|
|
|
JACKSON, N.Y.
Roger Meyer, behind a town’s language ordinance.
It’s about 2,500 miles from this green, rural town in the rolling hills near Vermont to the Mexican border at Nogales, but that hasn’t stopped Jackson from making a bid to be New York’s small version of Arizona in the immigration wars.
Or that’s how it is beginning to feel two months after Jackson — which has 1,700 people, no village, no grocery store or place to buy gasoline, no church, no school, two restaurants and maybe a few Spanish-speaking farm workers — decided it needed a law requiring that all town business be conducted in English.
One nearby town, Argyle, has since passed a similar resolution. A third, Easton, is likely to consider one at its Town Board meeting in June. The law has already put Jackson at odds with the New York Civil Liberties Union, which says it violates state and federal law. But in the great American echo chamber, every mouse gets to roar, so Roger Meyer, who proposed the law, feels he is making progress toward protecting the English language from threats near and far.
“For too long, the federal government has shirked its duty by not passing English as the official language of the United States,” said Mr. Meyer, 76, a Town Council member and retiree who runs Chains Unlimited, a sawmill and chain saw and logging supply company. “So seeing as this law couldn’t be passed from the top down, I felt I’d start a grass-roots movement to try to get it passed from the bottom up.”
The law designates English as the town’s official written and spoken language, “to be used in all official meetings and business conducted by the elected officials and their appointees.”
The civil liberties union has asked the board to rescind the ordinance.
“The English language is not under attack in Jackson or anywhere else in the state or country,” said Melanie Trimble, director of the civil liberties union’s capital region chapter.
The group said the law prohibited constitutionally protected speech and discriminated against anyone with limited English skills who tried to conduct business with the town, whether they wished to report a crime or to testify in local court or to obtain a building permit. It contains no exceptions for medical emergencies and police investigations, in which public health and safety are at stake, the group said.
Asked if, for instance, he felt the law would prohibit a flier in Spanish about a rabies epidemic, Mr. Meyer said he believed it would not. Alan Brown, the town supervisor and the only board member to vote against the law (it passed 3 to 1, with one member absent), said he thought it would.
Mr. Brown added that he saw no reason to spend taxpayer money to defend a law that couldn’t be enforced. “The law would play to some people’s prejudices, and I don’t think that’s a good thing,” he said.
One thing supporters and opponents agree on is that the law reflects no imminent threat.
“We have records going back to 1816, and they’ve never been written in anything but English,” Mr. Meyer said. “This law isn’t changing anything. It’s just making it official that we’re going to do what we’ve been doing for 190 years.”
And Mr. Meyer said the law was in support of English, not in opposition to any group. “It’s not prejudicial or anything like that,” he said.
Still, he said, he wanted to make a statement in reaction to what he believed was a movement whereby immigrants were less likely to learn English and assimilate into the culture than in the past.
“People come here because it’s better than the place they were in,” he said. “If that’s the case, you should be adapting yourself to our ways. We shouldn’t be adapting ourselves to your ways.”
The debate on the proposal was split almost down the middle, but Mr. Brown concedes he has taken some heat from his vote, while Mr. Meyer said he had received only praise.
“I walked into a restaurant in Hoosick Falls the other day and a fellow sitting at the counter said, ‘There’s the guy that pushed the English,’ ” he said. “And they all applauded me.”
People are quick to say that the few Hispanic farm employees in the area are valued workers and that there is no animus in the law. But Mr. Brown said that if not animus, there was probably something else tied to the undercurrent of unease everywhere, even in this distant, peaceful place.
“This law didn’t just pop up because someone has interest in and sympathy for the fact we’ve always done our meetings in English,” he said. “What is a human’s greatest fear? It’s fear of whatever, of death, of terrorism, fear of what we don’t understand. We’re all afraid of the unknown. My opinion is that this is just adding to all that.”
E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com
Continue Reading
Jon Corzine, second from left, returned to Wall Street in March as the chief executive of MF Global Holdings.
For Jon S. Corzine, it has come to this: a bare Manhattan office still littered with mementos from the previous occupant, at a company few outside Wall Street have heard of.
It is a long way from Goldman Sachs, which he once ran, or Drumthwacket, the New Jersey governor’s mansion, from which he was booted by the voters in November.
