Pro Commerce

Executive compensation (1 of 2)

There has been perennial outrage at the high levels of compensation that CEO's have gotten since the early 1990s when the Democratic Congress decided to penalize corporations for any wages over $1 million unless tied to performance. That is when corporations found dozens of ways to outrage Congress and many others, by raising CEO compensation far above anything ever seen before.

Inside the executive world the prevailing current argument is that CEOs do much more good for the world (with hundreds and thousands of employees) than movie stars, Oprah, and highly paid athletes; and CEOs carry far greater burdens every day of the week. It is also argued that CEOs are in a competitive field just like senior electricians but at much higher rates.

Both of these arguments are valid but they don't slake legitimate complaints about CEO salaries.  There are two problems that are different from the celebrity star argument and the competitive wage market argument. 

(1) The wage scales of executives under the CEO are effected by the CEO's compensation.  Thus a rise in CEO compensation raises everyone elses or else, with too great a disparity, discourages and drives out subordinates. For a good understanding of this I quote Jeff Imelt the CEO of giant General Electric: "The key relationship is the one between the CEO and top 25 managers of the company, because that's the key team," ...Immelt has said in recent interviews. "Should the CEO make five times, three times or twice what this group makes? That's debatable, but 20 times is lunacy," he added.

Last year, Mr. Immelt received $3.3 million in base salary, $5.8 million in bonus and $396,267 in other compensation, as well as other plan-based awards valued at $4.7 million at their grant date. His compensation, he has said, was in "the two to three times the range" of GE's other 25 top executives.

The top executive wages also trickle down very fast to the entire company and raise everyones wages, making the company less competitive in open markets or more costly for the consumer in monopoly markets.

(2) The argument that the market for CEOs is a competitive market is hard to defend because there are only a few thousand CEOs and it is almost impossible to argue that there is a standard level of competence as there is with senior electricians. (continued in the next blog).

Serious competition

When you start to question the Lefty version of the world it is inevitable that you are forced to question the whole conglomerate of Lefty institutions.  Which is worse, labor unions, environmentalists or innocent people who support their positions?

In this Wall Street Journal article, today, Environmentalists Oppose Air-cleanup Plan, by Jim Carlton, we learn that the leading enviro group NRDC has joined with the Teamsters and other unions to stop Long Beach and LA harbors from expanding.  Both harbors are near capacity, as well they should be; exports are booming.

These two adjacent harbors handle 50% of all the shipping, by volume, in the U.S., in and out. They handle 60% of the U.S. cargo by value. That is a lot.  The rest of our shipping is scattered around 10 other ports.

As the WSJ reports, the NRDC and the Teamsters are trying to use environmental review legalities to keep the harbors from expanding to handle increased trade. They make no bones about their fake environmental position.  The NRDC is opposed to GNP growth and unions are opposed to any jobs that aren't union.

This is serious competition to severely damage the U.S. economy to put many people out of work and to make sure that fewer new jobs are created in our society.  The Allied forces in WWII tried to bomb ball-bearing plants in Germany; ball-bearings were seen as critical to the survival of an industrial nation.

Like the Allies trying to destroy Germany, the NRDC and the Teamsters are in a serious competition to see who can do the most damage to America.

Lawsuits

In Japan you can get virtually any electric device to massage you or vibrate you.  You imagine it, you'll find it, including a full body massage.

Every such healing, stretching, massaging or vibrating device introduced in the U.S., with the exception of the simplest sex vibrator, has been pulled off the market when the company selling it gets hit with a lawsuit.

We have a general American view, discovered thirty years ago by George Leonard that any product that comes on the market should have been designed by fully prescient engineers who made sure no possible misuse could ever be made of the product.

George pointed out that nearly every jury would buy the argument when presented with the facts of a disaster, say a car rolling over while taking a turn too fast, that the engineers of the car could have foreseen the use of the car at too high a speed and should have built in a design to thwart misuse.

