Perhaps This Is Part Of The Problem?

      The nuts and bolts of corporate government culture. If nothing is to be gained/gamed by hiring a former staffer, then why do corporations do it regularly? Let alone for high salaries...... Corporations tend to do what is best for themselves, expecting a return on an investment.

Tax Lobby Builds Ties to Chairman of Finance Panel

HARRY REID, MAX BAUCUS, WASHINGTON DC, TAXES, US: NEWS, INSIDE WEALTH, MCDONALD'S CORP, ALTRIA GROUP INC, VERIZON COMMUNICATIONS INC, FEDEX CORP, GENERAL ELECTRIC CO, BUSINESS NEWS

By: Eric Lipton

The New York Times | Sunday, 7 Apr 2013 | 12:00 AM ET

Restaurant chains like McDonald's want to keep their lucrative tax credit for hiring veterans. Altria, the tobacco giant, wants to cut the corporate tax rate. And Sapphire Energy, a small alternative energy company, is determined to protect a tax incentive it believes could turn algae into a popular motor fuel.
To make their case as Congress prepares to debate a rewrite of the nation's tax code, this diverse set of businesses has at least one strategy in common: they have retained firms that employ lobbyists who are former aides to Max Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which will have a crucial role in shaping any legislation.
No other lawmaker on Capitol Hill has such a sizable constellation of former aides working as tax lobbyists, representing blue-chip clients that include telecommunications businesses, oil companies, retailers and financial firms, according to an analysis by LegiStorm, an online database that tracks Congressional staff members and lobbying. At least 28 aides who have worked for Mr. Baucus, Democrat of Montana, since he became the committee chairman in 2001 have lobbied on tax issues during the Obama administration -- more than any other current member of Congress, according to the analysis of lobbying filings performed for The New York Times.
''K Street is literally littered with former Baucus staffers,'' said Jade West, an executive at a wholesalers' trade association that relies on a former finance panel aide, Mary Burke Baker. ''It opens doors that allow you to make the case.''

Like Ms. Baker, many of those lobbyists have already saved their clients millions — in some cases, billions — of dollars after Mr. Baucus backed their requests to extend certain corporate tax perks, provisions that were adopted as part of the so-called fiscal cliff legislation in January. Baucus aides who later became lobbyists helped financial firms save $11.2 billion in tax deferments and helped secure a $222 million tax benefit that is shared with the liquor industry.

