Handful of Republicans Support Uniting American Families Act

As a post this morning noted, some within the Republican Party get the message that "business as usual" based on God, guns and gays and the subjugation of women is a recipe for disaster.  A case in point is the small handful of Republicans who have signed on in support of the Uniting American Families Act which would afford equal treatment to legally married same sex couples as already enjoyed by heterosexual couples under the nation's immigration laws.  What is telling is that these legislators recognize that the anti-gay legal framework favored by the GOP base is harming America's competitiveness in the global market for the best and the brightest employees and innovators.  It goes without saying that one can only imagine the shrieks and sheets of flying spittle these brave and rational Republicans will illicit from the Christofascists within the GOP base.  Here are highlights from Huffington Post:

Two Republican House members signed a bill on Friday that would allow same-sex couples equal rights as heterosexual ones for immigration purposes, making the legislation bipartisan -- although with only small levels of GOP support -- in both chambers.

Reps. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.) and Richard Hanna (R-N.Y.) joined Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and 145 Democratic lawmakers in support of the bill, called the Uniting American Families Act. Dent, Hanna and Collins are the only Republican cosponsors of the bill. All three were endorsed by Log Cabin Republicans, a group of gay supporters of the GOP, in their most recent campaigns.

Hanna explained his move in a Tuesday statement to HuffPost as a pro-business decision. Our laws force some couples to live apart rather than in the country of their choice, pressuring Americans to take their talent, innovation, and wealth elsewhere," Hanna said. "Businesses large and small in New York, many of them multinational corporations, are struggling to keep some of their best workers in the United States ... We can keep jobs, dollars and talent right here in the United States by simply allowing financially and emotionally committed couples to live together in the same country.”

Shawn Millan, a spokesman for Dent, gave the same reason for support in a statement, saying "business leaders have consistently told Congressman Dent that they are losing talented workers because the existing immigration laws threaten to break up committed couples."

The Uniting American Families Act was introduced in April 2011 by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.). It could help as many as 40,000 binational same-sex couples who hope to petition for their partner for legal immigration, according to a study from the Wilson Institute at UCLA. Those couples have nearly 25,000 children in total, the same report found.

Because of the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, those couples are not afforded the same rights as opposite-sex couples to petition for green cards for their spouses, even if they are also legally married in their state. That can mean couples are separated for at least six months -- or longer, if one partner is in the United States without authorization -- while they wait for another visa to temporarily return to the country.

One can only hoe that this commonsense legislation will be enacted both because it makes business sense but also because it reflects common fairness and equality under the nation's civil laws.

CEO Refuses to Do Business in Antigay Jacksonville

I noted yesterday how Hampton, Virginia mayor Molly Ward has signed the Mayors for Marriage Equality Statement.  Besides the fact that it's the right thing to do and is a step towards ending marriage discrimination, there's a practical side to signing onto marriage equality: more and more businesses do not want to locate to cities and states that discriminate.  Thus, if a city wants to attract progressive and innovative business, supporting gay equality and non-discrimination protections makes sound economic sense.  A story out of Jacksonville, Florida highlights this reality.  A member of the board of directors of a sizable business looking to relocate to Jacksonville changed its mind when that city voted down non-discrimination protections for LGBT citizens.  Bigotry carries a cost even if the bigots sometimes do not grasp that they are killing their own economic future.  Here are highlights fro The Advocate:

It was in August when the Jacksonville City Council shot down an antidiscrimination ordinance protecting LGBT residents. Repercussions of that decision are now reverberating, as a local attorney says a major corporation refused to move to Jacksonville because of the measure's failure.

Marianna Smith is a lawyer and board member at an unidentified company. She writes in the The Florida Times-Union that the CEO of the company she serves on the board of refused to relocate to Jacksonville after the council rejected the ordinance (click here for a closer look at the measure's failure). The CEO was also affected by antigay letters and op-eds that appeared in local newspapers. Here's what Smith wrote:

"To build a business, you need more than just land; you need a favorable environment for employees.

I am a member of the board of directors of a rapidly growing, multi-million dollar international company. We employ chemists and engineers, marketers/sales staff plus a full manufacturing and distribution facility.

The company is located in a landlocked city and wishes to move to a city with a port, rail and truck service.
I have strongly advocated Jacksonville as our future business home. Unfortunately, the CEO came to evaluate Jacksonville when the letters and comments of hate were in our paper opposing the proposed changes to the Jacksonville anti-discrimination ordinance.

The CEO was shocked and said any determination about Jacksonville would not occur until after the bill was voted on by the City Council.
 
Jacksonville lost this company because of the results of the anti-discrimination bill vote.

I have served as a director on other international boards, and I can promise you that those companies would also decline Jacksonville as a headquarters home in view of the way our council and some citizens responded to a call for equal rights.

