Good news isn’t when it’s ignored

I picked a great week weather-wise for a vacation, but news-wise, not so much. There were more major stories in the last two weeks than in the last two months.

In January, retailers recorded a 3.3 percent year-over-year sales increase, and with a reading of 58.4, the Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing index shattered expectations. The reading suggests annualized GDP growth of 5.5 percent.

Notwithstanding Toyota shooting itself in the gas pedal, it was a solid earnings quarter. Heck, even home builder Beazer Homes recorded a first-quarter profit. OK – it was the result of a tax credit – but things are stabilizing on the home front.

The market chose to ignore the good news in lieu of sovereign debt troubles, and in particular, Greece. Last Thursday all hell broke loose and the Dow dropped 268 points, breaching below the 10,000 mark. On Friday the markets held their collective breath in anticipation of the employment report. When the headline unemployment rate dropped from 10 to 9.7 percent, they breathed a sigh of relief before continuing to trade downward.

Perhaps it was because the jobs numbers weren’t all positive. The January nonfarm payroll decline of 20,000 was encouraging but the November/December revisions chopped an additional 90,000 jobs. And the Department of Labor’s annual benchmark revision indicated that almost 600,000 more jobs were lost in 2009 than had been previously reported.

So how did the unemployment rate go down? Magic, and the existence of two separate surveys. The household survey, not the payroll survey, is used to calculate overall employment. Personally, the household survey is a bit too fuzzy for me.

In other news, Fed chair Ben Bernanke was thankfully reappointed and the president – reacting to the Scott Brown victory – came out with guns blazing.

First he announced his bank “bombshell.” Then, as part of his new focus on job creation, he visited Nashua to discuss his plan to aid small businesses.

As politically motivated as the president’s change of direction is, I’m pleased that he has decided that jobs and small business are the priority. I would be more pleased if that epiphany had occurred a year ago, before Washington tinkled away billions on a poorly structured stimulus package. A stimulus package, I might add, that only allocated the Small Business Administration an additional $500 million.

I believe this validates my criticism of the president. Either that or Mr. Obama is now misguided in his new focus and he should return to championing health care. It’s a tough call.

My vacation has me playing catch up, so I haven’t yet digested the details of either the president’s proposed banks reforms or his small business initiative. I can say that both are on the right track. Next week we’ll look at the details.

For today I’d like to close with a critical Supreme Court ruling that went virtually unnoticed. The 5-4 ruling removed decades-old restrictions on corporate political expenditures and opens the floodgates for corporations and unions to funnel money into “political messaging.”

Call me silly, but I consider it dangerous to allow corporations to have a political voice. And evidently President Obama agrees. In an unusual “violation” of protocol, he chastised the judges who were sitting in the front row during his state of the union address.

“When government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought,” wrote Justice Kennedy for the majority.

I get the slippery slope First Amendment thing, but we could easily create the legal equivalent of “shoe spikes.”

Justice Kennedy went on to write, “corporations may possess valuable expertise, leaving them the best equipped to point our errors of fallacies in speech of all sorts.”

Spoken like a man who has never worked for a corporation. I wonder if he was referring to the Wall Street banks that would love to deploy their massive financial resources to make a positive contribution to the public discourse.

In dissent, Justice Stevens called the majority opinion “a rejection of common sense of the American people.”

That sounds about right.

The Constitutions begins with these words: “We the people of the United States,” not “We the entities of the United States.”

The First Amendment stipulates that “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press; or the right of people to assemble.” There is no mention of corporations. And the specific mention of the press is an example of type of legal shoe spike I had in mind.

Public corporations are chartered to make money, not express political viewpoints. True, government policy can inhibit the ability to make money but so can competitors, the economy, and even the weather. Thems the breaks: deal with it. Stockholders in public corporations do not share a singular political view and therefore those corporations should not be allowed to speak for “them.” Corporations should express their concerns to their shareholders and allow those shareholders to exercise their constitutional rights as individuals.

The ruling reversed the position the court took in 2003 and sadly gives special interests increased power to distort the political process.

Author, professor, entrepreneur, radio and TV commentator Tony Paradiso can be reached at tparadiso@tds.net.