Inspirations and Aspirations

Westchester Bicycling Summit

Posted on April 8, 2009 | 4 comments

Yesterday, David Wilson, President of the Westchester (New York) Cycle Club, and a former political correspondent for Westchester’s Journal News, put together an extraordinary program of cycling and pedestrian advocacy, The Westchester Bicycling Summit, at the Westchester County Civic Center in White Plains.

Mr. Wilson brought together an impressive array of political leaders, cycling advocates, city and transportation planners, researchers and consultants, and cyclists and other interested citizens from across Westchester County. He also announced the formation of a new advocacy group for cyclists and pedestrians in this classically suburban community, The Westchester Biking and Walking Alliance, which will hold its first organizing meeting at 7:00 pm on Monday, May 11, at the Bronxville Library.

Attendees included The Honorable Nita Lowey, congresswoman from New York’s 18th Congressional District; Westchester County Executive Andy Spano; Westchester County Legislator Michael Kaplowitz; President of the League of American Bicyclists, Mr. Andy Clarke; Michael Oliva, Mid-Atlantic Trail Coordinator for the East Coast Greenway; Jackson Wandres, representing the RBA Group, planners and engineers who have consulted with the City of New York and other municipalities on Safe Routes to School and other alternative transportation projects; Westchester County Planner Lukas Herbert; Julie Bond of the Center for Urban Transportation Research; as well as local representatives of the MTA and New York State Department of Transportation.

The overall message of the day was clear. The writing is on the wall, and the time is right, to rethink how we plan and build transportation infrastructure. Traditional suburbs, like many of the communities in Westchester County, have long been remiss by planning most of their infrastructure with the automobile the only form of transportation taken into consideration. Shockingly, families move to Westchester for the peace and quiet, only to realize, in many communities, that they can’t safely allow their children outdoors to play, or even walk to school, because of the speed and volume of car traffic in their neighborhoods, and the absence of pedestrian and cycling-friendly improvements.

Despite her brave admission that she herself is afraid to ride a bike outdoors, Congresswoman Lowey gave the meeting her sense that the Democratic Congress, and the administration of President Barack Obama, would both look favorably on “green” infrastructure projects, and that she intended to see to it that both stimulus funds and regular appropriations would be made available throughout her district for cyclist and pedestrian friendly improvements such as bike paths, bike routes and new sidewalk construction. County Executive Andy Spano pledged that he would see to it that Bee-Line buses would install and permit use of bike racks, and that he believed that it was both likely and feasible that many of the projects now planned or underway, like the scheduled improvements to the Bronx River Greenway Corridor, would in fact go forward. Associate County Planner Lukas Herbert described significant near-term plans for major improvements to bike paths and bike routes throughout the County, and some of the complexities, successes and frustrations of getting those projects funded and built.

Andy Clarke, of the League of American Bicyclists, gave a fascinating presentation on their Bike Friendly Communities program (a version available here). Among other interesting facts, he noted that 85% of automobile trips nationwide are for recreational purposes, rebutting once and for all the tired common wisdom that automobile-only roadway improvements are “serious,” while projects that include bike and pedestrian friendly elements are somehow frivolous.

One point all interested parties agreed on: We will get the infrastructure we ask for, only if we ask for it. If we want green, walkable and bikeable communities in Westchester County, we as citizens have to step up to the plate and demand them. After some initial hemming and hawing, County Executive Spano confessed that, yes, the squeeky wheel gets the grease, and only citizen interest and participation will motivate legislators – at the municipal, county, state and federal levels – to deliver the funds necessary to build the kinds of bike and pedestrian friendly transportation infrastructure we want and deserve in our Westchester cities and towns.

Children enjoying Westchester's North County Trailway

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Posted in Cycling, Politics

Here Comes the Sun

Posted on April 8, 2009 | Leave a comment

According to Jewish tradition, the sun completes its cycle in the universe every 28 years. This morning, coincidentally the morning of the first night of Passover, the sun is said to begin its new cycle.

Late medieval sun prayer, courtesy www.renaissanceastrology.com

Late medieval sun prayer, courtesy http://www.renaissanceastrology.com

Not a particularly religious person, I cannot help but fervently join those celebrating today, in looking forward to new beginnings, to a new dawn, to the world made anew.

