The Russians Are Coming

What exactly did you believe in? 

Globalization and the news:  Thomas Friedman with the New York Times thought globalization was a good thing.  Of course he moved away from a Minneapolis suburb and has made a living around the globe ever since.  He got on the world stage in New York and lost his local connection. 

Yesterday I responded to a call from the St. Paul newspaper, agreeing to a subscription.  It was against everything I believed to respond to a telephone solicitation.  Yet it might save one local paper.  I thought my ideals were worth bending until the caller told me she was in Nevada.  It was a stock company.  I then told her no.  Maybe the day would return when local ownership returned.  I was beginning to disagree with Thoms Friedman.   

Foreign buyers.  The acquisition of steel maker by a Russian company so that they now own 10% of all United States steel manufacturers.  The sellers of this recent business did not care, especially in a falling U S market.  The Russians had the money now due to oil.  So what exactly did you believe in after the Cold War?  Was this a good thing?  Should I ask a Vietnam War vet or a Hmong refugee. 

What exactly did you believe in?  Last year there was the acquisition of the Wall Street Journal by an Australian, Robert Murdoch.    Free markets. Human rights.  The United States Constitution guarenteed a free press. 

The cost of education, health care, oil.  The survival of a local press.  Was it all to be determined just by a free market?    What exactly did you believe in? 

 

 

Wound Care For the Minneapolis Star Tribune?

 

Avista Capital Partners, the private equity firm which owns the Minneapolis Star Tribune, has reportedly completed the acquisition today of a wound care company, ConvaTec, in what might be a timely story.   

 

Nordic Capital and Avista Capital Partners paid US$4.1 billion for ConvaTec, which specializes in advanced wound care management and ostomy (artificial skin opening) barriers.  

 

In a related note, Avista’s next debt payment for the Minneapolis Star Tribune is due in September.

  

 

 

Murder in Beijing

The media was slow to report on exactly who was murdered in Beijing.   Todd Bachman had fame in his own right.  He was CEO of Bachmans, a 121-year-old family business located on 60th and Lyndale in Minneapolis.  This was the largest florist in this part of the country.  Mr. Bachman in April 2008 became the chairman of the board of what I once knew as Florist Mutual based in Edwardsville, Illinois.  Apparently Florist Mutual has changed its name to Hortica Insurance & Employees Benefits.  I never had met the man but i expect he was as classy as the two companies under his charge.     

The father of 3 daughters, he lived in Farmington.  His 6’4” daughter, Wiz, the youngest, had attended UCLA on a volleyball scholarship after rising through her youth in volleyball the way boys in Lakeville are groomed as hockey players.  

(See  http://www.startribune.com/business/26470694.html.)  

With the 300 police reportedly who descended on the scene, it is understandable that the media in China is having a hard time to learn more about the story.

 

It looks to me like the Farmington Independent seems to have broken the story before the Minneapolis and St. Paul papers.   

Todd’s name appear as one of the board of trustee, the chair of Admissions/Financial Aid, at Wartburg College, a private liberal arts Lutheran college affiliated with the ELCA in Waverly, IA.   

 

Mark Zeigler is a writer with the UNION-TRIBUNE in San Diego.  On August 14, 2008, he wrote the following from with a dateline of BEIJING.

China scholar sees ’symbolism’ in killing of foreigner

In a city of 17.4 million people, the ancient Drum Tower, or Gulou, rises majestically from a gray sea of crumbling brick homes and meandering alleys in central Beijing.  Nearly all of the residents of Beijing are Chinese, and Westerners are easy to identify.  One place they are likely to be found is the Drum Tower.

The notion of suicide also carries a different meaning in China than in the West, as an act of protest. The popular annual Dragon Boat festival commemorates the death of Qu Yuan, a poet from 300 B.C. who drowned himself as a final, heroic act of defiance against a repressive government.   

Locals speak of the increasing number of people from the countryside who move to Beijing in search of a better life and, if they don’t find it, quickly become disillusioned. A 2004 report by the Beijing Suicide Research and Prevention Center named suicide as the fifth leading cause of death in China and No. 1 among people between the ages of 15 and 34.

Chinese authorities said Tang was a troubled 47-year-old man from the eastern province of Zhejiang. He reportedly had lost his job at a factory in Hangzhou, had gone through a divorce and was living in a rented room in Beijing. Beijing newspapers and television stations have carried little, if any, mention of the story.

