Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (14569)	10/31/2003 12:38:50 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793623

It looks like Putin is turning Russia back into a Dictatorship. _________________________________________ Lawless Russia By Masha Lipman Washington Post MOSCOW -- The arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's biggest oil tycoon, followed by the seizure of shares of his company, signals a dramatic escalation of the political change underway in this country. The campaign against Khodorkovsky is being conducted by two bodies -- the Federal Security Service and the Prosecutor General's Office -- whose operations are now unchecked, while other public and government institutions have grown weak or irrelevant. Both agencies are controlled by a faction in the Kremlin administration, their activities endorsed by President Vladimir Putin. The political opposition is timid and the elites fragmented and demoralized. The political regime of Putin's Russia is commonly described as a "managed democracy," but in the Khodorkovsky affair it has acted as a police state. Russian law enforcers have blatantly trampled the law. Yesterday they seized the 44 percent of shares in Yukos, Khodorkovsky's firm, owned by two foreign holding companies. The Prosecutor General's Office claimed that the shares "de facto belong to Khodorkovsky." Calls for public discussion of Khodorkovsky's arrest were cut short by a sharp and angry statement from Putin. All in all, the message to the business community was that those who dare challenge the state may end up in jail -- or have their property summarily expropriated. Like any Russian tycoon, Khodorkovsky may have been involved at one time in murky business operations. His early capitalist past is not impeccable, as he readily admits. But in later years he transformed Yukos into a transparent, world-class business. He has carried out major philanthropic projects in education, training teachers in Internet skills and in the support of liberal political parties. While he used his wealth and influence to further his business goals at home and abroad, the very size of his business and the scope of his philanthropy caused him to think about Russia's future in broad terms. There are several possible reasons for the Kremlin attack on him. One is that he had become too big a player, almost a rival to the Kremlin -- apparently arousing Putin's grave concern. Another was that those around Putin have their own ambitions to shape Russian politics. The biggest stakes in the Russian political game involve the presidential election of 2008, when Putin's second term (which he's certain to win this coming March) will expire. The competition in this game played by feuding factions in the Kremlin administration has been extremely tough. The elimination of the influential billionaire by one such faction -- Putin's new elite, consisting of former KGB people -- gives it a tremendous advantage in the struggle. The attack on Khodorkovsky and his employees began months ago. Against all expectations, he was not intimidated. He said he would rather be a political prisoner than a political émigré, and embarked on a trip around Russia pledging to prove to the Russian people that it was still possible to stand up for one's rights. Such open defiance is virtually unheard of in Putin's Russia. The emergence of such a direct challenger -- almost a political dissident -- was apparently more than the president and his KGB aides could take. The victory of this faction has now been made clear by the resignation of Alexander Voloshin, Putin's chief of staff and leader of the rival Kremlin group. It is a victory for which Russia will pay a high price. The Russian stock market dropped dramatically after Khodorkovsky's arrest. Yesterday's freezing of almost half of Yukos's shares was followed by a steep decline in the firm's stock price and a flurry of panicky statements from market experts. Foreign investors are likely to shun Russia. This was probably not what Putin had in mind. What he wanted was to get rid of a powerful and arrogant tycoon and keep Russia stable. But having unleashed the methods of a police state and entrusted the government to his KGB henchmen, Putin may now find it difficult to keep them in check. His favored faction are an incompetent, unsophisticated and greedy lot, with little experience of political maneuver but with some bad habits of repression. Their being in power is bound to do Russia tremendous harm. The majority of the Russian public, meanwhile, may be pleased to see a fat cat in trouble with the state. But everyone in Russia is certain that the case against Khodorkovsky is politically motivated, and because of this the rule of law is undermined. The realization that law enforcers as well as the courts are manipulated by the state further deepens the mistrust between the Russian state and society. The broad grant of power given the Prosecutor General's Office in the Yukos affair will be interpreted by prosecutors all over the country as a license for them to hunt local businessmen. A threat to jail them for real or imagined economic crimes will sound much more convincing after prosecutors have locked up the man who built the best-governed and most transparent of Russia's big businesses. This does not mean scores of smaller entrepreneurs will find themselves behind bars but rather that the "tariffs" they have to pay to be left alone will grow. Corruption will become even more blatant than it is today. Putin should consider himself lucky to have a business elite that is subdued and easily intimidated: So far, Khodorkovsky's fellow tycoons have declined to stand up for him. Some of them leave the country, while others curry favor with the Kremlin. But pushing the nation's most active, efficient and achieving group into humiliation and passivity can hardly help Russia's economy. By bringing back fear of the state to public and political life, Putin is killing one of the most important achievements of Russia's post-Communist liberation. He may also be killing Russia's hope for a better future. Masha Lipman, editor of the Carnegie Moscow Center's Pro et Contra Journal, writes a monthly column for The Post. washingtonpost.com

