In “Introducing the Things of Spring” Ms. Collins says Official state rocks and birds and flowers are nice distractions for legislatures, but naming a state gun is pretty creepy. Mr. Blow addresses “Silliness and Sleight of Hand,” and says suspicions of the president have moved from the theoretical to the theological. Mr. Nocera says “The Party’s Over for Buffett,” and that there will be no more free ride for The World’s Greatest Investor, who will be facing the music in Omaha. Here’s Ms. Collins:
Springtime Progress Report: Early this year, we learned that Utah was considering a bill to name a Browning pistol its official state firearm. Meanwhile in Washington, Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey was pushing for a bill that would make it more difficult to sell guns to people on the terror watch list. I am excited to report that one of these pieces of legislation finally has been passed into law.
Yes! Utah now has an official state gun. It beat out Arizona, which this week bestowed its honor on the Colt Single-Action Army pistol.
Lautenberg’s bill, meanwhile, has gone nowhere whatsoever. It would require that gun purchases by people on the terror watch list be vetted by the attorney general’s office to make sure that arming the individual in question would not pose a danger to homeland security. Opponents point out that the terror watch list is not always reliable, and the bill might therefore force innocent Americans to go through an entire additional step while purchasing armaments and explosives.
“It’s taking a little bit of a back seat,” the senator conceded. “But we’re on it.” Like all advocates of sensible gun regulation, he has, by necessity, developed an incredibly optimistic outlook.
Speaking of the sunny side, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence is happy to report that so far this year, no state has passed a law prohibiting colleges from banning guns on campus. This is pretty notable, since failure to require that institutions of higher learning be gun-friendly is the only thing that stands between some states and a perfect 100 percent rating from the National Rifle Association. “It’s failed 51 straight times in 21 states,” said Brian Malte of the Brady Campaign.
Actually, it did pass in Arizona recently, although it was vetoed by Gov. Jan Brewer. We have had cause to make fun of Governor Brewer in the past, sometimes for matters as trivial as making up stories about illegal immigrants leaving piles of severed heads in the desert. However, this woman has had a heck of a lot of crazy legislation to plow through. Besides the “campus carry” bill, she nixed a “birther” bill aimed at knocking President Obama off the next state presidential ballot. So, really, even though Brewer did sign the bill making the Colt pistol Arizona’s state gun, you cannot say she had a bad April.
The Colt bill, which had originally failed during the Arizona Legislature’s rush to adjournment, was resuscitated and passed in the wee small hours of the morning just before everybody left town. You’d have thought this would be a hard sell, what with the memory of the Tucson massacre so fresh, not to mention the fact that, as a lawmaker of Navajo descent pointed out, the Colt’s role in winning the West has somewhat less pleasant connotations to Arizona’s American Indian population.
However, in the end, the majority conceded to the logic of people like Senator Steve Smith, one of the sponsors. “One would argue the white men themselves were instrumental weapons of mass destruction against the Native Americans. Should we not honor any white people?” he demanded.
What with all this excitement, the lawmakers did not have enough time to make a miniscule change in state law that would have allowed 20,000 residents to get extended unemployment benefits, which would have been paid for entirely by federal funds. The state has a 9.5 percent unemployment rate.
But, you know, they had the official state gun thing to work out. “It wasn’t their priority,” said the House minority whip, Anna Tovar.
Besides deliberately ignoring the long-term unemployed and caving in to lobbying by the gunmakers, I’m sorry to say that Arizona also gave the whole state thing-naming tradition a bad name.
I have always been a big fan of official state rocks and birds and flowers, in part because selecting them really does tend to distract legislatures from other more alarming activity. Also, the nominations usually come from groups of schoolchildren, who then get to watch democracy in action as the contenders for state fern or state song go head to head in a battle down to the wire. Many years ago, I was privileged to watch a fight over the official state mammal of Connecticut, in which the whale beat out the deer, to the edification of all homeowners who have never once woken up to discover that overnight, a whale had eaten their tulips.
But it’s pretty creepy to imagine a bunch of third graders debating the merits of potential state guns. There are plenty of other routes to go here. I believe New York is working on a state dog. Neither Arizona or Utah has a state dog, although I was impressed to note that Utah has both an official state vegetable (Spanish sweet onion) and an official state historic vegetable (sugar beet).
Opportunities abound. If you want to name something, states, go for a beagle.
Here’s Mr. Blow:
President Obama buckled.
On Wednesday, he released his long-form birth certificate, but not without chiding the media and his detractors for their “silliness” in forcing the issue.
