Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall

Quickly lost among the other manufactured controversies earlier this month was a call among Irish American groups to boycott Urban Outfitters. The clothing chain’s sin was to unveil a line of St. Patrick’s Day T-shirts that rehashed the usual jokes about Irish drinking.  

Perhaps to its credit, Urban Outfitters has offended a rainbow coalition of special-interest groups in recent years. Native Americans, gays, animal-rights activists, and even Miley Cyrus have all denounced the company over various perceived offenses.

Certainly, it’s hard to deny there is a double standard at work here. The Irish are fair game in polite society. I’ll bet a lorry full of soda bread that Urban Outfitters would not produce a T-shirt of a black watermelon-gobbling Sambo or a hook-nosed, gold-hoarding Jew. Public outcry would be too great in those cases.

But the fact is that drinking alcohol is a major part of Irish culture. Irish drinking was not an evil plot cooked up by Oliver Cromwell or an unfair smear pinned on us at Ellis Island. Like many ethnic stereotypes, it’s been earned.

The Irish often hold their most negative stereotypes as sources of pride. I was as guilty as anyone and acted as if not being drunk on St. Patrick’s Day was the Irish American equivalent of joining the Orangemen.

Alcohol and I went our separate ways a few years ago without any melodrama or religion. Many of my family members are also teetotalers, and we inhabit a netherworld of contradiction that includes blacks who hate fried chicken, spendthrift Jews, and Asians who are good drivers.

Celebrating St. Patrick’s Day with potatoes and whiskey is like celebrating Black History Month with watermelon and crack. But the fact remains that millions of Irish are drinking themselves into a stupor and vomiting green beer in the name of cultural pride.

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Most people who go out and get blind drunk on St. Patrick’s Day aren’t doing it to insult the Irish any more than they’re insulting Mexicans on Cinco de Mayo or Cajuns on Mardi Gras. People will seize upon any excuse to get drunk. These are merely drinking holidays in the US. Very few people who wake up caked in their own vomit after Fat Tuesday head to church on Ash Wednesday. Likewise, the people drowning in tequila on May 5th know very little about the Battle of Puebla. How many St. Patrick’s Day celebrants even know that he was from England?

Why not start celebrating more appropriate drinking holidays? I suggest “End of Prohibition Day” on Dec. 5 (1933) or “W. C. Fields’s Birthday” on Jan. 29 (1880). Let the hipster bars stay open all night on March 28 to observe the birthday of Captain Frederick Pabst (1836).

I wish drinking wasn’t such a staple of Irish culture. I also wish I was a billionaire and that Riverdance never happened.

If we don’t want people to think that Irish = drunk, it’s up to the Irish to chip away at the reputation we’ve earned. The only thing less appealing than the Irish embracing their worst stereotypes would be if they shrouded themselves in the cloak of a victimized minority endlessly seeking appeasement. Drunk or sober, the Irish should be above that.

As Mitt Romney stumbles his way through the Republican primaries, his candidacy has brought renewed scrutiny of the oft-demonized world of private equity.

Before venturing into politics, Romney was one of the founders of Bain Capital, one of the largest private equity firms. Big buyout private equity firms such as Bain have been cast as among capitalism’s worst villains. For a time, some of them fit the bill. But private equity is actually structured to be capitalism at its reasoned best.

Many of the established private equity firms got caught up in the easy money that reached its fevered peak in 2006 and 2007. Debt financing was easy to get, so buyout firms often bought companies while saddling them with debt. Then they would take out another big group of loans or bonds and use the money to pay a dividend to themselves before they had the time to do anything for the company worth paying themselves dividends. Some even were able to sell these companies, often to other private equity firms, who in turn added more debt to its capital structure to make the buy. This cycle continued for several years and left broken companies in its wake. Private equity’s name was sullied.

But when the big private equity firms did this, they were operating against the standard model of private equity firms that had been established for decades. And while what they did was sleazy, it was 100% legal, and they got away with it because they were able to convince myopic shareholders to sell to them. So painting the private equity industry as a ruthless villain trying to toss grandmothers out of their homes won’t work. Private equity firms weren’t involved very much in the mortgage debacle. 

And neither should it trip up Mitt Romney. Bain was not among the industry’s worst offenders and by the time the private equity industry became blinded by euphoria, Romney was long gone.

What people fail to realize about private equity is that it allows investors to avoid the often shortsighted, stock-market-driven view of businesses. Publicly traded companies have to disclose their returns every quarter. A bad quarter or even the expectation of a bad quarter can send their stock price down. And because anyone with enough money can buy stock, public companies have a shareholder constituency that can be a royal pain in the ass.  

The way private equity is traditionally done, a firm can take time to make long-term investments in companies. In theory a private equity firm doesn’t have stockholders breathing down their neck every three months demanding positive returns. They can hold onto a company for the long haul and have a down quarter or two if it means they’re investing in a stronger future. A typical private equity firm has an investment period of 10 years and its investors are typically large pension funds, insurance companies, and a few wealthy individuals who want to keep money safe for long periods of time and walk away with a nice return. They know a new or struggling company may take some losses and that being off the public market can give it time to recover and grow.

