Banks and Wall St: Reach for your piggy banks

THE CLOSING DAYS of the year have prompted financial advisors to call me for a "review" of our inertial investments. They, of course, wanted to lead me in a positive direction with cheery "maybe-we-can-upgrade" them . To what? I asked with a snarl, as if I hadn't heard it all before. Besides, how is one to react after all of the things that have gone into the tank for people like you and me with the experts in charge of our accounts.

I've also been getting written notices advising me of all of the changes taking place in the accounts in the new year. One of them from my bank folds out to nearly 19 inches of tiny print, which should immediately prepare you for the worst. To assist the confused reader, it should have at least been bundled with CliffsNotes. In bold face it declares:

"PLEASE READ THIS NOTICE OF CHANGE IN TERMS ("Notice") AND RETAIN THIS DOCUMENT FOR YOUR RECORDS."

Their odd insertion of a lower case "notice" was fair warning that it was written by the same kind of person who once sent me impenetrable Air Force orders with jargon that I never fully understood other than I had to report to such- and-such base at such-and-such time.

I did notice that the term "Credit Card" appeared more often than "savings account", which was comforting in that they weren't looking to me to help pay for Wall Street bonuses under their concept of the blessed free enterprise system. But I did take a stab at one of the paragraphs:

Finance Charges: If not already the case, your APR will be a variable rate calculated by adding 21.74% to the value of an index and will have a minimum and maximum of 24.99% . As of October 1, 2009 the APR is 24.99%. As of July 1, 2010, the maximum amount (cap) will be removed.

You could stop trying to decode the bank's 19" directive right there. What they want you to know in layman's terms is that the interest rate on your credit card is going up. And up. And up.

At the same time, the interest paid to me on my savings account and CDs is virtually invisible.

I also have been hearing from the folks who handle a portion of my securities . They sent me a flier that was reassuring. It said things like:

The team of financial advisors...strives to maintain current records of your investment experience and objectives. To this end please provide your...advisory team with any information that might assist them in determining your risk tolerance, financial circumstances and investment objectives.

Investment objectives?

When an advisor called me I told him explicitly what my investment objective was for my last remaining fail-safe mutual fund that has been mired in red ink for more than two years.

"SELL IT!" I barked.

"When?"

"As we speak".

"But..."

"As we speak!"

I had been telling my experts for more than two years that Wall Street couldn't care less about the little guys in the market. The big guys have proved it time and again that your money and mine was strictly a way for them to pocket the profits.

As Arianna Huffington wrote the other day:

The big banks on Wall Street, propped up by taxpayer money and government guarantees, had a record year, making record profits while returning to the highly leverage activities that brought our ecoomy to the brink of disaster. In a slap in the face of taxpayers, they have also cut back on the money they are lending....But since April, the Big Four banks - JP Morgan/Chase, Citibank, Bank of America and ells Fargo - all of which took billions in taxpayer money, have cut lending to buinesses by $100 billion."

The check for the sale of the my mutual fund arrived a couple of days ago. Against the advice of any financial advisor, I stuck it into the purgatory of a savings account. At least I know it will be safe there. How's that for a financial objective?

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"Bush's brain", is so troubled

KARL ROVE, the so-called "Bush's brain," went back up to Fox's robotic news spinner, to say that he was "troubled" by the Obama administration's response to the terrorist who wanted to blow up the plane from Europe. You sort of expect his repeated tongue-stomping to get attention. But if he took a single breath, he might recall who was president when they were crashing jets into buildings on 9/11, now that it has been established that his team from the Oval office ignored all warnings.

Steele and Kasich: A lucrative sideline

REPUBLICAN NATIONAL Committee chairman Michael Steele and Ohio GOP gubernatorial candidate John Kasich have found that their political roles can pay off in more ways than one. In less polite society it's known as gaming the system. The word has now gotten out, like those 22 million missing e-mails, that they are frequently invited to share their beliefs in lofty Republican values with audiences across the land. In return, they are personally being paid thousands of dollars by their hosts. And their money-making sideline appears to be more than crass with former RNC chairmen.

Hissed the conservative Washington Times: "Michael S. Steele, Republican National Committee chairman , is using his title to market himself for paid appearances nationwide, personally profiting from speeches with fees of up to $20,000 at colleges, trade associations and other groups - an unusual practice criticized by a string of previous chairmen."