Our legal system makes sure that lawsuits can be  brought against almost any product or service, with little or no merit.  The consequence is that the cost of defending against lawsuits forces small companies to go out of business or sell out to larger companies that can survive lawsuits. 

That is why we only have giant companies in the auto industry, pharmaceuticals, HMOs, electrical equipment, engine manufacturing and virtually all consumer electronics.

Change our laws about lawsuits and we'll have more interesting products in our markets and more innovative small businesses.

Zoka

The people who live in the world of coffee already know about Zoka.

Zoka is a small roaster of coffee in Seattle, that has gained an international following for the quality and taste of its fresh roasted coffee.

The photo on this page is a Zoka coffee shop in Mejiro Tokyo, the second one they've opened in Tokyo. 

I would guess that Seattle and Tokyo are the two coffee capitals of the world, though every one would argue that Turkey, Israel, Vienna and a few other places are rightfully on that list.  I frankly won't argue the point.  Seattle created the first worldwide coffee business after swallowing the idea of daily espresso whole-heartily and Tokyo has been the Blue Mountain-brew-one-cup at a time capital for half a century.

I actually like the Zoka espresso drinks very much and recommend it.  The same is not true of the Clover machine brew of regular coffee they sell for $10.  I do love the fact that infuriates all the coffee world, Starbucks bought the Clover company.

Kaiseki smorgasbord

The Japanese have had a great influence on American food and taste.  Sushi is obvious but the Japanese version of 'presentation' has been an even greater influence.  Eat in any of the top restaurants in America in the past twenty years and even the second ranking restaurants and you'll find that the presentation is 75% of what you are paying for and 100% borrowed from Japan.

The Japanese have even taken foreign food ideas and applied the same presentation value to the foreign food.

The Japanese 'presentation' model is best seen in their elaborate ten-twelve course meals called 'kaiseki.'  Kaiseki is probably derived from the Japanese Tea Ceremony which emphasizes simple elegance and avoids ostentation.  Each dish in a kaiseki meal is intended as an aesthetic masterpiece in all dimensions including seasonality.

The Japanese have now borrowed the Scandinavian smorgasbord idea and translated it into a kaiseki meal.  The two photos on this page show part of the appetizer selection and a very small part of the dessert selection at the Imperial Hotel 'Viking' luncheon.  The price is appropriate, $55, no tip.  The kaiseki-smorgasbord idea is now in use in many large Japanese hotels.

Telecom deregulated

Have you noticed that telecom is virtually an unregulated field these days.

As recently as five years ago, most telephone calls were made from land lines owned by a few giant telecom companies that were under state regulators. If you didn't like something you had a state regulatory body to complain to.

Today, nearly all phone calls are made over wireless systems and computer transmitted digital signals that are completely unregulated.

This has been a major transition in the telecom business with very little comment. 

We all complain about the high cost of cell phone service, the unwarranted two year contracts and the periodically poor quality of the transmission but there are so few complaints that nothing rises to the level of a call for new regulation.

Most complaints are minor and directed at issues of fraud or deceit that are handled by consumer affairs government offices.

The reality is that an unregulated field is working fine, despite the consolidation of the wireless companies into a few giants. Even fewer in the near future.

Can-do-life

I mentioned in an earlier blog that America is now so rich, prosperous and diverse that we have reached a commercial threshold, the point where any American who will join the mainstream can fully participate in the prosperity of our society. 

That means for many of us who have skills and talents that are above average, we are now able to lead a new kind of life.  This life has no name.  It is a life where we can pursue the kind of life in which everything we do is fun and much of it generates income.

Many observers have noticed that skilled workers often pursue multiple careers; that job changing and career changing are common modes.

I am going further, I'm saying that many people don't pursue jobs or careers, they pursue their interests and live the life they find enjoyable. These new people are able to support themselves doing what they enjoy most, whatever they enjoy most. There is nothing in this related to trust funds or inheritance.

