Friday September 11 Housing and Economic stories

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Al Gore's Hypocrisy -- His Very Inconvenient Utility Bill - (www.freerepublic.com) Back home in Tennessee, safely ensconced in his suburban Nashville home, Vice President Al Gore is no doubt basking in the Oscar awarded to "An Inconvenient Truth," the documentary he inspired and in which he starred. But a local free-market think tank is trying to make that very home emblematic of what it deems Gore's environmental hypocrisy. Armed with Gore's utility bills for the last two years, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research charged Monday that the gas and electric bills for the former vice president's 20-room home and pool house devoured nearly 221,000 kilowatt-hours in 2006, more than 20 times the national average of 10,656 kilowatt-hours. "If this were any other person with $30,000-a-year in utility bills, I wouldn't care," says the Center's 27-year-old president, Drew Johnson. "But he tells other people how to live and he's not following his own rules." Scoffed a former Gore adviser in response: "I think what you're seeing here is the last gasp of the global warming skeptics. They've completely lost the debate on the issue so now they're just attacking their most effective opponent." Kalee Kreider, a spokesperson for the Gores, did not dispute the Center's figures, taken as they were from public records. But she pointed out that both Al and Tipper Gore work out of their home and she argued that "the bottom line is that every family has a different carbon footprint. And what Vice President Gore has asked is for families to calculate that footprint and take steps to reduce and offset it." A carbon footprint is a calculation of the CO2 fossil fuel emissions each person is responsible for, either directly because of his or her transportation and energy consumption or indirectly because of the manufacture and eventual breakdown of products he or she uses. (You can calculate your own carbon footprint on the website http://www.carbonfootprint.com) The vice president has done that, Kreider argues, and the family tries to offset that carbon footprint by purchasing their power through the local Green Power Switch program - electricity generated through renewable resources such as solar, wind, and methane gas, which create less waste and pollution. "In addition, they are in the midst of installing solar panels on their home, which will enable them to use less power," Kreider added. "They also use compact fluorescent bulbs and other energy efficiency measures and then they purchase offsets for their carbon emissions to bring their carbon footprint down to zero." These efforts did little to impress Johnson. "I appreciate the solar panels," he said, "but he also has natural gas lanterns in his yard, a heated pool, and an electric gate. While I appreciate that he's switching out some light bulbs, he is not living the lifestyle that he advocates." The Center claims that Nashville Electric Services records show the Gores in 2006 averaged a monthly electricity bill of $1,359 for using 18,414 kilowatt-hours, and $1,461 per month for using 16,200 kilowatt-hours in 2005. During that time, Nashville Gas Company billed the family an average of $536 a month for the main house and $544 for the pool house in 2006, and $640 for the main house and $525 for the pool house in 2005. That averages out to be $29,268 in gas and electric bills for the Gores in 2006, $31,512 in 2005.