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (14569)	10/31/2003 1:09:55 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793623

It's no longer just blue-collar workers but also affluent tech professionals who increasingly are being forced to face competition on a global labor market. Hey, Lizzie! I think you resemble this remark. :>) _____________________________________________________ Lou's Blues Lou Dobbs and the new mercantilism Julian Sanchez REASON Columbia University economist Jagdish Baghwati once quipped that defenders of free trade have "no prizes or surprises." "No prizes" because the basic case for free trade is in many ways the same as that made in the time of Adam Smith and David Ricardo—not the sort of innovative technical work that garners Nobels. "No surprises" because it often seems as though free traders are trapped in a public policy version of Groundhog Day, forced to refute the same fallacious arguments over and over again, decade after decade. Throughout the 1990s, it looked as though, perhaps, the debate had finally been resolved in favor of open markets and an ever more global economy. In 1992, after all, both major party candidates vowed to champion the North American Free Trade Agreement. Even now, people around the world report positive attitudes toward trade, and little regard for the warning cries of the giant-puppets-and-black-masks antiglobalization crowd. Ah, but what a difference a decade makes. The economic party in America is decidedly over for the moment. It's no longer just blue-collar workers but also affluent tech professionals who increasingly are being forced to face competition on a global labor market. At a time when nationalist "us versus them" thinking is back in vogue, the temptation is strong to find someone—ideally brown people with funny accents—to carry the blame for our economic woes. One of the loudest spokesmen for this emerging xenophobic populism has been Lou Dobbs, host of CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight. In recent months, Dobbs has devoted large chunks of his daily program to investigative series with such titles as "Exporting America" and "A Crowded Nation." The persistent message of these reports is that Americans are being harmed by foreign high tech workers, undocumented laborers (a phrase that sends Dobbs into apoplexy) and cheap overseas manufacturing. This habitual cross-border finger pointing may boost ratings, but it doesn't make much sense, either theoretically or empirically. From 2001 to 2002 new H1-B visa applications declined sharply. This suggests that the rough IT job market is less a function of foreign workers displacing domestic ones than of both being squeezed by poor economic conditions. The same dynamic seems to be at work in the manufacturing sector, where, according to the Cato Institute's Dan Griswold, real imports of manufactured goods fell 5.4 percent in 2001 (after four years of robust increases) as domestic manufacturing output fell by 4.1 percent. And despite the current recession, manufacturing output is still up 40 percent from a decade ago. Throwing up barriers to trade under those circumstances would simply yield fewer goods at higher prices for American consumers. Like so many others, Dobbs frames the debate about outshoring in the tech sector in terms of preserving America's "competitiveness." But as economist Paul Krugman has argued, this "dangerous obsession" with competitiveness rests on the utterly misguided notion that countries can be thought of as corporations writ large, "competing" with each other in the same way that Coke competes with Pepsi. Even if we accept that language, however, it is not clear that state action can provide a solution. Dobbs (and tech workers disillusioned by the bursting of the dot-com bubble) might fondly wish that highly educated professionals in Asia would be kind enough to lobotomize themselves and go back to farming for the sake of inflating U.S. programmers' wages. Alas, that's unlikely to happen. If American tech firms are unable to benefit from the skills of foreign workers, we may rest assured that their foreign competitors will. Even when they're not overseas, Dobbs has little affection for the foreign-born. His most recent effort in print, a U.S. News and World Report opinion piece decrying our "population overload," was written with a crayon. We are clearly meant to recoil at a series of context-free factoids, such as the purportedly alarming observation that in a developed, high-tech economy where ever more efficient agricultural techniques are practiced, we're "losing" farmland. And buggy whip factories too, I