Comedown though it may be, this is where Mr. Corzine, 63, finds himself, having returned to Wall Street in March as the chief executive of MF Global Holdings, a brokerage firm that specializes in futures and derivatives trading and is one-twentieth the size of Goldman.
Showing the kind of political poise that sometimes eluded him as governor, and before that, senator, Mr. Corzine professes to be thrilled, even energized, by the new job. “This was like a starburst. It’s hard to believe this kind of opportunity presented itself,” he said. “Goldman was small when I joined it, too.”
Unfortunately, ex-banker from Goldman Sachs is an even less appealing credential than one-term governor these days.
As bad as the rejection by the voters was, the fraud suit brought against Goldman by the Securities and Exchange Commission is another blow for Mr. Corzine, who ran Goldman from 1994 to 1999 and helped guide its journey from private partnership to public company.
“When I ran for senator in 2000, being a Wall Street banker from Goldman Sachs was a major plus in your résumé,” he said. “People have seen excesses. There’s a different attitude about it.”
Still, Mr. Corzine has always shown the ability to bounce back from setbacks, whether it was being forced out as chief executive of Goldman a decade ago, or recovering from a near-fatal car accident as governor in 2007.
“He was tenacious,” said Jack Mazzotti, a friend of Mr. Corzine since their days in high school in rural Taylorville, Ill., about a four-hour drive south of Chicago. “He set out early on to make his mark and nothing was going to stop him.”
Second acts may be common enough on Wall Street, but this would be a much tougher third act, especially given the fierce competition in MF Global’s sector, where commissions have been whittled down and small companies have to fight for each transaction. As Mr. Corzine puts it, “We’re not too big to fail.”
At an age when contemporaries and rivals like Henry M. Paulson Jr., who succeeded Mr. Corzine at Goldman and went on to become the Treasury secretary, are writing memoirs, Mr. Corzine is aiming for a shot at redemption. He is getting his hands dirty at a firm full of rough-edged traders, rather than the Ivy League types who populate Goldman.
What is more, he is not the only former Wall Street chief to return with the goal of turning around a much-smaller company. John A. Thain, the former Goldman Sachs executive who ran the New York Stock Exchange and, less successfully, Merrill Lynch, is now steering CIT after its bankruptcy filing last fall.
Old Wall Streeters do not have a habit of fading away. There is always one more trade, especially when the last two or three have not worked out. And Mr. Corzine hardly wants to go out on a low note, not when regulation is about to transform the securities industry and he has enough contacts in Washington to help shape the process.
Mr. Corzine, who worked his way up from trading government bonds at Goldman, hardly needs the money. But he said his love of markets drew him back to his roots, as well as the opportunity to build up a firm that has a strong presence in futures and options trading but is still trying to expand into other areas, like bonds, and has not fully overcome a 2008 trading scandal.
“I wouldn’t have come here if I thought MF Global were going to be the same company in five or 10 years,” he said. “We have to find other ways of building revenue.”
His horizons will not be limited to MF Global, however. He plans to teach a class on public policy at Princeton this fall and now also serves as a partner at J. C. Flowers & Company, the private equity firm founded by his friend J. Christopher Flowers. J. C. Flowers owns a 10 percent stake in MF Global.
Seven months after Mr. Corzine lost a bid for a second term as governor, it is clear that the rejection at the polls still smarts. “It’s painful to lose, and anybody who tells you that it isn’t is disconnected from reality,” he said. “It impacts you personally and how you feel about yourself for a while. And it always sets up 20/20 hindsight.”
Unlike his loss in the election, Mr. Corzine never saw his ouster from Goldman coming. Power at Goldman has swung back and forth between investment bankers and traders for decades, and in 1999 Mr. Corzine lost out to the bankers, including Mr. Paulson, who was later the Treasury secretary under President George W. Bush.
“Goldman was more of a shock,” he said. “It took a while to get my mind around it.”
Bruising as these exits have been, Mr. Corzine is not quite ready to quit the public arena. He hopes to emulate other elder statesmen who managed to bridge the gap between finance and public life, like Felix Rohatyn, the Lazard banker who helped save New York from bankruptcy in the 1970s and has been an adviser to mayors, governors and presidents ever since. Still, Mr. Corzine does a delicate dance when the subject of Goldman comes up, not exactly defending the company but not throwing it under the bus, either.
