Wells Fargo To Buy Wachovia
Rumors had been swirling that troubled Wachovia Bank was being eyed for a federally backed takeover by Citigroup, but instead it looks like it might be purchased by Wells Fargo for $15.1 billion, without government assistance. And what everyone in town wants to know is this: What’s the Buffalo connection?
Well, it all started back on May 20, 1818, in the small village of Pompey, New York, south of Syracuse. The boy born there on that date would have to support himself from the age of 13 on, working for a man named Daniel Butts, carrying village mail. Later, he worked as a grocery clerk.
In 1845, when he was still 25, railroads and canal boats only traveled as far west as Buffalo. That was the year an express carrying business running from Buffalo to Cleveland, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Chicago was born. Daniel Dunning, Henry Wells, and our hero, William G. Fargo, formed Wells & Co. Later, the company would morph into a little enterprise called American Express.
When gold was discovered in California, Wells, Fargo and another partner in American Express named John Butterfield saw an opportunity to make a bundle transporting freight from the booming west to the business centers of the east. They formed a separate business in San Francisco called Wells Fargo & Company in 1852. From then until 1869, when the transcontinental railroad was completed with the driving of the golden spike at Promontory Summit, Utah, Wells Fargo enjoyed a virtual monopoly in the transport business, running deliveries throughout the wild west while simultaneously creating a dramatic American image that has been used by Hollywood from its very beginning—the stagecoach. It remains the Wells Fargo corporate symbol.
Fargo built a huge mansion on 5.5 acres of land in Buffalo, bordered by Jersey, West, Pennsylvania, and…Fargo streets. Presidents and other luminaries like Mark Twain visited there. Inside, there was a fully functioning barber shop. One can imagine Fargo sitting down every morning to receive his daily shave, freshly steamed towels on hand.
 Here's a photo of the place as it looked in 1900, shortly before it burned to the ground. |
 And here's a picture of the hall... |
Fargo went on to become mayor of Buffalo from 1862-1866, during part of the Civil War.
Of course, the Wells Fargo that’s purchasing Wachovia is more than a few steps removed from this great American tycoon, but hey, it’s a connection all the same.
You can visit and pay your respects at his impressive obelisk in Forest Lawn Cemetery. His family rest in section AA. He has rested there since 1881.
October 2, 2008
Project Censored
This report from Amanda Witherell of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, which each year publishes a roundup of Project Censored’s most underreported stories of the year:
The daily dispatches and nightly newscasts of the mainstream media regularly cover terrorism, but rarely discuss how the fear of attacks is used to manipulate the public and set policy. That’s the common thread of many unreported stories last year, according to an analysis by Project Censored.
Since 1976, Sonoma State University has released an annual survey of the top 25 stories the mainstream media failed to report or reported poorly. Culled from worldwide alternative news sources, vetted by students and faculty, and ranked by judges, the stories were not necessarily overtly censored. But their controversial subjects, challenges to the status quo, or general under-the-radar subject matter might have kept them from the front pages. Project Censored recounts them, accompanied by media analysis, in a book of the same name published annually by Seven Stories Press.
“This year, war and civil liberties stood out,” Peter Phillips, project director since 1996, said of the top stories. “They’re closely related and part of the War on Terror that has been the dominant theme of Project Censored for seven years, since 9/11.”
Whether it’s preventing what one piece of legislation calls “homegrown terrorism” by federally funding the study of radicalism, using vague concerns about security to quietly expand NAFTA, or refusing to count the number of Iraqi civilians killed in the war, the threat of terrorism is being used to silence people and expand power.
“The war on terror is a sort of mind terror,” said Nancy Snow, one of the project’s 24 judges and an associate professor of public diplomacy at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. Snow — who has taught classes on war, media, and propaganda — elaborated: “You can’t declare war on terror. It’s a tactic used by groups to gain publicity and it will remain with us. But it’s unlikely that [the number of terrorist acts] will spike. It spikes in the minds of people.”
She pointed out that the number of terrorist attacks has dropped worldwide since 2003. Some use the absence of fresh attacks as evidence that the so-called war on terror is working. But a RAND Corporation study for the Department of Defense released in August said the war on terror hasn’t effectively undermined Al Qaeda. It suggested the phrase be replaced with the less loaded term “counterterrorism.”