imagine. Another fantastic non sequitur blames immigrants for a brief uptick in regional air pollution, blithely ignoring a trend of two decades of improvement in American air quality [PDF]. Perhaps the most risible claim in the piece—and competition is stiff—is Dobbs' allegation that population growth "threatens our liberties and freedom." He cites Cornell Ecologist David Pimentel, who says, "Back when we had, say, 100 million people in the U.S., when I voted, I was one of 100 million people. Today, I am one of 285 million people, so my vote and impact decreases with the increase in the population… So our freedoms also go down the drain." Dobbs and Pimentel share an atavistic notion of freedom, what classical liberal Benjamin Constant called the "liberty of the ancients," which is to say, the power one exercises through democratic politics. It occurs to neither that Constant's "liberty of the moderns," the freedom to shape one's own life through voluntary associations with others, is enhanced by greater trade and interaction. Both in his columns and on his television program, Dobbs' makes his position seem superficially plausible only by focusing myopically on costs and resolutely ignoring benefits. He counts the strain on infrastructure created by growing populations, but not the support for that same infrastructure provided by more people working and paying taxes. When we look at both sides of the ledger, according to the calculations of the late economist Julian Simon, we find a net benefit from immigration. When it comes to trade, Dobbs' one-sidedness gets things even more dramatically backwards. I had always been under the naive impression that we have jobs in order to be able to buy the stuff that we want. Whether I consider my salary "low" or "high" then depends on how expensive that stuff is. Dobbs, apparently, is inspired by a more Puritan work ethic. On his account, we want jobs for their own sake; if other people are willing to offer us goods more cheaply than we can make them ourselves, this cruelly robs us of the opportunity to work longer and harder. Dobbs, of course, is an educated fellow, and presumably familiar with these arguments. But providing a voice for those eager to blame a Dark Other for the world's ills can only be good for ratings. And that, at least, ensures that Lou gets to keep his job. Julian Sanchez is Reason's Assistant Editor. He lives in Washington, D.C. reason.com

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (14569)	10/31/2003 3:47:18 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793623

To bad, Dick. You are the "Bob Dole" of the Democratic Candidates. SLATE ______________________________________ on the trail See Dick Run The media conspiracy descends on Gephardt in Iowa. By Chris Suellentrop Posted Thursday, October 30, 2003, at 7:16 PM PT SIOUX CITY, Iowa—Dean season! Gephardt season! Dean season! Gephardt season! If any lingering debate remained over which presidential candidate is currently enjoying his media moment, my two days with Dick Gephardt settled it. The calendar says it's pheasant season in Iowa—it started Saturday—but the 20 national reporters who follow Gephardt for all or part of his campaign swing from Des Moines to Sioux City are the latest sign that not only have the leaves turned in late October, but so have the media. I came along to witness firsthand the evidence for something I wrote earlier this month after the Phoenix debate, that Gephardt's hard-nosed and well-organized Iowa campaign presents, at the moment, the biggest obstacle to President Dean (or, to be fairer, Democratic Nominee Dean). But I missed the media conspiracy memo that told everyone else to show up, too. During Gephardt's weekend swing in Iowa two days before, only three national reporters trailed the candidate. But now, David Brooks is here. So are Mara Liasson of NPR and Carl Cameron of Fox News. Throw in reporters from ABC, MSNBC, Knight Ridder, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Christian Science Monitor, Newsweek, and the New York Times. (Counting Brooks, on Wednesday there are two New York Times writers following Gephardt.) Just for the sake of overkill, there are reporters from the British press and from Japanese television along for the ride. At one event in Pocahantas, Iowa—a town with an absolutely gigantic statue of the Indian princess outside her teepee welcoming visitors from the highway—the number of journalists nearly matches the number of prospective caucus-goers. To add to the mid-December feel brought on by the growing press horde, on Wednesday morning it snowed. The Gephardt campaign pushes its slow-and-steady-wins-the-race angle (or is it a plea for votes from Maryland Terrapins alums?) by emblazoning "Fear the Turtle!" on the front of the press itinerary, complete with a little clip-art turtle on every page. The packet includes the latest Iowa poll results, which show Gephardt and Dean in a statistical tie for the lead, with Kerry and Edwards lagging behind. For good measure, the campaign throws in last week's favorable press clippings, including Des Moines Register wise man David Yepsen's assertion that Gephardt is the Iowa front-runner and that Dean has "plateaued" in the state. Also enclosed is a much-discussed Washington Post report—distributed, in truncated form, to voters at campaign events—that Gephardt is the candidate "many prominent Republicans fear the most." Not included is a delicious