Who's To Blame For The Mortgage Crisis?

If you're having a hard time getting your head around exactly what happened in the historic meltdown of America's home-mortgage market, you're not alone.

As the wife-and-husband investigative team Leslie and Andrew Cockburn suggest in their new documentary, "American Casino," nobody fully understands it: Not the bankers and brokers who sold subprime mortgages (often using deceptive tactics or disingenuous language), not the Wall Street wizards who carved them up into ever more esoteric financial instruments, not the free-market wise men like former Fed chair Alan Greenspan or former Sen. Phil Gramm, and certainly not the ordinary citizens who believed they were fulfilling the American dream and wound up losing their homes, their financial security and their self-respect.

Actually, the Cockburns meet one guy in "American Casino" who understands the whole mess better than most, a California real estate investor named Jeff Greene who smelled the end of the housing bubble around 2006 and bet $1 billion against the mid-decade exuberance of Wall Street. Sitting in his walled and gated beach compound in Malibu, Greene calmly tells the camera that the opportunity for his successful hedge bet (which has yielded $500 million so far) involved massive pain for millions of homeowners.

We meet some of those people too; the Cockburns focus in particular on the African-American community of Baltimore, a city devastated by the tidal wave of foreclosures. Of course foreclosed properties can be found in virtually every neighborhood of every town and city, and at every income level. But Latinos and African-Americans are several times more likely to be affected than whites, and while the problem is undeniably complicated, that almost certainly reflects the enduring legacy of racism. In the 1990s and 2000s, neighborhoods that had previously been "redlined" by traditional lenders became targeted by unregulated and unscrupulous vendors of subprime mortgages, who neither knew nor cared whether borrowers were likely to default on those loans. As we now know, the results were toxic.

One of the film's sad ironies is that middle-class homeowners like Denzel Mitchell, a Baltimore high-school teacher, or Patricia McNair, a family therapist, might well have qualified for conventional loans from normal banks. (One survey mentioned in the film suggests that at least half the people who applied for subprime mortgages in 2006 could have qualified for prime mortgages.) Instead, they were enticed into too-good-to-be-true first and then second mortgages that adjusted sharply upward, which they couldn't realistically afford. Both people are aware that their own lack of financial sophistication is partly to blame for their predicament, but that does nothing to lessen the heartbreak as McNair and her husband have to leave the appealing family home where her adult children grew up, or as Mitchell must abandon his organic vegetable garden and the Tuskegee Airmen-themed bedroom for his little boys.

But if you want to blame somebody for what happened to Mitchell, McNair and millions of other Americans, the place to point the finger is at the fervid deregulation advocated by Greenspan and enacted by Congress under the whip of Gramm and other free-market ideologues. Such laissez-faire reforms created a wide-open marketplace where bankers and brokers could sell whatever extortionate mortgage deals they wanted to whomever they wanted, while lying to consumers about what they were getting and lying to lenders about the borrower's income and assets. Meanwhile, as one anonymous former Bear, Stearns banker tells the Cockburns, Wall Street securities dealers carved up packages of mortgages into abstruse, "fourth-dimensional" instruments to be sold to "idiots."

"American Casino" is of necessity a fragmentary tale; it was being filmed in 2008 as the crisis broadened and deepened, with events unfolding too fast for the Cockburn cameras. But while the mortgage crisis still awaits a rigorous deconstruction along the lines of Alex Gibney's "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," this film stands as an intimate, terrifying document that renders an incomprehensible slice of recent history in human terms. While the stories of Denzel Mitchell and Patricia McNair made me want to weep, the film's most memorable images stem from the Sisyphean task of Jared Dever, a bright and handsome local official in Riverside County, Calif., whose job is to control the county's mosquito epidemic, largely caused by the fetid, abandoned swimming pools behind foreclosed suburban homes.

Dever patrols a nightmarish, new-but-decrepit landscape straight out of the fiction of J.G. Ballard, carefully checking empty houses for signs of meth labs or marijuana grow zones before attacking the pools, whose algae-green water is full of abandoned patio furniture, tires and sports equipment, along with millions of mosquito larvae and the minnows who live on them. I'm not sure that hosing down the whole subdivision with Malathion is any kind of answer. Civilization didn't leave much of an imprint on that place. Now that the bankers have sucked out all its supposed economic value, we might as well drain the pools, knock down the houses and let the coyotes and rattlesnakes take over.

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Source:

http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/btm/feature/2009/09/02/casino/index.html?source=rss&aim=/ent/movies/btm/feature

Tags:

Salon, American Casino, Leslie and Andrew Cockburn, documentary, bankers, brokers, subprime mortgages, Jeff Greene, redlined, Phil Gramm, Alan Greenspan, Global Economic News,

Posted via email from Global Business News

IKEA is as Bad as Wal-Mart

My mother still owns, and uses, the same vacuum cleaner she bought early in her marriage, just after World War II. She still lives in the house my father -- not a carpenter by trade, but an electrician -- built in the early 1950s with the help of his brothers, a small but sturdy Cape Cod-style dwelling with hardwood floors and solid wood doors that close with a hearty, satisfying clunk (as opposed to the echoey click of hollow-core doors).

Today the idea of anything -- a household appliance, a piece of furniture, a house -- being built to last is almost laughable. When your vacuum cleaner stops sucking, you most likely haul it out to the curb and trek to Target or a big-box home-goods store to replace it. Even if you could readily find someone to repair it, the trouble and the cost would be prohibitive. If you need a bookcase, there's always IKEA: Sure, you'd prefer to buy a sturdily built hardwood version that doesn't buckle under the weight of actual books, but who has extra dough to spend on stuff like that? The IKEA bookcase is good enough, for now if not forever.

