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Page 4 • The News-Banner • WEDNESDAY, MAY 23, 2012
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Number
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The ‘infrastructure
capital of America’?
So Gov. Mitch Daniels thinks that
Indiana is the “Infrastructure Capital
of America.”
Somehow I suspect that our seven
county council members – six of
whom are from the same party as
Gov. Daniels – may have a different
word for it Thursday morning.
They’ll be sitting down then to try
and figure out where in the heck Wells
County is going to find $7 million to
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Opinions expressed on this page do not necessarily
represent the views of this newspaper.
Frank
Shanly
fix the county’s bridges.
I was in Markle last Wednesday
evening, and perhaps that was
just as well, as I might have felt
the need to take issue with Gov.
Daniels over this at the Wells County Republican
Party’s Lincoln Day dinner in Zanesville – ironically
Weekly
Word
only a few miles away from one of the bridges currently
causing our elected officials the biggest headaches.
Our commissioners and county council members
have “chosen” – in effect, they had little other option
– to use County Economic Development Income Tax
revenues to cover the cost of urgent repairs to Bridge
206, just southwest of Zanesville on Marzane Road.
Spending CEDIT money on roads and bridges may
be something our Chamber of Commerce people don’t
like, but we’re not going to get much new business
coming into the county if our infrastructure isn’t up
to scratch. (And a significant number of trucks do use
Bridge 206.)
Federal grants have helped the county replace
two bridges in recent years — one on 400W just
south of Ind. 124, and also the bridge on 900S over
the Salamonie River. But “federal” aid comes from
Washington, not Indianapolis.
Perhaps Gov. Daniels didn’t pass by Bridge 206 on
his ride into town, or any of the semis that have been
diverted through the Town of Zanesville – which has
had trouble of its own with town roads in recent years,
which in turn is part of the reason why they created an
ordinance to keep semis out of town.
(They have temporarily “put aside” their ordinance to
help provide a routing solution while the bridge is being
repaired.)
Perhaps no one informed Gov. Daniels of the problems
Wells County is facing. But as the problem is not
unique to here, surely he should have heard about it
from someone by now.
Media coverage of the recent commissioners primaries
in Noble County indicated they are also having
some pretty serious infrastructure issues.
Then, of course, we have ditches and drainage, which
again, surely is part of infrastructure.
McKinney Ditch is only the tip of the iceberg here. It
seems to be something of a very open secret that in most
cases, if the health department tested a ditch anywhere
in the state, they would find levels of e. coli much higher
than federal “allowable” limits.
The only question is: “By how much?”
And nobody — state, county or individual — seems
to have the money to address these problems either.
Leaving residents to sit on a potential health timebomb
doesn’t exactly seem to me to be ideal management
of infrastructure.
Perhaps it was just as well I was in Markle, and not
Zanesville, last Wednesday!
frank@news-banner.com
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Who’s Who
A continuing series on how to contact government officials
LIBERTY TOWNSHIP
TRUSTEE: Diane K. Rockwell (R), 0056 W. First St., Poneto,
IN 46781. Office— 2954 W. Market St., Liberty Center (Liberty
Center fire station), 694-6300.
TOWNSHIP BOARD: Richard Borror (R), 2479W 300S, Liberty
Center 46766; Trenton Markley (R), 4321W-100S, Liberty
Center 46766; Scott Minniear, 2521W-300S, Liberty Center, IN
46766.
ROCKCREEK TOWNSHIP
TRUSTEE: Phylian Keefer (D), 5635N 500W, P.O. Box 311,
Markle, IN 46770; phone 758-2080.
TOWNSHIP BOARD: Lindsay J. Burnau (R), 2579W-525N,
Uniondale, IN 46791; John Legge (R), 170 Conifer St., Markle,
IN 46770; Arlene Gordon (R), 3194W-100N, Bluffton, IN 46714.
UNION TOWNSHIP
TRUSTEE: Brian D. Imel (R), 8313N 600W-90, Markle, IN
46770; phone 758-2426.
TOWNSHIP BOARD: Kedric L. Bailey (R), 3475W-1000N-
90, Markle, IN 46770; John M. Walmsley (R), 11941 E. Smuts
Dr., P.O. Box 104, Zanesville, IN 46799; Robert Caley (R), 7756N
Marzane Road-90, Markle, IN 46770.