Sean Neary, a spokesman for Mr. Baucus, said the senator had regularly rejected requests from those lobbyists for provisions benefiting their clients, like an appeal from one former aide, Pat Bousliman, now working as a wind industry lobbyist, to extend an alternative energy loan guarantee program that expired in 2011.
Mr. Baucus's decisions are based on the merits of the policies, Mr. Neary said, not on who is advocating for them. ''The fact is, oftentimes good policy can indirectly benefit someone,'' he said. ''That doesn't mean it shouldn't be done.''
The debate over the tax code — which has emerged as part of the two-year effort to stimulate the economy and reduce the deficit — could turn into a battle royal. While many members of Congress talk about lowering the corporate tax rate, replacing that lost revenue would require eliminating many tax loopholes that legions of lobbyists, including many who had worked for other prominent lawmakers, make a living laboring to expand or defend.
Mr. Baucus, 71, the son of a wealthy Montana rancher, is somewhat of a wild card in the tax debate: he is the top Democrat in what arguably is the Senate's most powerful committee seat. The finance panel helps dictate how the government raises almost all of its money, and spends nearly half of it.
But he often bucks his party's leadership. Last month, for example, he voted against the Democrats' budget proposal for 2014, which included nearly $1 trillion in new revenues. He also favored the Bush administration's tax cuts in 2001 for Americans including the wealthy, putting him at odds with many Democrats.
Mr. Baucus, who has spent nearly his entire professional career in Congress, declined a request for an interview. But Mr. Neary said that every action the senator takes is motivated by his commitment to voters.
''Every vote has to answer one question for him and that is: How is it impacting Montanans?'' Mr. Neary said.
Several veteran Capitol Hill aides said it was naïve to suggest that former aides could extract special favors from their one-time bosses — unless what they were pushing for had broad support. But the former aides still bring an advantage to the corporations that hire them.
''It does mean you will have someone who knows how the levers of power are pushed or how to push the levers, and who can describe to you how situations are going to play out based on their years of experience,'' said Jim Manley, a former aide to Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader. Mr. Manley now works at a Washington lobbying and communications firm, QGA Public Affairs.
In recent interviews, four former aides to Mr. Baucus said that their ties to him heightened their appeal to potential clients. The link also helped justify their salaries, in some cases $500,000 or higher, more than double or triple their Capitol Hill paychecks.
Former Senate aides who become lobbyists must wait a year before they can contact Mr. Baucus or his staff on behalf of a client, according to Senate ethics rules.
Staying active in their circle, one former aide said, also requires that they help Mr. Baucus's political career, through fund-raising and other assistance.
Several of the lobbyists regularly fly to Big Sky, Mont., for weekend fund-raising retreats that Mr. Baucus hosts, or attend more intimate events in Washington like a gathering last month near the Capitol, where Paul Wilkins, Mr. Baucus's chief of staff, talked about the millions of dollars Mr. Baucus will need to raise for his re-election campaign next year.
Among them, the top givers include Jeffrey A. Forbes, Mr. Baucus's former Finance Committee staff director, who has donated a total of at least $25,000 to Mr. Baucus, his political action committee or the Montana Democratic Party. He attended the retreat in February at the Big Sky resort, which included skiing, snowmobiling and a big family dinner at Buck's T-4 Lodge. The totals grow much bigger — to hundreds of thousands of dollars — when donations from Mr. Forbes's clients, including Verizon and Altria, and other partners at his lobbying firm, are counted.
Mr. Wilkins said that the donations and fund-raising had been vital, noting that the nearly $4.6 million expected in hand by the end of this month would rank Mr. Baucus's campaign chest among the top 10 in the Senate.
''It allows us to scare off opponents,'' Mr. Wilkins told the group, which included former Baucus aides turned lobbyists, at a Capitol Hill townhouse owned by Federal Express. ''It is the basis of everything that we do. So thank you for your support and everything you have done for Senator Baucus.'' A New York Times reporter in attendance was asked to leave the private event.
Asked later about his comments, Mr. Wilkins said, ''There is no expectation that former staffers do anything related to the office. They are private individuals, if they want to donate fine. If they don't want to donate, that is fine, too.''
Mr. Baucus's office points out that the former aides who now work as tax lobbyists are a small fraction of those whose who have worked for him over the years. Still, several colleagues who have served more than two decades on the finance panel -- including Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, and Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, both as ranking Republican or chairman — have much smaller networks of former aides who are tax lobbyists, according to the data collected by LegiStorm and the Center for Responsive Politics.
Republicans, though, imposed term limits on committee leadership posts more than a decade ago to help deter the creation of a so-called iron triangle among the chairman, federal officials and corporate lobbyists.
Mr. Baucus is viewed as an important ally when it comes to including corporate tax priorities into legislation. Last year, he introduced a plan — most of which was eventually passed into law as part of the fiscal cliff deal in January — that contained more than a dozen tax breaks, some of them pushed by clients who had retained Washington lobbying firms that employ his former aides or political advisers.Shannon Finley, who served as a political consultant and fund-raiser for Mr. Baucus before joining a lobbying firm in Washington, was hired in late 2011 by Beam, the liquor industry giant, to protect a federal tax break that it gets a cut of for producing its Cruzan rum in the United States Virgin Islands. Despite protests from fiscal conservatives that it was a giveaway, the provision was included in Mr. Baucus's package, costing $222 million over the coming decade. Ms. Finley declined to comment.
The National Restaurant Association, whose board includes a senior McDonald's executive, had three former aides to Mr. Baucus working on tax-related matters, including Patrick Heck, who once held the post of chief tax counsel to Mr. Baucus. The association helped secure three provisions in the January deal, worth an estimated $5.9 billion over the next decade to restaurants and other companies. Elizabeth Garner, a Restaurant Association lobbyist, said Mr. Heck had expertise and relationships that proved helpful in their push.
With a debate on rewriting the tax code to streamline and simplify it expected to start this year — leaders in both the House and the Senate are working on their own drafts — lobbying could reach levels like that of the 2009 debate over health care, which also was overseen in part by the Senate Finance Committee, with Mr. Baucus at the gavel. His staff is already hosting meetings with industry lobbyists, academics and outside parties to get advice on the tax package that the Senate Finance Committee is trying to create.
Mr. Baucus's former aides will almost certainly be pushing competing plans. Some large corporations with relatively high corporate tax rates, like Verizon and Altria, have retained Mr. Forbes to help push for the overall cut in the tax rate, while others, like General Electric, which pays a relatively low rate, have a team of lobbyists including Ms. Finley to try to protect their various federal tax advantages.
Mr. Baucus's office said the senator's actions on the tax rewriting effort would be based on the bipartisan consensus that he was trying to build among the committee's members, not any special favors that individual industries wanted, even if they were represented by his former aides.
Bob Packwood, the former Republican senator from Oregon who was the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee in 1986 — the last time Congress passed broad legislation rewriting the tax code -- said in an interview that former aides tended to have access to lawmakers, though he questioned how much influence they really had.
But one thing is certain: they will try.
''The lobbying will be tremendous,'' he said. ''As it was last time.''
—Kitty Bennett contributed research.