metaphor for Gephardt supporters to latch onto: While hurtling from campaign stop to campaign stop in Iowa over the past few months, the Dean van has been pulled over multiple times for speeding. At his first stop, a senior center in Des Moines (the first of three consecutive senior centers visited by the campaign), Gephardt is supposed to deliver a "health policy address," but it turns out to be a rehash of old Howard Dean quotes about Medicare. (Later, while being ribbed by reporters about the false advertising, Gephardt's Iowa press secretary, Bill Burton, protests that he never called it a "major" policy address.) The newest wrinkle: Gephardt wants to paint the 1997 balanced budget accord—generally thought to be one of President Clinton's major accomplishments, and one supported by Dean—as a "deep, devastating cut" in Medicare. While Gephardt speaks in front of a sign that reads "Protect Social Security" and "Protect Medicare" over and over, like computer-desktop wallpaper, I wonder: Does he really want to play this game? Dredging up old quotes and votes about Gephardt's onetime conservatism is what helped to derail his '88 campaign. He voted against the establishment of the Department of Education. He voted for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion. He voted to means-test Social Security and to eliminate cost-of-living adjustments from the program. He voted for Reagan's 1981 tax cuts. He opposed an increase in the minimum wage. Does a man with a legislative record this long and varied really want to ostentatiously declare, "There are life-and-death consequences to every position taken and every vote cast"? If that's so, how many times was Dick Gephardt on the side of death? For now, however, it's a more recent House vote that's preventing Gephardt from running away with the Iowa race. At nearly every campaign event I attend, Gephardt is forced to deliver, in effect, two separate stump speeches. The first is the one he would like the campaign to be about: universal health care, jobs, and the immorality of rapacious multinational corporations. Gephardt's not anti-capitalist: "Capitalism is the best system," he says in Pocahontas. "But capitalism has to have rules, so the capitalists don't destroy the very system" they benefit from. He describes his visits to Mexico, China, and India, where workers live in the cardboard boxes used to ship the products they make. "I smelled where they live," he says. They live without electricity, without running water, with raw sewage running down the streets and next to "drainage ditches filled with human waste." "They live in worse conditions than farm animals in Iowa," he continues. "This is nothing short of human exploitation, that's what it is, for the profit of some special interests in the world." I'm not sure I agree with Gephardt's proposed solutions—though I'm intrigued by his notion of a variable international minimum wage—but there's no denying that he's a powerful critic of global capitalism's excesses. Then, once Gephardt has finished and the applause has subsided, almost invariably a voter raises his hand to ask: What about Iraq? Was this war about oil? How can we recover the world's respect? How can we pay for all your programs with a war on? At this point, Gephardt is forced to unveil stump speech No. 2. Sept. 11 changed everything, he says. Government's highest obligation is to protect American lives. In a Gephardt administration, the highest priority would be to prevent a nuclear device—"dirty or clean"—from going off in New York, Los Angeles, or Des Moines. That's why he decided Saddam Hussein needed to be removed. He supported the war because he believed the estimates of the CIA and the warnings of former Clinton administration officials, not because he listened to President Bush ("I would never do that"). Slowly, Gephardt's defense of his vote for the congressional war resolution transitions into a critique of the president. Though in an interview he insisted that the president was smart, on the stump he's not shy about insinuating that the president (whom he often refers to as "Dubya") is stupid. "He's incompetent," "He frightens me," "He's hard to help," I told him America founded the United Nations because "I wasn't sure he knew the history," and "If you'd been meeting with him every week since 9/11, you'd be running for president," too. Because Bush refused to negotiate with Kim Jong Il, North Korea is now "weeks away" from producing nuclear bombs. Bush abandoned the peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine, saying "It's not our problem." He's arrogant. He doesn't play well with others. By the end, people are satisfied enough with Gephardt's explanation, and maybe even a little terrified, but you get the sense that they're not enthused by it. But Gephardt isn't counting on enthusiasm. He has a couple edges on Dean, in addition to his obvious union support. For one, a surprising number of Iowa Democrats just don't like the former Vermont governor. The opposition to Gephardt tends to be substantive, based on his support for the war or his failure as Democratic leader to enact a more Democratic agenda. But the opposition to Dean is stylistic, or maybe even cultural. In socially conservative Iowa, sometimes you hear it whispered: Where's Dean's wife? Before Gephardt arrives at an event in the town of Ida Grove, I overhear a woman grumble about Judith Steinberg's refusal to campaign for her