When I am asked for career advice I am increasingly willing to say to ordinary people: do what you love and you will not find it difficult to support yourself.

I call this choice in life the: can-do-life.  I assume you know what I mean and I assume you know people who are living like this.

Connecting Bobbitt to Yehoshua

The connection is weak. Ed Rothstein, a first rate American intellectual mind, has reviewed Philip Bobbitt's Terror and Consent about the current wars of non-state terror groups against nations. I will read Bobbitt's book after I finish the two current books on my Sony Reader that relate to the same subject and which you will soon see reviewed.

Then there is the article that is widely discussed by nearly everyone in Israel (be prepared, it is very long) and has been translated into English.  It is A.B. Yehoshua's, seminal work on anti-Semitism.  Yehoshua is probably the world's greatest living thinker.

Yehoshua finds the 2000 year hatred of the Jews among people with no consistent characteristics, against Jews with no consistent characteristics to lie in the fear of the mysterious force that holds the diverse population of Jews together: nationhood. 

Nationhood arises in a people without a land, without a common spoken language or ethnicity. Nationhood arises from a lifetime focus by Jews on a common set of laws (the Torah). 

Very interesting connection because today, Israel (the people in love with the world of laws) is locked in a firm embrace with America (the country that defines itself by its love of a Constitution), and both are hated, in the new terror war, by tribal people who abhor the idea of a nation based on laws.

UN not credible

I have long advocated a replacement for the UN, mostly because it is so riddled with anti-Semitic hate it warrants the title 4th Reich.

Now I am tempering my position because (1) I've seen some compromise in the discussion of Durban II. South Africa is no longer being considered as a site, because the Islamic hate nations realized no decent nations would attend to give the Islamic hatred credibility if the conference were a perfect repeat of Durban I.  In other words, the monsters need the credibility the UN offers and can, in some occasional rare cases, withhold.

(2) The emergence of the coalition of market-tolerant-tyrannies (China and Russia) and their desire to promulgate their new found ideology of pro-tyranny warrants a forum where free market nations can confront the tyrannies.

I was inside the conservative revolution

I was in the heart of the conservative revolution as it was getting started.  So far I've never seen the history written.

I became president of the San Francisco Young Republicans in early 1963 the year before the presidential campaign with Goldwater versus Rockefeller. San Francisco had the largest Young Republican chapter in the US with over 4,000 members.  The SF Young Dems had only 400 members. 

San Francisco was 100% for Rockefeller and had both a Republican mayor (George Christopher) and Congressman (William Maillard). During my time as a Republican activist, I worked on the Nixon campaign for Governor, the Rockefeller campaign for the Republican presidential nomination* and for Milton Marks an SF Assembly candidate.

I regularly went as a delegate to the California Young Republican conventions from 1962 to 1964 which was the time during which the Conservatives took over the party. The designation at the time was Conservative and Liberal Republican.

There were no issues, just the terminology and personalities. The Conservative movement came out of Orange County and San Diego. They had come to life because California in 1958 had passed a state referendum ending 45 years of cross-party voting that had produced endless Republican Governors and Senators.

The return to strong political party politics was entirely pushed by the Democrats and the growing government unions.  The consequence was the rush by everyone to control the parties with the Conservatives slowly winning on the Republican side. Their candidate, who eventually carried the nation, was Ronald Reagan who developed a political philosophy with its own new policy elements........ along the way .

The Republican Party as early as 1962 was using the term: 11th Commandment.  The 11th Commandment was that Republicans never attack other Republicans publicly.  That cohesive dogma, forged after 30 years out of national Congressional office, has been a guiding light for Republicans ever since.

Reagan always included in his California cabinet and National cabinet many of my Liberal San Francisco colleagues including Caspar Weinberger.

*I've seen the Rockefeller loss mischaracterized by historians in print.  Rockefeller lost in the last week in California after gaining momentum with an Oregon win, when his campaign sent out a 'Don't let Goldwater push the nuclear button' flier that infuriated moderate voters.

