• The Queen and the coin

News Item: Government ministers and Queen Elizabeth II’s most senior officials have been heavily criticized by a committee of Members of Parliament for allowing historic buildings on the Royal estate to fall into disrepair.

The Queen will be urged to open Buckingham Palace to the public more often in return for millions more pounds from the government to to pay for a backlog of repairs. It now is open only about 60 days a year.

Some of the grandest state rooms at Buckingham Palace have not been redecorated since the Queen came to the throne in 1952. The palace wiring, which should have been replaced 10 years ago, was installed in 1949. The Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore, near Windsor Castle, which houses the tomb of Queen Victoria, has been designated by English Heritage as “at risk” after part of the ceiling fell in. A large stretch of roof at Windsor Castle and at Buckingham Palace also needs replacing.

Royal Tidbits: The queen has an estimated fortune of $571.033 million, according to Forbes magazine. That is her personal wealth and does not include properties held in trust for the nation, such as Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, the Crown Jewels, and the Royal Art Collection are excluded. Also not included in the estimate are her privately-owned properties such as Sandringham House, Balmoral Castle, and the Castle of Mey. The worth of Balmoral alone is estimated at $261.8 million. The Crown Estate Lands also are not included in that estimate. They are said to be worth more than $12 billion.

The Queen’s annual income is about $20.45 million from the Duchy of Lancaster, and the income generated from the Crown Estate land, that had belonged to the royal family since 1066, that generated about $180 million a year, out of which about $65.5 million is paid back to the British government to cover the monarchy’s costs. Thus, she makes at minumum $135 million a year.

• Thumbs down for bank

News item: Employees of a Bank of America branch in downtown Tampa, FL, refused to cash a check for an armless man because he could not provide a thumbprint for ID. He was trying to cash a check drawn on his wife’s account at the bank, and showed the bankers two photo IDs. He was told the only way he could cash the check was if he brought his wife with him or opened a new account with the bank in his own name.

I often observe, or am caught up by, idiotic behavior and inappropriate actions of those in the business world, but in the final analysis usually am able to find some sort of sense at the end of the tunnel. This one, however, baffles me.

A rigid corporate policy is one thing, but an obviously impossible rule to follow should have at least elicited a call from someone at the bank branch to a higher-up to find out what to do in such a situation. That, of course, supposes at least one person in the branch had an operating brain cell.

• So speed ‘em up, Joe

I live in an Upstate New York city just across the Hudson River from the State Capital. Thus, I get to hear and read about a lot more stupid government inactions actions than many people in other parts of the state.

The most recent deals with the decision by the State Liquor Authority (SLA) to reject an application for a liquor license by some local businesspeople seeking to open a wine/martini bar.

The reason: It is within 200 feet of a church, which automatically negates its request.

The problem: It is not within 200 feet of a church.

It is located across the street from a Salvation Army facility that most of the week is a food pantry. It holds one religious service once a week. But then, so does an entertainment venue on the same block, and no one is calling it a church.

Also, at least five other establishments on the same block hold valid state liquor or beer/wine licenses, and have for years despite the presence of the Salvation Army.

It took six months for the SLA to come up with this rejection. The right or wrong of it is obvious can be debated from various angles. What troubles me most is the excuse the SLA uses for its snail-like pace in considering license applications statewide.

During the period of months and, in some cases, years the applicants are waiting, they usually are putting time, effort and money into their facilities. A quick “No” by the SLA can dash all those hopes and lay waste to the money involved.

William Crowley, the SLA mouthpiece spokesman, says the agency has only 22 examiners divided among offices in Buffalo, Albany and New York City. They are responsible for reviewing all license applications. Crowley says the SLA received 5,315 applications between July 1, 2008, and July 1 of this year. The examiners also had to consider an estimated 7,000 applications for short-term permits, most of which are for caterers who, under state law, need a license just to serve for as little as an hour, one time. Thus, says Crowley, they can’t keep up with the workload.

Really? Let us, as they say, do the math.