JEFFERSON TOWNSHIP
TRUSTEE: Richard McCoy (R) 802 N. Jefferson St., Ossian,
IN 46777; phone 622-6010.
TOWNSHIP BOARD: Lloyd W. Meyer (R), 5643E-800N,
Ossian, IN 46777; C. Dan Rupright (R), 706 N. Jefferson St.,
Ossian, IN 46777; Tim Baker (R), 2142E-800N, Ossian, IN
46777.
Today in History
By The Associated Press
Today is Wednesday,
May 23, the 144th day of
2012. There are 222 days
left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in
History:
On May 23, 1937, industrialist
and philanthropist
John D. Rockefeller, founder
of the Standard Oil Co.
and the Rockefeller Foundation,
died in Ormond
Mitt Romney, vampire?
Mitt Romney went into the wrong line of work. If
only he had been a lecturer in constitutional law, he
wouldn’t have a business record vulnerable to distortion
by a desperate incumbent president.
Barack Obama’s hands, in contrast, are clean.
He taught at the University of Chicago Law School
and didn’t make the mistake of attempting to start,
acquire or turn around companies. He has no business
failures because he has no business successes
-- if you don’t count selling books about himself to
the adoring multitudes.
The president’s re-election campaign is out with
a scorching advertisement hitting Romney for one
of Bain Capital’s flops, a steel firm that it bought
and that eventually went under. This is an instance,
according to one of the former steelworkers appearing
in the ad, of “vampire” capitalism. The nefarious
Romney swooped down on the thriving company
and drained it of its life force. If it were a businessschool
case study, it could have been authored by
Bram Stoker.
Or so we’re told. GS Industries is hardly the
morality tale the Obama re-election campaign makes
of it. Bain Capital didn’t acquire the company to
drive it into the ground for fun and profit. Bain wanted
to make it work -- despite its outdated equipment,
union strife and punishing competition, foreign and
domestic. Bain failed, but not for lack of trying over
the course of seven years.
Soon after Bain acquired it in 1993, the steel
company announced a $98 million plant modernization
and merged with another firm to form, in
the words of a Reuters report, “one of the largest
mini-mill steel producers in the U.S.” This is a funny
way to go about deliberately destroying a company.
Bain loaded the firm up with debt and took out a
dividend, but it reinvested part of the dividend in the
operation. It reportedly spurned a potential offer to
buy the firm around the end of 1997.
All the effort went for naught. The management
proved incompetent. Cheap imports undercut prices.
And the firm was unionized, a factor common to
In this election, we’re not
having an argument that pits
capitalism against socialism.
We are trying to decide what
kind of capitalism we want.
It is a debate as American as
Alexander Hamilton, Andrew
Jackson, and Henry Clay --
which is to say that we have
always done this. In light of
the rise of inequality and the
financial mess we just went
through, it’s a discussion we
very much need to have now.
The back-and-forth about Bain
Capital, Mitt Romney’s old company,
is part of something larger. So
is the inquest into the implications
of multibillion-dollar trading losses
at JPMorgan Chase. Capitalism can
produce wonders. It is also capable of
self-destruction, and it can leave a lot
of wounded people behind. The trick
is to get the most out of what capitalism
does well, while containing or
preventing the problems it can cause.
To describe this grand debate is
not to deny that President Obama’s
campaign has some, shall we say,
narrower motives in going after Bain.
Obama’s lieutenants need to undermine
Romney’s claim that his experience
in the private equity business
makes him just the guy to get our
economy back on track.
The Bain conversation has already
been instructive. Romney’s friends
no less than his foes have had to face
the fact that Bain’s purpose was never
about job-creation. Its goal was to
generate large returns to Bain’s partners
and investors. It did that, which
is why Romney is rich.
Romney wants to focus on the
Beach, Fla., at age 97.
On this date:
In 1430, Joan of Arc was
captured by the Burgundians,
who sold her to the
English.
In 1533, the marriage of
England’s King Henry VIII
to Catherine of Aragon was
declared null and void.
In 1701, William Kidd
was hanged in London after
he was convicted of piracy
steel companies that couldn’t survive the
new low-cost environment.
GS went bankrupt in 2001 (two years
after Romney left Bain, as it happens). It
was a messy affair, with the U.S. Pension
Benefit Guaranty Corp. picking up the pieces
from the company’s underfunded pension.
