Sad news: “Lancaster Mayor Rick Gray on Monday morning ordered flags in the city to be lowered to half-staff to mark the death of philanthropist and community volunteer Caroline Steinman Nunan.

“Nunan, 85, died Sunday at the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H. She had been stricken Wednesday while visiting her daughter’s home in Norwich, Vt.”

WATCHDOG: This is a fitting tribute to an individual who devoted herself to civic improvements and the arts, epitomizing the best in the Steinman tradition.  The city and county had no greater friend and benefactor.  Hers was an example of selfless philanthropy.

In social gatherings, she would rush over to other community benefactors and  praise their efforts.  To her wealth was a responsibility to  improve the lot of others, not for  self aggrandizement.

As was recently demonstrated in the circumstances of a momentarilly ostracized artist couple,  once a friend, always a friend.  She made it a point to host them in public!

“May her memory be for a blessing.”

From the MORNING CALL:

Nevada’s got far more slot machines and table games, New Jersey has more casino workers and even Iowa has nearly twice as many casinos, but there’s one place where Pennsylvania gambling industry is king: taxes.

Pennsylvania collected more taxes from its casinos than any other state, passing Nevada for the first time, fiscal 2009 revenues show.

Perhaps most impressive is that the nearly $1.1 billion collected last year by Pennsylvania came from just nine casinos, while Nevada collected nearly a quarter-billion less from its 260 gambling halls…

Click here to read the full article.

From THE GLOBE AND MAIL:

Canadian banks that covet a bigger slice of the U.S. market have identified a small window of opportunity to potentially steal corporate business from troubled American banks.

Now some are pulling out all the stops – using top bank brass to wine and dine the heads of small U.S. companies and flying in analysts from Canada to provide market insight – in an attempt to convince those businesses to change bankers.

Corporate banking is known for being a tough market in which to grow, since companies often stay with one primary lender for decades. But past recessions have shown economic downturns produce temporary upheaval, which can be fertile ground in the hunt for new business…

Click here to read the full article.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Canadian banks are heavily regulated and thus did not suffer the melt down of the major USA banks in 2008 band 2009 that necessitated their rescue via TARP.

From the NEW YORK TIMES:

Americans fighting the war in Afghanistan have long harbored strong suspicions that Pakistan’s military spy service has guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants, according to a trove of secret military field reports made public Sunday.

The documents, made available by an organization called WikiLeaks, suggest that Pakistan, an ostensible ally of the United States, allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders…

The behind-the-scenes frustrations of soldiers on the ground and glimpses of what appear to be Pakistani skullduggery contrast sharply with the frequently rosy public pronouncements of Pakistan as an ally by American officials, looking to sustain a drone campaign over parts of Pakistani territory to strike at Qaeda havens. Administration officials also want to keep nuclear-armed Pakistan on their side to safeguard NATO supplies flowing on routes that cross Pakistan to Afghanistan…

Click here to read the full article.

An article reports:  “It was revealed a month ago that the three-member board of county commissioners will look at abolishing the HRC, which has been investigating complaints of racial, employment and housing discrimination here since 1964, as a cost-cutting measure.

“County residents could receive the same services from the state Human Relations Commission, supporters of cutting the local HRC have said, and closing it would save almost $470,000 annually out of a current county budget of $150 million.”

WATCHDOG: The same $470,000 directed towards the library system would make a huge difference in the quality of life of the approximately 2500 people who utilize county libraries over the course of each day.   The question therefore is not whether having a county as well as a state human relations commission has some merit, but rather what are the alternative use of the funds.

Article reports: “At more than 2,300 pages, the Dodd-frank Wall Street Reform and  Consumer Protection Act was bound to have unintended consequences.  It took only a day for the first one to come to light….Facing legal liability for the first time, [rating firms] are now refusing to allow their ratings to be used in offering documents.  This created a Catch-22 for companies that were trying to raise money by selling asset-backed debt.  The law requires those assets to include ratings in official documents.”

WATCHDOG:   In other words, Moody’s Investors Services and Standard & Poor don’t want to have any skin in the game.  They simply want to collect fat fees without responsibilities.   That is one of the reasons we got into this mess in the first place!   The Watchdog suggests they be held responsible for up to two million dollars in liabilities for each report.  That will add some discipline to the system.