Investigating Mitt Romney's Off-Shore Accounts

Vanity Fair has a lengthy article that looks at both Mitt Romney's business practices - which included encouraging employees to lie and engage in clandestine efforts against rival businesses - and also his preference of hiding money overseas so as to avoid paying U.S. taxes.  The picture that emerges from the article is unsettling: many questionable deals, hidden funds, brutal treatment of employees, and the dismemberment and closure of companies.  It's a picture quote different from the one being actively marketed by the Romney campaign to the general public.  Romney and his cronies seem to seek a return to the Gilded Age and seem happy to emulate the robber barons of old.  The practices certainly make one wonder what type of atmosphere would pervade a Romney White House. Here are article excerpts:

A person who worked for Mitt Romney at the consulting firm Bain and Co. in 1977 remembers him with mixed feelings.   .   .   .   Bain and Co., the person recalls, pushed employees to find out secret revenue and sales data on its clients’ competitors. Romney, the person says, suggested “falsifying” who they were to get such information.   .   .   .  “Mitt said to me something like ‘We won’t ask you to lie. I am not going to tell you to do this, but [it is] a really good way to get the information.’ … I would not have had anything in my analysis if I had not pretended.

This unsettling account suggests the young Romney—at that point only two years out of Harvard Business School—was willing to push into gray areas when it came to business. More than three dec­ades later, as he tried to nail down the Republican nomination for president of the United States, Romney’s gray areas were again an issue when he repeatedly resisted calls to release more details of his net worth, his tax returns, and the large investments and assets held by him and his wife, Ann. Finally the other Republican candidates forced him to do so, but only highly selective disclosures were forthcoming.

Even so, these provided a lavish smorgasbord for Romney’s critics. Particularly jarring were the Romneys’ many offshore accounts. As Newt Gingrich put it during the primary season, “I don’t know of any American president who has had a Swiss bank account.” But Romney has, as well as other interests in such tax havens as Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.

While the Romneys’ spokespeople insist that the couple has paid all the taxes required by law, investments in tax havens such as Bermuda raise many questions, because they are in “jurisdictions where there is virtually no tax and virtually no compliance,” as one Miami-based offshore lawyer put it.

That’s not the only money Romney has in tax havens. Because of his retirement deal with Bain Capital  .   .   .   Though he left the firm in 1999, Romney has continued to receive large payments from it—in early June he revealed more than $2 million in new Bain income. The firm today has at least 138 funds organized in the Cayman Islands, and Romney himself has personal interests in at least 12, worth as much as $30 million, hidden behind controversial confidentiality disclaimers. Again, the Romney campaign insists he saves no tax by using them, but there is no way to check this.

Bain bought companies, loaded them with debt, and paid itself extravagant fees, thereby bankrupting the companies and destroying tens of thousands of jobs.

Come August, Romney, with an estimated net worth as high as $250 million (he won’t reveal the exact amount), will be one of the richest people ever to be nominated for president. Given his reticence to discuss his wealth, it’s only natural to wonder how he got it, how he invests it, and if he pays all his taxes on it.

 Ed Kleinbard, a professor of tax law at the University of Southern California, says the Swiss account “has political but not tax-policy resonance,” since it—like many other Romney investments—constituted a bet against the U.S. dollar, an odd thing for a presidential candidate to do. The Obama campaign provided a helpful world map pointing to the tax havens Bermuda, Luxembourg, and the Cayman Islands, where Romney and his family have assets, each with the tagline “Value: not disclosed in tax returns.”

Romney’s personal tax rate is a particular point of interest. In 2010 and 2011, Mitt and Ann paid $6.2 million in federal tax on $42.5 million in income, for an average tax rate just shy of 15 percent, substantially less than what most middle-income Americans pay.

All the assets on Mitt’s financial disclosures are in blind trusts or retirement accounts held by him and Ann. Blind trusts are designed to avoid conflicts of interest for those in public office by having politicians’ assets managed by independent trustees. The Romneys’ blind trust was created when Mitt was elected governor of Massachusetts. Curiously, the Romneys appointed Bradford Malt as their trustee. It’s certainly true that under Malt the trusts don’t appear to be as blind as they might be . . .

Mysteries also arise when one looks at Romney’s individual retirement account at Bain Capital. When Romney was there, from 1984 to 1999, taxpayers were allowed to put just $2,000 per year into an I.R.A., and $30,000 annually into a different kind of plan he may have used. Given these annual contribution ceilings, how can his I.R.A. possibly contain up to $102 million, as his financial disclosures now suggest?

A report by Bain and Co. itself, looking at the period from 2002 to 2007, concluded that there is “little evidence that private equity owners, overall, added value” to the companies they took over: nearly all their returns are explained by broad economic growth, rising stock markets, and leverage. 