Perhaps it is just me, and my personal situation, confronted as I am with the necessity of reinventing my professional life in the teeth of a miserable recession. Sure the choice was mine to walk away from hawking mutual funds and lipstick (as I like to put it), and transition into the public sector, the non-profit sector, the education sector, in the hope of accomplishing something more personally meaningful. But the air itself seems to be full of change and new beginnings: the sudden thaw in America’s relationship with Cuba, a new direction in Middle East diplomacy, radical and yet-to-be-understood changes in both the private and public sector economies.

Novus Ordo Seclorum meets dona nobis pacem. American as apple pie, this protean self, this wish for glorious new beginnings. We call on our g*d or g*ds, whatever their names, for a long-overdue reinvigoration of civic pride; a chance to restore our lives, our families, our communities; a new opportunity to wage peace, and appreciate our relative prosperity. So whether you find your inspiration today in this ancient rite, in the supplications of the dark, middle days of Easter week, the mindfulness of Pesach, or merely the incrementally higher inclination of a friendly old star in its nearly timeless meridians, let us share, this day, our hopes for a world made anew.

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Posted in Life, The Universe, and Etc., Politics

The Shower as Class Metaphor

Posted on April 4, 2009 | 1 comment

Despite the fact that America has become the most class stratified, the least socially and financially mobile, society in the developed world, we still cannot talk about class transparently. We don’t even have an accepted language for dicussing social and economic class in this country. And merely raising the issue almost assures that you will be characterized as a Leninist class warrior.

Or maybe we have a language emerging. Complete with soap.

This week, social class in America emerged from the shower:

Here’s Ed Schultz, a new MSNBC host, describing his politics:

I’m gonna be the guy who represents people who take a shower after work. I’m gonna be that guy who’s gonna be there for the working folk of America. I’m a staunch supporter of unions.

And here’s United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard complaining this week on Huffington Post about the structure of the federal bailouts:

The message here could not be more clear: Washington will bailout out those who shower before work but not those who shower afterwards.

So. Stay clean America! I suppose this conversation has to start somewhere. Even in ridiculous and obfuscating metaphor.

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Posted in Other People's Money, Politics, The American Experience

Other People’s Money 3 – The Credit Crisis

Posted on April 4, 2009 | Leave a comment

The real point of this thread is to discuss how, at the heart of the current economic crisis, is our habituation to other people’s money.

What is credit, of course, but other people’s money? Would you really buy the 52-inch flatscreen and the Quatrroporte with your own money? Sure, first Hyundai, and now GM, are offering to take some of the risk out of buying a new car. But what was the choice to finance these items to begin with, but a way of sharing the risk of the purchase with a bank or finance company? If you knew for certain that you could afford it, shouldn’t you have just bought it?

That’s the crux of the banking and credit crisis as well. Incentives and rewards for top executives at financial service firms have not aligned with the long-term institutional interests of those firms for decades now, undercutting the very philosophical basis of arguments in favor of outsize executive compensation. Alan Greenspan, as we all now know, was “shocked”:

As I wrote last March: those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder’s equity (myself especially) are in a state of shocked disbelief. Such counterparty surveillance is a central pillar of our financial markets’ state of balance. If it fails, as occurred this year, market stability is undermined.

Really, dude? You didn’t see this one coming? That the executive overlords in the too-big-to-fail tranche weren’t accountable to anyone but their great-grandchildren? That on the basis of some Ayn Rand-ian fantasy you set a bunch of free radicals loose with trillions of other people’s money and somehow, by the laws of the universe — under some universal law of the origins of specie — it was all gonna’ work out for the best?

At least in the days when financial institutions were held, either by law or by custom, to some size where they couldn’t single-handedly risk trillions of dollars, they were accountable to each other. They’d have to build syndicates, and Bear Stearns wasn’t going to let Salomon Brothers drag them into a deal that smelled. No one on Wall Street wants to change someone else’s diapers.

Likewise the Clintonian and beyond “Fair Isaac Deal” that’s been foisted on the American middle class: In the end, American workers really didn’t need better credit scores, although their entire financial lives were overdetermined by this calculation; what they needed were better wages and a health care system that properly insures against financial calamity in the face of long-term or catastrophic illness. But we too fell sway to the lure of other people’s money.