Both Phillips and Snow agree that comprehensive, contextual reporting is missing from most of the coverage. “That’s one of my criticisms of the media,” Snow said. “They spotlight issues and don’t look at the entire landscape.”
This year the landscape of Project Censored itself is expanding. After talking with educators who bemoan the ongoing decline of news quality and want to help, Phillips launched the Truth Emergency Project, in which Sonoma State partners with 23 other universities. All will host classes for students to search out untold stories, vet them for accuracy, and submit them for consideration to Project Censored.
“There’s a renaissance of independent media,” Phillips said. He thinks bloggers and citizen journalists are filling crucial roles left vacant by staff cutbacks throughout the mainstream media. And, he said, it’s time for universities, educators, and media experts to step in and help. “It’s not just reforming the media, but supporting them in as many ways as they need, like validating stories by fact-checking.”
The Truth Emergency Project will also host a news service that aggregates the top 12 independent media sources and posts them on one page. “So you can get an RSS feed from all the major independent news sources we trust,” he said. Discerning newshounds can find reporting from the BBC, Democracy Now!, and Inter Press Service (IPS) in one spot. “The whole criteria,” he said, “is no corporate media.”
Carl Jensen, who started Project Censored in 1976, said the expansion is a new and necessary phase. “It answers the question I was always challenged with: how do you know this is the truth? Having 24 campuses reviewing all the stories and raising questions really provides a good answer. These stories will be vetted more than Sarah Palin.”
Phillips said he hopes to expand to 100 schools within the year, and would like the project to bring more attention to the dire need for public support for high quality news reporting. “I think it’s going to require government subsidies and nonprofit organizations doing community media projects,” he said. “It’s more than just reforming at the FCC level. It’s building independent media from the ground up.”
Phillips likens it to the boom in microbrewed beer and the spread of independently-owned pubs: “If we can have a renaissance in beer-making, following established purity standards, then we can do it with our media, too.” But for now, we have Project Censored, whose top 10 underreported stories for 2008 are:
1. HOW MANY IRAQIS HAVE DIED?
Nobody knows exactly how many lives the Iraq War has claimed. But even more astounding is that so few journalists have mentioned the issue or cited the top estimate: 1.2 million.
During August and September 2007, Opinion Research Business, a British polling group, surveyed 2,414 adults in 15 of 18 Iraqi provinces and found that more than 20 percent had experienced at least one war-related death since March 2003. Using common statistical study methods, it determined that as many as 1.2 million people had been killed since the war began.
The US military, claiming it keeps no count, still employs civilian death data as a marker of progress. For example, in a Sept. 10, 2007, report to Congress, Gen. David Petraeus said, “Civilian deaths of all categories, less natural causes, have also declined considerably, by over 45 percent Iraq-wide since the height of the sectarian violence in December.”
But whose number was he using? Estimates range wildly and are based on a variety of sources, including hospital, morgue, and media reports, as well as in-person surveys.
In October 2006, the British medical journal Lancet published a Johns Hopkins University study vetted by four independent sources that counted 655,000 dead, based on interviews with 1,849 households. It updated a similar study from 2004 that counted 100,000 dead. The Associated Press called it “controversial.”
The AP began its own count in 2005 and by 2006 said that at least 37,547 Iraqis had lost their lives due to war-related violence, but called it a minimum estimate at best and didn’t include insurgent deaths.
Iraq Body Count, a group of US and UK citizens who aggregate numbers from media reports on civilian deaths, puts the figure between 87,000 and 95,000. In January 2008, the World Health Organization and the Iraqi government did door-to-door surveys of nearly 10,000 households and put the number of dead at 151,000.
The 1.2 million figure is out there, too, which is higher than the Rwandan genocide death toll and closing in on the 1.7 million who perished in Cambodia’s killing fields. It raises questions about the real number of deaths from US aerial bombings and house raids, and challenges the common assumption that this is a war in which Iraqis are killing Iraqis.
Justifying the higher number, Michael Schwartz, writing on the blog AfterDowningStreet.org, pointed to a fact reported by the Brookings Institute that US troops have, over the past four years, conducted about 100 house raids a day — a number that has recently increased with assistance from Iraqi soldiers.