That cycle of consumption seems harmless enough, particularly since we live in a country where there are plenty of cheap goods to go around. But in her lively and terrifying book "Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture," Ellen Ruppel Shell pulls back the shimmery, seductive curtain of low-priced goods to reveal their insidious hidden costs. Those all-you-can-eat Red Lobster shrimps may very well have come from massive shrimp-farming spreads in Thailand, where they've been plumped up with antibiotics and possibly tended by maltreated migrant workers from Burma, Cambodia and Vietnam. The made-in-China toy train you bought your kid a few Christmases ago may have been sprayed with lead paint -- and the spraying itself may have been done by a child laborer, without the benefit of a protective mask.

"Cheap" is hardly a finger-waggling book. This isn't a screed designed to make us feel guilty for unknowingly benefiting from the hardships of workers in other parts of the world. And Shell -- who writes regularly for the Atlantic -- isn't talking about the shallowness of consumerism here; she makes it clear that she, like most of us, enjoys the hunt for a good deal. "Cheap" really is about us, meaning not just Americans, but citizens of the world, and about what we stand to lose in a global economic environment that threatens the very nature of meaningful work, work we can take pride in and build a career on -- or even at which we can just make a living.

Discount chains pretend to be the most democratic of enterprises, willing and able to fill our every need at a price we can afford: Ingenious slogans like "Design for All" (Target) and "Save money. Live Better" (Wal-Mart) make that point pretty well. Shell asserts that an excess of cheap goods -- and the drive to make and sell them ever more cheaply -- is putting a deadly squeeze on workers worldwide. Most liberal-leaning citizens are aware of the profit-making schemes of Wal-Mart and, even if we actually shop there, find them distasteful (although Shell notes that among economists, the chain has its defenders).

But Shell asserts that even outlet malls and seemingly benign, friendly, progressive stores like IKEA are part of the problem; along with more obvious bad guys like Wal-Mart, they perpetuate a cycle that, far from nurturing creativity and innovation in the marketplace, ultimately benefits a relative few at the very top of the economic chain. Shell notes that before retiring in February 2009, "Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott Jr. took home in his biweekly paycheck what his average employee earned in a lifetime." You might say that, for Scott, the good news is that everybody can afford to shop at Wal-Mart; the better news is that he himself doesn't have to.

Shell begins by outlining the history of mass production in America (perhaps not surprisingly, firearms were among the first items to be mass-produced) and the rise of the discount chain. In the late 1800s a sickly farmer's son named Frank W. Woolworth opened the first "five-and-dime"; later, foreshadowing a future that workers around the world now seem doomed to live out, he quipped, "We must have cheap labor or we cannot sell cheap goods. When a clerk gets so good she can earn better wages elsewhere, let her go."

The understanding is that she'll have somewhere else to go, where her skills and talents are wanted or needed, considered something worth paying for. But increasingly in our current work climate, more skills only make a worker more expensive and possibly more demanding, not more desirable. With meticulousness and daring, Shell approaches this problem and the myriad thorny issues twined around it, incorporating the research and views of an assortment of economists, political scientists and law professors to build her case. At the core of her argument is the idea that the wealth of cheap goods available to us doesn't make our lives better; instead, it fosters an environment that endangers not just the jobs of American workers but the idea of human labor, period.

It's impossible to grapple with the global economy without addressing the tricky subject of China, and Shell does so with the right amount of clear-eyed empathy. She notes that China as a nation has grown wealthier while its poor have become poorer. According to figures released by the World Bank, between 2001 and 2003 the income of the poorest 10 percent of China's 1.3 billion people had fallen by 2.4 percent, to less than $83 per year. In that same period, the country's economy grew by 10 percent, and its richest people became 16 percent richer.

Many of China's poor work in factories, earning ever-shrinking pay under inhospitable or dangerous conditions, as the American conglomerates who do business there press the Chinese government to revise or reverse regulations that might make these laborers' work lives more tolerable. The government, understandably eager for China to take its place at the global-commerce table, is all too eager to comply. A Shanghai journalist makes a piercing comment to Shell: "We do not yet have the luxury to concern ourselves too much with things like human rights."

But Shell is careful to point out that China isn't the source of the "cheap goods" problem. She quotes Mark Barenberg, a professor of law at Columbia University and an expert on international labor law: "The severe exploitation of China's factory workers and the contraction of the American middle class are two sides of the same coin." The idea is that when global corporations squeeze labor in China and other developing nations, they're able to use the threat of low-wage competition to, as Shell puts it, "roll back decades of hard-won gains in wages, benefits, and dignified treatment for workers in the United States." In other words, employers in the United States can easily use the threat of downsizing and outsourcing to gain more power over, and squeeze more juice out of, their employees -- who, in turn, enjoy increasingly less protection from unions.

While the Chinese are hardly the villains of Shell's story, certain Swedes have plenty to answer for: Shell's chapter on IKEA is the most gently damning in the book. Shell is quick to admit that IKEA products -- from bookshelves to tables to lamps -- are very nicely designed. And the ingenuity of designing furniture so that it can be shipped efficiently, compactly and cheaply, with an eye toward environmental concerns, is admirable. But Shell also points out the hypocrisy inherent in IKEA's philosophy.

As a clever IKEA commercial, directed by Spike Jonze, points out, an old lamp (or bookcase or table) doesn't have feelings; any piece of furniture can and should be replaced at any time. The ad, and the whole IKEA approach, suggests that objects have no lasting meaning or value. They're disposable; when we tire of them, we should just throw them out. Then why, Shell asks, does IKEA personify its products by naming them, à la the Lack coffee table or the Kura loft bed? "If IKEA thinks it's crazy to care deeply about objects, why," she asks, "does it sell a wok named after a girl?"