I should say so. However, if you're one to keep score, it does seem that the University of Akron snared a bargain when it paid Steele only $12,000 for his public speech in E.J. Thomas Hall on Oct. 15. Having sat through his schtick at the time, I would have have moved his fee four or five decimal points to the left.

If Kasich was paying attention to the Steele System of rhetorical punishment and rewards, he must have been a quick study. Indeed, he prefers the Cadillac version of fees, doubling what Steele feels is an honorable charge for a service call to corporate business groups and friendly associations, regardless of the oddity of speaking in states like Nevada, Illinois and Minnesota where there aren't likely to be any Buckeye voters. But a Wall Streeter to the core, he's finding it's not that difficult to charge whatever the traffic will bear.

Meantime, Columbus Dispatch columnist Joe Hallett pointed out, Kasich "hid in the weeds" during the attempts to resolve the state's budget crises, except to "deplore the tax increase." Way back in June, Kasich bobbed at the Cleveland City Club when asked for his views on fixing the budget, insisting: "I'm not messing with that...It isn't my job now to be micromanaging the process." He's lucky. Gov. Strickland, with help from legislative Republicans, fixed it without him.

Is Kasich serious about being a governor? Or are all of those out-of-state fees too generous for him to change his mind?

A nod to the cast of 2009

WELL, THE GOOD NEWS is that we've managed to get through 2009 without South Carolina, Texas and Alaska seceding. The bad news is that 2010 will give them another whole year to think about it. So may we assume that Ft. Sumter and Myrtle Beach vacations are safe for another year? The outlook for these states, particularly Texas, is hazy at best. As George Bush proved not long ago, we are never that safe from Lone Star politicians. Sorry, but I never know what to think of Alaska.

There are other matters working in behalf of national sanity. The political scene in South Carolina is in such disarray that its leaders won't have much time to think about checking out. Sen. Lindsey Graham has his hands full with the Republicans in his county who censured him after accusing him of being too "relevant". Gov. Sanford will be too busy trying to figure how many of his shadowy trips to Argentina can be converted into tax write-offs as official therapeutic business. And Rep. Joe Wilson must be so self-satisfied that he has already seceded on his own. By adding "You lie!" to Bartlett's Quotations he has at least matched Socrates' "Know thyself" for profound brevity.

Meantime, secession-leaning Gov. Rick Perry of Texas may have to revive the spirit of Davy Crockett and Sam Houston to head off a serious challenge to his day job by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison in the Republican primary. Both candidates are tightly identified with prayerful guidance, so Perry may have to depend on troops on the ground for this one.

The year nearly succeeded in ending without Sen. Joe Lieberman charging up to Fox News to declare his impatience with Yemen. But on the last Sunday of the year - what perfect timing! - he virtually declared war on Yemen without consulting President Obama or Congress. The befuddled Connecticut senator, who never served a day in military service, is one of Capitol Hill's super-chickenhawks with a sliding-scale identity depending on the moment.

The year produced something new in political slang - tea parties, which had little to do with tea nor partying. Polls told us that a majority of Republicans believed (1)Palin should be president (2)climate change was a liberal red herring and (3) that Obama could very well have been born in an African tree. They wanted the rest of us to believe that socialism was at our front door when in fact, if they had been paying any attention, they would have known that there have been many "socialistic" programs around for nearly a century. It has been with certain irony that one of the biggest but not brightest congresswomen, Michele Bachmann, has received more than $250,000 in farm subsidy handouts while she has been bad-mouthing socialism and various federal excesses.

Fortunately we saw less and less of the losers: Fred Thompson, Rudy Giuliani, (who has declared that he isn't running for anything this year) and Mike Huckabee, who still manages to front for Sheriff Andy Griffith. On the other hand, Newt Gingrich continues to rise from the ashes and has even threatened us with running for president in 2012. It was a good year for Rush Limbaugh, who became familiarly known as the head of the Republican Party, and Glenn Beck, who is so wacky that he is more to be pitied than censured.

And the Republicans in Congress continued to play the role of the Petrified Forest, anchored to their waist in their opposition to health care reform whle supporting death panels, death taxes and death notices for their opponents, as did Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. Curiously, they scored an approval rating of 23 pct. in the latest public survey. They, more than anything else, could save the Democratic Party in 2010 from self-destructing.