The Money and Connections Behind Al Gore's Carbon Crusade - HUMAN ... - (www.humanevents.com) Along with Gore, the co-founder of GIM is Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson. Last September, Goldman Sachs bought 10% of CCX shares for $23 million. CCX owns half the ECX, so Goldman Sachs has a stake there as well. GIM’s “founding partners” are studded with officials from Goldman Sachs. Al Gore is chairman and founder of a private equity firm called Generation Investment Management (GIM). According to Gore, the London-based firm invests money from institutions and wealthy investors in companies that are going green. “Generation Investment Management, purchases -- but isn’t a provider of -- carbon dioxide offsets,” said spokesman Richard Campbell in a March 7 report by CNSNews. GIM appears to have considerable influence over the major carbon-credit trading firms that currently exist: the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) in the U.S. and the Carbon Neutral Company (CNC) in Great Britain. CCX is the only firm in the U.S. that claims to trade carbon credits. CCX owes its existence in part to the Joyce Foundation, the Chicago-based liberal foundation that provided $347,000 in grant support in 2000 for a preliminary study to test the viability of a market in carbon credits. On the CCX board of directors is the ubiquitous Maurice Strong, a Canadian industrialist and diplomat who, since the 1970s, has helped create an international policy agenda for the environmentalist movement. Strong has described himself as “a socialist in ideology, a capitalist in methodology.” His former job titles include “senior advisor” to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, “senior advisor” to World Bank President James Wolfensohn and board member of the United Nations Foundation, a creation of Ted Turner. The 78-year-old Strong is very close to Gore. CCX has about 80 members that are self-confessed emitters of greenhouse gases. They have voluntarily committed themselves to reduce their emissions by the year 2010 to a level 6% below their emissions in 2000. CCX members include Ford Motor Company, Amtrak, DuPont, Dow Corning, American Electric Power, International Paper, Motorola, Waste Management and a smattering of other companies, along with the states of Illinois and New Mexico, seven cities and a number of universities. Presumably the members “purchase” carbon offsets on the CCX trading exchange. This means they make contributions to or investments in groups or firms that provide forms of “alternative,” “renewable” and “clean” energy. CCX also has “participant members” that develop the carbon-offset projects. They have names like Carbon Farmers and Eco-Nomics Incorporated. Still, other participant member groups facilitate, finance and market carbon-offset projects to “sequester, destroy or displace” greenhouse gases. CCX aspires to be the New York Stock Exchange of carbon-emissions trading. Along with Gore, the co-founder of GIM is Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson. Last September, Goldman Sachs bought 10% of CCX shares for $23 million. CCX owns half the ECX, so Goldman Sachs has a stake there as well. GIM’s “founding partners” are studded with officials from Goldman Sachs. They include David Blood, former CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management (GSAM); Mark Ferguson, former co-head of GSAM pan-European research; and Peter Harris, who headed GSAM international operations. Another founding partner is Peter Knight, who is the designated president of GIM. He was Sen. Al Gore’s chief of staff from 1977-1989 and the campaign manager of the 1996 Clinton-Gore re-election campaign. Like CCX, the ECX has about 80 member companies, including Barclays, BP, Calyon, Endesa, Fortis, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Shell, and ECX has contracted with the European Union to further develop a futures market in carbon trading. What’s in it for the companies? They will benefit either by investing in carbon credits or by receiving subsidies for doing so. Front and Center: Clearly, GIM is poised to cash in on carbon trading. The membership of CCX is currently voluntary. But if the day ever comes when federal government regulations require greenhouse-gas emitters -- and that’s almost everyone -- to participate in cap-and-trade, then those who have created a market for the exchange of carbon credits are in a position to control the outcomes. And that moves Al Gore front and center. As a politician, Gore is all for transparency. But as GIM chairman, Gore has not been forthcoming, according to Forbes magazine. Little is known about his firm’s finances, where it gets funding and what projects it supports.

Climate Money Distorts Science - (www.financialsense.com) Far from being grassroots activists to save the planet, the climate industry is funded with billions. Meanwhile they shut down debate from concerned scientists with libellous claims of “oil shill”, even though oil funded money amounts to paltry loose change. Ominously, giant bankers have moved in, pursuing the trillions of dollars in carbon trading. It’s time to talk about monopoly science, about massive vested interests and it’s time the IPCC version of science was audited. The US government has a near monopsony on climate research. It has spent over $79 billion since 1989 on policies related to climate change. Despite the billions: “audits” of the science are left to unpaid volunteers. A dedicated but largely uncoordinated grassroots movement of scientists has sprung up around the globe to test the integrity of the theory and compete with a well funded highly organized climate monopoly. They have exposed major errors. Big money is moving in. Carbon trading worldwide reached $126 billion in 2008. Banks are calling for even more. Experts are predicting the carbon market will reach $2 - $10 trillion making carbon the largest single commodity traded. Meanwhile in a distracting sideshow, Exxon-Mobil Corp is repeatedly attacked for paying a grand total of $23 million to skeptics—less than a thousandth of what the US government has put in, and less than one five-thousandth of the value of carbon trading in just the single year of 2008. The large expenditure in search of a connection between carbon and climate creates enormous momentum and a powerful set of vested interests. By pouring so much money into a question have we inadvertently created a self-fulfilling prophesy instead of an unbiased investigation? How could that much money fail to find some links? Can science survive the vice-like grip of politics and finance?

