ustxtxb_obs_1978_09_08_50_00013-00000_000.pdf

How to drain your swamp and make a million At a time when many Texans are expressing alarm at the quickening pace of investment by wealthy foreigners who are buying Texas land, banks, corporations, hotels, office buildings and anything else that’s for sale, Southern Methodist University has decided to throw in with the sheiks and counts by teaching U.S. brokers, trust officers, developers, lawyers and the like how to sell’ a piece of the state to foreign investors. The Costa Institute of Real Estate Finance, a branch of SMU’s Cox School of Business will co-sponsor a September 13 seminar that is aimed at all those involved in peddling property to “nonresidents.” The announcement boasts that all of the scheduled speakers have successfully managed deals for foreign nationals. Among the advertised topics are: “Tax planning for investment in U.S. real estate by foreign investors”; “Recommended professional services available to foreign investors”; and “Federal and state restrictions on ownership of U.S. land by non-resident aliens.” Dr. Robert 0. Harvey, chairman of real estate and regional science at SMU’s business school, will moderate the session. Appropriately enough, the seminar will be held in the Gold Room of a Dallas hotel. The tab is $75 a head, or three for $165 if you’re all from the same company, and that includes cocktails and lunch. Who’s the guest speaker at the luncheon? You guessed ita real, live foreign investor! Harris Worcester Fleeced Republican gubernatorial nominee Bill Clements was the honored recipient in July of U.S. Sen. William Proxmire’s Golden Fleece Award for the “biggest, most obvious or ridiculous example of wasteful government spending.” The award stems from Clements’s tenure as deputy secretary of defense under Presidents Nixon and Ford, when he presided over the annual expenditure of $1.2 million from a special “Emergencies and Extraordinary Expenses” fundpart of which turns out to be the entertainment fund for Pentagon brass. Among the extraordinary expenses that caught the skeptical eye of the senator from Wisconsin: $2,500 for a farewell party for Clements and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld when they left the government in January last year; $12,161 for “secret entertainment by the National Security Agency”; over $3,000 to pay for the visit of a Mexican Air Force big-wig, including a tour of Disneyland; $244 for cufflinks and tie tacks presented to Clements and Rumsfeld at the January 1977 reception. Clements, who’s been making a lot of noise lately about his efficiency as a federal administrator and his unequaled solicitude for the oppressed taxpayers of Texas, was understandably miffed by Proxmire’s disclosure, but he gamely defended the Pentagon entertainment ex :\\k –,\\ penditures as a necessary part of the “mission of the Department of Defense to support the foreign policy of the U.S. government.” He also suggested that the “dubious honor” was a political ploy timed to benefit the candidacy of Democratic opponent John Hill. Not that Hill seems to need much helpthe latest polls show Clements trailing the Democrat by a 66 to 20 percent margin. Ill wind from the West As Dolph Briscoe keeps telling us, weird things come out of Califor nia. In August, one of them came to Fort Worth. Howard Jarvis, the patriarch of Proposition 13, came blustering into the Tarrant County Convention Center to solicit money and support for his new crusade against federal taxation. Before an audience of defiantly middle-class Texans, Jarvis unveiled a national tax relief program that, ironically, promises little if anything for the middle classchief among his “reforms” is a proposal to abolish all taxes on capital gains, which count heavily among the precious perquisites of the rich. While Texas political leaders, fearing for their political lives, ducked into the bushes at the sight of Jarvis, Texas labor leader Harry Hubbard surprised everyone by jumping squarely on the demagogue’s back and lashing him mercilessly until he left the state. The AFL-CIO president challenged the Californian to a public debate, then promptly belled the old cat, scoring him as a “charlatan,” a “mossback” and worse. The state’s politicians, meanwhile, kept to their hide-outs, trembling at the thought of what Jarvis would do to poor Harry now. But Jarvis turned out to be toothless. All he did was whine that Hubbard was “a moocher,” trying to get a free ride on Jarvis’s new-found fame. Then one Royal Masset, head of the group that invited Jarvis to Fort Worth, tried in a curious twist of logic to label Hubbard a “coward” for issuing a debate challenge “against a 76-year-old man who knows nothing about government in Texas.” Indeed. Hubbard had little trouble deflating Jarvis’s rhetoric in the debate, and he subsequently urged labor leaders elsewhere to take Jarvis on when he pops up in their states with his traveling medicine show. “Conservatives love to preach about how much it will help the little guy if you let the rich get richer,” said Hubbard, adding that “we learned the lesson about that nonsense 50 years ago, and we’re not going to permit a con man like Howard Jarvis to raise it again unchallenged.” THE TEXAS OBSERVER 13