Bain engaged in startling penny-pinching with the laid-off employees. Their contracts stipulated that if they left early they would have to pay back the costs of relocating to Miami—but in spite of all that Dade had done to them, it refused to release the employees from this clause.   .   .   .   .   generous pensions were converted into less generous benefits, wages were cut, and more staff members were laid off. Some employees contacted Norman Stein, then the director of the pension-counseling clinic at the University of Alabama law school, with a view to challenging the conversions. Stein says the employees were “extraordinarily nervous,” so fearful, in fact, that they refused to let lawyers even make copies of pension documents. “I have been dealing with pensions issues for over 25 years and I never saw anything like this,” recalls Stein. The spooked employees did not go to court.

Nor was this an isolated incident: Kosman lists five other “formerly healthy” companies—Stage Stores, Ampad, GS Technologies, Details, and KB Toys—Bain helped drive into bankruptcy, while making big profits.  

The bottom line is that Obama's seemingly harsh ads attacking Romney have a strong basis in fact.  They underscore the reality that Romney cares nothing for average people and their financial well-being if he can make a buck out of screwing them over - in a careful legalistic way, of course.  Just because something is technically legal doesn't mean it's not immoral nonetheless.

Duke Energy CEO Denounces North Carolina Amendment 1

At a breakfast meeting discussing business issues where he was the keynote speaker, Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers fielded a question on North Carolina's toxic anti-gay Amendment 1. After first stressing that he was speaking as an individual, and not on behalf of Duke Energy, Rogers then proceeded to trash Amendment 1 and predicted that if the measure passes, history will not look kindly on those who backed it. Indeed, he said the measure and its supporters will be viewed in the same category as those who supported the horrible Jim Crow laws of yesteryear. That analysis is accurate for a number of reasons not the least of which is that the folks who back Amendment 1 are the same people (or their descendants) who wanted to maintain racial segregation forever. With racial bigotry being less socially acceptable, these haters and enemies of equality under the civil laws have targeted gays as their victims. Here are highlights from a piece in the Charlotte Observer:

Rogers hesitated, but then couldn't stop himself from telling the crowd of 300 or so how he felt. If North Carolinians put the gay marriage ban into the state constitution, Rogers said, "You're sending a message to the world about what kind of community this is; that we're not inclusive."

Read more here: http://obsdailyviews.blogspot.com/2012/04/dukes-jim-rogers-tees-off-on-marriage.html#storylink=cpy#storylink=cpy

"If this amendment passes, we're going to look back 20 years from now, or 10 years from now, and we're going to think about that amendment the same way we think about the Jim Crow laws" that discriminated against African-Americans. North Carolina is competing with the world for business, he said, and "we have to be inclusive and open."

Read more here: http://obsdailyviews.blogspot.com/2012/04/dukes-jim-rogers-tees-off-on-marriage.html#storylink=cpy#storylink=cpy

It's heartening that a business leader of Rogers' stature sees the discriminatory intent of the amendment so clearly and is willing to say so in public. Now, will others in the business community join him?

Read more here: http://obsdailyviews.blogspot.com/2012/04/dukes-jim-rogers-tees-off-on-marriage.html#storylink=cpy#storylink=cpy

"I'm old-fashioned: I believe we're all the children of God and we shouldn't have special rules for some and not for others. We have to recognize differences in people and celebrate those differences. That's just something I believe.

"And I'll go a step further - and this is going to be somewhat controversial when I say this. If this amendment passes, we're going to look back 20 years from now, or 10 years from now, and we're going to think about that amendment the same way we think about the Jim Crow laws that were passed in this state many, many years ago. "This is the 21st century. We're competing with people around the world. We've got to be inclusive and open."

Read more here: http://obsdailyviews.blogspot.com/2012/04/dukes-jim-rogers-tees-off-on-marriage.html#storylink=cpy#storylink=cpy

It's noteworthy that Rogers believes that Amendment 1 will make North Carolina less competitive in the business realm. It's a case I have made many times before: most progressive and innovative businesses do not want to locate in areas that are backward and socially discriminatory.

Business Bets on the G.O.P. May Be Backfiring

With the Republican Party's obsession of pandering to its Christianist/Tea Party base and seeking to balloon the deficit by increasing tax cuts for the wealthy, there may be little money available to throw in the direction of business interests that foolishly thought that the GOP is the party of big business which would answer the call of big business to fund construction projects and other measures that would put money in business coffers. Frankly, it's more evidence that the GOP of yesteryear is gone and has been replaced by a sectarian party that is stridently anti-government. A piece in the New York Times looks at the perhaps misplaced bets made by the business community on the GOP acting rational and in the best interests of business. Here are some highlights:

Big business groups like the Chamber of Commerce spent millions of dollars in 2010 to elect Republican candidates running for the House. The return on investment has not always met expectations.