Dynax

Dynax was the name of the partnership I belonged to in Japan for twenty years.  The principal was Takahashi, Seiji who died two years ago and had closed the business a few years earlier as his health failed.

My job was to review all projects and bring a fresh outside perspective to the issues of the company.  Dynax was a business that we don't have in the U.S.  It was a commercial social science think tank.

I'll only describe two projects.  One client was Seibu, a major department store chain, that wanted to have a direct link to the tastes of 15 year old  girls.  We at Dynax figured out a solution to that problem.  We chose two high schools in Tokyo, handed out fliers.  We offered a phone number that girls could call on Monday and Wednesday to get advice from a 'big sister' on specific issues such as skirt length, make-up at school, etc.  We had real women answering the phone..  We then offered a tape summary of the previous nights' calls and advice on Tuesday and Thursday for the girls who called in.   We had a perfect connection to 15 year old girls' tastes and interests.

Another client wanted to make the best use of imported experts who gave luncheon talks to our client company's engineers and specialists.  The client wanted to make sure that the material was completely understood and digested.

Solution: All the listeners were asked to make 3x5 card notes on the key points in the talk, during the talk.  After the talk we put all the cards on the wall under the appropriate subject areas and with appropriate lines connecting the cards.  The process took several hours and forced the participants to deeply examine the nature, structure and content of the talk.

The deep examination was precisely the intent of the methodology we had developed.

This is too sad to gloat over

I have no sympathy for most parents who send their children to Waldorf schools. Most of these parents are wimps and wusses who are into New Age woowoo and who want to make sure that their children turn out to be wimps and wusses.  No TV and only wooden toys...standard Waldorf New Age fare.

But I have great sympathy for the children of these goody-goody monster parents.  This news story is about a Waldorf kindergarten in El Sobrante  East of the Berkeley hills that had to close because of multiple cases of pertussis (whooping cough).   

I warned just seven months ago that when parents discuss not getting childhood inoculations it is time to leave the room, such parents are vicious child abusers. The disease I've seen, which is prevented by infant inoculations, is pertussis. Pertussis is awful. See for yourself.

Now we know, that Waldorf parents are probably nuts, most certainly fools, rich nuts, rich fools....for letting their children go to a school where pertussis has broken out.  That means that many Waldorf students didn't get infant inoculations, thanks to their parents' child abuse behavior.

Poor kids, I hope they don't die.  I hope they live to let their dysfunctional parents understand the unnecessary evil child abuse they have received.

Public schools require proof of infant inoculation.  That is why I'm so down on Waldorf (private expensive)school insanity.  California Courts have required parents who rejected leukemia treatments to get it for their children.  The same court orders have to become true for infant inoculations.

Trends in Japan

Two years ago I reported on meeting a man in Japan who follows retail trends.  He does a much better job than I do and he has two related businesses.  One that follows trends so you know that the trend following blog will be around and exciting for many years and the other that sells some of the most interesting products that are described in the trend blog.

Don't miss it. Its fun and keeps you posted on the most dynamic and innovative retail market on the planet.

One of my recent favorites is a wool suit that can be cleaned in the shower and dries quickly.

Hu what?

I learned in the U.S. Army not to make fun of my fellow soldier's names. It is really a cruel form of humor.  I just couldn't resist this Chinese-English pun.

The underlying question about Hu Jintao is of potentially extreme importance in world affairs. Hu Jintao is the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party.  That is the top position in China.  General Secretary Hu is spending the current week in Tokyo with Japanese Prime Minister (top position in Japan) Fukuda Yasuo.

This could just be a chance to work on a few touchy issues like overlapping claims to a seabed with natural gas under it, the acceptance of pandas in Japan, food trade health problems, etc.

Or this could signal a major realignment of power in the world.  Japan and China are each other's main trading and investment partner.  There has been friction for nearly a century, sometimes open warfare.  Now the greatest friction is between Japan and North Korea and North Korea is a client state of China's.

