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OPINION&EDITORIAL
COMMUNITY COMMENTARY
Teen road safety subject of meeting By Nancy Sheridan
Leading North County community outreach efforts on public health issues about prescription drug abuse and teen safety, Scripps hospital recently joined with La Costa Canyons’ Teens for Teen Safety club and San Dieguito Alliance for Drug Free Youth to sponsor the town hall meeting on distracted driving, drunk driving and prescription drug overdose Dec. 3 at La Costa Canyon High School. Teens for Teen Safety, founded by LCC mom Jennifer Riggs, is dedicated to promoting awareness of teen safety issues at the school. The panel presentation focused on the consequences of teen drinking, driving and drug abuse with the goal of raising family awareness and creating opportunities to discuss these issues among parents and teens. Dr. Andrew Accardi, a Scripps emergency room physician, spoke about the physical and emotional aspects of treating multiple victims of teen car crashes and the
long-lasting effects he sees in survivors trying to cope with depression on repeat visits to the Emergency Department. Dr. Eric Wardrip shared how his 16-year old son Will was killed in a recent deadly, reckless car crash last year in Fairbanks Ranch. Sheriff’s deputies reports indicated that Will, a passenger in the car, was the only one not wearing a seat belt. Chelsea Hill, now 19, of Pacific Grove, told how she became paralyzed last February after she was involved in a crash when riding home from a party where both she and the driver were drinking. Aaron Rubin, now a quadraplegic who uses a wheelchair and raises one finger to signify yes or no to communicate, told his story through his mother Sherrie. Aaron, a 2000 graduate of Poway High School, suffered a heart attack and stroke after overdosing on Oxycontin. Sixty percent of teens admit to risky driving, according to national surveys. “As a community
we need to model good behavior, provide safe alternatives if a driver or passenger does not feel safe to drive, and continually remind our kids that the energy and enthusiasm of youth may entice kids to make unsafe driving decisions,” Dr. Accardi said. Hundreds of students and their parents heard the presentation. “A very powerful evening,” was how one North County father of two teenage daughters described the evening. It really struck home as a parent of teenagers. The combination of advice, wisdom and unfortunate knowledge of victims’ parents and the victims themselves was educational and beneficial for me as a parent, and for my teenager daughter to hear. In affluent North County, we as parents need to do better jobs. We may not be able to keep our kids out of trouble 100 percent of the time, but we can reduce the risks. We need to learn to say no, TURN TO SAFETY ON A15
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RANCHO SANTA FE NEWS DEC. 31, 2010
Something feels just a little bit familiar ... These headlines lately about how Wall Street movers and shakers are throwing lavish parties for the holiday season, one featuring a performance by the hip-hop star Lil’ Kim dressed up as a black cat, reminded me to look for the article I’d heard about called “What Good is Wall Street?” The hosts are reported not to be celebrating as much about extravagant year-end bonuses, but instead about a mood of rosy optimism in the financial world that happy days, if not here again already, are surely close to returning again for the long term. To Wall Street, the late summer-early fall of 2008, when the system folded in on itself only to be rescued by government intervention, is a long time ago. Now what about the rest of us? The stories of bonhomie at the Battery also brought to mind something that has stuck since I read it more than a year ago in a column by the economist Paul Krugman, published in July 2009. The column came out just as investment banker Goldman Sachs reported record quarterly profits and gave out bonus money comparable to the heady pre-crash days of the run-up of the real estate market, hefty hedge fund profits and the lucky streaks in general of the high rollers. Adding it all up, Krugman writes that it means Goldman is good at what it does. It also means that the compensation system there that helped put us in the dog house in the first place remains pretty much intact. Further, as he notes, “ ... by rescuing the financial system without reforming it, Washington has done nothing to protect us from a new crisis, and, in fact, has made another crisis more likely.” I sure hope not, but what’s that got to do with anything? In the Cassidy article, a fulllength magazine feature, the suggestion is strong that it’s business as usual once more by the pareddown big players like Goldman and the investment arms of institutions such as Bank of America, Citibank and JP Morgan Chase, whose bank branches dot the North County landscape like so many In-N-Out Burger places and Jack in the Boxes. The article also gets you to wondering about the inherent
BY
BRUCE KAUFFMAN Not That You Asked worth of this brokerage and investment banking function; or, in other words, why are these Street people are so highly paid? One leading economist tells Cassidy that they’re basically a utility that moves capital through pipelines and channels much as a water district moves H20 around and delivers it to the customers. Someone said toll takers. At best, that makes these financial folks middle men and middle women. Here comes the money train. Switchman, hit the button and send it into creditdefault swaps. Now someone has to be the gobetween and send out the chits that come in to wherever, granted. But what social purpose beyond that is being served here by the high financiers who apparently are willing to spend as much as $400,000 to rent a big place in the Hamptons for the summer? Here’s a sample of some of the factoids generated by the New Yorker article: — The chairman of Britain’s financial watchdog, the Financial Services Authority, says a lot that happens on Wall Street, and in other financial centers around the world, is a “socially useless activity.” He says activities are engaged in that add no real economic value even though they generate revenue and profit. This is called extracting “rent” from the real economy. — Look at all the profits produced by businesses in the U.S. as a big cake. Twenty-five years, the slice cut for the financial firms, was around one-seventh. Last year, it was more than a quarter. — In 2006, pay in the financial sector was some 60 percent higher than in other sectors. At Goldman Sachs, average pay jumped last year by 27 percent, or to $340,000. — A top senior officer at the Bank of England says it’s in the interest of bank managers to “make mirages look like miracles.” — An anonymous blogger cum TURN TO ASKED ON A15
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