Goldman was among many big players in the market for synthetic collateralized debt obligations, the complex mortgage securities at the heart of the S.E.C.’s civil fraud suit, he said. “This transaction isn’t unique relative to what other people have done. They’re a proxy for the industry, so maybe that calls on you to carry yourself with a little more discretion.”
He cannot help sympathizing with Lloyd C. Blankfein, Goldman’s chief executive and a former subordinate of Mr. Corzine’s on the trading floor.
“You had a prosecutor’s mentality in terms of how the senators acted,” he said. “The committee has a mentality and a mandate to discover wrongdoing.”
What about the charges? “It looks like a thin legal case to me,” he said. “You had people identified as suitable customers. Ultimately, it’s an issue of whether you wanted to be in synthetic C.D.O.’s.”
But as he knows well from politics, public attitudes are a whole different story. “On a public relations basis, Goldman was going to lose to begin with when you see civil fraud on the table,” he said.
For all the negative publicity surrounding Goldman, Mr. Corzine’s presence could help restore investor confidence in MF Global’s top management.
MF Global had a scandal of its own in 2008, when a rogue trader made unauthorized bets on wheat, incurring a $141 million loss and sending MF Global’s shares 93 percent lower. The company was fined $10 million, and late last month, the trader was indicted on fraud charges.
Shares of MF Global have never recovered from that plunge, and with estimated 2010 revenue of $1.86 billion, MF Global is a minnow compared to Goldman and its $45 billion in revenue.
Still, Mr. Corzine is having more success so far with MF Global shareholders than he did with New Jersey voters. The stock is up 25 percent since he joined, and Wall Street was pleased that MF Global was able to snag him.
Continue Reading
WASHINGTON — In a burst of rule-making, federal agencies have toughened or proposed new standards to protect Americans from tainted eggs, safeguard construction workers from crane accidents, prevent injuries from baby walkers and even protect polar bears from extinction.
Toys from China were inspected in California by Stephen Gardner of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
The latest on President Obama, his administration and other news from Washington and around the nation. Join the discussion.
Over the last year, the Obama administration has pressed forward on hundreds of new mandates, while also stepping up enforcement of rules by increasing the ranks of inspectors and imposing higher fines for violations.
A new age of regulation is well under way in Washington, a fact somewhat obscured by the high-profile debates over the health care overhaul and financial oversight system and by fresh calls for greater federal vigilance spurred by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the deaths of coal miners in West Virginia.
The surge in rule-making has resulted from an unusual confluence of factors, from repeated outbreaks of food-borne illnesses to workplace disasters. Some industry groups, wanting foreign competitors to adhere to the same standards they must meet, have backed new federal mandates. The push for some of the measures began at the end of the Bush administration, a tacit acknowledgment that its deregulatory agenda had gone too far.
Still, the new aggressiveness reflects the new cops on the beat, and the contrast with the Bush administration is an intentionally sharp one. While the Bush administration mostly favored voluntary compliance by industry, senior Obama administration officials argue that carefully crafted regulation can be a positive force.
“We start from the perspective that we all want a cleaner environment, longer lives, improved safety,” said Peter R. Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, which reviews major regulations. “Smart regulation can make people’s lives better off.”
But complaints from industry leaders are intensifying. Manufacturers, home builders, toymakers and others say that Washington has been overzealous about imposing new requirements, and they warn of serious consequences for businesses and consumers.
“I am all for clean water, but this really isn’t helping,” said Bobby Bowling IV, president of the Tropicana Building Corporation in El Paso, who objects to rules adopted by the Environmental Protection Agency last year requiring larger construction sites to prevent turbid storm-water runoff. “All this is one more obstacle to development,” Mr. Bowling said.
The National Association of Manufacturers made a similar complaint about the cost of many of the new proposed mandates. “Dollars spent on compliance with cumbersome regulations are dollars not spent on hiring new employees,” said Erin Streeter, a spokeswoman for the group.
Obama administration officials reject the criticism, saying that the benefits associated with the dozens of major rules adopted between President Obama’s inauguration and the end of 2009 outweigh the costs by an estimated $3.1 billion, a savings they assert is greater than that attributed to new regulations in the first years of the Clinton and Bush administrations.
They arrived at that figure by factoring in upfront costs — like the price of stronger brake systems being mandated in new tractor-trailers — with the estimated long-term savings — like reduced property damage and an estimated 227 fewer highway deaths each year.
