Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

Doggie diary: The story of Rosie and Sophie The first real damage

I guess it was just a matter of time. Exhaustion takes hold and we miss the signs.

Consider the last couple of days, as we still tried to keep them calm after their surgery, when all of their puppy energy gets pent up without an outlet. They run around the house like crazed and headless chickens on a sugar rush, tumbling maniacally. The result, as I wrote earlier, was a little issue with Rosie’s incision, but nothing major.

They are not listening particularly well, however, which is probably our fault. And we are failing to pick up the signs.

There have been the pee issues of late — Rosie, for some reason, has taken to relieving herself on the rug shortly after coming in from outside. Not that she hasn’t attempted to tell us — she has. It’s just that our frustration and her constant requests to go outside — and her less-than-clear signals (she gets antsy but not in a specific way that distinguishes it from other behavior, unlike Sophie who will ring the bells by the door) — have gotten the better of us.

All of this culminated early this morning in the latest damage: a hole in our den couch. Sophie has chewed through a laptop power cord — not great, but not irreplacable. The hole in the couch, however, is a major problem. Our couches are an unusual green with tan piping and a pillow top attached to the main cushion. We can’t just sew it and turn the cushion around or over; we have to get it repaired and/or live with the obvious damage. Who knows what it will cost (laptop cord was $100), but it is money that we do not have.

It happened around 6 or 6:30 — they began bugging us at 4 and Annie let them out. Sometime after that, closer to 6, they began bugging us again. We failed to listen — exhaustion, aggravation — told them to lie down and fell back to sleep. They knocked over the gate that keeps them in the bedroom and hallway and were loose for a while.

Bad dogs, for sure, but bad owners, as well. We’ve now learned a valuable lesson: When they start bugging us like that, we have to get up.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Hightstown grudgingly plays governor’s pension game

Hightstown is going to take advantage of the state pension holiday — but only because the state is holding towns like the borough hostage.

The state has tied the pension deferral to extraordinary aid, the pot of money the state sets aside for cash-strapped towns. The aid is designed as tax relief, but requires towns essentially to exhaust all other means to bring their tax rates down.

The aid, however, functions like an addictive drug that forces them to keep coming back for more every year.

Consider what happens to municipal surplus use. Towns are forced to use 95 percent of their surplus balance as revenue in their budget to qualify for the aid. When towns do that, they often find themselves scrambling the next year if it cannot find enough revenue to offset the amount of surplus used. That forces towns to repeat the mistake, to go back to the state for aid and spend down their surplus again, creating a never-ending downward spiral.

Towns can only reverse this trend by hoping the state provides them with more money than they have received in the past (fat chance) or by experiencing ratable growth. The problem is that many of the towns that seek extraordinary aid are built out like Hightstown or Jamesburg, leaving them with few opportunities to expand their ratable bases.

The pension deferral will only exacerbate this problem next year. Hightstown estimates that the pension deferral will save it $159,000 this year, which then has to be repaid over 15 years at 10 percent interest beginning in 2012. That means the borough is facing a minimum spending increase next year of $159,000 and then another hit in excess of $40,000 in 2012 when repayment of the deferral hits.

That’s a lot of cash, but it is understandable why Hightstown would go down this road. Not doing so would cost the borough $200,000 this year — money that would be impossible to replace in the budget. Plus, Hightstown is not alone. Manville also is deferring its pension payments, primarily for the same reason.

While Plainsboro Mayor Peter Cantu says that, because of the current economic climate the program makes sense, it is just another example of the state’s dysfunction when it comes to budgeting. After nearly four years of criticizing past practices that essentially kicked fiscal problems down the road, the state is doing the same and asking municipalities to join in the fun.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Government-to-government graft

Several years ago, South Brunswick paid consultants to lobby the state and federal governments in an effort to win grants for its SMART bus and to get the widening of Route 1 moving.

The township in 2005 hired Cavarocchi, Ruscio and Dennis of Washington to take advantage of the firm’s influential ties to the power-holders, looking to cut through year’s of indifference by higher-level officials and get the township’s goals accomplished.

The cost was $120,000. The result, money for the bus line and some federal money for Route 1 and state interest in the widening. Money well-spent? Maybe, but only if you consider the issue from the narrowist of perspectives.