• 5,315 applications received in one year
• 22 examiners
• 260 calendar work days in one year
That comes out to 242 applications per year per examiner, assuming a five-day work week. If we discount 15 days per examiner for vacations and stray holidays, that comes to about one application to be handled per day.

Doesn’t seem to be much of a workload, does it?

Now let’s look at the one-time applications.

• 7,000 applications received in one year
• 245 calendar days worked by each of 22 examiners
• That comes to 318 per examiner per year, or 1.3 applications per day.

Add it up, and we get 2.3 applications to be handled per day.

Whew! I bet those examiners are laughing their asses off have to lean back and uncap a cold one after maintaining such a blistering pace.

• E-Z pest (Parts 1 and 2)

PART 1

Twice in recent weeks my wife and I had occasion to travel on New Jersey’s ugly boring convenient Garden State Parkway. We paid the usual tolls, followed the posted speed limits, and went on our merry way.

Shortly afterward, we received — on different days — notices of toll violations, one for her and one for me.

Not unusual to get different notifications since we had taken two different cars on our trips — one registered to me, one to her. But unusual in that the alleged violations had to do with the E-Z Pass toll lanes.

We don’t subscribe to E-Z Pass, for a number of reasons, chief among them the fact I don’t like the idea that a government or quasi-government agency can track my whereabouts (*), running a close second to my heartfelt belief that such agencies usually are riddled with incompetence.

Yes, the notifications had blurry photo images of our cars and the license plates were correct. However, we never use the E-Z Pass lane because we’re not authorized to do so, plus we’re not stingy or stupid enough to try evading a 25-cent toll. What would be the point?

So, I drew up a letter on behalf of both of us. It said:

To Whom It May Concern:

We have each received a “Notice of Enforcement Action” for alleged violations of toll lanes on the Garden State Parkway.

Both are in error.

• We are not subscribers to E-Z Pass.
• We do not use the E-Z Pass lanes.
• We did not avoid paying any tolls.

We suggest you look into your mechanized enforcement process to find your errors. Perhaps the situation is similar to the recent problems E-Z Pass experienced in the Buffalo, NY, area, in which large numbers of people were wrongly accused.

In addition, we are hereby requesting written withdrawal of these erroneous charges, for our records. The two notices are enclosed.

Thank you.

That should do the trick.

PART 2

Well, I just heard from the State of New Jersey today about the E-Z Pass foulup screwup scam problem.

No, not the letter of apology and clarification I requested. It was a

NOTICE OF ENFORCEMENT ACTION
SECOND NOTICE

in big black capital letters.

I’m now expecting a second such letter since this one only dealt with the original notice sent to my wife.

Once again, we’re off tilting at windmills in an attempt to get a government agency/business/other pest to rectify a problem of their own creation.

( * ) If that sounds like conspiracy theory paranoia, let me share a brief anecdote. When E-Z Pass first came into being, I was a senior editor at a daily newspaper here in the Empire State. The E-Z Pass people said no one should worry about their movements being tracked because that would never happen and no one would give out such information. One of our city editors had a long commute to work and used the Thruway on a daily basis. He signed up for an E-Z Pass card, drove on it for a while, then had one of his reporters go through a contact to get his E-Z Pass history. He had it in less than an hour.

Update: I eventually paid both tickets. A cop-out on my part, but since I have to use that same highway on a regular basis, I can’t envision myself trying to keep battling the State of New Jersey for unfettered and unharassed access even though it is in the wrong. And, for the record, I never received a human response to any of the three letters I sent, having to settle for mechanically-generated form letters that never did address the problem.

• Glad to be of service

I have been a card-carrying member of American Express for a very long time, progressing from Green Card to Gold Card but declining the offer of a Black Card created for zillionaires, not being in that elite financial niche.

Usually, good ol’ AmEx comes through very nicely in the service department. However, several years ago the company inexplicably issued me an Optima credit card I neither wanted, needed nor asked for. My Gold Card was serving me just fine, thank you.