If Japan and China became close, or even allies, the world now and in the future would be radically different.  These two countries together possess the population and technology to confront and possibly equal the United States. 

Is that going to happen? Is that already happening? Am I in Tokyo during a week that will turn out to be of major historic importance?

Diet

Americans deeply believe in the theory that 'you are what you eat'.  How valid is this driving force in American (and German) life? 

There are many peoples around the world who have had extreme food consumption practices for dozens of centuries.

The Indian Brahmans are vegetarians and have been for millennia.  They also believe that eating onions increases intelligence.  Here is a gigantic population of true vegetarians, tens of millions, that are virtually indistinguishable from their non-veggie neighbors.  They aren't taller, faster, healthier, stronger nor longer lived.  I don't know if they are smarter.  So what does that tell us about vegetarianism? 

'Nothing', if empirical evidence means nothing to you.

We have more extreme examples.  The Inuit eat virtually no plant life because they live far above the Arctic circle.  No problem with health, lifespan or strength.  Don't let your kids who hate spinach know about the Inuit.

Then there are the Masai. Centuries of drinking cattle blood.  They are very tall.  But the same diet among the Mongols hasn't changed their height.

Then there are all people in the world who do eat pork or don't eat pork, do drink milk or can't drink milk, all the people who eat mainly rice, all the people who eat mainly fish and all the people who live mostly on Yak butter.  No real correlations with anything....height, weight, health, lifespan...nothing.

So how valid is the core belief that  'you are what you eat'?  Don't answer.  I've never seen anyone change their mind on this issue.

First bird of Spring

I saw this photo recently at Trader Joe's near San Francisco's Fisherman's wharf.  The photo is the original Cost Plus.  There is a current Cost-Plus 25 feet away from the original location, and much bigger.

Cost Plus is very important to those of us who love commerce.  It is nearly a religious icon. 

America before Cost Plus, circa 1958, was a retail world made up of two or three products in many lines of consumer goods.  A god-damn sterile shopping world with products from a small number of big companies.

Cost Plus opened America to the world.  It found and imported a great variety of low cost, quality, useful products from around the world. It turned a narrow, barren, bigoted, virgin American shopping world into a lusty, vigorous, enjoyable, open minded universe of excitement.

On a related subject, I read Virginia Postrel's blog. Virginia occasionally mentions how fortunate we are to have so many consumer products available to us in America.  That is complete nonsense Virginia.  Until you have visited a Tokyo department store, and particularly Tokyu Hands, you have no idea what consumer choice is.  For every product we have on an American retail shelf, the Japanese have four times as many.

Veggie Restaurant

I ate in a new veggie restaurant in the Yoyogi Uehara neighborhood of Tokyo recently.  That should make the trip tax deductible since I am on the board of Greens restaurant (vegetarian) in San Francisco.

Greens has been a success for more than 25 years. Greens has been full nearly all its history with 180 seats recently expanded to over 200.  It recently opened on Sunday nights and was full immediately.  I originally found the location for the restaurant in 1980 and helped conceive the original Greens with the abbot of San Francisco Zen Center.

What Greens did right and the Yoyogi restaurant does wrong is to use plenty of butter, cheese, cream, sugar, rich sauces, great deserts and have a very large wine list. There were never any fliers, magazines or newspapers in Greens for veggie issues nor were there any products for sale with a veggie ideology, like organic virgin olive oil.

The food at Greens has always been expensive and great.  It recently got even better, changing with the times. Veggie food is expensive to prepare, because, unlike a slab of steak or fish, it can't be thrown on the grill. Everything has to be carefully cut, diced and presented. That is labor.  Veggie food is labor intensive and that is expensive.

Comments on my blog

I love getting comments. I get more comments in a week on my blog than I got in six months on my national public radio interview program.  The radio program had an audience that was more than twice as large.  Active comment contributors are something wonderful about blogs and the Internet.