Considered more broadly — within the context of a story in today’s Star-Ledger — the money is part of a questionable trend that drains public coffers by privatizing the interaction between government agencies.

The story focuses on a report from the state comptroller that found that 74 government entities spent $3.87 million to lobby state government — a figure that the report acknowledges may understate the amount spent because it only includes self-reported spending and also does not include money paid in dues to organizations like the state League of Municipalities. It also does not take into account money spent to lobby the feds, which cost $1.9 million.

The government agencies included ran the gamut from municipal and county governments to school boards to independent authorities, with some spending as much as $536,000 over the two-year peeriod. And the lobbying issues included both general and specific issues —

The Mercer County Improvement Authority hired a lobbyist (for $136,000) to monitor legislation and work with NJ Transit, while Montgomery paid a lobbyist $17,000 to aid in the purchase of the North Princeton Developmental Center.

The report raises two questions — whether public agencies should be allowed to hire lobbyists and what kind of disclosures are necessary to ensure that citizens know what is going on in their names.

Five states ban the hiring of lobbyists — legislaton on which the comptroller neglects to take a position. Better disclosure, however, is absolutely necessary, he says.

“It makes no sense to permit public entities not to disclose information that private companies are required to provide about the hiring of lobbying firms,” State Comptroller Matthew Boxer said. “Given that we’re talking about a use of taxpayer dollars that some would deem controversial, public entities should in fact be held to a higher standard of transparency than private companies.”

He adds that

the public is certainly entitled to information from government entities hiring lobbying firms as to why such expenditures are necessary, whether steps have been taken to reduce costs and, in the end, what public benefits were derived.”

That’s the least we can expect.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Call him Timothy "Get-tough" Geithner

OK. The headline’s meant ironically, of course, but if the Treasury secretary fills in the details of today’s financial industry regulation plan with some real teeth, we might just want to start calling him that.

Here is what The New York Times is reporting today based on Geithner’s testimony before the House Financial Services Committee:

Mr. Geithner, in his opening statement, called for “comprehensive reform. Not modest repairs at the margin, but new rules of the game.”

Under the administration proposal, hedge fund, private equity and venture capital fund advisers would for the first time have to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission. They would be required to provide the government — on a confidential basis — information on how much they borrow to leverage their investments as well as information about their investors and trading partners. The S.E.C. would then share those reports with a new “systemic risk regulator.”

On first blush, it seems shockingly strict given how Geithner has been dithering on this up until now (not to mention that his dangerous public-private bailout plan could cost us far more than we should have to pay for this mess).

Geithner has, until now, been far too worried about what the bankers and pseudo bankers had to say, too concerned that the people who gambled like drunken cowboys would get angry with us.

More from the Times:

The plan outlined in broad strokes by Mr. Geithner would require Congressional approval. It would give the government new powers over “systemically important” banks and other financial institutions that are so big that their collapse would jeopardize the economy as a whole.

The plan also calls for the government to

The government would have the power to peer into the inner workings of companies that currently escape most federal supervision — insurance companies like A.I.G., multibillion-dollar hedge funds like the Citadel Group and private equity firms like the Carlyle Group or Kohlberg, Kravis & Roberts.

If regulators decided that a company had become “too big to fail,” as was the case with A.I.G. in September, they would subject it to much stricter capital requirements than smaller rivals and much closer scrutiny of its borrowing levels and its trading partners, or counterparties.

Geithner apparently envisions something like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, “created during the Depression after a wave of bank failures, insures customers’ deposits and can take over failing banks.”

(T)he most striking new proposals, and the ones that may provoke the most heated opposition from the industry, would regulate so-called private pools of capital — hedge funds, private equity funds and venture capital funds — and the gigantic market in financial derivatives, including instruments like credit-default swaps, the insurancelike instruments that allow investors to hedge against bond defaults.

Privately traded derivatives — “like the credit-default swaps that were used both to hedge against and to speculate on high-risk mortgage-backed securities” — also would come under scrutiny, the paper said:

The administration would require that all standardized derivatives be traded through a regulated clearinghouse. Traders would be required to provide documentation on their collateral and borrowings. They would also be subject to new eligibility requirements, and their trading and settlement practices would be subject to new standards.

As I said, we have to wait for the details, but this looks a lot better than I had been expecting.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.