No sooner had he released it than Donald Quixote was off to his next windmill: the president’s college grades.
Donald Trump is still playing to suspicions of President Obama. And it’s no longer theoretical. It’s theological. For the detractors, truth is no longer dependent on proof because it’s rooted in faith: faith that American exceptionalism was never truly meant to cover hyphenated Americans; faith in 400 years of cemented assumptions about the character and capacity of the American Negro; and faith that if the president doesn’t hew to those assumptions then he must be alien by both birth and faith.
This is how the moneyed interests — of whom Trump is one — want it. That is how sleight of hand works: distract and deceive. They need this distraction now more than ever because the right’s flimsy fiscal argument — that if we allow fat cats to gorge, crumbs will surely fall — is losing traction.
It’s losing traction with voters as the Supreme Court continues its crusade to put corporate interests above those of citizens. Just Wednesday, it ruled that there is a way for businesses to keep consumers claiming fraud from banding together in a single class-action lawsuit.
It’s losing traction among workers. Gallup reported this week that a majority of Americans worry that they won’t have enough money in retirement. And that worry is well founded. According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute’s annual Retirement Confidence Survey released last month, 56 percent of American workers said they have less than $25,000 in retirement savings and investments. Twenty-nine percent of those said they have less than $1,000. At the same time, the average Wall Street cash bonus in 2010 was nearly $130,000, and the Republican budget proposed by Representative Paul Ryan seeks to dismantle Medicare and lower taxes on the wealthy.
It’s losing traction among young people as it was reported last week that the unemployment rate for workers ages 16 to 24 reached a record high last year, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Meanwhile, last summer, student loan debt exceeded total credit card debt for the first time, and the Republican budget seeks to slash Pell grants.
It’s losing traction with families as the national average price of a gallon of gas is nearing $4, while oil companies are reaping record profits while taking billions of dollars in government subsidies.
(There’s something immoral about giving handouts to entrenched corporate interests with armies of lobbyists while seeking to cut those to hungry children, struggling families and frail seniors.)
It all loses traction as more Americans begin to see the far right for what it truly is: a gang of bandits willing to sacrifice the poor and working classes to further extend the American aristocracy — shadowy figures who creep through the night, shaking every sock for every nickel and scraping their silver spoons across the bottom of every pot.
In fact, Gallup reported on Thursday that unfavorable views of the Tea Party, which was cheered and championed by billionaires and business interests, had jumped to 47 percent this month, a new high, while last week it reported that approval of Congress among Republicans and independents had dropped to a depressing 15 percent.
So the right needs to backfill its shaky fiscal reasoning with political segregationist rhetoric — amplifying a separation of the “us” from the “other.”
State Senator Jake Knotts of South Carolina last year called President Obama — along with the state’s governor Nikki Haley, who is Indian-American and a Republican — a disparaging slur. When pressured to resign, he refused, proclaiming that: “If all of us rednecks leave the Republican Party, the party would have one hell of a void.” Do tell.
This is not to say that all Republicans are tolerant of this behavior. Far from it. But the party has taken the strategic position that in some cases its politically advantageous to allow demagogues and xenophobes, sectarians and homophobes to not only see the party as a sanctuary but as a place to rise to its top.
In the last several months, Republican state lawmakers and party officials have said the most reprehensible things about Hispanics, gays and blacks.
State Representative John Yates of Georgia compared the state’s threat from illegal immigrants to the threat from Hitler in World War II and suggested that border agents should be allowed to “shoot to kill.” State Representative Curry Todd of Tennessee compared pregnant illegal immigrants to multiplying rats.
State Representative Larry Brown of North Carolina suggested cutting off financing used to treat people with H.I.V. and AIDS because they are “living in perverted lifestyles.” Brown also drew criticism in October for an e-mail he sent to fellow Republicans in which he used disparaging terms about gays.
And David Bartholomew had to resign as the Virginia Beach Republican Party chairman after forwarding an e-mail that joked about someone taking his “dog” to the welfare office and saying: “My Dog is black, unemployed, lazy, can’t speak English” and has no clue “who his Daddy is.”
In 1965, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described how the strategy of separating people with common financial interests by agitating their racial differences was used against the populist movement at the turn of the century, explaining that “the Southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow.”
He continued that Jim Crow was “a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man.” He called this “their last outpost of psychological oblivion.”
But the right, with a new boost of energy from Trump, is reaching for new frontiers. The language and methodology are different, but the goal is the same: to deny, invalidate and subjugate, to distract from real issues with false divisions.