IKEA makes money, and lots of it, by passing on to the consumer the cost of assembling its products, thus turning the consumer into part of its workforce: Depending on how you look at it, we either save money by putting IKEA furniture together ourselves, or we pay for the privilege of putting IKEA furniture together ourselves.

Regardless, these tables and bookcases aren't, and aren't intended to be, heirloom pieces. But Shell wonders if our expectations are too low. We no longer expect craftsmanship in everyday objects; maybe we don't feel we even deserve it. "Objects can be designed to low price," she writes, "but they cannot be crafted to low price." But if we stop valuing -- and buying -- craftsmanship, the very idea of making something with care and expertise is destined to die, and something of us as human beings will die along with it: "A bricklayer or carpenter or teacher, a musician or salesperson, a writer of computer code -- any and all can be craftsmen.

Craftsmanship cements a relationship between buyer and seller, worker and employer, and expects something of both. It is about caring about the work and its application. It is what distinguishes the work of humans from the work of machines, and it is everything that IKEA and other discounters are not."

What's more, IKEA is the third-largest consumer of wood in the world and uses timber that comes mostly from Eastern Europe and the Russian Far East, where, Shell points out, "wages are low, large wooded regions remote, and according to the World Bank, half of all logging is illegal." IKEA president and CEO Anders Dahlvig asserts that the timber his company uses is harvested legally, and the company does employ forestry experts to monitor the company's suppliers. But Shell points out that IKEA has only 11 forestry monitors, not nearly enough to keep a watchful eye on all those suppliers worldwide, and five of those specialists are devoted to China and Russia, a vast spread of territory by itself. Dahlvig says that hiring more inspectors would cost too much; he'd have to pass the cost on to the consumer.

Would enlightened consumers pay a little more, maybe, to buy products made from wood that had been, unquestionably, legally harvested? Maybe -- but it's not the consumer's choice to make, at least not right now. And if there's one thing that makes reading this eye-opening book an ultimately frustrating experience, it's that Shell can't offer many helpful solutions to this tangle of economic and moral problems, aside from urging us to be more aware as consumers.

Still, she does cite one example of an organization that at least tries to get it right: Wegmans, a chain of supermarkets with stores located mostly in the suburbs of New York state, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia and Maryland, offers its employees job-training programs, health insurance and retirement benefits. The company operates on the supposition that if it treats its employees respectfully, they'll be better prepared (and more willing) to serve the needs of customers. The approach seems to work: Wegmans profits financially by fostering and retaining customer loyalty, and its employee turnover rate is low -- roughly 6 percent, measured against an industry-wide rate of more than 30 percent. The company also buys a large percentage of its produce from small, local farmers, and has been doing so for 20 years.

If "Cheap" is a harrowing document of the pursuit of profit at the expense of our basic humanity, the example set by Wegmans -- Shell saves it for the end of the book -- sounds almost too good to be true, the kind of crazy business idea that, according to the logic of outfits like Wal-Mart, shouldn't work. In reality, it's one of the foundations of good business: Treat your employees well, and they'll serve you well in return. The cost may be higher, but the price is right.

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Source: http://www.salon.com/books/review/2009/07/12/cheap/index.html?source=rss

Tags: IKEA, Walmart, China, Cheap labor, low-cost producer, Outsourced manufacturing, World Bank, Columbia University, Russian forests and timber, Global Economic News, Global Development News, Salon,

Posted via email from Global Business News

How To Go Viral

The man who created flash mobs explains why crazes like Susan Boyle ruin our ability to focus on the big picture.

Bill Wasik is an Internet instigator. Though he works as an editor at Harper's, Wasik is best known as the creator of flash mobs, that early 21st-century trend in which, directed by chain e-mails, people formed mobs in public places for no other reason than to form mobs. That's hardly his only act of Internet impishness, though: Over the course of his career, Wasik has adopted numerous online personas in order to test the boundaries of our ever-expanding viral culture. He tried to derail the burgeoning career of indie rock darlings Peter Bjorn and John, started a fake version of the New York Times for conservatives, and ran a site focused exclusively on negative attacks against political candidates. In the process, he's analyzed how and why some stories became cultural phenomenons and others languish in the nursing home of online oblivion.

Now, in his new book "And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture", Wasik sets out to explain what he's learned from all his Web mischievousness and also what our increasing addiction to the Internet indicates about us as a society. We now have more information at our fingertips than ever before, but Wasik suggests we find it hard to focus on issues that really matter because we're so consumed with myopic, ephemeral things.

Recently, Salon spoke with Wasik via phone about nanostories, self-marketing, flash mobbing in front of Claire's Accessories and the fleeting fame of Susan Boyle. Your book is mainly about viral culture. We hear that term bandied about a lot, but what does it actually mean?

I use the term "viral culture" to talk about a whole new model for how we find out about things, whether it's a new band or some new celebrity or a political argument. When I use the phrase, I am thinking about a mode of culture that finds its purest expression on the Internet. But I also think that the shifts that I'm talking in the book deal with the speed with which we find out about new things. That obviously isn't just happening online, it's happening everywhere. When I talk about viral culture, I'm talking about a culture that's reinventing itself on an Internet model.

