Wayne Parke, Chairman Vanderburgh County Republican Party, will hold a News Conference at 1:30 PM Thursday August 2 to announce who he has selected to fill the ballot vacancy for County Coroner.

Purpose: Announce Coroner Candidate
Time: 1:30 PM
Date: Thursday August 2, 2012
Location: GOP HQ Office
815 John Street
Evansville IN 47713
Phone: 812-425-8207

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He is Sandy Weill, the once-lionized dealmaker who turned our banks into financial “supermarkets” that tie us everyday depositors and Main Street borrowers to the profiteering schemes of unbridled Wall Street traders and the whims of global speculators. Thanks, Sandy — for nothing.

Beginning in the late 1980s, Weill went on a decade-long merger binge, taking over Travelers Insurance, Smith Barney, Aetna, Solomon Brothers and other powerhouses of high finance, culminating in 1998 with his grabbing of Citibank. The whole empire was named Citigroup, Weill was paid a king’s ransom, and his conglomerated entity was widely hailed as a work of genius. Only one problem: It was illegal.

After the financial collapse of 1929 led to the Great Depression, the Glass-Steagall Act was passed to protect people’s deposits from another system-wide crash by prohibiting banks from also owning stock brokerages, insurance corporations, hedge funds and other shadowy, high-risk financial operations.

Picky-picky, said Weill, who hired a hoard of lobbyists to demand that Washington legalize his illegal structure by simply repealing the pesky law he was blatantly violating. He even brought former President Gerald Ford and former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin onto Citigroup’s board of directors to be bipartisan front men leading the charge to kill Glass-Steagall.

Sure enough, in 1999, Congress dutifully went along with Weill’s push for repeal, and Wall Street promptly rushed to amalgamate more Citigroups, thus creating the “too-big-to-fail” system that — only eight years later — did indeed fail. Weill’s “work of genius” forced a multitrillion-dollar bailout on us taxpayers (including $45 billion that went to Citigroup itself), and it wrecked America’s Main Street economy. By then, though, the genius had retired with so much money that he could afford to air-condition hell.

But now — approaching 80 and perhaps hoping to avoid that destination — Weill has suddenly become a born-again convert to the gospel of Glass-Steagall. Late last month, the architect of today’s megabanks called for them to be “split up” so they do not “risk taxpayer dollars” and are “not too big to fail.”

Wow — redemption! Note, though, that Saint Sandy is not returning any of the millions he pocketed from his devilish scheme — just in case he really does need to buy that air conditioner.

Of course, the system has not treated Weill like a crook, even though he not only violated the law but arrogantly flaunted it. No, no, the criminal acts of Street royals like him are countenanced as the unintended consequences of “financial innovation.” His problem, you see, is not that he has a criminal mind, but that he suffers from a rare and tragic genetic flaw called NAD — Narcissistic Avariciousness Disorder.

NAD is what caused Weill to create Citigroup in the first place, then drove him to use his clout to get Congress to legalize his illicit house of cards, which came crashing down on the American economy in 2008.

But having NAD means never having to say “mea culpa,” much less “I’m sorry.” So, while Weill now says from his luxurious retirement bunker that Glass-Stegall should be reinstated, he still insists that he was right to repeal it at the time — and that he’s not responsible for any of the painful economic and social consequences of the collapse that America continues to suffer.

Indeed, he’s even playing the victim, complaining recently on a TV show that “our world hates bankers.” No, Sandy, the world hates greed and self-aggrandizement. You are, after all, the guy who until recently kept a 4-foot-wide wood etching of yourself in your office, grandiosely titling it, “The Shatterer of Glass-Steagall.”

Yet the clueless bankster who shattered that glass so he could reach into the system and help himself to an immense fortune now wants us to remember him as a pious reformer cloaked in the sackcloth of ethical banking.

Who does he think he is fooling? You might remember that just weeks after American taxpayers ponied up the $45 billion bailout of his once-haughty bank, Weill commandeered a Citigroup jet — fueled with our dollars — to give him a free ride to a Mexican resort for a vacation! Reporting on this act of narcissistic avarice, The New York Post wrote Weill’s eternal epitaph in a two-word headline: “Pigs Fly.”

The calls and emails that we received this morning advising us that the City County Observer had been compared to Fox News by Tim Ethridge, Editor of the Courier and Press at the Green River Kiwanis Club gave us all pause to think. Of course given the domination of cable by the Fox News Network we are flattered to be considered by a lifetime journalist to be worthy of such comparison. Knowing what other outlets think of Fox News though we suspect that the comparison was not meant to show the CCO any love or respect.

