Red Cross seeking donations

I'm in Chicago for a consumer law conference. While walking to the conference site a young woman approached me on the sidewalk, asking me to donate to the Red Cross. I told her that I'm not interested, because too much of the money I would donate would go to over-paid executives. She quickly responded that the head of the Red Cross only makes a bit more than $600,000. I told her that this was outrageous. She asked, "So you would never give to a charity where the person in charge makes $600,000?" I said, "Never." The Red Cross is not alone in paying huge salaries to its executives.   Here is a list of the salaries of some of the executive salaries of some of the biggest charities in the United States.   Many of these charity leaders earn less than $200,000. I know a lot of teachers who work every bit as hard as any executive, yet they are paid a pittance compared to $600,000. I know many people who believe in a cause enough to work untold hours for the cause for no pay at all. It seems to me that charities ought to work harder to find leaders who believe in the cause enough that they will do it for outrageous salaries. For comparison, the salary of members of Congress is $174,000 per year. A justice on the United States Supreme Court earns $223,000 per year. Ralph Nader lives off of $25,000 per year.  The average chief executive (charity and non-charity) in the United States earns less than $300,000/year.

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Succinct bio of Robert Rubin

At Truthdig.com, Robert Scheer offers the following condensed bio of Robert Robin, one of the architects of too-big-to-fail banks. It puzzles Scheer that, while Bernie Madoff is sitting in prison, Rubin, whose actions have caused far more damage than Madoff, remains out and about, after having served as an Obama advisor. Here's the an excerpt from the bio:

Rubin’s tenure atop the world of high finance began when he was co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, before he became Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary and pushed through the reversal of the Glass-Steagall Act, an action that legalized the formation of Citigroup and other “too big to fail” banking conglomerates. Rubin’s destructive impact on the economy in enabling these giant corporate banks to run amok was far greater than that of swindler Bernard Madoff, who sits in prison under a 150-year sentence while Rubin sits on the Harvard Board of Overseers, as chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and as a leader of the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project. Rubin was rewarded for his efforts on behalf of Citigroup with a top job as chairman of the bank’s executive committee and at least $126 million in compensation. That was “compensation” for steering the bank to the point of a bankruptcy avoided only by a $45 billion taxpayer bailout and a further guarantee of $300 billion of the bank’s toxic assets.

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Americans are moving their money away from banks

Last year I moved my money. I made the move in response to a campaign started by Arianna Huffington at the end of 2009.  She urged that we stop supporting big banks (especially too-big-to-fail banks) and start supporting local banks and credit unions. I moved my money to a credit union (I chose Gateway Metro Credit Union), and I've never looked back. Credit unions are non-profit; they are service oriented, offering low fees or no fees. My new credit union offered me great customer service. In my city of St. Louis, credit unions offer you the use of each others' ATMs without fees. When I asked what the minimum balance was for my new checking account, the woman from the credit union said, "There is no minimum balance." I had been struggling with my bank for 3 weeks to set up an HSA savings account, for which it was going to charge me $25/year. The credit union had the account set up in 15 minutes and is not charging me any fee. The credit union offers online check paying and other account services comparable to those offered by the bank I formerly used.  I am much happier doing my banking at a local credit union, especially thanks to the superior customer service. Bottom line: If you are still keeping your money at a big bank, there are many good reasons for moving it. Think about taking it local, especially to a credit union. It turns out that after some of the big banks starting imposing new fees last month, there has been a mini-stampede away from the big banks and toward credit unions:

The Credit Union National Association (CUNA) reports that a whopping 650,000 Americans have joined credit unions since Sept. 29 — the date that Bank of America announced it would start charging a $5 monthly debit fee, a move it backed down on this week. To put that in perspective, there were only 600,000 new members for credit unions in all of 2010. “These results indicate that consumers are clearly making a smarter choice by moving to credit unions where, on average, they will save about $70 a year in fewer or no fees, lower rates on loans and higher return on savings,” said CUNA President Bill Cheney.

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Who is getting hurt by U.S. drone attacks?

How certain are we that the people being killed by U.S. drones are people who are threatening the United States? Linking to a BBC article based on reports on the ground, Glenn Greenwald discusses the hundreds of civilian casualties about which we almost never hear anything at all, many of these deaths involving children:

It’s easy to cheer for a leader who regularly extinguishes the lives of innocent men, women, teeangers and young children when you can remain blissfully free of hearing about the victims. It’s even easier when the victims all have Muslim-ish names and live in the parts of the Muslim world we’ve been taught to view as a cauldron of sub-human demons. . . . Everyone knows that the American President cannot commit “murder”; that’s only for common criminals and Muslim dictators (whom the West starts to dislike). But however one wants to define these acts, the fact is that we have spent a full decade bringing violence to multiple countries in that region and — in all sorts of ways — ending the lives of countless innocent people.
How can one distinguish Taliban from non-Taliban while operating a drone? Many argue that you can't:
Viewed from a drone, any adult male in the tribal areas can look like a target, according to Mirza Shahzad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer who is taking on the CIA. "A Taliban or non-Taliban would be dressed in the same way," he said. "Everyone has a beard, a turban and an AK-47 because every person carries a weapon in that area, so anyone could be target."
This story reminds me of Amy Goodman's observation (and Jon Stewart's) that the United States excels at engaging in wars that remain sterile (and thus acceptable to Americans) because of the stunning lack of photographs. It is their contention (and mine) that if we had even a minimal level of reporting from the U.S. war zones, that our wars would quickly end. I suspect that the BBC is also correct that given manner in which drones are being used, that they are causing a lot of people in the Middle East to hate the United States.  In other words, I have great concern that our drone wars are counter-productive to American long-term objectives. Many of the moral issues caused by the increasing use of war robots are discussed by Peter Singer at this TED lecture.

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Fines for barking dogs in LA

A recent story in the LA Times addresses a topic near and dear to me, because in years past I suffered the aural assault of five neighborhood dogs barking excessively. I even bought the neighbors (two of my neighbors) no-bark collars for their dogs, but they refused to use them. Eventually, the neighbors (who were all otherwise pleasant people ) moved away, taking their dogs with them.  I'm talking about barking that began at 6 am right below my bedroom window and continued off and on until midnight. It would penetrate right through closed windows and closed doors.  It would be as loud inside our house as we listened to the TV set.  The problem is that some people are not at all adverse to noise, but I am admittedly sensitive. Barking dogs at close range keep me from thinking, playing the guitar and sleeping.  The barking dogs to the west were a different kind of nuisance from the cat loving lady to the east (she had more than 20 stray cats, and also had an indoor 50 pound African serval that ate one of her other indoor cats). From the above article in the LA Times, we learn that the city of Los Angeles is taking this problem of barking dogs seriously. Owners of excessively barking dogs will be fined. What is excessive barking?

A dog's barking would be considered excessive if it continued for 10 minutes or more, or intermittently for 30 minutes or more within a three-hour period . . .
The fines are hefty, as I believe they should be:
Under the changes, dog owners would face fines starting at $250 for a first offense, $500 for a second and $1,000 for a third if a hearing conducted by the Department of Animal Services determines that a dog barks too much.
I'm not against dogs. My family has one, and you will occasionally hear her bark a couple of times, but that's usually it (except when a possum sits on the fence).  I am happy for the people of LA who will now have a better chance of enjoying the lack of barking.

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