Part of that involves nanostories, which you also write about extensively. So how do nanostories flare up and then burn out? I define nanostory as the basic unit of this kind of churning viral culture. Susan Boyle is a classic example of a nanostory. She burst onto the scene. Not just in Britain but here in the U.S. with a few YouTube videos. And immediately what she becomes is not just a little celebrity but this giant symbol of all this stuff about the culture that people want to hang on her. Her age or her appearance becomes symbolic of cutting against this youth- and beauty-obsessed media culture. The sort of style of music she likes, these throwback Broadway songs, wind up being indicative of some kind of more transcendent approach to music.

She becomes this giant symbol and all this meaning gets heaped upon her. But then of course, there's nothing to sustain it. She became this giant micro-star at a point when she wasn't going to be on television again for many weeks. If you can't feed the machine, then it shuts down. We'll just be distracted onto the next thing if it doesn't give us more to keep us going. That, to me, is a classic example of a nanostory. It is a short-lived media phenomenon that is driven by the sheer quantity and speed of the contemporary conversation. So many hours of cable news to fill, there are so many blogs that need refreshing. Now there's Twitter and more. And so we seize upon these tiny little things and try to elevate them into sensations, but of course they can't bear up under the weight of it.

With so many different mediums, why do they all seem to follow these same stories? At the end of the day, why does anyone care so much about this random singer that none of us have ever met?

That relates to the "Long-Tail" -- the idea that the Internet will allow us to splinter off into a lot of smaller niches. The Internet does allow for smaller and smaller communities of interest that have more and more intense likes for shared things. But I also think one great value of culture for us is that we like to have something to talk about with each other. And so, you might have a great love for some very, very obscure form of heavy metal and on the Internet you can find all the other 5,000 different people around the world who like this very particular heavy metal music. But it's also true that if you go to high school or if you work in an office or if you have sort of friends out in the real world, you're going to want to engage with them in the shared stuff of mass culture. Mass culture continues to exist precisely because it's the stuff of cultural exchange among ourselves. And so, that to me is the reason why you have 10 million people becoming obsessed with Susan Boyle instead of 10,000 people. Precisely because she becomes grist for this bigger conversation.

But doesn't that suggest that what human relationships are founded upon is incredibly shallow or meaningless?

I don't know if I would go so far that it all has to be meaningless. You sometimes have these great sensations stirred up by news stories or by pieces of investigative journalism or great art. There's this section of the book where I talk about the Politico, the online politics site. Their audience really is interested in a lot of interesting picayune policy details. But of course it's also true that that audience cares about meaningless scandal.

Right, the Politico also broke the John Edwards haircut story. So does our fixation with nanostories make us less able to focus on the mega-stories, the long-term problems such as global warming or the economic crisis?

Absolutely. One of things that I find so depressing about the climate change conversation is the fact that we actually have succeeded in implanting climate change in a lot of people's minds as an important long-term challenge. But more often than not, the way that that happens in public discourse is seizing on these tiny, little, grabby ideas that are really, really short-term. So, Al Gore has a movie. That was the seminal moment in coming to an understanding about climate change in this country, where we could turn it into a little entertainment business piece. And I think your point about the economic crisis is right on too. We sat there and talked about the AIG bonuses for four days. It was very telling that we can only know the big problem these days by way of some tiny little piece of outrage or delight, through these little nanostories.

I also want to talk about what you call your experiments in viral culture. You are the originator of flash mobs. What was your goal in sending out an e-mail to your friends to tell them to meet you in front of a Claire's accessories store?

I had become really interested in chain e-mails and in the ways you'd get something forwarded from a friend or from your uncle or wherever. It did sort of seem like chain e-mails were a medium and if you could somehow tap into that, then you could potentially do something creatively interesting with that. And I had been thinking about how I might be able to use a chain e-mail to get people to come to a show of some kind. But after thinking about it for a while: What if there was no show? What if the idea with the e-mail was I just laid it on the line, forward this to everyone you know, we're going to get together, and the whole point of us getting together will be for us to all be together in some place that nobody expected us to be?

What were some of your other experiments and what have they shown you about viral culture?

One other experiment was in the indie rock world, where it's hard to stop the buzz of an indie rock band. So I created a site called StopPeterBjornandJohn that attempted to stop the rise of this band. I entered the Huffington Post Contagious Festival, which was this thing they ran for a year, where you would enter and create a site that got as many hits as possible, and whichever site got the most hits won. I also created this politics site called Oppodepot with the idea of it being a sort of collaborative site, a repository of smears, negative political information.

I had some very interesting conversations with Jonah Peretti, who was the mastermind behind the Contagious Festival and is now the head of this site called Buzzfeed, and Jonah made the valuable point that successful viral sites need to speak to some kind of social relationship. If you're going to forward it along to someone you know, you're only going to forward it to someone that something about your preexisting relationship with that person makes you think they'll like it. He gives the example of this New York Times article, "What Shamu Taught Me About Having a Happy Marriage." It was an animal trainer writing about how the wisdom of animal training helped her understand her relationship with her husband. It was the number one story forever, seemingly.

Right. But think of all the different social relationships that it spoke to. If you were married, you might jokingly send it to your spouse. If your friend was having relationship troubles, you might send it to them. Or your parents. And also, you can have a viral thing that's designed to be appreciated ironically and you can have one that's designed to be appreciated earnestly, but man, if you have something that can be appreciated either way or both ways at the same time, then you're cooking with gas.

Another lesson I'd say I learned from the mob project is the idea of secrecy and being a secret agent. Being part of a small, elect group of people that are going to carry out some mission. That idea has a lot of appeal just because it gives you a thrill of belonging and being special in an Internet culture where everything is usually accessible to everyone all the time. I think that's an interesting point -- what is it that we all get personally out of these nanostories?

There's a way in which having the novelty before somebody else has it, so you can give it to them, becomes a kind of exchange. People like to be the friend who knows about the new band or the new movie or the new Internet meme that their friends don't know about.