I made several telephone calls to the appropriate 800 service number, explaining the error of their ways and asking them to get rid of the card for me. Each time I was assured that would happen. Each time it did not.

I did likewise online several times and was assured it would be rescinded. It was not.

Yesterday in the mail I received a letter that said, in full (although I’ve deleted certain numbers):

Re: Account Ending XXXX Optima Credit Card

Dear William M. Dowd,

We are writing to you to let you know that we have closed the account listed above because you have not used it in the last 24 months. Please be assured that we do appreciate your business.

If you have any questions, please call us at 1-800-XXX-XXXX.

Sincerely,

Jud Linville
President and CEO, Consumer Services
Member Since 1989

Well, thank you for finally getting around to filling my repeated request, Mr. Linville, even if it was for the wrong reason.

And, about the mention that you’ve been a member since 1989 — So what? I’ve been one since 1985. It still didn’t get me the service I required. So there.

• A horse of a different angle

In 42 years as a newspaper journalist, I had one column of commentary killed. It was about Joe Bruno’s handmaidens.

Joe Bruno, for those outside New York State, reigned as the GOP’s State Senate Majority Leader for many years, wielding a Leno-jawed countenance, carefully barbered silver hair and Machiavellian turn of mind to become one of the three most powerful people in the Empire State. The other two were Sheldon Silver, the New York City Democrat who ruled, and still does, the Assembly as Speaker, and whoever happened to be occupying the Governor’s Mansion at the time, no matter which party was in power.

After one of my columns pointing out some Bruno scalawaggery prompted a series of letters to the editor from various of his supporters, I wrote another explaining to readers what the connections were between Bruno and the letter writers. The editor of the newspaper killed that column at the last possible minute, vaguely muttering something about “Let them have their say.” As if they hadn’t already, in several ways:

Their letters were printed quickly, rather than having to wait in line behind others on other topics as was the usual practice. But, don’t for a moment think anyone in the power structure had whispered in this editor’s ear. Heaven forbid such thoughts.

Bruno, Silver and the governor of the moment. They were the infamous “3 Men In a Room” who decided who would get how much money in each year’s state budget, wheeling and dealing in secrecy and presenting their budget as a fait accompli for the cowardly lions of the Senate and Assembly to dutifully approve in sheep-like lockstep, often without even reading the complete document. Included in the document was a slush fund, usually in the $200 million range, the 3 Profiteers divvied up to hand out to pet projects to garner votes for their next re-election bids.

This was the kind of governance that prompted the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law to annoint as the nation’s most dysfunctional legislature.

Bruno, whose monumental ego was massaged by people who understood the quid pro quo of having taxpayer money shoveled their way, was a regular on the pay-and-preen circuit, appearing at various edifices named for him for his generosity with my money.

Bruno’s ego and deal making may have come back to bite him squarely on his seat of power. Even though he retired from state government last year — and immediately registered as a lobbyist — a federal grand jury last week indicted him on an eight-count felony charge, alleging he used his elected position to extract $3.2 million in private consulting fees from clients who sought to use his influence. Bruno, 79, pleaded not guilty and vowed to fight the charges when taken to court.

The matters of ego and bad business decisions go hand-in-hand. Throughout the Capital Region of New York, Bruno’s home area, we have evidence of the cult of personality that thanked him for giving them my money by labeling such things as the Joseph L. Bruno Town Park in Hoosick Falls, Joseph L. Bruno Family Resource Center of the Commission on Economic Opportunity for the Greater Capital Region Inc., the Joseph L. Bruno Scholarship from the New York State Summer School of Orchestral Studies, the Joseph L. Bruno Theater in the Arts Center of the Capital Region, the Joseph L. Bruno Stadium at Hudson Valley Community College, the Joseph L. Bruno Pavilion at Saratoga Spa State Park, the Joseph L. Bruno Biotechnology Development Center at Albany Molecular Research, the Joseph L. Bruno Lobby in the Greenbush Area YMCA … . I can’t go on.

