Globe 06/16/04 NEW GIG FOR OLD POLITICAL HAND

The Boston Globe
June 16, 2004, Wednesday ,THIRD EDITION
SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A21
LENGTH: 770 words
HEADLINE: NEW GIG FOR OLD POLITICAL HAND
BYLINE: BY SCOT LEHIGH

THE LAST YEAR HAS BEEN A TIME OF TRAUMA AND TRANSITION FOR MICHAEL GOLDMAN.

After bumping his shin on a plastic crate last July and apparently lodging a sliver in his right leg, the hyperkinetic political consultant lay in the hospital for long weeks at real risk of losing the limb. Draining and treatment with intravenous antibiotics finally arrested a severe infection that had spread from just above his ankle to over his knee, swelling the leg to twice its normal size. Even after being released from the hospital, Goldman was confined to bed for another four months.

Finally recovered, he is now revving at about three-quarters speed. But after more than a quarter-century of political combat, Goldman, who cut his teeth as a top aide at the old Metropolitan District Commission back in the first Dukakis administration, is leaving politics for a new opportunity: a six-days-a-week talk show on Bloomberg Radio.

The show, "Simply Put," is co-hosted by Goldman and former MetroWest Daily News columist and author Tom Moroney. Currently a weekend affair, in mid-July it will be become a regular week-day show on WBBR-AM in New York City, a station whose signal reaches as far southwest as Philadelphia and as far northeast as Worcester and that also covers the Cape and the Islands. "Simply Put" will also be carried on the XM, the Sirius, and the World Space satellite systems.

In a medium that often resembles a partisan food fight, with bombast and insults crowding out insightful discussion, Goldman, a diehard Democrat, wants the show to offer a different sort of listening experience.

"We're not looking to do liberal or conservative," he says. "The trouble with talk radio is that they have come to believe that the only thing people want is to hear their most extreme positions - with neither side acknowledging that the other side has any validity to its arguments - when what people really want is smart, balanced talk."

Goldman, who has done several weekend shows for WRKO over the years, says he hopes listeners will come away feeling as though they have heard a truly intelligent discussion and have learned something new from it.

Although he is obviously relishing the new opportunity, the full-time radio job also means ending his work for political candidates. For someone who has been talking to Goldman about campaigns and politics for two decades, it's hard to imagine an election season without his strategic perspective, his irrepressible energy, his imaginative spin - and, yes, his deep-on-deadline calls that are nigh unto impossible to end. Teased about the latter, Goldman laughs good-naturedly. "Well," he says, "you have to take the bad with the good."

There has been plenty of good. The 55-year-old consultant has been a fixture in Massachusetts politics for a quarter century. In 2002 he was instrumental in Bob Reich's late-starting gubernatorial campaign; in 2000 he worked on Bill Bradley's presidential bid. He was the strategist behind Phil Johnston's underdog congressional run in 1996, a long-odds apparent upset that was later overturned by the courts.

In 1986 he nudged a bumbling Joe Kennedy out of the pages of Paris Match and into the local papers in the Eighth District. He labored long to help George Keverian of Everett unseat then Speaker Thomas McGee in a legendary legislative leadership fight in 1983-84 and worked for Scott Harshbarger in his successful primary challenge to sitting attorney general Jim Shannon in 1990.

And he was Bill Keating's right-hand-man for his failed challenge to then Senate President William M. Bulger in 1993-94. Indeed, as he sits at his desk telling old war stories, Goldman can't help chortling about the way Bulger described him in his 1996 memoir: "He was able, ambitious, intelligent and the practitioner of an utterly ruthless calculus." Now, being called "utterly ruthless" by Bill Bulger is a little like being labeled a carnivore by a coyote, and Goldman is still tickled by the irony.

Ruthless? No. Hard-charging? Certainly. But there has always been about the man a generosity, a loyalty - and, it must be said, a volubility - that is unusual in a trade of political hired guns.

"He is a wonderful person," declares Johnston, now the state Democratic Party chairman. "He is ferociously loyal to his clients and his friends."

Which is why, as he embarks on his new career in radio, and leaves the world of political consulting behind, the many who count Michael Goldman as a friend will be wishing him well.

Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com.



NOTES:
SCOT LEHIGH

FT 02/14/05 Push for Korean directors puts pressure on StanChart

Financial Times (London, England)
February 14, 2005 Monday
USA Edition 1
SECTION: FRONT PAGE - COMPANIES & MARKETS; Pg. 15
LENGTH: 424 words
HEADLINE: Push for Korean directors puts pressure on StanChart
BYLINE: By ANNA FIFIELD
DATELINE: SEOUL

Seoul's financial watchdog is putting pressure on Standard Chartered, the UK-based bank, to ensure Koreans make up half the board of directors at Korea First Bank when it completes its Pounds 1.75bn (Dollars 3.27bn) takeover in April.

The Financial Supervisory Service's guidance is likely to pose a challenge for London-based StanChart as only three of KFB's 16 directors are Korean.

Although just a recommendation, the advice is part of a broader push in South Korea to curb foreign influence over domestic banks - a drive that could also affect Citigroup, which last year acquired KorAm bank, and Lone Star, the US private equity fund that controls Korea Exchange Bank.