http://www.cnbc.com/id/100621726

Baltimore - Synagogues and Corned Beef

   A small intro on Jewish life and history in Baltimore from The New York Times Travel section.

April 5, 2013

Glimmers of Jewish Glory Days in Baltimore

By JENNIFER MOSES

I grew up on stories about the glory days of Jewish Baltimore, when, in my father’s telling, Jews were really Jews. He told stories about walking to shul, or synagogue, with his father and uncles, seeing men and women in their Shabbat finery promenading after services, and sitting in awe as the great Viennese-trained cantor, Abba Yosef Weisgal, cried out to the heavens under the soaring ceiling of Congregation Chizuk Amuno in Reservoir Hill, the Baltimore neighborhood that my forebears called home.

But by the time my siblings and I came along in the late ’50s and early ’60s, all that was gone. The elegant “in town” neighborhood of my father’s childhood memories had long since decayed, and attending High Holy Days services at Chizuk Amuno was an exercise in watching an urban congregation on life support as the Jewish community relocated to the suburbs.

Happily, Jewish Baltimore is on the rebound, and not just in the suburbs. On a cold day in February when I went in search of the settings of my father’s stories, I landed in a place where perseverance, preservation and memory have conspired to keep that vanished world available.

Turns out that I’m hardly alone. The Jewish Museum of Maryland welcomes some 7,000 schoolchildren yearly, not to mention thousands of curious adults. Situated between the historic Lloyd Street Synagogue and its slightly more junior former rival, B’nai Israel, the entire complex is a tribute to what once was. The surrounding East Baltimore neighborhood itself was not only the first stopping-off place for German Jewish immigrants, but was also, from as early as the 1830s to about 1920, a teeming immigrant enclave, known to its own citizens as Jewtown. What Orchard Street was to the Lower East Side, Lombard Street was to Jewish East Baltimore: blocks so crowded with people hawking everything from dry goods to produce to poultry that merely navigating them required a dollop of chutzpah. The street was lined with storefront cheders (Jewish elementary schools, usually for boys), Talmud Torahs (religious schools), overcrowded tenements, outhouses and gutters running with the blood of recently slaughtered animals for the kosher market. The place was home not only to Jewish immigrants, but also to Italians and African Americans. Washing was a luxury, Yiddish was the language of haggling and a stretch of Lombard Street was known as Corned Beef Row.