Trump is helping the right shape new weapons from old hatreds, forming shivs from shackles, all the while patting himself on the back and promoting his brand.
But his point of pride is the right’s mark of shame.
But it’s not a racial issue at all, no, of COURSE not… Here’s Mr. Nocera:
It’s D-Day for the World’s Greatest Investor.
Starting at around 9:30 this morning, Warren Buffett will stand on the stage of the cavernous Qwest Center in Omaha and face the music. Three journalists will ask him questions culled from thousands that have been e-mailed by shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett’s sprawling holding company. The audience will consist of 35,000 of those shareholders who traveled to Omaha to hear him.
Buffett describes this event — a k a the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting — as “Woodstock for capitalism.” It’s normally a festive affair, with shareholders celebrating a stock that has made many of them wealthy, while Buffett, a shameless ham, cracks wise and dispenses folksy investing wisdom.
This year, though, the tone is likely to be more somber, thanks to l’affaire Sokol, which has seriously dented Buffett’s pristine image. For someone who has said repeatedly that he would rather lose money than even a shred of reputation, his actions have been inexplicable. Thus the questions this morning are going to be unusually tough. As they should be.
David Sokol, of course, was the trusted Buffett aide who left Berkshire last month after it was revealed that he had bought $10 million worth of Lubrizol, a company he then convinced Buffett to buy — giving Sokol a nifty $3 million profit in a few weeks’ time. To his credit, Buffett is the one who revealed this information in a press release.
But in that same release, Buffett went to embarrassing lengths to absolve his former top lieutenant, even writing at one point, “Neither Dave nor I feel his Lubrizol purchases were in any way unlawful.” That is a stupefying sentence for someone who tells his executives that if they’re worried that “some action is too close to the line, just assume it is outside and forget about it.”
Since then, Buffett has been subject to criticism of a kind he has never before faced. Michael Steinhardt, the former hedge fund manager, went on CNBC and essentially denounced him as a hypocrite. Journalists have written stories that show Sokol in an extremely unflattering light; in a lawsuit last year, he was accused of ripping off minority shareholders of a venture he controlled — an accusation with which the judge, after hearing Sokol testify, wholeheartedly agreed. “It makes you question Warren’s judgment,” said Jeff Matthews, an investor and the author of the new e-book, “Secrets in Plain Sight: Business and Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett.”
Earlier this week, the Berkshire Hathaway audit committee issued a scathing report, accusing Sokol of dissembling about his Lubrizol purchase. The report seemed rather conveniently timed to take a little pressure off Buffett in advance of the annual meeting. But it shouldn’t.
Even if Sokol did lie to Buffett, as the audit committee suggests, the Sokol mess still raises a host of painful questions for both Buffett and his shareholders. For starters, the report doesn’t explain why Buffett let Sokol walk out the door with a pat on the back instead of a kick in the rear. What moved him to pre-emptively clear Sokol, who had so clearly violated Berkshire’s code of conduct, of wrongdoing? What does that tell us of possible flaws in Buffett’s character?
Just as importantly for shareholders, there are questions about his management style — questions that were once easy to ignore but no longer are. Buffett has always operated Berkshire Hathaway more or less by the seat of his pants. Although Berkshire owns more than 40 companies outright and has more than $136 billion in revenue, Buffett employs fewer than two dozen people at the holding company itself. He often buys companies with very little due diligence; he reads their financial reports, meets the owners and makes a deal. His board is made up primarily of cronies, including his son Howard. Berkshire’s compliance practices essentially consist of a letter that he sends to his top executives every two years reminding them to act ethically.
In other words, Buffett has always played by his own rules — rules that are extraordinarily lax by the standards of good corporate governance. He’s been able to get away with this because, well, he’s Warren Buffett. His track record has been so great, and his persona so impregnable, that his shareholders have been willing to give him a bye.
But after the Sokol business, Buffett’s management practices at Berkshire Hathaway deserve much tougher scrutiny. “Standards and practices have to change,” Matthews told me this week, shortly before hopping on a plane to Omaha. I can’t imagine that most Berkshire shareholders would disagree.
If they’re smart, Buffett and his shareholders will view this fiasco as a wake-up call. Buffett is 80 years old. He can’t run Berkshire forever, much as he might like to. When he finally retires, Berkshire will only succeed if it has a management structure that is not solely reliant on one man’s investing genius.
Being the World’s Greatest Investor just isn’t enough anymore. Not that it ever should have been.