So, in the coming months, as we slowly unwind this horrible mess, let’s look to these benchmarks:

Financial firms need to get smaller, not larger. They need the participation and countervailing force of multiple-firm involvement in deals large enough to threaten, or that might even remotely threaten, the overall stability of financial and credit markets.
We need more shareholder reform and activism. Executives at financial firms need to be held to account, every day, for how they handle the corporate assets with which they have been entrusted. This very much includes how much they pay themselves and each other.

Lastly, let’s all wean ourselves off our habt of living off other people’s money. Start a savings account. Pay with cash. You’ll be a better person for it.

P.S., while I’m on a rant, why does this guy (see video) have to be a cyclist? Just as the cycling community started to recover from the negative impressions created by John Kerry?

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Posted in Other People's Money, Politics, The American Experience

The Life We Want. The Blog We Have.

Posted on April 2, 2009 | Leave a comment

Surfing around from Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish yesterday, I followed his link to a blog which appears to be a well-executed version of something I wanted to create years ago, but didn’t have the time for. The Anonymous Liberal is a sustained, well crafted defense of the political principles that guided this country for the better part of the 20th century, but in recent decades suffered derision and slander under relentless assault, first from the radicalizing “New Left,” and, in response, from the radicalizing “Revanchist Right.” Her (or his?) take on current political events are well worth your time.

In the back of my mind, I believe if I could have shown the American masses, through a politically themed blog, that the “liberal” John Kerry was the true conservative in the 2004 presidential race — the kind of thing Anonymous Liberal does so much more effectively, rationally and dispassionately than I ever could — W. would have truly faced an “accountability moment,” and we could have been spared some of the long, national hangover we now face.

Ah, where did the time go?

Instead, working for years under a “creative director” who was an intemperate jerk, exhaustion set in. Certainly one didn’t come home at the end of the day energized to go tinkering in in the proverbial garage of the Internet. Rather, one took one’s comforts in draughts of chilled vodka, the companionship of friends or MSNBC, the contentment of a well-made and (in large part) peaceful marriage.

Now we face the task of not just reinventing ourselves, but reinventing ourselves while the economy around us faces major renovations as well. Who will be better positioned to thrive in the coming uncertain decades, the schoolteacher or the banker? The graphic artist or the writer? The large foundation executive or the entrepreneur? The Congressional aide-de-camp or the assistant vice president?

The life we want is out there. We confront a seeming luxury of choices. Still opportunity narrowly escapes our grasp.

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Posted in Life, The Universe, and Etc., Politics

Yesterday’s Weather, by Anne Enright

Posted on April 2, 2009 | Leave a comment

Celtic Tigers personified; genitals, fek*bombs intact.

Compelling. Double Yeh’s!

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Posted in What We're Reading, in Six Words or Less

Other People’s Money 2 – “Permanent Upside Bias”

Posted on March 31, 2009 | 1 comment

Recent oil prices and forecast

It seems to me that more contrarian-minded investors have been successful over the long term than common wisdom would suggest. Take a long hard look at where the crowd is headed, and run as quickly as possible in the opposite direction. Bet against MBS’s? You betcha! Sell into a rally? Gotcha covered!

Which begs the question: why is every position in your (and my) portfolio long?

Last year, with the Dow treading water and oil at $145 a barrel and seemingly heading north forever, I was occasionally asked if there was anything I would invest in. I repeatedly said I only had one suggestion: if I had the nerve, I would short oil. Putting aside the relative complexity and expense of futures trading, did I do it? Did anyone I spoke with? Of course not.

I was reminded of my prep school days in Rhode Island. A fortune was to be made any time the Rangers played the Bruins, or the Knicks played the Celtics. Kids from New York would beat my door down to bet FOR New York, kids from Boston, FOR Boston. Not once did some kid from New York ever say, the Knicks are going to get their butts kicked, give me Boston and 5. There’s no joy in betting AGAINST something. Only money. Which is why I was happy to bet against both the Knicks and the Celtics, getting points or favorable odds from both sides. (A nice little business; kind of like selling lottery tickets.)

Retail investors – and I suspect American retail investors in particular – have what I call a “permanent upside bias.” We want to invest in things we believe in, that will grow, that will make us happy and rich and skinny and “the new 30.” On top of that, we don’t want to “sell” things we don’t believe in anymore. Where’s the fun in that? We don’t believe in dumping (as a society, we won’t even dump waste). So not only do we never take short positions, we never sell soon enough either. It’s one of the major reasons experienced institutional investors and “insiders” beat retail investors all the time. They’re unsentimental, and they’ve learned when and how to sell.