husband. "I can't get used to that," she tells her companion. "It's supposed to be a family thing." By the same token, Gephardt never fails to mention the "church loans" and "church scholarships" that allowed him to attend Northwestern and then Michigan law school. He also refers to his son, Matt, who survived prostate cancer as an infant, as a "gift of God." I don't think I've ever heard Howard Dean say the word "God" in reference to anything. Just before the last stop in Sioux City, I'm granted a 10-minute ride-along interview with Gephardt. I've got a number of questions, but the one I really want an answer to is this: If balanced budgets and free trade—two things that don't get a lot of emphasis in the Gephardt platform—weren't the secrets of the Clinton economy, what were? Higher taxes for the rich? Gephardt explains that the '97 budget accord wasn't needed to balance the budget, and then he tries to explain why Bush's steel tariffs—which Gephardt supported, and which made the United States lose manufacturing jobs—aren't analogous to the retaliatory tariffs Gephardt wants to be able to impose on foreign products or factories that don't comply with minimal labor and environmental standards. Soon enough, we're so sidetracked that I've forgotten entirely what we were talking about. But afterward, when I'm once again following Gephardt in my rental car, I'm left with my question: Clinton balanced the budget and promoted free trade, and the economy boomed. President Bush ran up enormous deficits and put new restrictions on trade, and the economy sputtered. Isn't Dick Gephardt's plan closer to President Bush's? Chris Suellentrop is Slate's deputy Washington bureau chief. You can e-mail him at suellentrop@slate.com. Article URL: slate.msn.com

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (14569)	10/31/2003 5:08:06 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793623

This was an actual obituary published in The Times-Picayune, New Orleans on 10/2/2003: (Urban Legends) Word has been received that Gertrude M. Jones, 81, passed away on August 25, 2003, under the loving care of the nursing aides of Heritage Manor of Mandeville, Louisiana. She was a native of Lebanon, KY. She was a retired Vice President of Georgia International Life Insurance Company of Atlanta, GA. Her husband, Warren K. Jones predeceased her. Two daughters survive her: Dawn Hunt and her live-in boyfriend, Roland, of Mandeville,LA; and Melba Kovalak and her husband, Drew Kovalak, of Woodbury, MN. Three sisters, four grandchildren and three great grandchildren, also survive her. Funeral services were held in Louisville, KY. Memorial gifts may be made to any organization that seeks the removal of President George Bush from office. Origins: A senior citizen who so despised the current president that, before she died, she left instructions directing that her memorial gifts should "be made to any organization that seeks the removal of President George Bush from office"? That seemed to be the case with 71-year-old Sally Baron, whose 21 August 2003 obituary as published in the Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, ended with the statement that "Memorials in her honor can be made to any organization working for the removal of President Bush." Although Ms. Baron may not have cared much for the President, the unusual instruction in her death notice apparently was not placed there at her own request, but was something her family thought up for her after she passed away. According to an article that ran in the Capital Times the same day as Ms. Baron's obituary: When Sally Baron's family wrote her obituary, they described a northern Wisconsin woman who raised six children and took care of her husband after he was crushed in a mining accident. She had moved to Stoughton seven years ago to be closer to her children and was 71 when she died Monday after struggling to recuperate from heart surgery. Her family had come to the question of what might be a fitting tribute to her. "My uncle asked if there was a cause," her youngest son, Pete Baron, said. Almost in unison, what her children decided to include in the obituary was this: "Memorials in her honor can be made to any organization working for the removal of President Bush." "She thought he was a liar," Baron's daughter, Maureen Bettilyon, said. "I think his personality, just standing there with that smirk on his face, and acting like he's this holy Christian, that's what really got her." The decision to put the line in about Bush came easily, although after several family members thought of it, there was some "how can we really say this" kind of laughter. "It should be impeachment, not removal," Pete said, laughing. "That can mean a couple of things." Joe Baron has no question that his mother would approve. "She just didn't trust that a big corporate guy was going to be doing what was best for her. She just really didn't trust him," he said. This phenomenon was echoed in the obituary quoted as an example at the head of this page. A 2 October 2003 death notice for 81-year-old Gertrude M. Jones, as displayed on the web site of the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper, ends with the instruction that "Memorial gifts may be made to any organization that seeks the removal of President George Bush from office." Several mourners have posted pledges to donate money to the Democratic Party in Ms. Jones' memory in her on-line guest book. snopes.com