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And because companies that are owned by private equity firms don’t have the same disclosure requirements, they have an advantage. They don’t have to tell the public how much they are worth, how much they invested in new technology, or how many employees they have. This can give businesses a competitive edge in the business world and allow them to develop things under the radar.

This privacy is also what helps set buyout firms as great go-to villains. A cadre of wealthy investors that keeps things confidential is a boon to conspiracy theorists. With its many political connections and ties to the defense industry, the Carlyle Group was accused of everything short of kidnapping the Lindbergh baby, and in the last decade it has mostly divested itself from its defense holdings.

About 10 years ago, several private equity and venture capital firms had to disclose more information than they wanted to because their investors included state pension funds. State disclosure laws were brought to bear, and private equity firms had to disclose private company information that even many pro-disclosure law advocates agreed should remain private. The losers in the end were the state pension funds and other public entities, which were later shut out of some of the more lucrative funds.

Private equity can be a place of respite from the public market’s demands. However, many of the large private equity firms today have either gone public themselves or have some kind of publicly traded entity attached to them. They have investors, public and private, demanding they put money to work, and if they can avoid the temptation of easy money on the debt markets, they will be better for it in the future.

John Liu

In New York City, an unraveling campaign-finance scandal is leading toward the possible resignation and indictment of John Liu, a former city councilman known to be planning a mayoral run.

Liu is caught up in a scandal where his campaign is charged with taking money illegally donated by a supporter.

If true, what makes this so incredibly stupid is that Liu is the City Comptroller, i.e., the chief treasurer, accountant, and public-pension investor responsible for overseeing billions of tax dollars. Having a comptroller embroiled in a campaign-finance scandal is as embarrassing as having a police commissioner caught selling crack.

The scandal began with the arrest of one of Liu’s large campaign donors. This donor also served as a “bundler,” someone who organizes other donors and helps bring in more campaign contributions.

Some of these bundlers find it convenient to violate campaign-finance laws and are able to use their positions to donate more of their own money to a campaign than they would otherwise legally be allowed.

With city campaign-finance laws being what they are, these big donors can’t invent fictitious people as donors or keep a slush fund. Instead they must donate their own money and get some poor fool to act as a “straw donor.” The straw donor gets a lump of money from the actual donor and turns around to donate it in their own name, usually through the same donor who is acting as a “bundler.” 

This is what one of John Liu’s bundlers allegedly got caught doing. He reportedly told an FBI agent that he would donate through these straw donors to keep things looking legal. 

Rogue campaign bundlers are nothing new and not necessarily a political career’s death knell. Hillary Clinton had a problem with one of these bundlers but managed to stay above the fray. When her campaign managers learned that some of her money was donated illegally, they quickly identified all the donations and returned them. Like Liu’s accused bundler, Clinton’s rogue bundler was also Asian. 

In Liu’s case, there were months of silence and the return of a token number of donations.

That would be bad enough, but it got worse with his campaign treasurer’s arrest on Tuesday. Among other things, the campaign treasurer was accused of falsifying donation records so that the Liu campaign would be entitled to more matching campaign funds. New York City’s generous $6-to-$1 matching funds can make politics more corrupt, since campaigns will be less scrupulous about raising money when they are desperate to sextuple it. 

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The campaign treasurer, Jia “Jenny” Hou, is only 25. I remember when I was 25 (Clinton was president and people still watched movies on VCRs), and there was no way I was responsible enough to balance a multi-million-dollar political campaign’s books. Your average young Asian woman is much smarter and responsible than I was at 25, but I doubt this woman was masterminding wire fraud on her own.

The idea that Liu, who reportedly ordered his staff to call him “Mr. Comptroller,” would be so laissez-faire as to let a young campaign worker commit wholesale fraud under his nose is ridiculous. To borrow from a future New York Post headline, it’d be “Liu-nacy.” He would have us believe he is somehow incapable of policing his own high-level campaign staff and that a young campaign aide dreamed up a fraud scheme all by herself. He’d have an easier time convincing us that Asians are bad at math.

The indictment on his campaign treasurer refers to “persons known and unknown,” which suggests there will be more indictments. The question now does not seem to be if Liu will be indicted, but when. Liu’s campaign next year may not be for mayor, but for staying out of jail. 

The New York City Democratic Party is a dysfunctional ethnic bouillabaisse that hasn’t elected a Democratic mayor in 20 years in one of the country’s most liberal and Democratic cities. The smart money in the race is being donated to City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, an openly lesbian Democrat who is expected to have departing Mayor Bloomberg’s support. Quinn is by far the front-runner, and the race to catch up to her may have led the Liu campaign to start cutting legal corners. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives. There are no third strikes in New York City politics. John Liu is out.