Its experience wasn’t unusual, alas. Dozens
of steel companies died in the same period,
including the iconic Bethlehem Steel. If the
workers at GS had never heard the name
Mitt Romney, there is still a good chance
they would have been out of jobs.
Employment in the steel industry has
undergone a historic contraction. From 1980 to the
beginning of the new century, the steel industry in
the United States lost more than half its workers.
Japan and Germany also experienced declines in
employment, as advances in productivity made it
possible to produce more with fewer people. Far
from causing this trend, Bain was trying to find a
way to ride it out.
Where it failed with GS, it succeeded with Steel
Dynamics. In the mid-1990s, Bain invested in and
raised capital for the technologically innovative
mini-mill that became one of the largest U.S. steel
companies. It eventually sold its stake in 1999, making
a massive return for its investors while Steel
Dynamics is now generating $6 billion in revenue
and employing more than 6,000 people. If this were
a government-subsidized green-energy project rather
than the inspired work of imaginative executives and
sharp-eyed financiers, President Obama would have
already given a celebratory speech at its plant.
Even if the Obama account of GS were fair (it’s
not), it’s dishonest to discuss it without connecting
it to Steel Dynamics and the larger context of private
equity’s role in American capitalism’s creative
churn. Cheap and unworthy, all that can be said for
the attack on Bain is that it meets the standards of
the Obama re-election campaign.
comments.lowry@nationalreview.com
A choice of capitalisms
E.J.
Dionne
positive side of his business
dealings that did create
jobs. He wants to brag about
the companies Bain helped
bring to life, among them
Staples, Sports Authority
and Domino’s.
That’s fair enough. But
having made an issue of
Bain on the plus side, he
also has to answer for the
pain and suffering -- or, as
defenders of capitalism like
to call it, the “creative destruction” --
that some of Bain’s deals left in their
wake.
This leads naturally to the question
of how creative the destruction
wrought by our current brand of
capitalism actually is. Since the dawn
of the leveraged buyout era three
decades ago, many friends of capitalism
have questioned whether loading
companies with debt as part of these
deals is good for companies and for
the economy as a whole.
Does this approach cause unnecessary
suffering among the employees
of the companies in question and the
communities that often lose plants
and jobs as a result? Sucking pension
and health funds dry to aggrandize
investors seems less like a creative
act than a betrayal of workers who
made bargains with their employers
in good faith.
More generally, while some of the
innovations in the financial sphere
have been beneficial to growth, it’s
far from clear that this is true of all
or even most of them. Some of them
helped cause the downturn we are
still trying to escape and created
incentives for the dangerous risk-tak-
and murder.
In 1788, South Carolina
became the eighth state to
ratify the United States
Constitution.
In 1873, Canada’s Parliament
voted to establish
the North West Mounted
Police force.
In 1911, the newly completed
New York Public
Library was dedicated by
President William Howard
OPINION
Rich
Lowry
ing that led to JPMorgan’s troubles.
And there’s little doubt that our new
financial system has transferred
wealth from other sectors of the
economy to the people at the top of
the financial business.
Vice President Joe Biden’s speech
last week in Youngstown, Ohio, drew
wide attention for its criticism of
Romney as someone who just doesn’t
“get it.” But when Biden moved
beyond Romney, he offered an energetic
broadside against the new world
of finance, and he picked the right
venue to make his case: a noble bluecollar
town that has been battered by
the winds of globalization and economic
change.
“You know the difference between
having an economy that makes things
that the rest of the world wants, and
having an economy that is based on
financialization of every product,”
Biden told his listeners. “You know
the difference between an economy
... that’s built on making things rather
than on collateralized debt, creative
credit-default swaps, financial instruments
like subprime mortgages.
That’s not how you build an economy.”
Romney, by contrast, is wary of
dismantling any of these nifty new
Wall Street inventions, one reason
why he wants to repeal the Dodd-
Frank financial reforms.
We need to have this great national
argument. To borrow a term pioneered
by Germany’s Christian Democrats,
we can try to build a social
market. Or we can have an anti-social
market. An election is the right venue
for deciding which it will be.
ejdionne@washpost.com
Taft, Gov. John Alden Dix
and Mayor William Jay
Gaynor.
In 1934, bank robbers
Clyde Barrow and Bonnie
Parker were shot to death
in a police ambush in Bienville
Parish, La.
In 1945, Nazi official
Heinrich Himmler committed
suicide while imprisoned
in Luneburg, Germany.