“They are worried you’ll have copycats,” said an official from a Chinese governmental agency, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job. “You have how many people who are destitute and disenfranchised in a city this large? (Publicizing the incident) might empower someone to do it again.

“It happens all the time,” said a European language teacher who has lived in Beijing for a decade and who declined to give his name. “Someone loses everything. They lose their job.  They get divorced.  They kill themselves. It happens so often here that no one notices anymore. “

 “I think it’s a minority but I think it exists,” Brownell said of anti-foreigner sentiment in China. “It’s a product of all the rhetoric of China’s humiliation at the hands of the West. There is a deep-seated xenophobia that has been an integral part of China for centuries, to close down and shut off to the rest of the world. It’s still there today, to a certain extent.”

The Drum Tower was renamed the Tower of Realizing Shamefulness in 1924, serving as a museum devoted to invasions and occupations by foreign nations. It once served as a watch tower on the northern edge of the city, able to alert residents of unwelcome visitors. It has since been converted to a tourist attraction.

 

 

To Give, Not to Count the Cost

Jeff Jacoby cited some fiscal facts today in the Boston Globe, in the wake of news this week where General Motors announced a $15 billion quarterly loss, in an environment where any corporation dependent on oil seemingly was headed for a fatal crash.   

Jeff Jacoby cited the increase in the Bush administration estimated budget deficit without the inclusion of the full cost of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan or of the expected drop in tax collections, if the economy continues to worsen. The facts presented included a projected $389 billion deficit in the current fiscal year.  This was an increase of $226 billion more than last year’s deficit.  As critics in Congress have begun to criticize, Jacoby noted that a president cannot spend money unless Congress has made the appropriation.  The Democrats have had control of the two chambers over the past 19 months. 

Jacoby pointed out that a budget deficit was not the same thing as the national debt that was currently $9.6 trillion and climbing.  And ask some forclosed home owner about the cost of debt service.  To the US government, this debt service was projected to be nearly $250 billion this year, the fourth-largest item in the federal budget.  Forget about the coming Social Security crisis traveling with its partner Medicare.  Jeff Jacoby quotes McCain as one who promises to balance this budget, yet with a plan to have troops remain in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Obama rules out balancing the budget.  “The National Taxpayers Union Foundation, tallying the promises made by the presidential candidates, calculates that Obama’s ‘investments’ would cost taxpayers another $344 billion a year. McCain’s add up to an extra $68.5 billion.” 

In an unrelated matter, I listened at lunch as Tim Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota, talked about candidates who work to “earn” a vote.   Somehow their was a disconnect in the language of politics with the real world of work and money.   

I was still looking for a candidate who lived by the first rule of holes.  (ED NOTE:  See July 26,2008.)  Maybe they are both so old they had forgotten.  But a twelve-year old knew that when you were in over your head, you stop digging.

POST SCRIPTS:    

If you like a good horror movie, don’t miss ‘I.O.U.S.A.’ a new documentary on the nation’s looming fiscal problems.

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Posted: Aug. 19, 2008

We don’t normally write about films, but today we’re making an exception. The real national debt is now a hefty $53 trillion – $175,000 for every person in the country.

“I.O.U.S.A.” is meant to scare you. As the Reuters news agency put it, this film “may be to the U.S. economy what ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ was to the environment.”

Go see “I.O.U.S.A.,” the new documentary on America’s coming fiscal reckoning.

Relevance

Writing was all about relevance.  It seems of late that newspapers and bookstores were at risk.  The irony was that these two industries were based upon relevance.   There was an unease about being a writer and trying to make a living at it.  I majored in English literature.  I so far have not made a living at it.  As a follower of Darwin’s Theory, we were all in a struggle to survive.  But in the end, we will all be goners.    

The real world required patience.  The e-world demanded instant gratification.  I wondered what the state of the written word would be in ten years.  

Reading and writing was all about relevance.  I heard it said on C-span a few years ago on Book TV that women bought 85% of all books.  There were something like 120,000 books published a year.  Woman.  Books.  Relevance.  Truth.  The news.  When you got down to it, life was mostly about truth in relationships.  To wake up to the truth. In the news.  In relationships.     

A newspaper carried forth an institutional voice.  There was an identity to a newspaper.  A newspaper did have political views.  It was all about ideas.  What was it about the new generation that no longer found relevance in holding the printed news?  Was there a missing gratification?  Were we all moving away from any concept of suffering in the world.  

I wondered what the state of the political world would be in ten years, as a consequence of the state of the written word.  Without newspapers.   There was an unease afterall in being a writer, without a place to write.  Think of the foundation of the traditional community.  Family.  Schools, Churches. 