This is by way of mentioning that I occasionally delete a legible comment. Profanity doesn't bother me neither do exaggerated or vehement language.  I love opposition and I love people who attack my positions.  What I delete (other than spam) are name calling ('you are a racist') stupidity and people who completely miss the point.

One recent commenter attacked me on human genetic engineering saying that it had nothing to do with stem cells. That is stupid, unless some genetic engineers are working on rocks. Or someone confuses germ cells (eggs and sperm), a terminology that includes stem cells.

There are plenty of people who miss the point and just react to a title or an image and have no idea what is written in the blog.

I am endlessly surprised at the number of students who ask me to write their papers on hippies and on the arguments against democracy. Should I ask for money? 

On the democracy issue, I don't argue against it, I only argue that democracy actually precedes rational thought, not the other way around. That is the history of the Dutch Republic and modern democracy everywhere else.

New Games failure

Stewart Brand invented a brilliant idea in the hippy era called New Games.  Stewart realized that games played by individuals have a metonymic relationship to war and international relations. Our games are small scale training for our war making styles.  He hoped that by changing the games people enjoy it might change the macro-world war making practices.

Stewart was indulging in the core hippy view of the world (everything, global, parallels inter-personal relations).  Stewart may not have believed this core view himself but he was willing to give it a try, since he knew the hippies would love to play New Games.  Stewart was right about the hippies. New Games was a hit and hippies loved it.

Trouble is: even with a business that was set-up and designed to promote New Games around America and around the world....the New Games are not one of the hippy contributions that have been adopted by the wider society.

I have two explanations. First, inter-personal games (including chess) and team sports are metonymic reflections of national warfare practices, not the other way around.  The warfare has to change first, not our games. Second, peaceful cooperative games are no damn fun.  We Americans have a strong personal drive to compete, strive together and constantly improve our skills in a meritocratic environment.  Games serve that purpose. New Games, non-competitive, didn't.

We  do not live in a sandbox. There is no adult supervision in life.  Each person has to learn to deal with others in power terms, not goody-goody, Quaker, pacifist terms.

For a good dissent see Scott in the comments.

George W. Bush (2)

This is my second fleeting thought about the 41st president of the United States of America. Number one is the previous blog.

I consider George W. Bush to be one of the greatest presidents in American history. One who should be put on Mt. Rushmore in the next 50 years.  One who will have more streets, schools and children named after him than any other human being in the next two centuries.

Like Lincoln, he 'stayed the course' during a war of national survival despite the most vitriolic, hate-filled, venomous ravings of the Democratic Party, and he won the war. Like Theodore Roosevelt, he brought significant reform to national government with or without the support of the Republican party, most of the time with the support of the Party. Reforms included tax overhaul of significant importance, Supreme Court reform, UN reform and many others....

The only reason I have to doubt my judgment on the greatness of George W. Bush is that I identify too closely with him.  Like him, I am surrounded by the most idiotic, short-sighted, self-serving, anti-empirical ranting of people who ceaselessly spew their blind rage at everything in range. Like him, I find no reason to respond.  Like him, I have spent six years washed in the shower of venom.  Like him, I know that my antagonists, including friends, have completely closed minds...response to their vitriol is not possible.

I love talking to people who accept an empirical world and empirical evidence.  There are so few, unfortunately.

George W. Bush (1)

Two fleeting thoughts about the 41st president of the United States of America. This is thought number one.

The Obama mania we have all had to suffer with for seven months is hard to explain.  Senator Obama himself is a hollow man with no strength of character, a propensity to lie in public (think 'he really does support NAFTA') and no accomplishments in his life outside of academia.

My explanation for Obama mania is that it is the reverse side of the coin. The coin has two sides.  Think manic-depressive.  One side of the coin is the Hate Bush Syndrome and the other side is the Love Obama Syndrome. One coin, two faces.