The FSS wants to institute regulations limiting the number of foreigners allowed to sit on the boards of domestic banks and impose residency requirements on non-Korean directors.

The National Assembly is due this month to consider a revision to the Banking Act that would require at least half of bank directors to have Korean nationality. It would also require directors to have lived in South Korea for at least a year before being appointed and live in the country throughout their tenure.

"At the moment, there is no law that can compel banks to limit the number of foreign directors," a senior FSS official told the JoongAng Daily newspaper.

The watchdog confirmed to the Financial Times at the weekend that it was asking StanChart to follow its recommendation. It expected StanChart to respond positively because of its commitment to "localisation".

A StanChart official could not confirm whether the bank had received the request but repeated the company's commitment to "diversity" on its board. StanChart's existing Korean business is headed by Tom McCabe, a US citizen, while KFB is led by Frenchman Robert Cohen.

StanChart last month clinched a deal to buy the country's seventh largest lender for Won3,400bn, its biggest acquisition and the largest foreign investment in South Korea.

The regulator's request comes amid public anxiety over the Dollars 1bn-plus profits made by Carlyle and Newbridge, the private equity funds, when they sold their stakes in KorAm and KFB respectively.

Lone Star will be able to sell its half-share in KEB, the country's fifth largest lender, when its lock-in period expires in October. HSBC, initially the front-runner for KFB but whose offer was trumped by StanChart, is expected to be interested in KEB.

Investors are attracted to South Korea because of the improving profit opportunities after a clean-up of underperforming institutions.

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The New York Times
February 8, 2005 Tuesday
SECTION: Section A; Column 6; Editorial Desk; Pg. 25
LENGTH: 742 words
HEADLINE: Spearing The Beast
BYLINE: By PAUL KRUGMAN.
E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com

President Bush isn't trying to reform Social Security. He isn't even trying to "partially privatize" it. His plan is, in essence, to dismantle the program, replacing it with a system that may be social but doesn't provide security. And the goal, as with his tax cuts, is to undermine the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt.

Why do I say that the Bush plan would dismantle Social Security? Because for Americans who entered the work force after the plan went into effect and who chose to open private accounts, guaranteed benefits -- income you receive after retirement even if everything else goes wrong -- would be nearly eliminated.

Here's how it would work. First, workers with private accounts would be subject to a ''clawback'': in effect, they would have to mortgage their future benefits in order to put money into their accounts.

Second, since private accounts would do nothing to improve Social Security's finances -- something the administration has finally admitted -- there would be large benefit cuts in addition to the clawback.

Jason Furman of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that the guaranteed benefits left to an average worker born in 1990, after the clawback and the additional cuts, would be only 8 percent of that worker's prior earnings, compared with 35 percent today. This means that under Mr. Bush's plan, workers with private accounts that fared poorly would find themselves destitute.

Why expose workers to that much risk? Ideology. "Social Security is the soft underbelly of the welfare state," declares Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth and the Cato Institute. "If you can jab your spear through that, you can undermine the whole welfare state."

By the welfare state, Mr. Moore means Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- social insurance programs whose purpose, above all, is to protect Americans against the extreme economic insecurity that prevailed before the New Deal. The hard right has never forgiven F.D.R. (and later L.B.J.) for his efforts to reduce that insecurity, and now that the right is running Washington, it's trying to turn the clock back to 1932.

Medicaid is also in the cross hairs. And if Mr. Bush can take down Social Security, Medicare will be next.

The attempt to ''jab a spear'' through Social Security complements the strategy of ''starve the beast,'' long advocated by right-wing intellectuals: cut taxes, then use the resulting deficits as an excuse for cuts in social spending. The spearing doesn't seem to be going too well at the moment, but the starving was on full display in the budget released yesterday.

To put that budget into perspective, let's look at the causes of the federal budget deficit. In spite of the expense of the Iraq war, federal spending as a share of G.D.P. isn't high by historical standards -- in fact, it's slightly below its average over the past 20 years. But federal revenue as a share of G.D.P. has plunged to levels not seen since the 1950's.

Almost all of this plunge came from a sharp decline in receipts from the personal income tax and the corporate profits tax. These are the taxes that fall primarily on people with high incomes -- and in 2003 and 2004, their combined take as a share of G.D.P. was at its lowest level since 1942. On the other hand, the payroll tax, which is the main federal tax paid by middle-class and working-class Americans, remains at near-record levels.

You might think, given these facts, that a plan to reduce the deficit would include major efforts to increase revenue, starting with a rollback of recent huge tax cuts for the wealthy. In fact, the budget contains new upper-income tax breaks.

Any deficit reduction will come from spending cuts. Many of those cuts won't make it through Congress, but Mr. Bush may well succeed in imposing cuts in child care assistance and food stamps for low-income workers. He may also succeed in severely squeezing Medicaid -- the only one of the three great social insurance programs specifically intended for the poor and near-poor, and therefore the most politically vulnerable.

All of this explains why it's foolish to imagine some sort of widely acceptable compromise with Mr. Bush about Social Security. Moderates and liberals want to preserve the America F.D.R. built. Mr. Bush and the ideological movement he leads, although they may use F.D.R.'s image in ads, want to destroy it.

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