“I don’t want to put anyone out of business,” said Inez Tenenbaum, chairwoman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, who was appointed by Mr. Obama. “But if anything will help the marketplace, it is to make sure that people have confidence in the products that they buy.”
The Environmental Protection Agency is perhaps the most aggressive advocate of the new regulatory philosophy in Washington. It has moved quickly to reverse or strengthen Bush administration policies on power plant pollution, lead paint and toxic chemical discharges.
Last month, along with the Transportation Department, the agency mandated that automakers significantly cut greenhouse-gas emissions while increasing fuel economy standards, an issue the Bush administration had put on hold, citing the industry’s weakened financial condition. The car companies pronounced themselves happy with the result because it eliminated the possibility of even stricter regulation by California and about a dozen other states.
The agency’s administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, has made clear that she would prefer to have Congress tackle climate change through broad legislation in what would be one of the largest regulatory actions in American history. But if Congress fails to pass a law, she has already started the process of mandating standards on her own.
The shift is also evident at major agencies charged with policing worker safety, health and consumer products. Many of the rules those agencies have adopted or are now pushing to impose — including a requirement that farmers refrigerate eggs and kill rodents to combat salmonella contamination on eggshells, which sickens 79,000 people a year — languished during previous administrations.
Now, a newly muscular Food and Drug Administration will have more authority, money and staff for greater scrutiny of products. Since bottoming out at 1,309 inspectors in the 2007 fiscal year, the agency now has 1,800 inspectors with 150 more on the way. Inspections rose 5 percent in 2009 after years of declines and are expected to increase steadily in coming years.
Reporting was contributed by
John M. Broder, Jackie Calmes, Gardiner Harris, Robert Pear and Matthew L. Wald.
Continue Reading
WASHINGTON — In a defeat for major Wall Street banks, the Senate on Wednesday rejected a Republican effort to ease some of the tight new rules included in the bill for trading derivatives, the complex financial instruments that were at the center of the 2008 financial collapse.
Senator Sam Brownback proposed exempting auto dealers from new scrutiny. President Obama opposed that plan.
The question of how to regulate derivatives has generated fierce debate in the Senate, as lawmakers wrestled with a desire to bring new transparency and safeguards to the market while not hurting businesses that routinely use derivatives to hedge against risks, like swings in energy prices, foreign currency rates or other commodities.
The regulatory legislation now includes some extremely tough provisions, put forward by Senator Blanche Lincoln, Democrat of Arkansas and chairwoman of the agriculture committee, including language that would most likely force most of the major financial institutions on Wall Street to spin off their lucrative derivatives businesses.
The Obama administration and even some Democrats have expressed apprehension about that proposal. But the Senate rejected an amendment by Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the senior Republican on the agriculture committee, that would have let banks keep their derivatives units and would have loosened other proposed rules.
The vote was 39 to 59.
So for now at least, Mrs. Lincoln’s proposal, which includes new requirements that all derivatives be traded on a public exchange and processed, or cleared, through a third party, remains intact. Parties to derivatives contracts, including existing contracts, would be required to post collateral to help protect against potential default.
Trading in derivatives is dominated by the nation’s five biggest banks, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo, and by one count, the banks had enlisted a cadre of more than 130 lobbyists to help reshape the legislation.
They may yet succeed. Given the Obama administration’s concerns, some lawmakers say they expect the derivatives rules to be modified before the bill is approved. The majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, is pressing to complete the legislation by early next week, though Republicans say it may take more time.
In floor debate, Mrs. Lincoln defended her tough rules. “The Chambliss amendment does not meet the test of what our markets require,” she said. “It is a stark reminder that if we do not act boldly in the face of the near collapse of our economy, tragic Wall Street abuses and abysmal regulatory failures, we will all suffer the consequences.”
Mr. Chambliss, echoing arguments from some bankers, warned that the legislation would harm businesses and drive derivatives trading to overseas markets outside the reach of American regulators.
“Our approach on transparency, on clearing, on end users, on capital requirements and on trading mandates are much more appropriate, much more reasonable, much more business-friendly,” he said. “My amendment will ensure that Main Street businesses will still be able to appropriately use derivatives in hedging their daily business risks.”