In the book, you suggest that our predilection for propagating Internet fads is a form of self-marketing and that the Internet is teaching us to constantly sell ourselves. We're selling our discernment or hipness when we "discover" the hot new band or funny YouTube video. You write, "When one has developed the media mind -- which is, at heart, a marketing mind -- one can never stop selling, but neither can one be entirely sold." Is it dangerous that we're all becoming marketers of ourselves? If so, what does it lead us to?

I do feel that there's something intrinsic to these kind of Web 2.0 modes of self-presentation that makes us think like marketers. When you post a video on YouTube or a link to your blog or a song to your MySpace page, without you asking in most cases, the technology is going to give you all of this data about how many people listened to this song or that song, viewed this link as opposed to that link. Suddenly, you're like the TV executive with the Nielsen ratings. And this is exactly what's happened to newspapers. You have this information that you never had before.

The editor of the Washington Post never knew before which individual stories in the paper were generating interest. He just knew the whole thing sold X number of copies. But with the Internet you have all this granular information about where your readers are coming from and which stories they pick. You can't help but use that information in how you decide to present yourself or how you decide what to write or what to create in the future. And that to me is the way that this kind of marketing mind-set unavoidably creeps into Internet culture.

But in terms of individuals presenting themselves, especially people who are aspiring culture makers and are trying to make a career for themselves, you post something that gets a bunch of hits or you record a song that suddenly gets a bunch of downloads, that could wind up being the sort of formative creative experience that you have in your life. People talk about getting their break and traditionally, you come to New York or wherever you are, somebody who has power or has experience picks out something you did or pick you out and says, hey you've got something. Many people have those formative experiences.

I would say that for 90 percent of culture makers coming up today, your break is going to be online. And the way that you're going to know you had your break is going to be numbers. It isn't going to be a single person, like an established poet, or an established musician coming up to you after a show or responding to a piece of writing you sent them and saying, I really believe you can do it. Instead, it's like this giant hive mind will pluck out something that you've done and say, this we love, this we bestow the pleasure of 2 million hits on. From there on out, you're going to use those cues you get from this giant machine to tell you what to keep doing and to tell you what to stop doing. And that to me is potentially scary in all sorts of ways. The hive mind selects for a certain kind of thing, it selects for culture that is instantly digestible, it selects for culture that is sensational in a certain sort of way.

So what do we do about this? You write, "We must become judicious controllers of our own contexts, making careful and self-reflective choices about what we read, watch, consume." How?

There are probably people who will happily surf the Internet hive mind for as long as it keeps on going. And I wouldn't begrudge them that. I'm more trying to speak to people like me, who on the one hand are really viscerally engaged with the online culture, who understand rightly that it really is the locus of almost everything exciting that's going on in the culture. You can't ignore it. But on the other hand we feel that being constantly plugged in is taking too much of a toll on us.

I would say that if there's one thing that's causing the novels of the world from getting written right now, it's surfing the Internet. I do think that a lot of creative people want to be working on their craft, they want to be thinking big about what they should be doing and my belief is that the culture is encouraging them to think small. To me, the challenge is to try to find ways to partially unplug ourselves. To carve out spaces in our lives away from information. Away from the sort of constant buzzing of the hive mind. I think some of these constraints can just be arbitrary. Tuesdays, I'm not going to look at the Internet. I think that can often be effective.

Another way of working on it is to develop more effective filters of information. Instead of just freely clicking around from site to site to site, and before you know it, you've spent four hours following your whimsy every which way, instead pick out a few sources of information that you feel like are not just crucial and well-done, but also fairly broad based and representative. To me, the most important step is recognizing that you can't possibly take in all the information that's out there. [You need to] make a wise intervention into your information consumption and try to make it manageable so that you can live a happy life and save time for the thinking of higher things.

Source: http://www.salon.com/books/int/2009/06/10/viral_culture/index1.html

Tags: Bill Wasik, nanostories, viral culture, salon, How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture, buzzfeed, Jonah Peretti, Contagious Festival, Global Blog Network, youtube, myspace,

Posted via email from Global Business News

The Great Deficit Scare Returns

Even liberals are getting antsy about debt and government spending. Stop worrying. The deficit hawks are wrong.

By Robert Reich

It's the kind of thing I expect to hear from deficit hawks and chicken littles -- from the self-described "fiscally responsible" right, from the scolds Ross Perot and Pete Peterson, from my former cabinet colleague Bob Rubin. But yesterday I was shown slides developed by the putatively liberal Center for American Progress intended to make the point. And today's front page story in the New York Times, by the eminent David Leonhardt, entitled "Sea of Red Ink: How It Spread From A Puddle," puts the issue right before our progressive noses, so to speak.

The Great Debt Scare is back.

Odd that it would return right now, when the economy is still mired in the worst depression since the Great one. After all, consumers are still deep in debt and incapable of buying. Unemployment continues to soar. Businesses still are not purchasing or investing, for lack of customers. Exports are still dead, because much of the global economy continues to shrink. So the purchaser of last resort -- the government -- has to create larger deficits if the economy is to get anywhere near full capacity, and start to grow again.

Odder still that the Debt Scare returns at the precise moment that bills are emerging from Congress on universal health care, which, by almost everyone's reckoning, will not increase the long-term debt one bit because universal health care has to be paid for in the budget. In fact, universal health care will reduce the deficit and cumulative debt -- especially if it includes a public option capable of negotiating lower costs from drug makers, doctors, and insurers, and thereby reducing the future costs of Medicare and Medicaid.