Brutality during these house searches has been documented by returning soldiers, Iraqi civilians, and independent journalists (See #9 below). Schwartz suggests the aggressive “element of surprise” tactics employed by soldiers is likely resulting in several thousands of deaths a day that either go unreported or are categorized as insurgent casualties.
The spin is having its intended effect: a February 2007 AP poll showed Americans gave a median estimate of 9,890 Iraqi deaths as a result of the war, a number far below that cited in any credible study.
Sources: “Is the United States killing 10,000 Iraqis every month? Or is it more?” Michael Schwartz, After Downing Street.org, July 6, 2007; “Iraq death toll rivals Rwanda Genocide, Cambodian killing fields,” Joshua Holland, AlterNet, Sept. 17, 2007; “Iraq conflict has killed a million: survey,” Luke Baker, Reuters, Jan. 30, 2008; “Iraq: Not our country to return to,” Maki al-Nazzal and Dahr Jamail, Inter Press Service, March 3, 2008.
[Stories 2-10 after the jump.]
September 26, 2008
Debate Live: Sneak Attacks Abroad
McCain on preconditions to talking with Iran: He’s lost this point, which is no surprise; but he makes a noble effort at the end to salvage some sympathy. Obama’s wielding of Kissinger trumps McCain’s feigned incredulity.
Obama on Russia and Georgia: Obama’s got a balanced and somewhat subject-broadening (or, to be less generous, subject-changing) response. McCain’s analysis on pipeline and military issues is spot-on, and to his credit, Obama doesn’t look for a weakness there.
When Obama switches the subject to alternative energy investments again, that’s smart: Russia’s power is based on its ability to broker petro-products. But will it seem an evasion or a smart transition? McCain’s not arguing…
Debate Live: Let Me Tell You Something Else…
In a debate that began like a Tower of Babel, in which questions were answered with non sequiturs, in which both candidates tried to pound the square pegs of their chosen talking points into the round holes of Jim Lehrer’s questions, McCain just drove that metaphor of the cliff. Into a deep, square, roundish canyon.
The barracks bombing in Beirut? The tired technique of evoking a conversation with “A mother whose son is…”?
Obama’s response is strong, up until the point that he, too, conjured some Jane Anybody. At which point my hostess brings me another beer, and Jim Lehrer turns the conversation to Iran…
Debate Live: Maverick, Iceman
McCain just called himself a maverick.
And now he’s making the attack he’s been waiting for: He’s saying the surge in Iraq was a success, and that he lobbed for it early and continues to stand by the tactic.
He’s relying on this argument, both to eclipse the current financial crisis as an issue and to make Obama seem weak on what McCain and those who gravitate toward his way of thinking call “national security.”
Obama, I think, could have done better than to dwell on the cost of the Iraq war. He’s going to be the candidate who was (at least) skeptical about the war. So just go whole hog: Say it was mistake. maybe even argue that the surge’s vaunted success is not a given. And all this stuff about Afghanistan? It’s a fantasy argument: If we focus military resources there, we just move the quagmire.
That said, Obama does sound voter-palatable on the matter. McCain’s attempt to differentiate between a tactic and a strategy was a suicide mission.
But at least the give-and-take has begun between the two.
Debate Live: Do I Stutter?
Some surface observations, since that’s what most debate analysis comes down to: Obama stammers. He sounds a bit rougher than one might expect, and McCain is wearing a terrible tie. And (I’m on ABC now) what’s that weird aquatic motion graphic? Does that represent sea level?
Debate Live: The Scorekeepers
If you’re watching CNN, there are six circles flanking the screen on which pundits are apparently scoring the fight in real time. The scoring system is impenetrable.
Nonetheless, it seems Castellanos is seeing hits recorded everywhere, but he scores it even so far. Brazile gives Obama a narrow lead. I can’t tell what Paul Begala is doing.
Borger (lower left hand) appears to have left for the bar. If this were a drinking game, Borger would be a buzzkill. Is he even listening to this debate?
Debate Live: McCain Starts Quiet, Carries an Old Pen
To begin, McCain sounds a bit frail and tired, which draws down the hardass maverick caricature he’s been composing for himself.