It was a tough year for Obama, who spent too much time trying to be neighborly to the R's, and an enomously profitable year for Wall Street, which spent the entire year being generous to its bonus-enriched self.

On the more diversionary side there was the emergence of new terms and words such as the Balloon Boy, Octomom and Twitter, which I still haven't figured out and probably won't.

Lastly, our "Persons of the Year" award goes to the upbeat hard-working Washington lobbyists whose numbers represented a growth industry despite lousy national employment figures for the year. According to the Harper's Index, drug company lobbyists outnumbered congressmen, 2-1. Health-care companies spent an average of $1.5 million daily to influence congressmen. What other group so generously contributed more to the economy?

Health care reform: halfway home

WELL, THE SENATE finally passed the damn thing. It wasn't easy, nor perfect, given the opposition from a handful of Democrats and all of those politically correct core-value Republicans ambling around the halls of congress on their knuckles, snorting that the end of the world was near.

This was the disloyal opposition at its worst, from the racket of "death panels" to Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn's unspeakable appeal to Americans to pray that someone would not show up for a vote to block a Republican filibuster. It didn't take a second or two to realize that he was tallking about Sen. Robert Byrd, the ancient and infirm Democrat, to either lapse into a deep coma or pass 0n to wherever Democrats go when they die. (As the talks now move to the House, the Coburn Prayer will still be on the table if and when an accord is reached to pass the bill.) I wonder when a U.S. senator last prayerfully called for a colleague's absence. Fortunately his avenging angels decided to sit this one out.

The nearly year-long debate was a made-for-TV (and cable) extravaganza in which fiction far overwhelmed fact. It was often played out by role-players who saw little reason to speak in behalf of rational differences. If you are looking for an explanation of how so much of this got out of hand, remember there is no better way to secure your 15 minutes of fame than to to sit in front of a TV camera arguing that health care reform doesn't necessarily turn on its axis and could easily knock the whole planet out of whack.

I couldn't resist thinking of Dick Cheney, recently applauded by the ultra right-wing Human Events, as the conservative of the year. The guy has been on the prowl for most of this decade with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator(ICD) that regulates the heartbeat - a device that the doctors figured might extend his life after his four heart attacks and a quadruple bypass. The total cost of his medical bill was reported to be nearly $3 million. But even pampered penny pinching vice presidents have a right to stay alive. One of his aides said his Blue Cross/Blue shield policy would likely cover all of it. Cool.

On the other hand, folks without health insurance are not vice presidents or senators.

As they say, rank has it privilege.

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A Christmas story on the Hill...

'TWAS THE DAY before Christmas and up on the Hill

Some creatures were stirring, still alert for a kill.

Their wallets were hung in their offices with care

In hopes that the lobbyists would soon be there.

The uninsured had frantically leaped from their beds

Wondering how they would pay for their critical meds.

They had visions of McConnell, with DeMint in his lap

And Boehner and Bachmann busily setting a trap.

But out on the lawn there arose such a clatter

That Brownback arose to pray for McConnell's great matter.

Away from the caucus they flew like a flash

Tore open some bags and looked for the cash.

The moon on the breast of the new fallen snow

gave the luster of K Street to those in the know.

When what to their wondering eyes should appear

But a gleaming Mercedes with eight powerful gears.

The driver was Palin , who was so lively and quick

I knew in a moment she was up to her old tricks.

More rapid than eagles her idolators they came

She shouted and winked and called them by name:

"Now, Bunning! now, Inhofe! now, Coburn! now, Steele!

it's time for all of us to seriously get real."

"To the top of the of the rostrum, to the top of wall

Now dash away, dash way, dash away all!.....

(Well, folks, it's getting late and you know how the thing ends. But if you want to add a line or two, be my guest. Besides, I don't get paid for this. GA)

RNC's Steele flips out on flipping a bird

ALTHOUGH IT didn't seem possible that RNC Chairman Michael Steele could lower his rants to the depths of the gutter, he did exactly that with a blast at Democrats on the health care front. In a conference call with former Texas Rep. Dick Armey, who has resurrected himself as a leader of the Tea Bagger movement, Steele frothed:

"I'm tired of this congress thumbing their nose and flipping the bird at the people of this country!"

Flipping the bird? If the term eludes you, think of a middle finger raised in anger. Some Democrats as well as Republican Sen. Judd Gregg found his outburst quite distasteful. As for me, I have no choice but to award him the Grumpy Abe Linguistic Lunacy (GALL) award. For Steele, that's not the first time he walked off with a GALL - and I'm sure not the last.