Even odder that the Debt Scare rears its frightening head just as the President's stimulus is moving into high gear with more spending on infrastructure. Every expert who has looked closely at the nation's crumbling infrastructure knows how badly it suffers from decades of deferred maintenance -- bridges collapsing, water pipes bursting, sewers backed up, highways impassable, public transit in disrepair. The stimulus, along with the President's long-term budget, also focus on the nation's schools, as well as America's capacity to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. These public investments are as important to the nation's future as are private investments.

First, some background: Deficit and debt numbers mean nothing in and of themselves. They take on meaning only in relation to something else. And the most important something else, in terms of deciding whether the nation can afford such deficits or debts, is the size of the national economy.

Pay close attention, in particular, to the debt/GDP ratio. True, that ratio is heading in the wrong direction right now. It may reach 70 percent by the end of 2010. That's high, but it's not high compared to the 120 percent it was in 1946, after the ravages of Depression and war.

Over time, the basic way America has reduced the debt/GDP ratio is by growing the U.S. economy. GDP growth makes even large debts manageable. When the economy is cooking, more people have jobs and better wages. So they pay more taxes. And they require less unemployment assistance and other social insurance. That's why it's so important now, in the depths of depression, that government, as purchaser of last resort, steps in and runs large deficits. Without large deficits this year and next, and perhaps the year after, the economy doesn't have a prayer of getting back on a growth path, and the debt/GDP ratio could really get ugly.

That growth path, by the way, will be faster and stronger if the nation invests in our infrastructure, our schools, and our environment -- which is exactly what Obama aims to do. In this respect, national budgets are like family budgets. It's dumb for an indebted family to borrow more money to take a world cruise. But it's smart even for an indebted family to borrow money to send their kids to college. So too with the Obama budget. Public investments, just like family investments, build future wealth. They allow faster growth. They make the debt/GDP ratio even lower and more manageable over time.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying there's nothing to worry about when it comes to long-term deficit and debt projections. I'm just saying now's not the time to worry, and we ought to temper our worries by understanding the larger context.

Not every expert agrees that a deficit-driven stimulus is the best and fastest way to get the economy back on a growth track, or that public investments can speed growth. Conservative economists, Republicans, and many Wall Streeters are skeptical because they don't think government can do anything well. But look at the record of the last seventy-five years -- look at how the nation got out of the Great Depression, and consider the critical role public investments have played since then in speeding the nation's growth, investments such as the interstate highway system -- and you have ample evidence that the deficit hawks are wrong. They were wrong when they convinced Bill Clinton to chuck a large part of his investment agenda (the nation is now paying the price) and they're wrong now.

So, back to the mystery. Why are the ostensibly liberal Center for American Progress and New York Times participating in the Debt Scare right now? Is it possible that among the President's top economic advisors and top ranking members the Fed are people who agree more with conservative Republicans and Wall Streeters on this issue than with the President? Is it conceivable that they are quietly encouraging the Debt Scare even in traditionally liberal precincts, in order to reduce support in the Democratic base for what Obama wants to accomplish? Hmmm.

Source: http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/06/11/deficits/index.html?source=rss&aim=/opinion/feature

Tags: Robert Reich, Salon, Debt, Deficit, Economics, Obama, New York times, Center For American Progress, Republicans, Democrats, GDP, Wall Street, Global Economic News, Bill Clinton, Budgets,

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Bush Is Gone, But Halliburton Keeps Cashing Cheques

Dick Cheney's former company spun off KBR in 2007 -- yet paid a huge fine for the military contractor 3 months ago.

The Houstonian Hotel is an elegant, secluded resort set on an 18-acre wooded oasis in the heart of downtown Houston. Two weeks ago, David Lesar, CEO of the once notorious energy services corporation Halliburton, spoke to some 100 shareholders and members of senior management gathered there at the company's annual meeting.

All was remarkably staid as they celebrated Halliburton's $4 billion in operating profits in 2008, a striking 22 percent return at a time when many companies are announcing record losses. Analysts remain bullish on Halliburton's stock, reflecting a more general view that any company in the oil business is likely to have a profitable future in store.

There were no protesters outside the meeting this year, nor the kind of national media stakeouts commonplace when Lesar addressed the same crew at the posh Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Houston in May 2004. Then, dozens of mounted police faced off against 300 protesters in the streets outside, while a San Francisco group that dubbed itself the Ronald Reagan Home for the Criminally Insane fielded activists in Bush and Cheney masks, offering fake $100 bills to passersby in a mock protest against war profiteering. And don't forget the 25-foot inflatable pig there to mock shareholders. Local TV crews swarmed, a national crew from NBC flew in from New York, and reporters from the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal eagerly scribbled notes.

Now the 25-foot pigs are gone and all is quiet on the western front. How did Halliburton, once branded the ugly stepchild of Dick Cheney -- the company's former CEO -- and a poster child of war profiteering, receive such absolution from antiwar activists and the media? Of course, the defeat of the Republicans in the 2008 election, the departure of the Bush administration, and a general apathy toward the ongoing, but lower-level war in Iraq are part of the answer, but don't ignore a potentially brilliant financial sleight of hand by Halliburton either. That move played a crucial role in the cleansing of the company.

"Burn & Loot"

Halliburton has been doing work in war zones since the early 1960s, when it acquired the construction company Brown & Root and was tasked by the Pentagon with building the infrastructure for the Vietnam War. Back in those days, it was vilified as "Burn & Loot." After more than three decades in news obscurity, in March 2003, with the invasion of Iraq, it suddenly returned to national attention. After all, not only had its former CEO been beating the public drums for an invasion, but its subsidiary KBR (the old Brown & Root) had been given a vast, open-ended, multi-billion dollar contractto build and maintain the new infrastructure of bases that the U.S. military was rushing to construct in that country.