Investors in Cerberus Seek to Pull $5.5 Billion - (www.nytimes.com) Clients with more than $5.5 billion invested in hedge funds controlled by Cerberus Capital Management have told the firm that they want their money back. About 71 percent of the investors in the two Cerberus Partners funds want their assets moved into a new vehicle that will be liquidated as market conditions improve, Stephen A. Feinberg, who runs Cerberus, wrote in a letter to clients delivered late Thursday. The withdrawals would leave about $2.2 billion of assets in the funds. “We have been surprised by this response,” Mr. Feinberg and his co-founder, William L. Richter, wrote in the letter, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Friday. A spokesman for Cerberus, which oversees about $24 billion in assets, declined to comment. While Mr. Feinberg said most of the firm’s clients continued to support the investment strategy, the mass exodus of investors is another black eye for the firm. The firm, which prefers to operate out of the public eye, has suffered from several prominent investments — most notably its investment in Chrysler — that left the funds down 24.5 percent last year. Some of those positions have recovered slightly, but the funds were unable to join the broad market recovery this year because they had little new cash to invest, according to a person close to the firm. Clients were also upset at the firm for suspending withdrawal requests at the end of last year, a move made by other funds with similarly poor performance. More than half of the clients were so-called funds of hedge funds, which experienced widespread redemptions of their own last year. In July, Cerberus decided to restructure the funds, offering clients who chose not to liquidate the ability to roll any future profits into a new hedge fund with sharply reduced fees. But the incentives did not seem to work, an indication that Cerberus’s 17-year track record of making money for clients had suffered a hit in the downturn. Mr. Feinberg has told investors that he still believes the investments in the Cerberus Partners funds will be profitable over time and that he did not want to sell securities and other assets in a down market.

New database shows six-figure government salaries abound in Bay Area - (www.insidebayarea.com) Online database lists salaries of more than 134,000 workers across Bay Area and beyond. A public health care district in southern Alameda County paid its chief executive $876,831 in 2008 — more than twice as much as any other local government employee in the East Bay, San Francisco,San Mateo County and San Joaquin County, an extensive survey of salary data by the Bay Area News Group found. The pay of Nancy Farber, CEO of Washington Township health care district, was nearly three times as much as what Contra Costa County paid the chief of its hospital in Martinez and four times as much as the top administrator at San Francisco General Hospital. Farber's pay more than doubled the salaries of administrators at government agencies with thousands more employees and budgets that dwarf that of the Washington district. The district has an elected board of directors that runs one hospital. What appears to be the only comparable salary in the Bay Area is that of the CEO of the Marin Healthcare District, Lee Domanico, whose contracted base salary is $498,000 and whose contracts allows for bonuses of as much as $209,016. The district has not answered a request for the exact amount of Domanico's 2008 pay. Farber's pay is but one example of data culled from the salaries of more than 134,000 local gover acrosnment workers in the Bay Area through Public Records Act requests. The disclosures follow a 2007 California Supreme Court ruling stating that the information is public, a decision in a case brought in 2004 by the Bay Area News Group's Contra Costa Times. Salaries ranging from those of firefighters and janitors to health care administrators and lawyers in 64 counties, cities and districts is now posted at ContraCostaTimes.com and InsideBayArea.com. The salary data will be a growing presence on the Web sites of the Bay Area News Group. Information on additional government entities will continue to be added. The data show wide discrepancies in pay and sometimes high salaries in government agencies, such as the Port of Oakland, where a semiskilled laborer grossed $123,450 in 2008, and in Newark, in southern Alameda County, where more than half of the 215 city employees were each paid more than $100,000 last year and the average gross pay was $109,027. As governments struggle through layoffs, furloughs and attrition, leaders are realizing that they have "given away too much" in salaries during flush budget years, said Gary Wyatt, president of the California State Association of Counties. More than 80 percent of general fund expenditures on a given government level are related to personnel, said Wyatt, an Imperial County supervisor. High salaries, he said, are often the result of "people being just too generous" with public money. Whopping numbers: Four of the 10 highest public salaries in the salary survey were paid to Washington health district employees, including Farber. Three of her subordinates were each paid from $372,555 to $407,065, the data show. San Joaquin County also had four employees in the top 10 highest paid employees — four doctors at the county's General Hospital, paid from $377,023 to $449,155. The other two members of the top 10 were Alameda County Administrator Susan Muranishi at $424,810 and East Bay Municipal Utility District General Manager David Diemer at $380,023. The Washington district headed by Farber, 61, of Sunol, employed 1,021 people last year, according to a list of employees it released, on a budget of $365 million. The salary of Joseph Stewart, the chief executive of the West Contra Costa Healthcare District in San Pablo, is $300,000. Its 2008 budget was $120.5 million.

