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Strategies & Market Trends : VOLTAIRE'S PORCH-MODERATED -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: T L Comiskey who wrote (53732)	7/12/2002 12:07:15 AM
From: Dealer	Respond to of 65232

doing to george... just as it was done to bill Now! Now! I don't think so.............. dealie

To: T L Comiskey who wrote (53732)	7/12/2002 2:09:08 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 65232

Bush's Corporate Conduct By E. J. Dionne Jr. Washington Post Columnist Friday, July 12, 2002 When President Bush spoke to cheering Wall Streeters this week, you almost expected him to take a leaf from another old pro and declare: "The era of big corporate power is over." Bush's job was to launch a massive repositioning campaign. He and his fellow Republicans have long been unapologetic advocates of freeing corporations and their leaders from the obnoxious, officious meddling of government regulators. Suddenly, thanks to the scandals and the sagging stock market, CEO liberation is not such a hot idea. As often happens in a democracy, the leaders are racing to stay in front of the people. But Bush's magic failed him, one of the few times it has since Sept. 11. The magic was gone for the most basic reason: In his heart of hearts, the president doesn't really believe that anything is systematically wrong with the way corporations are run and regulated. That's why the modest regulatory changes he proposed were aimed at stiffening penalties against a few bad actors, on the theory that most corporate leaders "do not cut ethical corners." Events are outpacing Bush, because while he wants to bow rhetorically before the new public god of corporate accountability, he doesn't really want to catch up with those who would write much tougher rules to change the incentives for accountants, CEOs and corporate board members. And so, while senators of both parties were voting to stiffen Sen. Paul Sarbanes's corporate reform measure, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill came out against the new system to regulate accounting that is the heart of the Maryland Democrat's bill. Rarely has the clash between Bush's well-wrought public rhetoric and his actual policy preferences been so obvious. The fact that there is a substantive -- one can even say principled -- difference between Bush and the Democrats on the matter of corporate accountability is one reason why this issue has a long shelf life. A second is the sudden relevance of the corporate careers of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Yesterday's newspapers offered a taste of what is to come with a report that, as a director of Harken Energy Corp., Bush received the very kind of insider loans that he condemned in his Wall Street speech. The news was relevant not because the president did anything illegal but because he has embraced high ethical standards against insiderism. Everything that Bush did as a businessperson, and everything that Cheney did as CEO of Halliburton, the oil services company, will thus be judged not only by legal standards but also by Bush's own, newly minted standards. This increases pressure on Bush and Cheney to reach into their respective pasts and disclose, disclose, disclose. Behavior that's legal can become questionable when ethical norms change, and this scandal is producing a new ethic for CEOs. Much of the behavior being condemned these days was fostered by the business culture that took hold in the go-go years of the 1980s and 1990s. Corporate execs once felt constrained by a community-minded spirit bred by the nation's shared experience of the Depression, the New Deal and World War II. In such a climate, CEOs thought it wise not to grab for every last dollar. To some degree, O'Neill himself is part of this old school. But since the 1980s, those who allowed their personal compensation to be constrained were seen as fools and fogies who just didn't "get" the post-1970s capitalist world. The brilliant, business-school-educated sharp guys came up with exceptionally inventive ways to hide losses and evade taxes. CEOs and corporate boards who resisted these new ways were seen as over the hill. You wonder: Have those sharp guys been dumping stocks because they know what is hidden in the books? What finally makes this business scandal more than a short-term obsession is a new split among leading actors in the business community. Investors, it turns out, have interests sharply at odds with those of CEOs and even corporate boards. That's why investors, on the whole, responded less favorably to Bush's speech than the CEOs did. And the shrewdest corporate leaders favor tough reforms so that America's markets can regain public confidence -- especially the confidence of foreign investors who might accelerate their flight from the dollar. Large-scale reform almost never happens unless some part of the business community supports it. Life is always awkward for pro-business Republicans when the business community splits on a major public question. Bush is dealing with the toughening of corporate ethics, a new tide for reform, a shaky market and a divided business community -- all in the context of his own past. No wonder he's had a hard week. © 2002 The Washington Post Company washingtonpost.com

