Editorials/Junk Bonds Into Scrap/Rooney Tunes
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS JUNK BONDS INTO SCRAP Washington, D.C. T he current concerto grosso of sad 1 news being played by the pundits of this unhappy town is that nowadays all the history is being made...
...He opposes this act of sexual congress...
...But resale restrictions written into the law by liberal congressmen may prevent buyers from realizing the enhanced value of these renovated units...
...There are some very sensitive vegetarians out there, who can always call on their cousins, the fruitarians, for support in a protest against CBS and the diabolical Andy Rooney...
...But an attempt to remove the Morrison provision was defeated in the House...
...Nor are they happy that the demise of Drexel Burnham Lambert and the junk-bond bubble has given them little opportunity to ham it up...
...According to Armey, the key congressmen to resist tenant ownership when the relevant sections of the 1987 law were debated in the House were Barney Frank (D-Mass...
...Companies burdened with junk-bond debt have been allowed to deduct interest payments on certain particularly junky junk bonds, though they never make interest payments in cash...
...Another problem written into the 1987 Housing Act, and not generally understood by conservatives, is that for each unit of public housing sold to a resident management corporation, a replacement unit must be provided, whether by "production, acquisition, or rehabilitation of vacant public housing units...
...Had government ended that policy the present bankruptcies might not be taking place...
...According to David K. Groo, the program manager for Robert Woodson's National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, this "one-for-one" replacement provision will "double the number of units" available to low-income families under the HUD umbrella (because the old units will remain subject to low-income eligibility rules...
...It was indeed, and when the time was ripe greedy operators conspired with politicians to thwart the regulations, buy off venal regulators, and render conscientious regulators impotent...
...Meanwhile, he is co-sponsoring, with Rep...
...T he current concerto grosso of sad 1 news being played by the pundits of this unhappy town is that nowadays all the history is being made elsewhere...
...But according to Stuart Butler, the Heritage Foundation's director of domestic policy studies, it is the changeover from management by the local housing authority to tenant management that will make all the difference...
...Well, on the day ROONEY TUNES T here was a day when the wits and 1 sages of television were cosmopolitan gadflies such as John Kenneth Galbraith, William F. Buckley, Jr., and my good friend Gore Vidal...
...Fauntroy, although a co-sponsor, was not enthusiastic about voucher replacement when I asked him...
...According to a minority staffer on the House Subcommittee on Housing and Community Development, the congressman most adamantly opposed to this measure is Henry Gonzalez of Texas, the chairman of the subcommittee, who believes that each unit sold must be replaced by a "hard" unit...
...A couple of years ago corporate takeover artists of prudent disposition recognized that junk bonds had inflated corporate prices and backed off...
...is under the direction of the likes of Andy Rooney —though do not look for Rooney On CBS for the next three months...
...On the resale restrictions, he recalled, Frank was "the most articulate person on the floor feigning compassion on the issue...
...Now the Sardonic Thought Dept...
...In fact he has actually said on a CBS special that "many of the ills which kill us are self-induced...
...Armey said he thought the provision "was designed to keep the unions involved in public housing...
...Tenants who buy units will have to sell them back either to the co-op or the public housing authority...
...Sir Jimmy Goldsmith returned to Europe where prices seemed more reasonable...
...Now, as we do not really know what Rooney said—unless you take- Bull as infallible—and thus cannot know what remarks might "approximate" Rooney's remarks, my guess is that commentary—at least on CBS —is going to become even more inane...
...That is a new record in brazenness...
...Actually, government had a hand in creating the speculative boom and bust...
...What has gotten Rooney into trouble is that he spoke his mind about anal intercourse among homosexuals, relating it to AIDS...
...Project-based" means that these vouchers will not be "portable...
...There is no other evidence that Rooney mentioned race and the New York Post has published similar remarks by Rooney about school dropouts that carefully avoid the matter of race, but this will do Rooney no good either...
...What is more, CBS's problems have just begun...
...Doubtless as the Republic's roll call of aggrieved groups grows our indignant alcoholics will be able to silence commentators as will drug addicts, and gluttons—though apparently not cigarette smokers...
...As for such topics as garbage collection in foreign lands and menopause, surely he will stay clear of these...
...The response to these men was not very hospitable in Washington, and it was downright hostile in New York...