Ideas to cut the federal deficit could cost homeowners billions - (www.latimes.com) Options that lawmakers are likely to consider to raise revenue include slashing the maximum deduction for mortgage interest or replacing it with a flat 15% tax credit. Reporting from Washington - You might assume that during August, with the Senate and House on their summer break, nothing much happens on Capitol Hill. You know the old saw: Your money is safe when Congress is out of town. But that's not quite the way it works. Committee staffs, economists, tax lawyers and policy shapers never really leave town. For example, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office this month delivered its latest revenue-raising options for Senate and House consideration as they write this fall's tax and budget legislation. Tucked away in the report are several plans that could -- if adopted -- cost homeowners billions of dollars. Although not formal legislative proposals, the CBO's options represent a handy fiscal menu for legislators to pick and choose from to reduce the federal deficit or to pay for new programs they might want to advance. Tops on the CBO's hit list for housing: Slash deductions for homeowner mortgage interest from the present $1.1-million limit to $500,000, phased in with $100,000 annual reductions starting in 2013. Taxpayers now can write off mortgage interest on their principal home debt up to $1 million and on home equity debt up to $100,000. Under the CBO's option, that maximum mortgage debt amount would shrink yearly until it hit $500,000. Over a 10-year period, this change would boost tax collections by an estimated $41 billion.

OTHER STORIES:

Is Angelo Mozilo a villain or just vilified? - (www.latimes.com) When David Gautreaux volunteered to assist at a charity golf tournament in Thousand Oaks two years ago, he was eager to meet the event's...

Wall Street will be watching for growth indicators - (www.latimes.com) Although investors go into the new week believing the economy is emerging from recession, they still need to see more solid evidence of a...

Wanting time off work before a mass layoff - (www.latimes.com) Dear Alana: I recently found out that the office I work in is closing and everyone who works here will be laid off as of December.

He's a driving force in the world of electric cars - (www.latimes.com) The gig: He doesn't make the cars of the future; he makes the cars of the future go. As chief executive of AC Propulsion Inc., Tom Gage...

Cassidy: Caught up in the economy's undertow - (www.insidebayarea.com)

Clunkers fuels consumer spending - (www.insidebayarea.com)

Intel boosts revenue forecast - (www.insidebayarea.com)

State cleans out its closet - (www.insidebayarea.com)

Mortgage partners sued for abuses - (www.insidebayarea.com)

FDIC to Ratchet Up Scrutiny of Newly Chartered Banks - (www.washingtonpost.com)

FDIC steps up scrutiny of new banks - (www.ft.com)

China Investment Investing Billions in Hedge Funds - (www.bloomberg.com)

China's CIC wealth fund muscles up as markets recover - (www.reuters.com)

A Reluctance to Spend May Be a Legacy of the Recession - (www.nytimes.com)

Coming soon: cash for appliances - (www.sfgate.com)

The end of the line for California automaking - (www.latimes.com)

Regulators Shutter Three U.S. Banks, Bringing 2009 Toll to 84 - (www.bloomberg.com)

Fresh Air in the Muni Market - (www.nytimes.com)