SAMUEL LOGAN Publisher


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e-mail:chronicle4@aol.com September 1-7, 2010 JACKIE BERG Chief Marketing Officer


BANKOLE THOMPSON Senior Editor


CORNELIUS A. FORTUNE Managing Editor


JOHN H. SENGSTACKE


Chairman-Emeritus 1912-1997 LONGWORTH M. QUINN


Publisher-Emeritus 1909-1989 Page A-6


By Bernard Parker WAYNE COUNTY COMMISSIONER


Ficano must state the facts Wayne County Executive Robert Ficano


wants to place the blame on others for the more than $200 million deficit facing the county.


However, Isuggest that he reveal the truth


about the departments he controls and t h e non-mandated projects he has established where overspending is rampant.


The fact is that in the projected budget pre-


sented by his Management and Budget Depart- ment for fiscal year 2009/10, 60 percent of the deficit is a direct result of the departments and non-essential functions that Ficano manages or has created through his administration.


Yes, the Third Circuit Court and Sheriff’s


Department are over their budgets, but Ficano fails to state that the St. Clair County Circuit Court issued a stay in a pending court case that requires that these departments operate at the same 2008/09 budget year level which resulted in both having a deficit for the 2009/10 fiscal year.


The County Commission, Third Circuit


Court, Sheriff’s Department or Ficano can over- turn the legal decision of the St. Clair County Circuit Court.


If Ficano is truly interested in balancing the


county’s budget so as not to face this fiscal di- lemma every year, he should just work with the elected officials to create a budget that each can agree to rather than creating a budget that he knows will end up in the courts.


This is a fiscally irresponsible tactic by his


administration. Each time the courts have ruled against him, it results in a larger deficit because of the legal fees that the county must pay for Ficano’s attempts to defend his unlaw- ful position.


Ficano is now doing the same thing in his


proposed 2010/11 budget. He wants to balance the budget by eliminating the 13th check for Wayne County retirees.


He said, “Wayne County Commissioners


should change the law so that county retirees no longer get extra money when the county can’t afford to pay it.”


The Commission considered his request and


after thoroughly researching the 13th check issue, we documented the agreement that was reached in the 1980s when the county faced another financial crisis.


The decision then was to eliminate the Cost


of Living Allowance (COLA) and replace it with the 13th check.


This action has saved the county millions of


dollars over the past 20 years. Ficano’s attempt to renege on an agreement


that was reached at that time without working with the County’s pension board to reach an- other agreement is the same bully and unlaw-


Bernard Parker These


ful tactic he contin- ues to try with other elected officials and their departments.


ac-


tions have con- sistently


been


overturned by the courts.


In the case of


eliminating the 13th check, former De- troit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick attempted this same action and


it was overturned by the courts with the judge ruling that the city could not use the 13th check surplus for any other purpose.


The same rules apply to the county. The result? We will end up with another


court decision against the county which would further increase our deficit due to court costs.


As a Commission, we believe that it would


be illegal and we should continue to honor the original negotiated pension agreement and give the county retirees the 13th check they have earned.


As the former Chair of Ways and Means


and now a member, I have consistently asked Ficano to work with the elected officials, in- cluding the Commission, to restructure the county so that we provide mandated services and temporarily reduce or eliminate spending that isn’t required.


Such non-mandated expenditures include


$4 million in additional funding Ficano gave to the Prosecutor’s Office, $4 million for the Land Bank created by Ficano, and $1 million for his personal “Constituent Services” group along with other non-essential spending by his administration.


He should also stop taking illegal actions


that have resulted in millions of dollars spent on legal fees trying to defend his actions. In- stead, Ficano should meet with county depart- ments to negotiate a budget that is realistic for everyone, including him.


I believe the County could consolidate de-


partments saving funds by eliminating admin- istrative overhead. It is also time to have seri- ous discussions about merging services with the City of Detroit and Oakland and Macomb counties.


Southeast Michigan must redesign services


and not be concerned with maintaining their turf. Instead, let’s really put the people first to deliver the services that are required and that they are entitled to.


I commend our Commission Chair Ed Boike


for standing up to County Executive Ficano by encouraging the Commission to approve a budget that is legal, fair and balanced.


What you will not hear about Iraq


By Adil Shamoo Iraq has between 25 and 50 percent unem-


ployment, a dysfunctional parliament, rampant disease, an epidemic of mental illness, and sprawling slums. The killing of innocent people has become part of daily life. What a havoc the United States has wreaked in Iraq.


UN-HABITAT, an agency of the United Na-


tions, recently published a 218-page report en- titled State of the World’s Cities, 2010-2011. The report is full of statistics on the status of cities around the world and their demograph- ics. It defines slum dwellers as those living in urban centers without one of the following: durable structures to protect them from cli- mate, sufficient living area, sufficient access to water, access to sanitation facilities, and free- dom from eviction.