...Too much alcohol, too much food, drugs, homosexual unions, cigarettes...
...Rooney has been suspended for a lapse into free expression...
...No one wanted to be blamed when the boom collapsed...
...The action is elsewhere, in Eastern Europe, on Wall Street, alas and boo hoo...
...In the private sector, he said, owners "become part electrician, part plumber, part painter...
...they will be permitted to buy their units when they return...
...They're all known to lead quite often to premature death...
...policy...
...that newspapers reported Drexel Burnham Lambert's bankruptcy, they also reported that Forstmann had left the sidelines and bought Gulfstream for some $175 million less than earlier rumors suggested, and without junk bonds...
...Thus Kimi Gray will have low-income tenants with the right to manage their Tom Bethel...
...Both were chided for their prudence...
...At any rate Bull claims that Rooney said, "Blacks have watered down their genes because the less intelligent ones are the ones that have the most children...
...Nor is he helped by the fact that we have only Bull's testimony that Rooney spoke of blacks...
...CAPITOL IDEAS HOMESTEADING ON THE LIBERAL PLANTATION T he story so far (Capitol Ideas, TAS, 1 February 1990): About eighteen months ago, the keys of ownership to the 464-unit Kenilworth-Parkside public housing project in Washington, D.C...
...Armey wanted," he said...
...A problem in present-day Washington is that the city is filled with people striking the heroic stance while on the take...
...Rooney...
...If the professionally indignant can silence Rooney for things he might not have said, you can be sure that others with a bone to pick are going to attempt the same coercion...
...Actually, when CBS admits Rooney back from exile he probably will desist from all non-vegetable jokes and may even stay clear of vegetable jokes...
...Now we read that three weeks before putting its 5,300 employees out of work Drexel Burnham Lambert awarded $350 million in bonuses to top executives...
...I hasten to say that Andy Rooney's commentary is not to my liking, as lime slacks worn with a blue blazer are not to my liking or men licking lollipops in public...
...That is something that Mr...
...It is no protection for candor...
...Doubtless the children would be improved by one of his wry and goofy discourses, say on the funny varieties of garbage disposal adopted by the different peoples of the world, how to react when menopause afflicts one's by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Tenant management, said Armey, is predicated on the right of poor people "to put their own sweat equity into their own homes, just as you and I do...
...Tenants who move away from Kenilworth-Parkside will move to the bottom of the voucher waiting list in any new jurisdiction...
...What would they have the United States do in Eastern Europe, unleash General George Patton...
...In a frenzy to make deals lucrative for lawyers and investment bankers, corporations were being burdened with onerous debt that at the first sign of economic downturn would flatten them...
...I am not sure it can stand up to the scrutiny of the committee...
...For two years one of the masters of 1980s finance, Theodore J. Forstmann, has been loyally showing up at congressional hearings to alert the Congress that the junk bond has been transformed from a benign instrument of economic growth into a narcotic fit only for addicts...
...They have a vested interest in the present moment...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1990 11...
...The project is now being renovated with HUD funds (possibly $35 million...
...A better policy is to stand by the First Amendment...
...Armey quoted Vento to this effect before a group of public housing residents...
...Bruce Morrison (D-Conn...
...Washington will move to enchain the bond markets in regulations...
...The heavily affected buffoonery of his persona is more appropriate to Saturday morning children's programming than to adult commentary...
...To remain in tenant-managed public housing, occupants will either have to stay poor (to remain eligible for subsidy), or buy units with resale restrictions...
...Responding to the complaints of militant homosexuals, Rooney granted an interview to a reporter from a homo10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1990 sexual magazine (that is to say a magazine written for homosexuals, not a magazine that loves other magazines), one Chris Bull, which is an ideal name for a journalist, don't you think...
...There is a poetic touch to the present junk-bond collapse...
...Well, it is not as though they were not told...
...and Bruce Vento (D-Minn...
...The danger is that tenants will lack an incentive to buy units...
...Notice the phrase, "so as not to impose any new rights . . . on the tenants...
...He told me two or three times of his "firm conviction that the private sector cannot and will not build housing for low-and moderate-income people...
...Most of us could not afford to own our homes if we couldn't go in and fix our own leaky faucets or replace light switches...