Corned Beef Row has dwindled to a mere two delis, Weiss and Attman’s. Attman’s, which opened in 1915, is still owned by the Attman family, and still serves enormous old-fashioned corned beef sandwiches with Russian dressing and a side of slaw, as well as everything else fattening, salty and delicious. Though the place is no longer kosher, the walls themselves proclaim its kosher yesteryears, with framed photographs of generations of Baltimore’s Jewish machers (big shots). Well past lunchtime, it was packed.

The real story, however, isn’t in the matzo ball soup, but in the museum, which, in recreated rooms, taped conversations, street scenes, pushcart displays and photographs, tells the story of a century of life in the neighborhood that was originally called Jonestown after the nearby Jones Falls, and is still, in some quarters, referred to as Jewtown. Particularly stirring for me were the re-creations and photos of garment makers, first in sweatshops, and later in factories, because it was in just such places that my great-great-grandparents, whose portraits now hang in my dining room, got their start — eventually moving out of the immigrant neighborhood, ending up in far more luxurious Eutaw Place in north Baltimore, “designed after the Champs-Élysées,” according to one description. It was their generation of upwardly mobile German-Jewish community members who eventually founded the Jewish Educational Alliance, night schools that helped primarily Russian immigrants assimilate, and the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, “the Y.” Their stories are recounted here, as well as the stories of succeeding waves of immigrants.

If it’s bricks and mortar you’re after, the place to go is next-door, to the Lloyd Street Synagogue, designed by Robert Carey Long Jr., and built in 1845 with a handsome but inconspicuous Greek Revival facade. The third-oldest standing synagogue in America, according to the Jewish museum, Lloyd Street functions today primarily as a section of the museum, with exhibits in the basement, as well as two archaeological mini-digs: the first revealing the original ovens that would ensure that the matzos eaten at Passover would conform to strict kosher standards; the second, of one of the oldest mikvahs (ritual baths) in the country, also dating to the mid-1840s. It was here that its first rabbi, Abraham Rice, sermonized in German from the bimah (raised platform) set in the middle, rather than at the end of the room, in accordance with European synagogue design.

But in the 1870s a rift grew between the synagogue’s founding, German-speaking Orthodox members (including my forebears) and newer upstarts who pushed to modernize worship services in accordance with the liberal ideas coming out of Germany. The founding members took their business elsewhere, building a new Orthodox synagogue, the Chizuk Amuno, at the end of the block. It is this building — the original Moorish Revival one that opened its doors in 1876, with one of the first American-born ordained rabbis, Rabbi Dr. Henry Schneeberger, at its helm — that continues to operate as a full-time modern-Orthodox synagogue, now B’nai Israel.

Entering on the first floor, the visitor is greeted by a warm room filled with books and plaques, but it is upstairs, in the sanctuary, that glory reigns: two tiers of seating (with a gallery for women), a raised center bimah, the original gas lamps (converted to electric) and a gorgeous, carved oren kodesh (ark) in the Moorish style, with palm fronds and gilded accents, and the Hebrew Decalogue, the Ten Commandments, in tabletlike form at the apex, as if to proclaim: we’re here, and we’re not going away.

There were dozens of other synagogues in East Baltimore as well, of course, and some of them still stand, including the long-abandoned, brick-faced Adath Israel on East Baltimore Street, and Adath B’nei Israel, a red-brick building that could easily be mistaken for a row house, also on East Baltimore Street and currently used as a church.

The good news is that, in a small but real reverse exodus, Jews are returning to the city. According to Rabbi Etan Mintz of B’nai Israel, some 5,000 have returned over the last few years alone, so much so that his own synagogue is busy year-round, and a new, if limited branch of the Jewish Community Center recently opened — downtown.

