Live from Music Row Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
CROM CARMICHAEL:
Michael, we talk regularly about ESG, the environmental, social, and governance doctrines of the left. And it’s interesting to see how when they are applied by organizations and the mess that they create, in the case of First Republic. First Republic still exists. I have my doubts as to whether or not it will exist much longer.
And so you have to ask, what happened with First Republic? As it turns out, they were the bank in California for the billionaire class. And they put a lot of their money there. And then what the bank did was it gave the billionaire class enormous loans for their home mortgages at extremely low-interest rates because they were all buddies and were all part of ESG, and they were all part of improving the planet.
Of course, now the average taxpayer is the one who’s going to have to pick up the tab if those gigantic mortgages at incredibly low-interest rates end up driving the bank under because nobody will want to buy the mortgages due to the very low-interest rates.
So the mortgages may be worth only 80 cents on the dollar, 75 cents on the dollar, even though the person who has borrowed the money is good for the money. But it was all part of the cronyism that happens on the left coast—two left hands. Then in San Francisco, another one on the left coast, there’s a story about a $300 million office tower, and I’ve seen the pictures of it; it’s quite beautiful in downtown San Francisco.
It is mostly empty, and it looks like it’s going to go up for auction. And it was $300 million in 2019. They’re saying that there’ll be as much as an 80 percent haircut and that the building will sell at auction for $60 million. Now, that’s the tip of the iceberg.
Major cities across the country, all of which are run by Democrats, are going to be suffering from similar fates. I don’t know if they’ll be as bad, but if you get 30 or 40 percent haircuts or even 25 percent haircuts in your commercial office building real estate, think what happens to the property taxes.
If I own this building, if I were to buy this building, somebody were to buy it at $60 million, I’d go right down the tax assessor’s office, and I’d say this building is worth $60 million, and I expect to be taxed on $60 million, not $300 million.
So these big cities are now going to see enormous losses in their portfolios. And then we had the interview of Anthony Fauci with The New York Times, talking about historical revisionism. He says, I really had nothing to do with all the bad things that happened. I was just merely just an advisor.
I didn’t demand that anything happened. I didn’t dictate that anything happened. Of course, there are hours and hours of him on TV saying exactly the opposite. And The New York Times buys it hook, line, and sinker. And then there’s Randi Weingarten, who testified before Congress, who says that she always wanted the schools to be opened and that she knew that remote learning was bad for the students.
I guess what she knows is that lying in front of Congress, as long as you have a Democrat in the White House, is perfectly okay as long as you’re part of the e ESG crowd. Then you have Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who, and this is not ESG, this is the opposite, rallied the Republicans in Congress to vote for increasing the debt ceiling, coupling that with very reasonable and appropriate spending cuts.
And so the House has now done its duty. It has now raised the debt ceiling contingent upon responsible actions by the other side. It’s going to be very interesting to see what happens because the Biden administration might claim over and over again that it’s the Republicans who won’t raise the debt ceiling.
It has raised the debt ceiling. It’s just put contingencies on it. There were four Republicans who did not go along. I think it was a mistake that they didn’t go along. I wish they had. They’re a noisy group of four, and a lot of what they have to say is good.
But when they take the position that there’s no reason for us to run a deficit at all, that’s just simply illogical and not good policy. But I am excited about what I think will happen now. The first quarter economy, I think it had negative growth.
But these things in the big cities and this big tower in San Francisco are a harbinger of things to come, and it’s not good. The Democrats who run those cities and who count on the taxes from that commercial real estate, they’ve not even begun to think about what they’re going to do if their revenue dries up.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this Crommentary:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “San Francisco” by Jared Erondu.