...Walter Fauntroy of D.C., the (1990) Urban Homestead Act, the principal provision of which will circumvent the problem of one-for-one replacement of public housing units by permitting the use of housing vouchers to meet the replacement requirement...
...Forstmann, though abounding with cash, sat on the sidelines and waited for market discipline to assert itself...
...Washington may be able to get back in the action by regulating the bond market further, but by doing so it will not improve the market or rid it of speculators...
...Homosexuals complained...
...The president of CBS News, in announcing Rooney's three-month trip to Siberia, asseverated that "I have made it clear that CBS News cannot tolerate such remarks or anything that approximates such comments, since they in no way reflect the views of this organization...
...Bruce Morrison himself defended the provision on the floor with the argument that its language "was carefully chosen so as not to impose any new rights or restrictions on the tenants, but to preserve the rights that already exist for the [union] employees...
...were transferred to a tenant management corporation, presided over by Kimi Gray...
...Families have been moved out to accommodate the reconstruction...
...Washington is a pleasant Southern town with no particular indigenous industry aside from government, which in prosperous and peaceful times is bland stuff...
...They were ready to take him out and hang him," Armey said...
...And Bruce Vento, by Tom Bethell he said, "actually argued that these people don't have the ability to tend to their own affairs...
...In an industry where freedom of thought and of expression are reverenced, Mr...
...If you have ever wondered why television commentary is so bland and childish, ponder the fate of Mr...
...Morrison that would tie the resident management association to the existing union contracts of the public housing authority...
...but subsidies and resale restrictions might keep them wards of the state...
...The congressman who today remains closely involved with these issues is Dick Armey, Republican of Texas, first elected to Congress in 1984, and responsible for putting together the successful military base-closing measure last year...
...In modern liberal America cigarette smokers have no rights...
...James Grant, founder and editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, has for an even longer time warned that giant corporations Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...More accurately, "so as not to give them any new rights...
...Washington is peripheral to the historic events shaking the world...
...But he was also troubled because "what was envisioned as a way station [i.e., public housing] became permanent...
...own project and permission to buy units within it...
...I can easily see his scrooched up face coming on the screen at the end of an hour of Saturday morning cartoons and commercials for repulsive breakfast foods as he intones one of his oh-what-a-fuzzy-wuzzy-am-I soliloquies...
...In either event, they will be encouraged to stay on at Kenilworth-Parkside, which will receive from HUD a "project-based" block of Section 8 housing vouchers, covering all rental and utility costs for seven years...
...If broadcasters do not, their problems with free speech will get worse...
...That has landed Rooney in hot water with black leaders as well as homosexuals, and it has done him no good to deny that he referred to blacks...
...The First Amendment in American media is a protection for flippancies and affronts against the usual easy targets, the presidency, the clergy, the local tycoon, apple pie...
...1=1 tabby cat, or an amusing vegetable—broccoli is always a favorite with this sort of wit...
...And what about the collapse of the junk-bond market and of Drexel Burnham Lambert...
...They drop out of school early, do drugs and get pregnant...
...The breakup of the Communist empire is in large part the consequence of forty years of steadfast U.S...
...The pundits and politicos who live here have been accustomed to the sound and fury of great events and do not like it that they are not center stage while democracy and capitalism revive the feudal states now so starkly revealed by the collapse of the Iron Curtain...
...A rmey mentioned another problem that I was not aware of—a provision put into the law by Rep...
...Now here in Washington the town's wizards will soon be stepping forward with a cure to ensure that no such boom will ever take place again...
...The list of taboo subjects in America is growing even as the number of irked minorities grows...
...were changing hands for no sound economic reason other than the short-term profiteering of greedy deal-makers...
...is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...Vento has never forgiven me for that...
...In other words, if a 500-unit public housing project is sold to its tenants, the local housing authority would not have to build or renovate 500 more units, but would be permitted to issue 500 new vouchers, which can then be used by low-income people to defray the cost of housing in the private sector...
...Incidentally, the disparagement of them came from both conservatives and liberals...
...But was not the S&L business secured by regulations...
...His error has been to speak candidly...
...They have all been bought off in one way or another, and they do not want to take any of the heroic actions their blood-curdling boasts might imply...
Vol. 23 • April 1990 • No. 4