To: T L Comiskey who wrote (53732)	7/12/2002 9:18:30 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 65232

Scientists (Again) Warn 'Star Wars' Threatens the Safety of Space Orbit SCIENCE JOURNAL The Wall Street Journal By SHARON BEGLEY July 12, 2002 From the moment President Reagan announced on March 23, 1983, that the U.S. should launch a Strategic Defense Initiative to shield the country from enemy missiles, some of the fiercest opponents of "Star Wars" have not been starry-eyed pacifists. They've been scientists. The Pentagon listened. Both the Reagan and (first) Bush administrations dialed back or shifted the focus of SDI when physicists pointed out that some schemes, like space-based lasers and neutral particle beams, were at best technically impractical and at worst in violation of the laws of physics. Now physicists are hoping the space warriors listen again. A new risk -- this one to the nation's $125 billion-a-year space industry and to intelligence satellites -- has emerged with the revival of a once-discredited idea: space-based missile intercepts and antisatellite weapons (ASATs). "Even one war in space would create a battlefield lasting forever," says physicist Joel Primack of the University of California, Santa Cruz, "encasing the planet in a shell of whizzing debris that would make space near Earth highly hazardous for peaceful as well as military purposes." Space-based systems to intercept missiles and destroy hostile recon and tracking satellites are back on the agenda for two reasons. The scrapping of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty last month lifted the ban on unlimited testing of such systems. And the Pentagon, which has focused on midcourse missile intercepts, recently asked for proposals for boost-phase intercepts, which destroy intercontinental ballistic missiles on launch. The Bush administration's budget requests show a clear interest in at least two low-Earth-orbit systems: lasers and kinetic kill vehicles. Those of you with long memories will remember the latter as "Brilliant Pebbles," a Reagan-era program whose goal (never realized) was to launch 1,000 minisatellites to spot enemy ICBMs and take them out. "There was more enthusiasm than realism around Brilliant Pebbles," says physicist Jeremiah Sullivan of the University of Illinois. "But with the end of the ABM treaty, almost every idea ever put out there is making a comeback." That's what concerns both physicists and arms-control advocates. Low-Earth orbit, from roughly 180 to 1,200 miles up, is the space equivalent of the Long Island Expressway on a Friday evening in August: "Crowded" doesn't begin to describe it. This belt is home to important astronomical satellites, including the Hubble Space Telescope at 375 miles. The International Space Station orbits about 250 miles up. Earth-observing satellites that study climate are here, too, as are military and mobile-phone sats. All are highly vulnerable to space debris. The U.S. Space Command tracks some 9,000 objects larger than 4 inches in diameter; more than 100,000 pieces larger than a marble whiz around in near-Earth orbit. As a result, small satellites 480 miles up have about a 1% chance per year of a fatal collision. Launching and testing Brilliant Pebbles redux would add to the risk significantly. But the real disaster would arise if an enemy blew up a Pebble or two. That, says Dr. Primack, could trigger "a chain reaction of destruction that would leave a lethal halo around Earth." Physicist Sally Ride of the University of California, San Diego, America's first woman astronaut, recalls a run-in with space debris. An orbiting fleck of paint from God-knows-where hit the shuttle's window, creating a small gouge. A fleck of paint is nothing compared with the hunks of metal, orbiting at 17,000 mph, that ASAT testing would create, she warned in a lecture at Stanford University this spring. Tests of space weapons could create enough debris to threaten the lives of astronauts aboard the space station, says Clay Moltz of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Worse, any country that felt threatened by America's space armada "would only have to launch the equivalent of gravel" to destroy it, says Dr. Primack. That would make near-Earth orbit unusable, and not just briefly. Debris 500 miles up stays there for decades before atmospheric drag pulls it down; anything above 900 miles essentially is up forever. The Pentagon is sharply split on space-based weapons. Many political appointees are gung-ho, but the operations side is leery, sources say. (The Missile Defense Agency declined to comment.) Dr. Moltz is holding a seminar on space debris for key congressmen and staffers on July 24. Keep Brilliant Pebbles from rising again, before near-Earth orbit is put off-limits. E-mail comments to sciencejournal@wsj.com. Updated July 12, 2002