Tell It To Al

Taco Bell took out full-page ads in newspapers today, to take a parting shot a law-firm that sued the company for daring to call the meat mixture in its tacos, “beef.”

“Would it kill you to say you’re sorry?” the ads read.

Click here to read more from The Associated Press. And click here to read what I wrote on the mystery meat lawsuit in February.

Alabama law firm Beasley Allen said it dropped its suit because  Taco Bell made changes to its marketing and product disclosures.

The chain says it made no changes to its products or advertising and there was no settlement. And the ads are there to shout it out.

“You got it wrong, and you’re probably feeling pretty bad right about now,” the ads read. “But you know what always helps? Saying to everyone, ‘I’m sorry.’ C’mon, you can do it!”

Back from Montana, I just had to write something on the Berkeley Pit, a giant pool of toxic waste that the Butte chamber of commerce has remarkably turned into a tourism attraction.

Click here to read my column on The Berkeley Pit, an open-pit copper mine, 1,700 feet deep, a mile wide, and flooded with more than 40 billion gallons of contaminated water. It helped make America the electronic nation it is today. And, somehow, I can’t think of anything that serves as a better metaphor for where we are today.

Corporate executives often complain about what union workers get paid, so it is only fair that union workers complain about what corporate executives get paid.

The AFL-CIO today launched a new website with a searchable database of CEO compensation at the top 299 companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500. Annual pay for the big corporate guys calling the shots – and often calling them quite wrong – averages $11.4 million.  That’s hundreds of times what average workers are paid.

Click here to see the AFL-CIO’s new site, Executive PayWatch 2011. It also has a handy Facebook app.

Runaway executive compensation was at the heart of our nation’s near financial collapse in 2008. Executives at giant corporations and banks paid themselves handsomely to take extraordinary risks. And when those bets went bad, the losses when to their shareholders, the taxpayers and the people living in the economy they nearly laid to ruin.

Still, there seems to be no force in the universe capable of reining in CEO pay. Not shareholders, not government, and certainly not unions.

Now here’s an idea: How ’bout you bankers make sure a borrower has the ability to repay before you make a loan?

Nearly three years after the financial crash, which was caused largely by shoddy lending practices,  the Federal Reserve Bank has issued a request for public comment on a proposal to set “minimum mortgage underwriting standards.”

The wheels of reform turn even more slowly than the wheels of justice. Oh, and let’s not encumber every loan with a burdensome new regulation:

“The proposal would apply to all consumer mortgages (except home equity lines of credit, timeshare plans, reverse mortgages, or temporary loans),” the Fed says. Click here to read the Fed’s request for public comment released today. And click here to read more from the Associated Press.

Wow, you mean borrowers will have to actually demonstrate an ability to repay? Is this a good idea, or what? That, Fed. Now those guys are thinkers.

Paul Ceglia’s case against Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg got a lot less laughable last week after the entrepreneur produced a contract and several emails that suggest he should own half of Facebook.

Facebook claims the documents are phony. But Ceglia has hired an impressive law firm and filed these documents in federal court.

Given Facebook’s $50 billion valuation, this is a really high stakes game in which someone is not telling the truth.

Click here to read my column on the newest Facebook flap.

Mary Schapiro, more than two years into her job as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, still battles sentiments in Washington D.C. that regulation is bad for business and nobody needs it.

Speaking before the Society of American Business Editors and Writers in Dallas recently, she said she wishes she could get past this.

It’s understandable the very enterprises that recently sent the U.S. economy into a tailspin want to avoid regulation so they can do this again, but shouldn’t this argument fall on deaf ears with the nation’s top securities cop?

Imagine a traffic cop taking the time to hear your specious argument about why stop lights and speed limits shouldn’t really be hard and fast rules.

Click here to read my column. And click here to read text of Schapiro’s speech.

Most Americans probably don’t know this.  But apparently, the Fed’s job is to push for deregulation of financial markets, sit pat as all kinds of ne’er-do-wells game an increasingly loose financial system, sing the praises of adjustable-rate mortgages for unwary consumers, claim all these subprime loan losses will be contained, scoff at predictions of a looming recession, and when the whole thing blows, be a “first-responder” to the inevitable financial crisis.

On this count, the Fed has done an amazing job. Or so it appears for now. The U.S. economy has indeed averted another Great Depression, but at what cost in the future?

Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank, is among the few at the Fed who believes inflation may be on the way and that it’s now time for the Fed to pull back on it’s extraordinary measures to prop up the economy. “Our job is done,” he said at the Society of American Business Editors and Writers Conference in Dallas last week.

Click here to read my column on Fisher.

Roger Staubach has broken my curse.

I’ve remarked before that whenever I write a column casting someone or something in a favorable light, they end up doing something stupid, or all hell breaks loose, and the world is forced to take a negative view.

A few recent examples:

* I wrote about the amazing transformation of Ponzi schemer Barry Minkow of ZZZZ Best fame into a pastor and fraud investigator. Then he  had to plead guilty to a new felony involving stock trading.

* I wrote about the safety record of the nuclear industry. Then Ka-boom! Earthquake proves me wrong in Japan.

* I wrote a nice column about Warren Buffett. Now he’s whitewashing “Sokol-Gate.”

Staubach, however, has long proved the exception. Click here to read the nice column I wrote on Staubach in 2006.

You’d think after such a positive piece, he’d have no where to go but down, considering my track record. But no, Staubach went on to sell his real estate empire, the Staubach Co., to Jones Lang LaSalle to for more than $700 million in July 2008.

Staubach is a Super Bowl winning Dallas Cowboy’s quarterback who is credited with coining the phrase “Hail Mary,” but this was the best play of his life.  He founded the firm in 1977, and sold it just three months before Wall Street collapsed in October 2008. And get this: In the years before the sale he gave 88% of the company to 300 insiders to help build it. Talk about a team player.

I ran into Staubach again last week at the Society for American Business Editors and Writers conference in Dallas. He told the group that despite some improvements, he still sees the commercial real estate market struggling with over-leveraged properties.

“We’re still going through difficulties,” he said of the market. “Hopefully, we’ll figure them out. I have a lot of confidence that eventually we will.”

As for the economy:

“I am not sure we’re out of the recession,” he said, ” based on the worry of inflation and also the debt were accumulating.”

He remains on the board at Jones Lang LaSalle with the title, “Executive Chairman of the Americas.” He also has a black Labrador named “Ryan” to keep his amazing life in its proper perspective.

Said Staubach: “When you have a dog and the title of executive chairman, it’s the fourth quarter.”

Clearly, Staubach is one of the good guys – a straight shooter to the end.

Warren Buffett is widely considered one of the good guys, at least as far as billionaires can be considered good guys.

But is he living up to his own standards in the stock trading scandal at Berkshire Hathaway?

Click here to read my column in The Sunday Wall Street Journal.

“We have had a series of Lindsay Lohan Congresses.”

Richard Fisher, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, has said it before but it’s worth repeating on a week that narrowly averted a government shutdown:

“We’re addicted debt and spending, and they have shoplifted our children’s future,” Fisher said at the annual meeting of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers in Dallas on Friday.

“It’s very sad.  …  She’s a beautiful creature.  They’re a beautiful creature. They’re  smart and capable. A lot of them are friends of mine.

“But …

“Under both Republican and Democratic leadership, past Congresses have created a fiscal sinkhole that is so deep and so wide it threatens to swallow up our prosperity and render our economy … a slaughterhouse.

“Instead of passing the torch to our children, they have passed them the bill.”

Great analogy, but here’s where it all breaks down for me:

It is still possible to love Lindsay Lohan.