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Showing posts from May 18, 2003
Bollettino The swing set Ah, so the 600 billion dollar -- Krugman prices it out at 800 billion - tax cut has been passed. The price tag in the headlines is, as everybody knows, a joke. We are in an extremely bizarre time. As the deficit piles up, we get a tax cut that is thinly justified as an attempt to bootstrap the market. Yep, get those equities flyin' again. At the same time, the Bush administration is gambling with the dollar. This is, perhaps, all they can really do -- the brain-dead people in Bush's Treasury have no other options. So the race is on to press the dollar downward. Now, LI is a simple country hayseed -- shucks, we just tried to buy the Brooklyn bridge from a passin' stranger yesterday. Yet even we noticed a curious disparity between the two strategies. Like, ain't it true, like they teach in the one room schoolhouse in the Hollow, that when you devalue the dollar, money flows to assets tied to other currencies? And don't that promote
Bollettino The Illusory Empire One of the great problems with political scientists is that they base so much of what they think on analogies that are carefully plucked of all annoying dissimilarities. Take the great Empire boom spawned by the neo-con set. This has been going on for a while now, since one of the Kaplans wrote an article in Foreign Policy about the U.S. as a benign empire. This Kaplan went on to compare the U.S. with Britain in the 19th century. As in all such comparisons, a surface verisimilitude is achieved by comparing military force, and interventions over the globe. What Kaplan didn't mention was that 20 million some Britons left the U.K. to settle all over the globe. He also didn't mention British investment in the colonial enterprise. Both of which are very unlikely to happen to the U.S. any time soon. The U.S. Empire is defined by the fifty states, plus some commonwealths. Iraq and Afghanistan are test cases of the imperial proposition. So far
Bollettino Chalabi is, reportedly, a man who likes to play close to the edge. He has a habit of going over it without a parachute. Perhaps he did it again when he attacked Al - Jazeera and the Jordan government with papers the INC had gathered from Saddam's files. Saddam's files are truly amazing things. They pop up here, labelled in big magic marker, George Galloway bribery papers; they pop up there labelled Al -Jazeera, our contacts in. But where, pray tell, is the folder entitled, Donald Rumsfeld, talks with, 1984; or George Herbert Walker Bush, covert aid supplied by, 1932-1989? I guess those papers just incinerated. And guess what? Neither the Times of London or New York, neither the Daily Telegraph nor the Washington Post, are looking very hard for them. Although I'd guess, just guess, that the US Military did look for those state secrets. Well, Chalabi's problem is that he depends too much on the kindness of strangers -- who he then rips off. So, mis
Bollettino Blood business Douglas Starr wrote an essential book about the trade of blood, entitled, no doubt by an agent, Blood: the Epic History of Medicine and Commerce . . One of the book's major concerns was the way the blood industry accidentally spread AIDS to hemophiliacs. There's a chapter excerpt from the book on a PBS site. We have to quote this graf, which explains how the blood business became a moneymaker after new techniques allowed companies to extract plasma, and thus made it possible to up the amount of blood a donor could give dramatically: " New classes of people became involved -- shadier buyers, more desperate sellers. Experts had warned about the potential for abuse. During a 1966 conference at Cohn's Protein Foundation, Dr. Tibor Greenwalt, a leader in nonprofit blood banking, cautioned against "exploiting for its proteins a population which is least able to donate them" -- yet that gave little pause to commercial entrepreneu
Bollettino Pigs, pigs, pigs Over at Junius , Chris Bertram briefly notes an article in Capitalism magazine criticizing Forbes and Fortune for giving in to the "socialistic" idea of reducing CEO pay. The Capitalist magazine rehearses a familiar idea: CEOs are like movie stars or athletes. Extraordinary pay is necessary to attract talent. This argument is a foolish disguise for a situation that is anything but laissez-faire. Movie stars and athletes commoditize an impression. If you go to a movie because you like x, or a basketball game because you like y, then x and y have successfully extracted a certain amount of money from you -- which is why they are paid the prices they are paid. Winning is nice, but a star on a NY team that doesn't win a championship will probably make more than a star on a team from North Carolina that does, because of the economics of the above. CEOs aren't in the impression business, give or take Oprah and Martha. Nobody bought GE produc
Bollettino For the Devil can work upon stagnating filth to a very great degree. For I prophecy that we shall have our horns again. For in the day of David Men as yet had a glorious horn upon his forehead. For this horn was a bright substance in colour and consistence as the nail of the hand. For it was broad, thick and strong so as to serve for defence as well as ornament. For it brightened to the Glory of God, which came upon the human face at morning prayer. For it was largest and brightest in the best men. For it was taken away all at once from all of them. For this was done in the divine contempt of a general pusillanimity. For this happened in a season after their return from the Babylonish captivity. For their spirits were broke and their manhood impair'd by foreign vices for exaction. For I prophecy that the English will recover their horns the first. For I prophecy that all the nations in the world will do the like in turn. For I prophecy that all
Bollettino Yesterday, in Britain, GlaxoSmithKline shareholders actually voted down the compensation package for its directors. The package was rather notorious even before the vote. Here's a BBC description of it: " GSK shares, for instance, have lost about one-third of their value in the three and a half years since chief executive Jean Pierre Garnier took over, amid concerns that the firm has failed to develop new best-selling drugs. This poor track record steeled investor opposition to a pay deal which would have given Mr Garnier a pay-off of up to �22m ($35.7m) if he was dismissed." The Guardian has a fuller story and the background. "The stage had been set for a rebellion at GSK after the Association of British Insurers (ABI), which represents the big insurance companies and which controls about 25% of the stock market, marked the company's remuneration policy as a so-called "red top" - a rarely used indicator intended to show se
Bollettino Ah, the weekend. Suicide bombing is the new bungee cord jumping sport throughout the Middle East, the dollar is quietly plummetting in the background as the Bush administration, which argues that its tax cut will raise stock prices, shows that it could care less, and the Private Jessica Lynch rescue turns out to have been a little less dangerous than your average frat party. Where to begin? LI talked to D. -- okay, I talked to my brother yesterday, and he was full of outrage about the faking of the taking of Jessica Lynch, pfc. Since the networks were full of her story two weeks ago and she has been figuring heavily in the national press, we expected a story about the BBC report in the NYT or the Washington Post. So far, we haven't seen one. Since much of the rightwing blog community, leaking into much of the rightwing communitiy, is always on guard against media manipulation, we decided to visit spots we usually touch on very gingerly. There is a general blo