Talk Back

By Al Lewis

A DOW JONES NEWSWIRES COLUMN

Gun advocates have just sent a message to Starbucks customers: You can have my iced caramel macchiato when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

Starbucks says it is OK to bring a firearm into its stores in the 43 states where it is legal to openly carry weapons. Just don’t get too jittery from the caffeine, and leave the coffee makers out of it.

“We are asking all interested parties to refrain from putting Starbucks or our partners into the middle of this divisive issue,” the company said in a statement released Wednesday.

“They’re ducking the issue,” said Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign To Prevent Gun Violence.

Um, isn’t that what you’re supposed do when someone walks into your store with a gun? Continue reading…

By Al Lewis 
     A DOW JONES NEWSWIRES COLUMN

Another two million homeowners will suffer foreclosures by the end of this year.

One of them, I am afraid, will be Sarah Schrock, 51, who lives in a quaint, yellow house near Kansas City, Kan.

Schrock isn’t perfect.

She has a low credit score. She has had trouble holding on to jobs. She is deaf because her mother contracted rubella during pregnancy. She reads lips, but she was once denied a promotion after her boss complained to her face that she just doesn’t hear so well.

Schrock had long been taking care of her sickly mother. When her mother died in March 2006, she was forced to take out a new mortgage on the house they had shared.

The deaf, grief-stricken, worn-down caregiver, living alone with her dogs, cats and birds, was the perfect target for a predator.

Schrock has now been fending off a foreclosure petition since March 2008.

Her best remaining hope comes from an imaginary horse named Hayseed that she has been drawing since 1981.

Continue reading…

By Al Lewis

A DOW JONES NEWSWIRES COLUMN

Terry Smiljanich was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Tampa, Fla., in the 1970s, prosecuting loan sharks.

“Just like in the movies, guys would come down from New York to collect,” he recalls.

A deadbeat borrower in one of Smiljanich’s cases even survived the cinematic cliche:

“They went into a bar and grabbed him, took him for a little ride, and told him that if he didn’t find a way to pay them off within 24 hours they were going to break his legs.”

High-interest loans with terrifying consequences is such a lucrative business that America’s banking industry lobbied for years to make them legal.

“Bank of America doesn’t break your legs, but they will ruin your credit and they will hound you to death,” Smiljanich said. Continue reading…

When Charles Satterfield joined Stanford Financial Group in 2005 as managing director of fixed income, he had no idea this meant peddling Certificates of Deposit.

“They wanted to tie my compensation directly to sales of the bank CD,” said Satterfield, a fixed-income investment strategist.

“When grandma came in and wanted stability and a little bit of income, my answer was supposed to be, “Oh, the bank CD.” “When a young guy came in and wanted to grow his principal, my answer was supposed to be, “Oh, the bank CD.” “No matter what the question was, I was supposed to answer, “the bank CD.’” Continue reading…

Sure’d be nice to get some more kumbaya out of Congress these days.

Like the kind I saw on Sunday morning between Arizona’s Sen. John McCain and Colorado’s Sen. Mark Udall.

I was doing my usual TV thing at Denver’s NBC affiliate 9News when 2% of the U.S. Senate — one Republican and one Democrat — walked in, practically hand in hand, getting ready to confront climate change and save our national parks.

It was a great surprise because I’ve always been a big fan of McCain, except for that one time when he ran for president.

Continue reading…

By Al Lewis
    A Dow Jones Column

Bottled water is one of the greatest achievements in the history of marketing.

Consumers used to slurp from a public drinking fountain for free. Now they pay as much as $40 to sip from a bottle – which is even more amazing than paying a monthly tab to watch commercials on cable TV.

You would think guys who spent decades in the advertising and public relations businesses would admire such a cunning manipulation of the free-spending American public. But not Eric Yaverbaum and Mark DiMassimo.

They are lashing back at bottled water. They are even spreading lies about the product to counter depictions of mountain water falls on something that may have spewed from a city spigot.

Continue reading…

By Al Lewis 
A DOW JONES NEWSWIRES COLUMN 
 
Business owners nationwide can’t wait until Friday when the federal minimum wage goes from $6.55 to $7.25 an hour.

That’s according to a group called “Business for a Shared Prosperity.”

This share-the-wealth agitator has assembled a colorful array of endorsements on its Web site, businessforafairminimumwage.org. It quotes Costco Wholesale Corp. (COST) Chief Executive Jim Sinegal and even Adam Smith, the philosophical founder of capitalism.

It also quotes Camille Caramor, who owns a Christmas tree farm in Louisiana:

Continue reading…

By Al Lewis
   A DOW JONES NEWSWIRES COLUMN

You can’t expect a bank that is dumb enough to sue itself to know why it is suing itself.

Yet I could not resist asking Wells Fargo Bank NA why it filed a civil complaint against itself in a mortgage foreclosure case in Hillsborough County, Fla.

“Due to state foreclosure laws, lenders are obligated to name and notify subordinate lien holders,” said Wells Fargo spokesman Kevin Waetke.

Continue reading…

Driving down a gritty boulevard, pocked with empty storefronts, a billboard aims to remind me that this lingering recession really isn’t so bad.

“Recession 101,” the sign reads. “Bill Gates started Microsoft during a recession.”

Well, bully for Bill, I muse.

Surely, that’s not his used van for sale in the cracking asphalt parking lot of the vacant stucco building that is languishing on a cratering commercial real estate market, directly beneath some happy highway message board with his name on it.

I call Microsoft to ask the meaning of this commercial assault on my economic sensibilities. You see, I love this recession. I enjoy waking up in each morning and finding a fresh calamity to write about. Continue reading…

By Al Lewis
   A DOW JONES NEWSWIRES COLUMN

Runners up for “2008 Man of the Year” included entrepreneur extraordinaire Richard Branson, former Motorola Inc. (MOT) Chairman Ed Zander, British retail mogul Philip Green and India’s billionaire industrialist Lakshmi Mittal.

And then there was that Robert Allen Stanford guy.

The brash Houston financier faced looming allegations that his privately held Stanford Financial Group – with 30,000 clients in 131 countries – was a just a Ponzi scheme.

London-based World Finance magazine dubbed him “Man of the Year” anyway.

Continue reading…