Will sports teams be the next on the endangered species list of things that bring us together?  And what will the elections of the 2020s be like?    

ON ANY GIVEN SUNDAY

 

MORAL RELATIVISM:  Was this a response of a people in Europe to World War II?   How was it that this movement began?  What had their children silently inherited?  How did it spread?  When did this bridge get constructed? 

 

MORAL RELATIVISM:  Leave me alone God!  You just saw my world destroyed.  And now we were all going to be apathetic towards you.  Apathy was a response showing anger.  The ultimate in a response.  The silent treatment.  I had pledged apathy to the Minnesota Vikings for the rest of my life when they were the cause of the construction of a dome stadium downtown that opened in 1982.  And I have seldom watched one of their games since.  I had cut the Vikings out of my life.   

Gopher State One Call

 

When I was a young boy, below the age of 7, I learned the first rule of holes.  It was probably in the next 7 or 8 years that I started discovering the other rules.  But I still go back to the first rule of holes to help me understand finances. 

 

This week Ford reported a quarterly loss of 8 billion dollars.  I heard it on the radio, so I still do not believe it.  There was something more about veracity when you read something.  I always thought the written word had more holiness.  But based on the rule of holes, they had a big one in their balance sheet. 

 

Politics was a lot like romance in the old days, when a man tried to impress a woman.  I am not sure if that is how it was still done today when two lovers woo.  But according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, in 2000, the government’s liabilities were just $20 trillion or two times the size of the economy.  Six years later government’s liabilities came to $50 trillion. The present value of all the major reported liabilities at that point was about four times the size of the U.S. economy in 2006, up a mind-boggling $30 trillion from fiscal 2000, or roughly $440,000 per U.S. household.  I had missed much financial reporting on these issues in the last 4 years.  I wonder if political reporters might start asking the candidates of both political parties questions on the state of the economy. 

And all of this was two years ago, before Fannie Mae, before oil increased 70% just in 2008.  In the wooing of 2008, see how many congressional or presidential candidates speak of the real world of finance.  It took a lot of unconditional love to vote for these people.    

 

In the meantime, in Minnesota we are watching nightly newscast sponsored by Franken and Coleman, the way Gillette used to sponsor the World Series.  What did these ads tell us about the sense of money of either Franken and Coleman?  What did these ads tell us about anything, except their concept about how to spend money? And why would you vote for any politician who spent money on ads from June through November.  Politicians it seemed, especially like a lot of men, tried to focus on other rules of holes beyond the first one.   

 

Even though those other rules are a lot more fun, the first rule of holes, which I learned about 4 feet under, is when you’re in one, stop digging. 

Now I know to call Gopher State One Call, to have them identify the hazards. 

 

 

 

 

 

Omnipresent Photographic Memories, Without Any Film

Bridge collapse.  The recession. The view from the Phillipines.  Food.  Brands.  Brands, until they were gone. Wine.  Survival & slavery.  Economic justice. 

We were all connected.  I walk by the Governor’s Mansion about three times per week.  It was the nicest neighborhood in St. Paul.  It no longer has an ethnic flavor, if it ever did.  The James J. Hill Mansion is a mile and a half down the street.  The history of America involved ethnic communities in which people of the same place of origin formed community here.   Those ethnic communities found places of worship to come together.  People of the same race, color, and creed.  And even though they shared a history of another land, time eroded much of an interest in their common history.  I thought of that yesterday passing a number of Somali people in Highland Park.  Though the Somali have a strong presence here, this week was the first time I have seen them strolling along Grand Avenue during the evenings this summer. 

The story of erosion of interest in the past was the same in my life.  I was an Irish Catholic and attended parochial schools for the duration.  Yet I never once heard much about the history of Ireland, or the ethnic history, any ethnic history, that had helped form the United States.  In a sense, the plurality was denied in a day and age when there was more real diversity than in the suburban world of post World War II that seemed to bloom in the 1970s.  Post World War II saw a spotlight shined on issues of discrimination against those in the community who had descended from slavery.  They too lived in the same ethnic community.  And until fairly recently, they never left the part of the city that they might claim as their home.  But the real trend in America was that people who share race, color, and creed had moved to the suburbs, and the real ensuing conflict was building community from a scattered base.   