We know very little about group behavior, group hysteria.  I see this two-sided coin thesis as one piece of empirical evidence about group behavior. Obama mania is the opposite of the Bush derangement syndrome:  both occupy the same brains.

Parisian public bicycles

I saw a recent report on the Parisian bicycle system Velib.  I can't find the news story (search engines can often be crap).  The problem with Velib is that many of the thousands of bicycles are returned daily in damaged condition, so damaged that the constantly circulating bike maintenance teams can't make adequate repairs without taking the bikes into their shops.

How is this possible since a credit card is required for non-Parisians to use the bikes?  Two reasons: one the public is not very nice and a significant percent of the public will mess-up anything (think graffiti) if they can get away with it. All you eco-fiends and do gooders would do well to examine this reality.

Two, the French in their unceasing demands for "privacy" have made it a law that credit card transaction must be erased a few hours after they are completed.  So the bicycle destroyers can get away with their destruction of public property, without being caught, once they know the French laws. 

Obviously scofflaws have good communications systems and are able to tell each other about the fun of destroying Parisian bicycles. ...unhampered.

Googled

Microsoft got Googled. The term Googled now has the added meaning of cuckolded.

What happened on Friday was that Yahoo explained to the potential groom, Microsoft, that Yahoo was serious about having Google generate all of its word-matching advertising and share the revenue when the site of the ad was on Yahoo. (Metaphorically getting pregnant with Google's child).

The only real value Yahoo offered to Microsoft before the proposed marriage was called off was the (virgin) Yahoo word search and ad match capability.

The jilted groom, the marriage being called off, told investors that Yahoo was only valuable for its word-search-ad sex appeal. That was also the reason that Yahoo and Google on Friday had the same price-earning value (40-1); making the two companies worth the same amount in investor's eyes.  Investors saw the future of Yahoo and that future is for Yahoo to be caring Google's child.

Buried by a blogger

Two themes that I can't resist.  A blogger in Minnesota, Michael Brodkorb, has probably buried Al Franken. 

I believe that bloggers have significantly changed American politics, and ultimately global democracy, by giving an advantage to honest candidates. (All praise to John McCain) I also believe that Al Franken is a mentally ill (Bush derangement syndrome), unqualified, ideological buffoon running for Senate in Minnesota.

Minnesotans love far-out crackpots but they also value honesty.

Michael Brodkorb, on his own, checked to see if Al Franken had paid state taxes in the several states where he had corporations, gigs and has been a resident.  Franken hadn't done so and was publicly force to pay $70,000 in state taxes. Franken, with no sense of humor and no modesty, blamed his CPA for the oversight and then demand that the CPA not defend himself or speak to the press.

The story is here. The mainstream Minnesota media is particularly Lefty and consistently dishonest so they didn't uncover the story and didn't report it.  The Republican party made the story public. We all owe Michael Brodkorb some extra respect.

The mixed autocrats need us

Russia and China will probably do well without democracy for a long time, maybe centuries.  They may spend centuries supporting their idea of mixed tyranny and industrial markets.

But they are in fact never going to be robust economies because they are parasites, in the biological meaning of that term.  When democracy and industrial markets are combined you get innovation and new markets. Russia has always, in its former incarnation as the USSR, been forced to buy Western factories, use Western market pricing and copy Western innovations in technology. They can only survive by borrowing. The same is true for China.

That will not change. The combination of tyranny and industrial markets will always trend toward the status quo.  The world will stop growing without the democratic free market nations....they (we) are the locomotives of the economic train.

The tyrannies will need us. Just as the socialist economies have needed us for the past fifty years.

Buy their houses

I really get sick of hearing about the preposterous anti-NAFTA debates and the proposals to bring jobs to the countless cities and towns where jobs have disappeared.  I don't want to call anyone stupid, but you have to be stupid to think the coal industry is coming back, that more people are going back into farming, that steel will be produced in areas with outmoded transport systems, backward looking unions and 19th Century steel mills, or that American auto companies are going to expand rapidly in the near future.

