Random Weekend Thoughts – Color them Brown
The Services Employees International Union Local 1000 announced 74-percent of their voting members authorized union leaders to call a strike. While the Local President Yvonne Walker said the strike vote was about a lack of contract, the suspicion here is that pay cuts through mandatory furlough days held great sway with those who voted for a strike. How a potential strike would play with California private sector workers suffering about 11% unemployment is not a sure thing. Me thinks if a strike occurs it would not go over too well with the general public ….
One wonders what’s on the mind of Attorney General Jerry Brown these days with some of the current political news. Brown, as governor, boosted public employees collective bargaining rights. How would he stand against the empowered public employees and their strike threats and battles over pension reform, which must be tackled by the next governor? Given that Brown is paddling that canoe of his toward the middle recently, while needing to curry favor with the public workers for a gubernatorial run, his position on public employees issues should be interesting ….
Whitman is the Consultants’ Friend
California’s economy may be hurting, but Republican Meg Whitman is doing everything she can to pull the political consulting industry out of the doldrums.
In the first six months the former eBay CEO – and political newbie – spent more than $2 million on political consultants and nearly $500,000 on polling for her likely run for governor.
It’s not as though she can’t afford it. Whitman, who was one of the 400 richest people in America back in 2007, had $4.9 million in her campaign war chest on June 30 and put another $15 million of her own into the “exploratory” campaign effort last month. Add to that the $2 million-plus she’s raised from donors in the past month and it’s obvious she can bring in all the outside experts she wants.
Still, you have to wonder if there are any questions left to ask after spending that much on polling. And if Whitman already has pumped out a couple million for consulting fees nearly a year before next June’s GOP primary, what’s the final total likely to be?
Distressed Homeowners and Their Mortgages; A Proposal for Sanity
An excellent OpEd piece in Friday’s
NYT, "Why Own When You Can Lease?" by investment banker Daniel Alpert, articulated quite well something that I have been thinking long and hard
about since early last Fall, when the economic collapse became very real, very
quickly, for us all.
Alpert says that mortgage lenders
need to do something more meaningful and creative about working with
"underwater homeowners." He says
there that, if they don’t, then Congress should make them. Alpert posits that this is the only way
to stop the cascading foreclosures, empty homes which tug down the real estate
market for all of our homes, in combination with serious intransigence on the
part of home mortgage lenders, is to get rational about letting distressed
homeowners continue to live in, and lease, the homes they are losing. Alpert makes a lot of sense; lenders
should listen.