Being long in equities is the ultimate herd mentality. I’m not saying that learning to love your inner short will be like taking candy from a baby. I’ve just always been curious why the same irony and skepticism that pervades our view of all the other aspects of our modern American lives doesn’t also inform our view of our investments. Made a profit in last week’s Obama mini-rally? Maybe you should think about taking the profit for a change.

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Posted in Other People's Money

Other People’s Money 1

Posted on March 30, 2009 | Leave a comment

Recent DJIA, courtesy, "My Side of the Coin"

Read “A Decade of Dow,” by My Side of the Coin here.

Famous personal financial advisors – Suze Orman and Jim Cramer come most easily to mind – keep giving people the same bad advice: if you have ten or more years to retirement, invest heavily in equities. The implication being, over any given 10 year period, you can’t lose.

Well, here’s the reality check.

Friday’s close on the Dow was 7,776.18.

On March 30, 1999, the Dow closed at 9,874.41.

That’s a 21.2% loss for that 10-year period.

Granted, there are 10-year periods in which you would have done fine in equities. If you had invested everything you owned in stocks on the day Bill Clinton took office, you’d be wondering what all the recession fuss was about, too. (To wit: see my post “Whatever happened to the ‘Barack-Olypse‘.”)

But there are abundant examples of 10-year periods in which you would have lost a bundle in the market. Investing in the equivalent of indexes or index ETFs anytime between 1965 and 1973, for example, you would more than likely have had a 10-year loss. And investing in equities at any point in the last decade, as we see above, was treacherous.

Unless you were timing the market – which we are repeatedly advised not to do – or picking individual stocks AND timing the market – which we are repeatedly told is too dangerous for the average investor – you would have been much, much better off over the past decade with CDs and T-bills. Hell, you would have been better off with an ING Savings Account!

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Posted in Other People's Money

The Great Mortality, by John Kelly

Posted on March 30, 2009 | Leave a comment

The Great Mortality, An Intimate History of the Black death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time, by John Kelly

European antisemitism more dreadful than Plague.

Rating: Eh? (A bit repetitive too.)

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Posted in What We're Reading, in Six Words or Less

Double-Take of the Week: “Clear and Hold”

Posted on March 29, 2009 | Leave a comment

…if you had said to us a year ago that– the least of my problems would be Iraq, which is still a pretty serious problem– I don’t think anybody would have believed it.

(President Barack Obama, Sunday, March 29, 2009, on 60 Minutes)

Is this whiplash, or is this love?

With the economy fixed, and the Obama rally well underway in the equity markets, the President turns his attention full time to “Pahk-eh-stan” and Afghanistan.

This is either political stagecraft of unprecedented genius, or a portent of just how screwed we really are by the sheer volume and diversity of the economic, political and social challenges we face.

Or both.

Maybe “clear and hold” isn’t just the latest strategy in the conflict I assume is now being rebranded the Committed War on Al Qaeda (CWAQ, pronounced “Quack”) from the perpetually ineuphonious GWOT, or Global War on Terror. Clear and hold appears to also be an effective strategy against the permanent Republican insurgency.

Having successfully left the likes of Cornyn, Boehner, Jindhal and Cantor sputtering and slack-jawed, reduced to nattering nabobs of Lafferism — left standing surely outside the mainstream as the Kurds will be left standing outside the new walls of Baghdad — the precincts of the economic bailout, TARP, budget, federal reserve and re-regulation, can be left safely in the hands of Leuitenant Geithner. The President has other fish to fry.

Various theories compete to tell us how long a new President can effectively maintain the political capital necessary to help move difficult or innovative legislation. A hundred days? The first term? Through the second year of a second term? One thing is certain: for every commentator who expresses the clear truth that this administration just took office (mumble it to the man, Mos Def! starting around 4:20), there is a cable news talking head with a countdown clock, telling Americans their heads are going to explode if the President doesn’t deliver world peace by the time their taxes are due.

So put me in the camp that gives the President the benefit of the doubt for this sudden, head-spinning turn to foreign policy matters. If the number of adults who are now taking Ritalin is any indication, the American attention span isn’t getting any longer. Movement on multiple fronts is required, and action, even action for the sake of action, is always a tonic to the American mind.

Still, wow, what IS that sudden pain in my neck?

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Posted in Politics