All these people who are out of work and listening to the demagogues, are in cities and towns that will NEVER recover.  Never.

Hey political liars and scam artists, listen-up.  In 1942 when the American war machine was gearing up and the labor market was being drafted America faced a drastic shortage of workers in the right industrial places.

Solution: Federal employees traveled all through Appalachia buying the houses of people who wouldn't migrate to Detroit and Chicago because their life savings were tied up in their houses. With their house sold, they readily up and moved.

Nothing has changed.  If people need to leave small towns for jobs in other areas, the government has to buy their houses, their only form of savings.  Then they will move...then they will find jobs.

I liked this

My brother sent me this circulating email apparently written by Richard J. Gross.

In case you didn't get it here it is: The Global Islamic population is approximately 1,200,000,000
or 20% of the world's population.

They have received the following 7 Nobel Prizes:

Literature:
1988 - Najib Mahfooz
Peace:
1978 - Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat
1994 - Yaser Arafat:
1990 - Elias James Corey
1999 - Ahmed Zewai
Economics: (zero)
Physics: (zero)
Medicine:
1960 - Peter Brian Medawar
1998 - Ferid Mourad

____________________________________________________________________________

The Global Jewish population is approximately 14,000,000 or about 0.02% of the world's population.

They have received the following 129 Nobel Prizes:

Literature:

1910 - Paul Heyse
1927 - Henri Bergson
1958 - Boris Pasternak
1966 - Shmuel Yosef Agnon
(continued)   

Heads-up

This source, the San Francisco Jewish Bulletin, is seldom an insider resource, but this time, in this story, they are quoting many reliable Israeli spokespeople.

This story is about significant progress in Syrian-Israeli negotiations with Turkey playing the negotiator and Jordan wanting reassurances.

The U.S. president is needed in the deal for the purpose of paying-off Syria, just as Carter was needed in 1978 to get Israel out of Sinai with a $2 billion a year payment to Egypt.  (Israel needed Carter in that deal though the Israeli's knew that he was an anti-Semite and that he would force Israel to accept control of Gaza as part of the deal.)

Number of stories

Have the number of stories and story lines increased in the past century? 

At the beginning of the century we had stories offered to us in the form of books, texts, newspapers, magazines, traveling street story tellers, family stories and good stories as part of every conversation. There were also stories in songs, musicals and in the theater.

At the end of the century we had all of the above plus, movies, television, Cable TV, radio, the Internet and a variety of storage media such as tapes, CDs, records, videos and media archives.

Have the number of stories and story lines increased?  I think the answer is yes but I have no reliable way to measure it. I know that Spike Lee brought new black characters and new story lines into our purview.  I suspect other new stories came from our contact with far different societies and cultures, via immigration.

We also have a few new story lines from our historical experience:the Holocaust, the genocidal quality of strong government (communists included), the birth of a New Israel, the failure of central communist planning and the recognizable connection between personal freedom and free markets.

I hope someone will work on this question.

A disgrace to his professor

I am beginning to hear myself rant.  I am deeply offended by Jeremiah Wright.  The man is a gross distortion of a decent human.  If he is any body's mentor they need serious new counseling.  Jeremiah Wright's worst distortion to date is the claim that he somehow reflects the thinking of Martin Marty.

I interviewed Marty for my public radio program and I have read several of his books. Marty is a good historian and a great appreciator of the religious inclusiveness of America.  He loves America and the role religion has played in our country. I will not be surprised to hear Marty disown and rebuke Jeremiah Wright.

Jeremiah Wright is the opposite of Martin Marty.  Wright's history is mean-spirited, vicious and nothing more than an ideological patchwork of blind ignorance.  His level of tolerance is minus five on a scale that only goes from zero to plus 5; he is the worst example of a demagogue, a racist and a bigot. Wright's claimed association with Martin Marty reaches a biblical level of abomination.

Is my message coming through?