Why the Wisners aren’t rich and famous
The other day a distant relative wrote me, after seeing my post about my ancestor Edward Wisner. He was researching family history, and sent me a link to a story about the Louisiana Land and Exploration Company.
LL&E traces its roots to the 19th century, when midwestern businessman Edward Wisner moved to Louisiana for his health. Wisner was struck by swampy southern Louisiana’s resemblance to the low-lying Netherlands, where industrious farmers had reclaimed millions of acres for farming. Envisioning farming on a grand scale, Wisner bought hundreds of thousands of acres, built levees, and drained the land.
Wisner’s plans, however, were thwarted by southern Louisiana’s severe weather. A 1915 hurricane destroyed many of the levees that Wisner had constructed. The venture’s finances faltered and in time there were foreclosures. Much of the land was eventually taken over by a group of midwesterners led by Henry Timken, who owned an Ohio ball bearing company. Timken hoped to lease the land to fur trappers.
In 1925 speculator Edward Simms approached Timken with an idea for a company that would explore for oil in the almost 600,000 coastal acres Timken then controlled. Timken agreed and in 1926 exchanged his acres for shares in the Border Research Corporation.
It soon became apparent that the land owned by Louisiana Land and Exploration, as the company was renamed in 1927, was rich in petroleum resources. In 1928 LL&E signed a contract with Texas Co. (now Texaco) in which that company agreed to lease all of LL&E’s acreage around ten productive salt domes.... In the contract, which was very generous for its time, Texaco agreed to pay LL&E a 25-percent royalty on production and 8 1/3 percent of its net profits on a dome-by-dome basis. The contract would remain in effect for as long as Texaco continued to drill on the acreage.
And so it is that the descendants of Edward Wisner do not have large trust funds full of Texaco money. However, for $18 we can still buy an original LLE stock certificate (pictured above).
LLE’s other claim to fame is that in 1987 fourteen leucistic alligators were born on the company’s alligator farm. These white gators were not albinos—their eyes were blue, not pink—but they were apparently quite charming.
The white gators were caught almost as they hatched. They were cute little critters, easily held and cooed over by television reporters.
“They totally infatuated us, and we found out they did the same to other people,” says Leighton Steward, LL&E’s former president.
Questions for the mayor of Marion
Wait a second ... isn’t NPR supposed to be the liberal alternative to all the hatespeak on the radio? At least a little bit liberal?
You wouldn’t know it from the astonishingly uncritical piece on Wayne Seybold, the mayor of Marion, Indiana (birthplace of James Dean and site of the last confirmed lynching of black people in the North). In a piece that appears online as “Progress And Promise For A Town Once In Crisis,” Noah Adams praises Seybold for the various steps he has taken to improve the local economy.
These include bringing Starbucks and Kohl’s into town, offering tax breaks and “land and buildings almost free” to corporations, privatizing garbage collection, and selling or giving away some of the city’s 22 parks.
Here are some of the questions Noah Adams didn’t ask.
1. Where do you think the money goes when people buy their coffee at a local coffeeshop? Where do you think it goes when they buy their coffee at Starbucks? What do you think more Starbucks stores will do to the owners of coffeeshops?
2. You are quoted as saying you think “brand names help bring factories.” What gives you that idea?
3. How many people lost their jobs when you privatized garbage collection? What happened to their families? Are you really saving enough money to compensate for the cost of increased unemployment and social services?
4. Why do you think “we don’t need 22 parks” and that it’s better to have only “five big parks ... that people drive to.” Does everybody have a car in Marion? Should you have to get in a car when it’s time to walk the dog, or to take your child to a playground? Can children drive to the park?
The parks, it turns out, are one topic that NPR listeners are all over. One of them quotes the mayor as saying, “Years ago you had to have a different park in every neighborhood because people walked. But it’s a different world today”—then mentions the mayor’s gain of 35 pounds since his days as a figure skater.
Andrew Tobias on the national debt
Paul Krugman has been beating this drum again and again and again ... but sometimes you need a fresh perspective on the same point of view.
Andrew Tobias provides this in his latest column. Here’s an excerpt.
I don’t usually use farm analogies, but here’s one. Let’s say the previous farmer left his equipment out in the rain and snow for decades so it froze, cracked, and rusted . . . even as he borrowed like mad to finance an unnecessary range war and lavish gifts to his richest friends, all the while neglecting the need for crop rotation. Over the years, he ran up big losses and an enormous debt. Okay? Now you’ve just been handed the deed to the farm. The underlying assets are outstanding – fertile soil and a talented local labor force. So what do you do? To right things, do you (a) fire the one mechanic who can actually keep one of the tractors running; stop buying feed for the chickens (you raise chickens); and eschew the additional debt you’d have to take on to buy seeds and plant the summer crop? Or do you (b) stop giving your richest friends lavish gifts, make peace with the cowmen, and borrow enough to plant the crop and get the farm running efficiently?
Shortchanged on wages and Social Security
The rich are getting richer. The poor are getting poorer.
There are many ways to parse what’s going on, and previous posts have touched on unemployment (more than once), financial deregulation (more than once), misperceptions about who has the money, credit card abuses, and a misunderstanding of risk.
The idea that Social Security is not going to be there for the next generation of retirees is gradually hardening into conventional wisdom and a self-fulfilling prophecy, with the implication that the desire to keep it is a symptom of greed and self-indulgence on the part of baby boomers. Get Radical: Raise Social Security, an op-ed in the New York Times by labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan, offers a different take.
Retirees today are shortchanged on Social Security because they have been shortchanged on wages for their entire working lives. The labor economist Richard B. Freeman points out that the hourly earnings of workers dropped by 8 percent from 1973 to 2005 while productivity shot up 55 percent or more. The United States is one of the few developed countries where workers are routinely cheated of a share in higher productivity.
And where has the money from the extra productivity gone? It’s gone right to the top, to the top few percent. If wages had been paid fairly based on productivity, there would have been enough money subject to the payroll tax to avoid even a modest shortfall.