In an unusually aggressive foray into the Senate floor debate on Wednesday, President Obama issued a statement in opposition to another Republican amendment, by Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, that would exempt auto dealers from coming under the purview of a proposed new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
In his statement, Mr. Obama said the amendment would create a “special loophole for auto dealer-lenders” that “would carve out a special exemption for these lenders that would allow them to inflate rates, insert hidden fees into the fine print of paperwork and include expensive add-ons that catch purchasers by surprise.”
And he added, “Unfortunately, countless families — particularly military families — have been the target of these deceptive practices.”
Later in the day, the Senate voted 98 to 1 to create a “consumer protection liaison” for military service members and their families.
Separately on Wednesday, the Senate approved an amendment to the financial regulatory bill that allows the Federal Reserve to retain its supervision of state-chartered banks and bank holding companies with less than $50 billion in assets that are now in the Fed system rather than transfer authority to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
Under the amendment, sponsored by Senators Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, and Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, the Fed can retain supervision of more than 4,900 bank holding companies and about 900 state-chartered Fed-member banks, though the institutions could choose to be overseen by the F.D.I.C.
The vote, 90 to 9, was a big victory for the Fed.
Sewell Chan contributed reporting.
Continue Reading
Federal regulators gave clearance Wednesday for a large and controversial field test of genetically engineered trees planned for seven states stretching from Florida to Texas.
A blog about energy, the environment and the bottom line.
The test is meant to see if the trees, eucalyptuses with a foreign gene meant to help them withstand cold weather, can become a new source of wood for pulp and paper, and for biofuels, in the Southern timber belt. Eucalyptus trees generally cannot now be grown north of Florida because of occasional freezing spells.
The Agriculture Department, in an environmental assessment issued Wednesday, said no environmental problems would be caused by the field trial, which could involve more than 200,000 genetically modified eucalyptus trees on 28 sites covering about 300 acres.
The permit would be issued to ArborGen, a biotechnology company owned by three big forest products companies: International Paper and MeadWestvaco of the United States, and Rubicon of New Zealand.
The Agriculture Department would have to grant separate approval for the trees to be grown commercially, clearance that ArborGen is already seeking.
Although two genetically engineered fruit trees — virus-resistant papaya and plum trees — are already approved for commercial planting in the United States, no forest trees have yet received that clearance in this country.
Genetically engineered trees have the potential to arouse even more controversy than genetically modified crops like corn or soybeans, which are made using the same techniques. That is partly because many people have an emotional attachment to forests that they do not have to cornfields.
Moreover, because trees live longer than annual crops and generally can spread their pollen farther, there are concerns that any unintended environmental effects may spread and persist longer in a woodland environment than in crop fields.
The Agriculture Department said Wednesday that it had received comments opposing the field trial from 12,462 people or organizations, compared with only 45 supporters of the trial. But a vast majority of the opposing comments were nearly identical form letters, it said.
Critics say that the eucalyptus trees, even without foreign genes, may become invasive. They also said the trees were heavy users of water, could spread fires faster and could harbor a fungus that sickens people.
“They’ve been a disaster everywhere they’ve been planted,” said Anne Petermann, coordinator of a coalition called the Stop GE Trees Campaign.
The Sierra Club, in a comment submitted in February, wrote, “ArborGen’s plans to grow 260,000 artificially developed, highly experimental, alien, genetically engineered cloned trees in extensive field trials raises many troubling ecological questions about the short-term and long-term environmental impacts and risks that these trees pose in the United States.”
The Agriculture Department said it had found those possibilities to be unlikely.
“The species of eucalyptus in this permit has difficulty establishing without human intervention, even in warmer climates,” the department said in its initial environmental assessment, dismissing concerns that the genetically engineered trees would spread like a weed. It said other impacts would be limited because each experimental plot would be no larger than 20 acres and isolated from the others.
ArborGen, based in Summerville, S.C., had previously received permission to grow the trees on the 28 sites. But on only two of those sites, covering 7.6 acres, had it received permission to let the trees flower.
The new permit would allow more trees to be planted at the 28 sites and to allow flowering on 27 of the sites. While flowering would normally mean the possibility of reproduction, the trees in the trial have also been engineered to produce no pollen.
ArborGen argues that because they grow so fast, eucalyptus trees would minimize the amount of forest land needed for commercial plantations.
“You are able to produce more wood off fewer acres of land,” Barbara Wells, the company’s president, said in an interview. “It’s very positive from that standpoint.”