Almost intentionally hidden in these sta-


tistics is one shocking fact about urban Iraqi populations. For the past few decades, prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the percent- age of the urban population living in slums in Iraq hovered just below 20 percent. Today, that percentage has risen to 53 percent: 11 million of the 19 million total urban dwellers. In the past decade, most countries have made prog- ress toward reducing slum dwellers. But Iraq has gone rapidly and dangerously in the oppo- site direction.


According to the U.S. Census of 2000, 80


percent of the 285 million people living in the United States are urban dwellers. Those living in slums are well below 5 percent. If we trans- late the Iraqi statistic into the U.S. context, 121 million people in the United States would be living in slums.


If the United States had an unemployment rate of 25-50 percent and 121 million people


living in slums, riots would ensue, the military would take over, and democracy would evapo- rate. So why are people in the United States not concerned and saddened by the conditions in Iraq? Because most people in the United States do not know what happened in Iraq and what is happening there now. Our government, includ- ing the current administration, looks the other way and perpetuates the myth that life has im- proved in post-invasion Iraq. Our major news media reinforces this message.


I had high hopes that the new administra-


tion would tell the truth to its citizens about why we invaded Iraq and what we are doing cur- rently in the country. President Obama prom- ised to move forward and not look to the past. However problematic this refusal to examine on the past — particularly for historians — the president should at least inform the U.S. public of the current conditions in Iraq. How else can we expect our government to formulate appro- priate policy?


More extensive congressional hearings on


Iraq might have allowed us to learn about the myths propagated about Iraq prior to the inva- sion and the extent of the damage and destruc- tion our invasion brought on Iraq. We would have learned about the tremendous increase in urban poverty and the expansion of city slums. Such facts about the current conditions of Iraq would help U.S. citizens to better understand the impact of the quick U.S. withdraw and what are our moral responsibilities in Iraq should be.


Adil E. Shamoo is a senior analyst at For-


eign Policy In Focus and a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He writes on ethics and public policy. He can be reached at ashamoo@umaryland.edu.


How To Write Us:


The Michigan Chronicle encourages letters from read- ers. Expressed opinions must bear the writer’s signa- ture, address and phone number (only the names will published with the letters). Write: Reader’s Speak, Michigan Chronicle, 479 Ledyard, Detroit, MI 48201 or email the editor at chronicle4@aol.com


Not owning a credit card


By Bryce Covert Recently the final phase of the Credit Card


Accountability Responsibility and Disclo- sure Act of 2009 went into effect. This last stage has good news for consumers. Lenders are banned from charging fees larger than the infraction — if you spend $20 over your max, you can’t pay more than $20 in a penalty fee. Issuers can no longer charge you for not using your card. And they can only charge once per each violation. In essence, this final phase is all about the fees.


Earlier phases reign in when and how credit


card companies can jack up interest rates. Rates can’t be raised on a card in the first year of an account.


Companies now have to give their custom-


ers 45 days’ warning before hiking up a rate, as well as a reason for raising it. They then must reevaluate the newly raised rate every six months, lowering it if the borrower has made six consecutive payments on time. (Although the vagueness of a reevaluation against factors such as market conditions and a consumers’ creditworthiness sound ripe for interpreta- tion.)


The new rules have sent credit card lend-


ers scrambling to protect profits — as good a sign as any that they’re likely to have a real effect on the companies they regulate. But the scramble also points to the ways the lenders plan to weasel around them. Before the CARD Act’s limits on interest rates hit, lenders quick- ly sent them soaring. The average interest rate on existing cards is far outpacing the prime rate, and rates are at their highest level in nine years. Said a Wall Street Journal article: “In the second quarter, the average interest rate on existing cards reached 14.7%, up from 13.1% a year earlier, according to research firm Syno- vate, a unit of Aegis Group PLC. That was the highest level since 2001.”


The card companies claim that this move is


not just to recoup any hit to profits from the leg- islation, but also because of “consumers still charging on their credit cards, but being unable to pay,” said Lauren Guenveur, the Synovate study director. But as Yves Smith points out, the number of credit card accounts has fallen by over 20% since their peak, and outstanding balances by 6%. Consumers are focusing on paying off debts (as well as being cut off from credit cards). There’s no doubt that defaulting consumers have a role to play here, of course. Over 750,000 consumers filed for bankruptcy through June 30 this year, up 15% for the same period in 2009 — on pace to reach the highest level since the new bankruptcy laws were put in place in 2005. Clearly many people in this


recession are unable to pay their balances. But as I showed in my last piece on credit cards, bankruptcy isn’t what credit card companies fear — it’s just that they want to prolong the period before filing. They want nothing more than to have lots of customers who can’t pay off their balances.