There is quite a bit more to this issue than meets the eye. The ONLY people that serve to protect us taxpayers from the Penn Square Partners are the LCCCA Finance Committee, Mary Ellen Davis, and Kevin Molloy. The LCCCA Finance Committee meets once a month, where it hears a presentation from Interstate Hotels and Resorts, the joint manager of the “integrated facility”. Members of the LCCCA Finance committee can – and do – question the numbers provided by IHR, but they often don’t have all of the background.

Mary Ellen Davis spends quite a bit of her time monitoring the expenditure of taxpayer dollars by Interstate Hotels and Resorts, in addition to her other duties. From the information she presents at LCCCA meetings, it is obvious that she is carrying a heavy work load.

Kevin Molloy is the ONLY person available full-time to keep tabs on IHR and the PSP. Kevin does not assume ANYTHING, and keeps a close eye on IHR’s operation of the convention center. Without someone of Kevin Molloy’s abilities, there would be numerous opportunities for the Penn Square Partners to take even more money from taxpayers than they do right now.

The other thing that Kevin Molloy does is go on sales calls with reps from Interstate Hotels and Resorts, and from the Pennsylvania Dutch Convention and Visitors Bureau. IHR manages both the hotel and the convention center, so they have no incentive to drive business toward the taxpayer-controlled meeting rooms (already there appear to be more small meetings in the hotel’s part of the facility, allowing the PSP to collect more meeting revenue than the LCCCA). Kevin Molloy is the ONLY individual who is in a position to advocate the convention center during a sales meeting.

My concern about this project all along has been its cost to taxpayers. Kevin Molloy and Mary Ellen Davis are the only two people employed full-time in this facility who work to protect the interests of taxpayers like us.

Good review. The reviewer sees the same weakness in the book that I saw.

“Lynn, libertarian by inclination, offers little remedy outside renewed anti-trust enforcement and a serious attention to checks and balances. For a better appreciation of how the tax, subsidy and regulatory systems favor the top one percent, read David Cay Johnston’s Perfectly Legal and Free Lunch. Lynn also misses how monopoly depends on control of natural resources including prime locations—like bank corners and auto strips. What is Wal-Mart, after all, but great swaths of real estate at major highway intersections? But let’s hope Lynn’s alarm summons up a new generation of trust-busters.”

Trust busting is good, essential in fact, but it is not enough. And, the David Kay Johnston book, “Perfectly Legal”, which she recommends is one of my favorites. He was the tax reporter for the NY Times and now is an independent writer. Absolutely brilliant on tax issues and how the tax code has been manipulated to favor the wealthiest 1/2% or so. If you combine Lynn with Judt you get a fuller picture because Judt’s main point is we need to present an alternative vision and develop new language to do so in order to get around some of the ignorant nonsense that passes for political discourse

From the NEW YORK TIMES:

Analysts believe that the Roberts court is unlikely to be swayed from its conservative trend by new members.

In those five years, the court not only moved to the right but also became the most conservative one in living memory, based on an analysis of four sets of political science data.

And for all the public debate about the confirmation of Elena Kagan or the addition last year of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, there is no reason to think they will make a difference in the court’s ideological balance. Indeed, the data show that only one recent replacement altered its direction, that of Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr.  for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in 2006, pulling the court to the right.

There is no similar switch on the horizon. That means that Chief Justice Roberts, 55, is settling in for what is likely to be a very long tenure at the head of a court that seems to be entering a period of stability…

Click here to read the full article.

From MORNING CALL:

…The Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program (abbreviated RACP, but pronounced R-CAP) was created in 1993 with a debt limit of $700 million. This debt ceiling has been increased regularly, mostly under Gov. Rendell’s watch, with the latest $600 million hike increasing the limit to more than $4 billion…

For starters, RACP grants, though part of the state capital budget, are not true capital expenditures. Like a family borrowing to buy a home or going into debt to expand a business, government can appropriately issue bonds to build facilities, schools and roads. But handouts to politically selected companies and special interests are an improper use of taxpayer-backed debt.

Furthermore, the use of state debt under Gov. Rendell represents an oversized credit card with an ever-increasing spending limit. It is one thing for a state to borrow for infrastructure projects and then pay off that debt over the life of the project, but Pennsylvania continues to borrow and spend more each year while only making the minimum payment due…

Click here to read the full article.