The old center (now an apartment building) is in central Baltimore, between the old neighborhood and the newer German-Jewish enclave just to the south of Druid Hill Park that my own ancestors moved to in the 1890s. Though long since cut up into separate apartments, my great-greats’ home, at 1826 Eutaw Place, looks exactly as it does in old photographs. As do most of the stately, elegant buildings in this “uptown” neighborhood that was the center of Baltimore Jewish life until around the 1930s. Here too is what my father calls “the family shul,” the same Chizuk Amuno building (now the reinvigorated Beth Am) that I’d been dragged to as a girl, with its original austere beauty and pale pink-and-blue glass-paneled windows intact. So too the Eutaw Place Synagogue (1892), with its soaring domes reminiscent of the Great Synagogue of Florence, maintained today by the Masons. A few blocks away, on Liberty Heights Avenue, stands the stunning Shaarei Tfiloh, famous for its stained-glass windows and large copper dome.

I had started out on a journey into my ancestors’ world. I ended up in the Baltimore Hebrew Cemetery to pay my respects to their lives. It was late winter, and the great old looming trees were bare, the grass was brown and sparse, and the traffic sounds coming from the other side of the cemetery’s stone walls seemed out of time. After placing small stones on the gravestones of my forebears as the traditional mark of my visit, I wandered into what appeared to be the cemetery’s oldest part, in the southeast corner. Here the gravestones slant into one another as if for comfort, their Hebrew inscriptions all but worn away. What lives were these? What hardships? What dreams?

IF YOU GO

Jewish Museum of Maryland, 15 Lloyd Street; jhsm.org. Nonmember admission $8.

B’nai Israel Congregation, 27 Lloyd Street; bnaiisraelcongregation.org.

Beth Am, 2501 Eutaw Place; bethambaltimore.org.

Eutaw Place Synagogue, 1307 Eutaw Place.

Shaarei Tfiloh Synagogue, 2001 Liberty Heights Avenue.

Baltimore Hebrew Cemetery, 2100 Belair Road.

Attman’s Deli, 1019 East Lombard Street; attmansdeli.com.

http://travel.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/travel/glimmers-of-jewish-glory-days-in-baltimore.html?pagewanted=all


B'nai Israel synagogue, Baltimore, Maryland
photo by Michael Temchine for The New York Times

The Future Of College Sports? Go Spelman!!

   From The New York Times - Spelman College rethinks college athletics to expand participation and more efficiently use resources - financial and physical.

 

 

April 13, 2013

At a College, Dropping Sports in Favor of Fitness

By MIKE TIERNEY

ATLANTA — The softball bats and golf clubs have been stored away. All is quiet, too, at the basketball gymnasium, the volleyball courts and the soccer field.

Only the tennis team endures at Spelman College, and after the Great South Athletic Conference tournament the last weekend of April, it will also be done. Then Spelman, a historically black women’s college with alumnae who include former slaves and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, will become the second college in the last decade to leave the N.C.A.A. altogether, the other being the New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn.

Officials at the college, whose 2,100 students make it the size of some high schools, decided last year to eliminate the athletic department. The college had 80 athletes spread across seven sports, but the athletic budget was roughly $900,000 for the 2012-13 academic year — from an overall operating budget of roughly $100 million.

“I was startled,” Spelman’s president, Beverly Tatum, said. “It seemed like a lot of money for 80 students.”

The highly unusual move by Spelman comes when few institutions seem to be able to resist the lure of intercollegiate sports, even as one scandal after another has tarnished the reputations of universities throughout the country.

The decision to shut down Spelman’s athletic program followed the announced intention of several colleges to leave the Great South, meaning the conference would have too few members to remain viable. For Spelman, joining another conference would have meant incurring higher travel costs, making improvements to the college’s athletic sites and fielding teams in additional sports.

While watching a basketball game in the Jaguars’ 62-year-old gymnasium, where a shorter-than-regulation court has necessitated a waiver from the N.C.A.A., Dr. Tatum began to wonder what the players would do for exercise after their eligibility expired.