And as Beverly Blair Harzog of CardRatings.


com pointed out, there are still plenty of loop- holes in this act. One helps to keep a consumer in the “sweat box”: while the act requires is- suers to apply payments above the minimum to the higher balances first, they can still put the minimum payment toward balances with lower interest rates. So the higher rate balanc- es don’t get the relief of your payment — the lower rate, less costly accounts do, leaving the others to rack up interest. Other loopholes: interest rates, while they can’t be hiked ret- roactively on old cards or within the first year of an account, can be raised “significantly” in all other circumstances as long as you get that 45 days-ahead notice. While you will now get a notification in the mail if your card has been discontinued, no one is sure just how much notification. Companies can’t raise an interest rate on one account because a consumer was late on an unrelated account, but Harzog says she sees some “suspicious” language lingering in cards’ Terms & Conditions.


Consumer advocates are counting the CARD


Act as a big win, because with more explana- tion and warning of both fees and rate hikes, there is less room for borrowers to get suck- ered into traps. And more information will cer- tainly mean a more level playing field. But as Moshe Orenbuch, a banking analyst at Credit Suisse, put it, “What the industry is doing is taking that cost and spreading it over all cus- tomers, as opposed to a smaller number.” Inter- est rate hikes are likely to continue across the board as a response to this legislation. And as the above loopholes prove, there will be holes for the companies to wriggle through — even if those holes might be smaller than they were before.


Many of the rules in this act highlight prac-


tices I can’t even believe were once condoned — like charging someone for not using their card. While that has been abolished, other sus- picious practices remain intact. Innovating in order to squeeze through loopholes and find new ways to make profits has come to define credit card company practices in recent years. Why would that change now? Even with the new rules, they’ll likely find ways to keep the sweat box full. I’m still skeptical, and I’m still staying away from credit cards as long as I can. Who’s with me?


A woman doesn’t need a man to have children?


By Gloria Feldt Jennifer Aniston sparked a classic Bill


O’Reilly firestorm when she said a woman doesn’t need a man to have children and a per- fectly fine life, thank you very much.


Defending not her personal situation but the


character she plays in “The Switch,” her hit movie about a single woman who chose to be impregnated by a sperm donor, Aniston said, “Women are realizing they don’t have to settle with a man just to have a child.”


O’Reilly retorted that Aniston trivialized the


role of men, saying she was “throwing out a message to 12 and 13-year-olds that, ‘Hey, you don’t need a dad,’ and that’s destructive.”


It’s no accident that this pop culture moment


occurred near the 90th anniversary of women’s suffrage, Women’s Equality Day, Aug. 26. The Aniston-O’Reilly tiff highlights both the prog- ress women have made and how far we are from reaching parity from the bedroom to the board- room. We might be able to make babies on our own, but according to the White House Proj- ect, only 18 percent of leadership positions across all sectors are held by women.


That includes women like Mary Cheney,


either clueless or co-opted or both, who even as she endorses anti-choice, anti-gay candi- dates, claims her own same-sex relationship and pregnancy choice are private matters.


It includes women like my Pilates instruc-


tor, who spent her life savings on achieving a high-tech pregnancy at age 42 and told me, “If men would step up to the plate, women like me wouldn’t be in this situation” of deciding solo whether or not to experience motherhood.


But the focus on these 50,000 or so excep-


tional conceptions overshadows the concerns and needs of the six million American women who become pregnant the old-fashioned way in any given year.


Besides, separating biology from destiny


is just one of many expansions of freedoms women have aspired to as far back as 1776, when Abigail Adams urged her husband John to “remember the ladies,” threatening that the women would rebel if excluded from the Con-


stitution (Yes, the same document Sarah Palin and the Tea Partiers want restored to its origi- nal state when enslaved African-American men were counted as 2/3 of persons and women were ignored completely). The Founding Fathers did not heed Abigail’s plea, the women did not rebel, and as a consequence it took until 1920 for women to achieve ratification of the 19th amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing them the right to vote.


Power isn’t a finite pie where a slice for you


makes less for me. It’s an abundant resource. The more it is shared, the more the pie grows, and the more everyone thrives.


But if men have not yet figured this out, nei-


ther have women decided it’s time to use their power to make the rest of the changes needed to reach full equality.


A recent Harris Poll found three out of five


Americans say the U.S. has a long way to go to reach gender equality. Not surprisingly, there’s a gender difference: half of men feel inequality remains whereas 74 percent of women agree. But the startling finding is that both men and women across the age spectrum downplay the importance of rectifying gender inequality, saying there are more pressing issues to fix.


Women can’t wait for a Jennifer Aniston to


lead the charge for change, and we don’t need to.


It took just one woman, unknown to the pa-


parazzi, calling AOL’s oversight to the attention of ten of her friends, asking each to forward the message to ten more, to start a viral protest to AOL. An avalanche of complaints ensued, and Women’s Equality Day cards magically ap- peared.


Assuring that attention is paid by media,


decision makers, and policy makers - and by women ourselves - to social and perceptual bar- riers standing in the way of a fair shake has become the women’s equality issue of these early decades of the 21st century. If we can accomplish that, women’s possibilities will indeed be unlimited.


O’Reilly will continue to be offended. But isn’t that just another sign of progress?


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