Yes, I was an Irish Catholic and had attended parochial schools.  This morning there was a priest on the altar from the Phillipines appealing for help.  He talked about his island where on average 14 typhoons hit each year.   Maybe you have to visit a place like the Phillipines, which I have done, to be hit by how much privilege is all around American life.  Because of that trip, his words hit me more deeply.  He had three points to his plea for money.  His second point was how his small island of the Phillipines currently provided 20 priests to 3 western Canadian provinces.  His last point was about how on his island there were no parochial schools and whatever quantity of religious education was taught all came from the priest. 

We were all connected.  Until your city experienced a bridge collapse over a major river in the heart of a downtown.  This was a bridge on an interstate highway serving traffic from Duluth to Texas.  The river once again divided.   August 1^st.  The anniversary was coming soon of the collapse.  (So too were the lawsuits over negligence, for that matter.)  The prudent person would have taken action. 

I was by that collapsed bridge last night, buying wine in my favorite liquor store.  I went there to buy a good bottle of wine.  And a bottle of Singleton.  It was a single malt scotch.  But it no longer was sold here.  There were different brands of single malt scotch but none of these had my loyalty.  There were so many other brand names, but I did not feel that they were worthy of my choice. But to have a choice of so many labels at this store was the ultimate in privilege that no other store in town offered in wine, in scotch.

Choice.  It was a buzz word of an American generation.  In most places of the world, there was not a choice.  In that trip I mentioned, I had heard the view from the Phillipines.  I talked to a bar girl there about her life.  The popular explanation offered by all bar girls was “I have no choice.”  What she really meant was she had no opportunity.  The jobs were few.   Her family needed money.  Or they would starve.  Half the people there lived in real poverty.  And they did not really need 14 typhoons a year dismantling the shacks that they called home.     

The recession here was now real, affecting basic needs of housing, of food.  I had been in the Jaycees a few years back. I think back to their creed.  It began, “Faith in God gives meaning and purpose to human life. “  The creed further stated, “Economic justice can best be won by free men through free enterprise.” Most Jaycees were young enough not to give much though to words.  I never really wondered what exactly “economic justice meant.”  Does it mean that the poor deserve what they get?  How did justice relate to opportunity?  Did they believe in scholarships for the brightest kid out there in the community?  The ideology came from the United States Chamber of Commerce and was best identified with the Republican Party.  I don’t know how much thought Republicans gave to issue of privilege, standards of care, and what the reasonable person would have done.  I was neither Republican, nor Democrat.  But my view on politics was a lot like my view toward both religion and philanthropy, or to that bottle of Singleton for that matter.  In politics, in religion, in scotch, it all started with trust.  I trusted the taste of Singleton.  So what now and who really was worthy of my support? Because nothing was worse in the world of philanthropy, to give the wealth which I could have spent on myself to someone and see them waste it.  And the trouble with both political parties was that neither seemed quite worthy.  But I had to choose if I wanted to drink something.  I wanted something worthy. 

That bridge collapse.  The anniversary was coming soon.  So too were the Republicans.  They soon were coming to my city, down the street in fact, to nominate a presidential candidate.  To be truly privilege was to be a delegate, representing a state and all that dogma they believed in. 

Wealth for the most part used to be a slow developing process.  Similar to love, and until you lost it, most of us never knew what we had always had.  Yeah, the Republicans were coming.   And that recession was here. 

When the Red in the Quarterly Statement Was Blood

I see the reasons why liberty is so sacred in the relationships of the churches, of newspapers, guarded by constitutions.  The most sacred part of life was the things that brought us together:  Family, church, newspapers.  It was all about the mortar.  The conflict of all the above was now a part of public policy. 

 

I never realized how sacred the 4^th Estate was until reading the reaction to readers of a column written by a favorite sportwriter yesterday, entitled “Who’ll Gather News When Internet Is All That There Is.”  See http://www.startribune.com/sports/18752054.html.  The vituperations in response to the column are what surprised me, a column about the day that was coming when the local newspaper was gone.  I wonder how often a columnist, a rabbi, a politician, ever wakes up wondering if it all was worth it serving the ignorant masses, people who could not see the big picture.  In this case, it was not about sports. 

 

The financial dilemma, the red in the quarterly statements of newspapers, was not some sluit.  I read the following AP news item, aware of the history of Lebanon over the past 25 years, and I realized that repercussions in a society when the mortar in church, in newspapers, breaks down forever. 

 

Lebanon’s long-simmering political crisis lurched deeper into violent civil conflict Thursday as rival bands of Shiite and Sunni gunmen battled in the streets for a second day and politicians took to the airwaves to denounce each other.

 

We were all too well-educated, and all too ignorant.