Dr. Tatum had become alarmingly aware of data showing that young black women were prone to diabetes, heart disease and other ailments linked to poor diet and exercise. Observing candles being lighted on campus at 10-year reunions in memory of alumnae who had died was chilling and revealing.

A remedy seemed obvious: disband N.C.A.A.-level sports and reallocate the money devoted to them toward establishing a wellness program that could take advantage of the college’s gym, courts and fields.

The college’s board of trustees approved the plan a year ago. The difficult part was informing the administrators, coaches and athletes. Sports has long maintained an integral, if muted, role at Spelman since its establishment 132 years ago in a church basement. So Dr. Tatum was neither capricious nor joyful with her decision to discontinue sports. The university’s seven teams learned their fate last year at an emotional assembly.

“It was a rough day,” Dr. Tatum said. The announcement was met with gasps, displays of anger, cries of “What?”

“I was absolutely shocked,” the tennis player Leah Howard, a junior, said.

Protocol at Spelman calls for sustained applause after a president’s speech. When Dr. Tatum finished, she told the audience: “I know you’re not happy. It is not necessary to clap.” She was mostly met with silence.

Sara Redd was a captain of the tennis team in 2006, when it won its only conference title. Now she is its coach, the last still active at Spelman.

She called Dr. Tatum’s original announcement “kind of devastating and sad,” but now says, “I think it’s a good idea,” provided that students take advantage of the expanded opportunities for physical activities, from Zumba to kickboxing.

Germaine McAuley, Spelman’s athletic director and the chairwoman of the physical education department, echoed that notion, despite her 25 years of college coaching experience and the breakup of her staff.

“It truly makes sense,” she said.

As part of the new initiative, the physical education department will be offering additional courses; the campus gym, Read Hall, is undergoing a renovation to improve its fitness facilities; and fitness and intramural programs on campus will emphasize activities that students are more likely to continue after leaving college, like golf, swimming, tennis, yoga and Pilates. Spelman also plans to promote those activities on campus more heavily, though not to make student participation mandatory.

As for the athletes, the underclassmen on the tennis team all plan to return to the college for the next academic year, according to Ms. Redd, even as opposing coaches mention the possibility of asking them to transfer. Ms. Howard, for one, expects to play intramurals, along with her sister, a rising freshman who intended to play tennis for Spelman and, even though that is no longer possible, still plans to attend.

The role of athletics at Spelman had been limited. Recruiting was largely confined to phone calls and e-mails. Scholarships and financial aid were based on need and academic achievement, per Division III rules. Incoming athletes generally cited the quality of the education as the main reason they chose to attend, with sports far from the core of campus life.

Now Dr. Tatum finds herself fielding calls from other university presidents who must justify the high price of athletics and its role in the mission of higher education. Ms. McAuley said she was approached by a few athletic directors at the most recent N.C.A.A. convention who suggested that their institutions were looking into the possibility of ending intercollegiate sports.

“All of us have to look at everything we are doing — what’s the value being added to the university and at what cost?” Dr. Tatum said.

When Dr. Tatum hears from her fellow presidents, she said, the conversations usually begin with them saying, “That took some guts.”

Her stock response is, “It would take more guts if it were the University of Michigan.”

By coincidence, Michigan was competing in the men’s basketball Final Four last weekend, about a mile from Spelman’s campus. On that Saturday, as the Wolverines prepared to take part in one of the marquee events in college sports, roughly 800 students jogged or speed-walked five kilometers on Spelman’s campus.

It was the inaugural event of what Dr. Tatum termed the Wellness Revolution, her strategy for educating students about sustained physical activity.

“I envision a culture of movement on the campus that includes greater physical activity for students, faculty and staff,” Dr. Tatum said, adding that many of the participants in the 5K “had never done anything like that before.”

“Now they are asking, ‘When can we do it again?’ ” she said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/sports/at-spelman-dropping-sports-in-favor-of-fitness.html?_r=0