There were many instances of Bruno’s sloppiness in assembling facts to go along with his dreams and daydreams. One of the most egregious came when he tried to help pull the wool over the eyes of the people of Troy, NY, a small city of 40,000 or so nestled on the east side of the Hudson River near the state capitol.

It was in 2003 that Bruno called an open-air press conference in Troy to present us with something he oh-so-modestly called “A vision presented by Senator Joseph L. Bruno.” I called it a hallucination.

Two years later, stuck in a newspaper conference room for an editorial board meeting, the then State Senate majority leader finally conceded on the record that the vision had evaporated.

So, what really happened to the $470 million “Harbor at Troy” waterfront project he had hyped — the one that promised such components as a Hudson River Heritage Center, a Troy Festival Center, a waterfront park and greenway, a harbor and marina, entertainment/ dining/retail spaces, a hotel and conference center, structured parking, aquariums, replicas of historic ships, a campus for U.S. Naval Academy midshipmen, a Hudson River monitoring system and on and on and on?

It all sunk under the weight of its own hot air when some very basic reporting was done. The kind of verification you might expect a powerful politician to do before attaching himself to such a project.

At the time, Bruno told us a consortium called the Hudson River Group would take care of everything. He said the developers behind the proposal helped create the widely praised Inner Harbor in Baltimore, Faneuil Hall in Boston and a riverfront project under construction in Hartford. However, neither Bruno nor anyone on his staff had conducted the due diligence such an audacious plan called for before throwing his considerable political weight behind it.

The developers Bruno praised had not, as it turned out, personally worked on any of the cited projects; the U.S. Navy had neither pledged $50 million to the project nor had plans to decommission the USS Albany and anchor it here as we were told.

In that editorial board meeting, Bruno expressed disappointment that the project had dried up, but, incredibly, once again said the people behind it had done wonderful things in Baltimore, Boston and Hartford.

“Actually, they had not,” I reminded him. “That was precisely one of the fallacies in that presentation.”

Bruno paused, stuck out that jaw, then replied petulantly, “Well, anyone who saw all those great plans they laid out would have been absolutely convinced the project would work.”

If it had, we’d be seeing some signs of the 650 construction workers who were supposed to hammer it all together, or the 1.3 million visitors we were to expect every year according to the good senator’s projections. Instead, all we saw was a political leader reluctant to admit he had been jobbed by some fast-talking developers. Or, was he intentionally part of the misdirection?

Initial exaggerations and fibs aside, did the project have merit? Bruno’s office announced six months after the original plan unveiling that a consultant would be hired to re-evaluate the project. In this same meeting two years later, he grudgingly revealed under persistent questioning that, no, no one had ever been hired and, no, no one would be. In other words, all those months later we finally were told on the record that we had been served another heaping platter of baloney.

So, as the particulars of the current bill of indictment make their way into the court proceedings, we’ll see a clash of egos, a web of intrigue, a pattern of demagoguery and, perhaps, a lesson or two on equine anatomy.

How so? Bruno, who among many pursuits is a lover of race horses and has been involved in that field, once was asked what he thought about criminal charges against two organizations he had long supported with my tax dollars — the Institute for Entrepreneurship and the New York Racing Association. He gave this thoughtful, statesmanlike reply:

“It doesn’t make sense to look up a dead horse’s rectum. You want to look up a dead horse’s rectum, go ahead; it’s not something I’m going to do.”

Should he not fare well in court, he might prefer that view than having to look us in the eye.

• Discovering which way is up

If your airline flight is delayed this winter because of icy runways, you may have Saskatchewan potash miners to thank for much of the inconvenience.

Hmmm?

The phrase “Saskatchewan potash miners” doesn’t come up much in conversation, but it certainly should be kept in mind these days. A shortage of potash, a form of potassium carbonate, caused by the 99-day miners strike this fall, has left many U.S. airports with low supplies of a key runway de-icer because they didn’t buy sufficient advance quantities of it.