Yule shopping: Blue shirts vs. Winston diamonds

THE FULL PAGE AD from a diamond merchant in today's New York Times reminded us that there were only "three days till Christmas." As if we didn't know. Despite the ugly war of attrition on Capitol Hill (Please. When will the cavalry arrive?), I am trying to be merry. I am even making allowances for all of the gushing these days over Mike Holmgren, the former football coach who now will be the BMOC of the Cleveland Browns. His pensive profile, surely inspired by Rodin's Thinker, arrived massively on the front page of the Plain Dealer today as the paper's sports columnists and editors worked hard to convince the reader of the historic significance of the moment.

Meantime, there are still those three days till Christmas to reckon with and the Times , in its snooty fashion, paraded a number of last-minute luxury gift ads from dealers with names like Ulysse Nardin, Everlon and Rolex. I was particularly taken by Harry Winston's $12,800 four-row diamond ring with the ground-level trade name of "Traffic." Honest.

I recall another time with no more than a hometown weekly that dwelled on births and deaths right up to its pre-Christmas edition. My mother made her annual shopping visit to George Saloom's little "department store" facing the World War I monument on the town square. She defined her need for a shirt for my father, deeply into the details. Only a few shirts were ever exhibited at Saloom's. So the proprietor would listen attentively, turn to the shelves behind the counter and pull out a couple of boxes that would meet her need. "We have a nice blue one and a white one in the right size," he assured my Mom with a degree a satisfaction as he removed the quarry from the boxes for closer inspection.

"I think I'll take the blue one," she said finally, aware that further shopping was not an option. "It won't show the dirt so fast. He spills things."

It was an annual transaction, to the point, with not a lot of deep thinking. Afterwards she would take me to Sam Samer's Candyland for a banana split. That makes me more cheerful already.

PolitiFact: Here's the lie of the year

PolitiFact.Com the fact-checking watchdog of the St. Petersburg Times, has reported its first "lie of the year" award in a survey of 5,000 voters: It is....death panels. The wacko term drew 61 pct. of the vote in a field of eight finalists. PolitiFact, which won a Pulitzer Prize this year for its work in exposing slippery tongues, traced the term to Sarah Palin, who stuck it in her Facebook psychobabbling. Here is how it was born:

"The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have go and stand in front of Obama's death panel so his bureaucrats can decide..."

Sarah can now claim she won something in 2009. And that's no lie.

Walter Hixson: A critical look at UA's priorities

WALTER HIXSON'S op-ed piece in Sunday's' Beacon Journal was more than a shot across the bow of the University of Akron administration. It hit the bow.

Hixson is a distinguished history professor who serves as president of the UA American Association of University Professors that is in overextended contract negotiations with the

school's front office. Some might argue that in his union role he would be expected to attack the administration for its alleged financial shortcomings. But that would merely summarily deny the validity of his criticism without giving it a wide- screen analysis.

Here are a few points in the Hixson column that should remain on the table:

The university's priorities have shifted from its self-proclaimed "landscape for learning" to a "landscape for earning". In the meantime, Hixson asserts, the new landscape "benefits a bloated administration and local contractors but no longer serves the best interests of the university to teach them."

Money budgeted for teaching and research has declined from 37 pct. in 2004 to 34 pct. in 2009. At the same time, student tuition as part of the university's income has risen from 32 pct. in 2002 to 43 pct. today. UA is also ranked near the bottom of salaries of associate and full professors - 10th and 11th among Ohio's state-supported schools.

So what do we make of this? Is UA failing as an attractive campus for educational talent that is heading somewhere else? Is it losing its competitive edge as it further engages in a massive building program on the campus rather than human talent?

As a rule, university administrations think corporately and resist responding openly to public criticism other than, at best, a canned statement from a beleaguered media information department.

Don't the points made by Hixson and other critics (yes, there are others) call for a forthcoming response from President Proenza and certainly from the Board of Trustees that has ratified the administration's initiatives ? Has the UA become top-heavy with management with vice presidents reporting to vice presidents?

Is there anyone on the board willing to take a serious look at the financial as well as image problems? Hixson's Sunday column should serve as the road map for anyone still in doubt about UA's need for accountability. After all, it is a public university.