More than six years later, KBR has taken in over $31 billion for a variety of services to the U.S. military, notably in the field of logistics, and the money continues to flow in. As of April 2008, under a renewed contract, the company estimated that it had served more than 720 million meals, driven more than 400 million miles on various convoy missions, treated 12 billion gallons of potable water, and produced more than 267 million tons of ice. While these numbers may be impressive, so are the multiple claims from Pentagon investigators of Godzilla-like overcharges and waste, not to speak of spiraling claims of workplace negligence, including faulty electrical wiring that led to deaths and injuries on bases KBR built, and a failure to provide adequately clean water supplies to the troops; and then there are those allegations of war profiteering made by activist groups and politicians.

In September 2004, Lesar announced that Halliburton was considering spinning off KBR as a separate company, in part he claimed because it was bearing the brunt of a "vicious campaign" of political attacks and its employees didn't "deserve to have their jobs threatened for political gain." It took three years, but in April 2007 the spinoff of KBR was completed. It is now officially on its own, and the results for both companies seem little short of miraculous. No protesters even attended the three annual shareholder meetings that KBR has since held, though its activities in the war zones have hardly changed, and only five made it to Halliburton's in 2008. This year, of course, the protesting larder was bare.

Five shareholder activists did manage to attend Halliburton's annual meeting, including me. (I own a single share of Halliburton stock.) When I asked Lesar about the company's links to KBR, he responded unequivocally, "First of all, let's be very clear, KBR and Halliburton are legally separated."

Just three months ago, however, Halliburton didn't hesitate to pay off $382 million in fines to the U.S. Department of Justice as part of the settlement of a controversial KBR gas project in Nigeria in which the company admitted to paying a $180 million bribe to government officials. Halliburton, Lesar assured us, had been willing to pony up such a sum to ensure that KBR could survive on its own. He painted the payment as an act of corporate generosity. I asked Albert Cornelison and Mark McCollum, Halliburton's top lawyer and chief financial officer, if the company had similarly agreed to pay off any future judgments against the company on its monster military logistics contracts in Iraq. Cornelison responded that he doubted the company had financial obligations for KBR's work in Iraq.

Military investigations continue

In reality, Halliburton's decision to spin the company off was surely tied to hopes that it might indeed escape a number of pending Iraq investigations and lawsuits, as well as tamp down the bad publicity KBR was generating. Still, those investigations are ongoing. At Fort Belvoir, Va., the headquarters of the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA), the office in charge of reviewing the Pentagon's payments to KBR, a small group of investigators continue to pursue that company's failures.

In early May, at a hearing on Capitol Hill, DCAA director April G. Stephenson told the independent, bipartisan, congressionally mandated Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan that, since 2004, her staff had sent 32 cases of suspected overbilling, bribery and other possible violations of the law to the Pentagon inspector general. The "vast majority" of these cases, she testified, were linked to KBR, which accounts for a staggering 43 percent of the dollars the Pentagon has spent in Iraq. "I don't think we're aware of a program, contract, or contractor that has had this number of suspensions or referrals," she told the hearing. (In the allied area of overpricing services, DCAA also recommended $4.3 billion worth of reductions to proposed or billed costs and pointed to another $3.3 billion worth of costs under the KBR contract that they believed were simply not supported.)

Stephenson's staff, she indicated, recommended not paying the costs KBR had billed to the Pentagon on more than 100 occasions, among other things suspending or blocking some $553 million in payments. In but one example of typical KBR practices revealed at the hearing, the company allegedly billed the Pentagon for 4,100 prefabricated living units for military bases in Iraq at an average price of $38,000, even though another contractor offered to provide similar units for $18,000 each.

None of this may, however, matter, if the Pentagon continues to follow the precedents it has recently set. As Stephenson notes, the Pentagon has already agreed to pay out at least $439 million of the $553 million the DCAA questioned, after accepting the company's explanations for each incident.

"I'm struck by the fact [that] the military doesn't seem to care about the cost as long as they get the service," said Commissioner Christopher Shays, former Republican congressman from Connecticut. "Is part of the problem that, in essence with this one contractor, we've basically said, 'KBR is too big to fail'?"

Shocking revelations

The Pentagon even appears willing to pay KBR for contracts that may have resulted in the deaths of military personnel in Iraq, allegedly electrocuted due to shoddy work by the company's electricians. Just as Lesar was addressing Halliburton's shareholders in Houston, Sen. Byron Dorgan's Senate Democratic Policy Committee was holding a hearing on Capitol Hill focused on KBR. Testifying was Jim Childs, a master electrician hired by the U.S. Army to help review military facilities in Iraq.

Childs claims that as many as 70,000 KBR-maintained buildings where troops lived and worked were unsafe because of faulty electrical wiring. "When I began inspecting the electrical work performed by KBR, my co-workers and I found improper electrical work in every building we inspected," Childs said. Hundreds of soldiers are believed to have received electrical shocks in showers and elsewhere as a result. There have beenfour documented fatalities, including Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth of Pittsburgh, Pa., a Green Beret, who died of electrocution while showering in his barracks in Iraq on Jan. 2, 2008. (Maseth's family has sued KBR, alleging wrongful death.)

According to Sen. Dorgan, documents show that KBR was paid huge bonuses by the Pentagon for this work, much of it after the allegations became public. If accurate, this gives "shocking" a new meaning. "How could it be that, given these obviously widespread problems with KBR's electrical work, the Pentagon decided to give KBR bonuses totaling $83.4 million for such work?" he wondered.