What other effects are we seeing from the strike? Well, as often happens during an extended strike, the timing was meant to be the worst possible for the business, which can be counter-productive for the strikers as well as the strikee. When 500 miners struck three mines owned by Potash Corp. they did so just as the company was pulling out all the stops to meet huge demand for potash-based fertilizer to boost crop yields in the face of rising food prices.

Now, airports, agri-business operations and other users of potash-based products are turning to alternative materials they are finding (a.) available, and (b.) often less costly.

So, the miners got most of what they wanted by putting a stranglehold on their employers, who themselves had been pulling in record profits, but in the long run may have shot themselves in the collective foot.

All of which reminds me of the beleaguered U.S. automakers and their highly-paid union workers. Their history consists of decades of demands for ridiculously high pay and perks and corporate waste and greed passed on to consumers. The auto consumers, just like the potash consumers, found alternatives — buying Japanese and Korean cars, for example — that were much more palatable.

How many times does a lesson have to be repeated before everyone learns a lesson?

• Give till it hurts

From the BBC.com Website:

A Muslim charity and five of its former leaders have been convicted of funding the Palestinian militant group Hamas, designated a terrorist group in the U.S.

Jurors reached the guilty verdict after eight days of deliberations in the retrial of the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.

The group, once the largest U.S. Muslim charity, was accused of giving more than $12 million to support Hamas. It was the largest terrorism financing trial since the 9/11 attacks.

Go here for the full story.

• Common sense shrugs

I’m one of a diminishing number of people who can’t let a day go by without reading one or more newspapers. But some of the verbal and philosophical sloppiness that fills the news and opinion columns without challenge by editors who spend much of their time these days fighting off corporate mandates to cut, cut, cut makes me wonder how much longer I can keep supporting the medium.

Just two examples from today’s Sunday package of ads and a bit of news:

• Syndicated columnist Thomas Friedman waxes on about how he wants to tell young people in restaurants to stay home and eat tuna fish to save their money for this continued string of rainy days. He doesn’t say how this would help. Nor does he acknowledge that diminished consumer support of such businesses will harm owners, staff, supply vendors, insurance agents, trash haulers, delivery people … in other words, people working hard to make a living and relying on consumer spending to do so.

• A letter to the editor concerning retiring New York Chief Judge Judith Kaye takes her to task for threatening a lawsuit to get judges’ salaries raised for the first time in nine years. The logic isn’t that such a stance is unseemly. Rather, the complaint is that judges already make more than the average minimum-wage worker. Well, of course they do, you ninny. They’re worth more to society, have broader and deeper responsibilities, had to undergo more training and life experience, and have more impact on the populace.

Bits of both such styles of “logic” figure into the annual complaints I’ve heard about social doyenne Marylou Whitney, whose themed costume parties are legendary when the thoroughbred horse racing season comes around each summer in Saratoga Springs, NY. Some people love the events; some decry them as excesses of the privileged class. The latter are as short-sighted as columnist Friedman. Whitney’s events help spread money around to florists, winemakers, chefs, waitstaff, parking valets, delivery people, electricians, costumers, painters and on and on, all of them getting paid for an honest day’s work.

That is so much preferable to the re-distribution of wealth that many on the liberal side of politics and society are continually espousing. An attitude I regard as trying to penalize people for being successful. Taxation through jealousy. Willful ignorance of individual effort and initiative. A disincentive to achieve.

That may be what we face in the first term of the Obama presidency. He’s widely thought to be a proponent of wealth re-distribution but he has kept his public comments on the topic flabby enough to allow for speculation until he announces some sort of plan. As he told the now-famous “Joe the Plumber” during a campaign stop:

“My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody … I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

Many iconic thinkers have commented on this situation, but none has summed it up as succinctly as Ayn Rand (“Atlas Shrugged,” “The Fountainhead”), the Russian-born American writer/philosopher show above who advocated rational individualism and laissez-faire capitalism:

“Whoever claims the right to redistribute the wealth produced by others is claiming the right to treat human beings as chattel.”