A simple majority of voters could approve the measure. But if it passed, it would require a two-thirds vote to repeal or amend it.
And this is pretty clever on Wal-Mart's part.  No hearings, no studies on the impact to the environment or even on traffic.  Forbidden by popular petition!  Cool. 
 
Well, it can be argued that one way to get the economy growing again is to drop the stranglehold of restrictions on businesses out there, and free businesses to make money and provide jobs.
 
We don't need government out here I guess, just folks gathering signatures on just about everything you can think of.  Consider it California's contribution to democracy, coming your way soon, from the place all the trends start.  We don't need "representative government" because we have direct democracy.
 
Robert McAdam, Wal-Mart vice president for state and local government relations, said, "When people feel they're not getting a fair shake with the legislative process, they take things to a vote of the people.  That's what the initiative process is about, having people petition for voter approval.  That's fairly consistent with California tradition."
 
And the "bypass elected government" trend is our gift, from California to you.
 
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