KBR, of course, denies everything. "We believe the standards that we did employ were standards that were known and thought to be acceptable in an expeditionary environment," KBR's William P. Utt told the Associated Press in response. "We don't think the wiring that we installed was potentially dangerous." In a brief statement about the deaths, the company wrote: "Based on our current knowledge and the information we have gathered to date, KBR has found no evidence of a link between the work the military tasked KBR to perform and the reported deaths that have resulted from electrocution."

Who is responsible?

One of the biggest problems with the sprawling 2008 KBR mega-contract appears to be that not enough people are watching the store (and evidently, some of those who do regularly doze off when payment issues arise).

In early May, Michael Thibault, co-chairman of the independent Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, highlighted a simple, if disturbing statistic at the second hearing of his newly established commission. Out of 504 oversight officials that, by Pentagon estimate, are needed to keep an eye on KBR's contract in Afghanistan alone, just 166 were actually in the field in April 2009. As Thibault added:

"After more than six years of fighting, this is just one example of serious and persistent shortfalls in staffing and training. In military parlance, no one is pulling guard duty on contractor performance. This example, an issue by itself, points to another broader question. Who is responsible? Who's going to fix these types of issues?"

At the Democratic Policy Committee hearing in late May, Charles M. Smith, a 31-year veteran of contract management in the U.S. Army, testified that Pentagon officials were deliberately ignoring criticism in deciding to reward KBR. Smith was in charge of KBR contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as of the award-fee or bonus-payment process that went with them. He refused to allow any bonuses to be paid out, however, because the company was not able to provide proper documentation of its costs. This was one reason, he believes, that he was taken off the contract in August 2004. Smith became a whistle-blower after he retired a year ago. Here is a sample of his testimony:

"The award-fee process is supposed to evaluate a contractor's performance level and provide a 'bonus' or award fee for superior performance. Failure to perform satisfactorily should result in a significantly lower or no award fee. [The award system] appears to me to have failed to work as it was intended and to have led to poor service for American troops, wasted taxpayer money, and possibly the deaths of soldiers in KBR operated facilities...

"The problems for operating in the environment of Iraq and Afghanistan are not insignificant. However, the major failure appears to me to have been a culture that decided KBR was too big to fail and too important to be held to account. The Army was aware of KBR's poor performance in Iraq. There have been numerous government inspections and reports. The Army, however, continued to give KBR high award fees. Those high award fees appear to have sent a message to KBR that performance did not really matter. Award-fee boards and decisions are a communications tool between the government and the contractor. The contractor learns what is important to the government and will respond accordingly." And the record shows that KBR did "respond accordingly."

Remembering Halliburton

In the meantime, Halliburton, which provided so many years of corporate "oversight" for KBR, has been cleansed of all charges in the court of public opinion and has essentially dropped from view. It has also done its best to ignore a shareholder resolution brought by Patrick Doherty, the comptroller of the city of New York, that raises the obvious issue of war profiteering in Iraq, based on the Pentagon dollars it raked in while its former CEO helped oversee the war that was making it so much money.

Some shareholder activists continue to pursue the company by other means. For instance, the pension fund of the Policemen and Firemen Retirement System of the City of Detroit filed a lawsuit in mid-May against David Lesar and other executives of KBR and Halliburton, accusing them of a "reign of terror." The lawsuit listed a number of complaints including bribes in Nigeria, overcharging the Pentagon for services rendered, accepting kickbacks, engaging in human trafficking, and concealing the rape of an employee.

"Under defendants' watch, and supposedly under their control and supervision, the companies were permitted to engage in conduct so notorious that the name 'Halliburton' has become virtually synonymous with 'corruption,'" the pension fund said in a complaint filed at the Harris County District Court in Houston.

"Defendants' failures have caused the Companies to suffer hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, and to be exposed to substantial additional judgments in the future."

Heather Browne, a company spokeswoman, responded: "It appears that the lawsuit is based on unfounded allegations. We intend to vigorously defend ourselves." Another shareholder activist, John Harrington, a socially responsible investment manager in California, used his KBR shares to file a protest resolution against the company this May. According to Harrington's press release:

"KBR's management is obviously not taking their human rights footprint very seriously. The board of directors is accountable to shareholders, but only if we assert ourselves as the real owners of the company. Understandably, shareholders don't like being associated with atrocities. If ever there was a need for responsible fiduciary human rights oversight within a company, it is with KBR. This company has been castigated in the press, sued, and accused of bribery, rape, murder, political corruption, tax avoidance, and who knows what else."

KBR nonetheless took in another $5.7 billion from the U.S. taxpayer in 2008, up 15 percent from the $4.8 billion it received in 2007. With the planned drawdown of U.S. troops in Iraq, KBR expects its revenue to fall this year. But shareholders need not worry: Its contract with the Pentagon, signed in April 2008, potentially sets it up to make more than triple the maximum profits allowed in the previous six years.

Recently, the Financial Times ran an interview with KBR's Utt, aptly headlined "KBR believes it is ready to construct a new image." The same day stock analyst Will Gabrielski raised his profit estimate for KBR, causing company shares to jump. If forgiving and forgetting are now the norm when it comes to the records of Halliburton and KBR in the Bush years, the question remains: Will the Pentagon complete this cleansing ritual or engage in the serious task of investigating both companies?

Source: http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/06/03/chatterjee/index.html?source=rss&aim=/opinion/feature

Tags: Military, Pentagon, Opinion, Pratap Chatterjee, Iraq War, KBR, FT, Halliburton, Will Gabrielski, George W Bush, Pentagon, Heather Browne, Dick Cheney, Salon, Global Development News Blogspot,

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