Even though money for major road and bridge projects is set to run out this weekend, House Republican leaders have struggled all week to round up the votes from recalcitrant conservatives simply to extend it for 90 or even 60 days. A longer-term transportation bill that contractors and the chamber say is vital to the recovery of the construction industry appears hopelessly stalled over costs.

At the same time, House conservatives are pressing to allow the U.S. Export-Import Bank, which has financed exports since the Depression, to run out of lending authority within weeks. The bank faces the possibility of shutting its doors completely by the end of May, when its legal authorization expires.

And a host of routine business tax breaks — from wind energy subsidies to research and development tax credits — cannot be passed because of Republican insistence that they be paid for with spending cuts.

Business groups that worked hard to install a Republican majority in the House equated Republican control with a business-friendly environment. But the majority is first and foremost a conservative political force, and on key issues, its ideology is not always aligned with commercial interests that helped finance election victories.

There could be real-world consequences to the conservative rebellion. The 90-day extension of the highway trust fund that House Republican leaders say they will pass this week in lieu of a broad highway bill would keep existing projects moving for now. But business groups say few new government-funded infrastructure projects can get under way without longer-range certainty about federal backing.

Exports have been one of the bright spots of the fragile recovery, but without Export-Import Bank financing, companies could struggle to complete contracts with overseas buyers. Those buyers will most likely turn to foreign competitors whose governments have more robust versions of the bank, businesspeople say.

With its charter set to expire in May, the bank is the target of conservative groups. They are making the case to Republicans that the bank, created in 1934 to finance sales to the Soviet Union, has no place in a free-market system. Club for Growth is holding it up as the next Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, crowding out private lending and offering dangerous loans that ultimately could be left in the laps of the taxpayer.

If anything, the anger over the stalled transportation bill is even more acute, business lobbyists say. The Senate, in a bipartisan vote, has passed a surface transportation bill that would keep money flowing for two years. The House, however, appears stuck.

Some Republicans are growing worried about the ramifications of these fights. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, has pressed to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank, but at the insistence of Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, he joined his party in opposing Democratic efforts to add reauthorization to a small-business finance bill. Now Mr. Graham says his party has to find a way to move a stand-alone bill, and fast.

“Come June, if this program dies, it will be the end of job creation for thousands of businesses for no good reason,” he said. “And it’ll happen on our watch, with our fingerprints on it.”

The GOP leadership should have thought through the consequences of allowing the patients to take over the asylum.

Banks Actively Seek Gay Employees

This Financial Times article (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a248d0de-c2b0-11dc-b617-0000779fd2ac.html) shows that more and more companies are recognizing the merits of recruiting gay employees. Would that this mentality would trickle down to Virginia and help it drag itself from the 19th century. One can continue to hope that a progressive light will shine upon the state. Here are some story highlights:

Lehman Brothers, the US investment bank, recently  held an unusual recruitment event at Hong Kong university. Lehman’s invitation was specifically aimed at gay and lesbian students who aspire to be bankers. Encouraged by the success of the presentation and buffet dinner for 50 students, Lehman is planning to extend its initiatives targeting the gay community this year. It will include the bank’s first pro-gay activities in Singapore, the city-state that has become one of Asia’s leading financial centres but where sex between men is illegal.

Lehman Brothers is not the only bank seeking to recruit from Asia’s gay community. Such is the enthusiasm among investment banks that some have banded together to give their Asian events a higher profile, taking it in turn to organise lectures, dinners and other events around a gay or lesbian theme. In November, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, Lehman, Merrill Lynch and UBS co-sponsored a cinema evening in Hong Kong which featured The Bubble, a 2006 film about the gay relationship between a Palestinian and an Israeli soldier.

Investment banks’ efforts to recruit more gays and lesbians is partly an attempt to attract the most talented employees. At a time when Asia has become the world’s biggest region for deals such as initial public offerings, investment banks are struggling to fill the new positions on offer. And the intense hiring competition makes it crucial to ensure talented gay people are not deterred from applying because of a combination of Asian intolerance and western macho behaviour on trading floors.

The international dimension of investment banking is also forcing employers to confront the issue of homosexual discrimination more regularly than their counterparts in retail banking and other more local institutions. A recurring problem is the difficulty of getting investment bankers to relocate to countries that do not offer dependent visas for same-sex partners.

India offers another intriguing situation, according to Stephen Golden, a vice-president at Goldman Sachs, who helps co-ordinate the bank’s global leadership and diversity programme. He says: “India is one of those places where the laws relating to homosexuality haven’t changed but society has. We have had employees who are openly gay and have been asked to transfer to India and have gone there without any issues. They understand the cultural environment and have had very good experiences.”