What we unquestionably do have is a large number of loyal readers of local news that is sourced in local government. It is easy to get caught up in the growth of online traffic but at the end of the day what we want to do is to use our platform to promote good public policy and responsible local government action. After learning of Mr. Ethridge’s comparison to Fox News we decided to do a little self-examination for the things that we are most pleased to have been a part of. Here are what we consider to be our 10 most significant contributions to the betterment of Evansville.

1. Exposing the SNEGAL attempt by the Weinzapfel Administration to eliminate Homestead Tax Credit: The CCO broke this story that lead to the reinstatement of $5.7 Million per year directly into the pockets of Vanderburgh County taxpayers.

2. Reporting on the dense pack technology fee increase of $32 Million sought by Vectren in a way that lead to an IURC field hearing in Evansville and the rejection of that fee by the IURC. The ratepayers of SW Indiana benefit to the tune of $32 Million over the next 20 years.

3. Earthcare Energy: When the rest of the local media was fawning over the prospect of loaning $5 Million without vetting the recipients, the CCO was busy aiding in the vetting process and reading the business plan that GAGE should have been doing. Eventually, Mayor Winnecke saw the light but the end of this has yet to play itself out.

4. Exposing the SNEGAL contract that the Weinzapfel Administration and GAGE used to pay former DMD Director Tom Barnett. The benefit from this is that someday there may be competitive salary schedules in local government and sneaky deals like this one will most likely never happen again.

5. Exposing the excessive price of the $18 Million Roberts Stadium ball fields that was proposed by the CVB as compared to other ball parks across the country. The result was that the project was halted saving the taxpayers $18 Million. By the way if the price had been realistic the CCO would have supported the project at another site.

6. Exposing the dilapidated state of the cemeteries and parks owned and operated by the City of Evansville: The result is a new awareness on the part of the Winnecke Administration to make a commitment to keep the cemeteries presentable for what is a very token amount of money.

7. The analysis of the valuation of the downtown Convention Hotel: Our analysis that was conducted in four hours on a Saturday morning was validated almost to the dollar by the $105,000 spent by the Redevelopment Commission on the Hunden Study. This is a case where the CCO could have saved the taxpayers $105,000 if only the two most recent administrations would have had the good sense to listen.

8. Exposing the financial debacle and neglect of the McCurdy project: The project is now slated to be completed with private money as it should have been all along.

9. Exposure of the financial failure of the Front Door Pride program

10. Financial analysis of the Vision 1505 (Safe House) project where the Evansville Housing Authority is spending $7.6 Million to complete a project that could have easily been done in another way for well below $1 Million: Once again, the City Administration did not listen to the CCO analysis and is essentially wasting over $6.5 Million of tax dollars. The best result here is that this type of senseless spending is ended in the future.

So, there you have it. What we are most pleased to have been a part of are the times that we have exposed government malfeasance to save the taxpayers of Vanderburgh County significant sums of money. This was the first time that we have ever written the numbers down but all things considered it is not a stretch to state that our watchdog efforts and willingness to report without fear of repercussion will be saving the people of SW Indiana nearly $100 Million over the next 20 years. Would the Homestead Tax Grab, the Vectren fee increase, the $18 Million ball fields, the Earthcare loan, etc. have been stopped in their tracks without the CCO? We shall leave that up to you our readers to decide.

It should also be obvious that community health, cleanliness, and tidy appearances are important to the CCO. We praise the leadership for cleaning the city and thrash them when things like the cemetery disgrace and needles in the parks are neglected or swept under the rug. There is much work to do in this department so stay tuned. We must say that Mayor Winnecke has been a breath of fresh air in the cosmetic problems that Evansville has suffered from for many years.

Our MOLES keep us ahead of the other new outlets and we can’t thank them enough for doing so. Our Moles also know they can trust us to expose things that need to be exposed without compromising them personally.

So to the question of the day, are we like a local version of Fox News? We do not endorse political candidates or party agendas, while Fox clearly does. We thrive on saving taxpayers money through exposing waste, fraud, abuse, and stupidity. All supposed news outlets have this as a goal. We promote actions to make Evansville more appealing. National news does not even give good lip service to such things.

The CCO is nothing more and nothing less than an online publication with three part time people who are not on salary that wants to see good public policy on a local level. We take it a step further in that this policy needs to simple enough and practical enough that people with common sense get it.

To paraphrase the great President Harry Truman, “the CCO does not give anyone hell, we publish the truth without fear, and the purveyors of rotten public policy think it is hell”. Keeping government accountable is the only reason that a free press exists.

So Mr. Ethridge, the CCO may have the ratings of Fox News locally, but we are not like Fox News. We are much more like Thomas Paine’s pamphlet called Common Sense. If there had been more common sense in Evansville in recent history there would be no City County Observer and the audience question this morning would have never been asked.