Then he makes that crack: “What are you afraid I can’t hear him?”
It gets a laugh, and he takes some strength from it, finds his feet. Then he’s talking about bears, and then he pulls what looks like a permanent marker out of pocket and says he’s going to veto all spending bills. That’ll make government more efficient.
September 25, 2008
Limbaugh Claims Obama Is An Arab
This via Think Progress, by way of the Daily Howler:
Yesterday on his radio show, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh falsely claimed that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) is “Arab.” “He’s Arab. You know, he’s from Africa. He’s from Arab parts of Africa,” Limbaugh claimed.
Limbaugh said it again today, Think Progress reports, while reading an article by Dave Davies of the Philadelphia Daily News. Limbaugh inaccurately quoted Davies’s article, inserting the word “Arab” into a description of Obama’s ethnicity.
According to Limbaugh, the article reads: “Obama’s name and his Arab-African heritage are obstacles to the party’s chances of capturing the White House, party activists are finding.”
In fact, the article reads, “Obama’s name and his African heritage are obstacles to the party’s chances of capturing the White House, party activists are finding.”
Roll the tape:
The Hatch Hitch
As anyone who’d bother to read this post knows, South District Councilmember Mickey Kearns and Delaware District Councilmember Mike LoCurto submitted a resolution asking the city’s law department to draft a statute banning some city employees from engaging in politicking. The resolution, they say, is a response to complaints that workers in City Hall are made to carry petitions, donate to campaigns, and canvass for candidates whom the mayor instructs them to support. (I’m having trouble downloading the text, so no link, sorry.) This mini Hatch Act—so called because it is a local version of the federal law—is intended, say Kearns and LoCurto, to protect city employees from being pressured by their superiors to do political work.
Niagara District Councilmember David Rivera and Council President Dave Franczyk signed onto the resolution, and the fifth man in the majority coalition, Lovejoy’s Rich Fontana, voted yea to send the resolution to the legislative committee.
That’s where it ran into attorney Peter Reese, who excoriated the measure for 10 or 15 excruciatingly funny minutes. (I don’t watch City Hall TV myself, or whatever it’s called, because I don’t have cable; if you do, and if such things interest you, try to catch Reese’s performance.)
Reese said the proposed legislation did not represent reform at all, that in fact it was “politics as usual.” He called the proposed legislation anti-union, because as written it could make union activity grounds for dismissal.
Edit: Mike LoCurto tells me I have misunderstood the section of the proposed legislation that led me to write what is now in brackets and italics below: “The exemption would only be for employees who are currently committeemembers,” LoCurto write. “They could remain committeemenmbers for their current two-year term. They would not be permitted to donate to campaigns during that time.”
[He said it was racist, for several reasons, not least of which is this: Current employees would be grandfathered, so they could still politick. Only new employees would be excluded from political activity. If you sort city employees by councilmanic district and race, you'll find a preponderance of white South Buffalonians. New Latino hires from the Lower West Side? You can't campaign for a candidate from your community. New African-American hires from Cold Springs? You don't get to pass petitions for you next door neighbor whose running for Common Council.
White guy from South Buffalo who has had a job since the Griffin administration and never fails to drop $50 into the hat at a Goin' South beer bash? Keep writing those checks.]
(Later in the hearing, North District Councilmember Joe Golombek pointed out that a ban on City Hall employees politicking would deprive the mayor of some of his ground troops in his re-election bid next year; meantime, county and local state employees, who tend to align with the county chairman, would remain free to campaign for the mayor’s opponent.)
Reese said the legislation had been misnamed: Instead of the “City of Buffalo Employee Protection Act,” it ought to be called the “Minority Exclusion Act of 2008.”
Worst of all, he said, it created a “political superclass.” Only folks like plow drivers, clerks, cashiers, sanitation workers, etc. would be prohibited from politicking. Appointees who serve at the pleasure of the mayor, the comptroller, or the council—immediate staff of the three branches of city government, in other words, the people who are closest to politicians and most overtly political to begin with—would not be covered by this mini Hatch Act.
It compromises First Amendment rights, Reese said. And state courts have already ruled that passing designating petitions for a political candidate is an absolute right of every citizen.
“And these are the things I like about this bill,” Reese said.
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