M-m-m Martha!
Bernie, Bernie, Bernie—what ever are you doing? Don’t you know what CEO means? It means CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER. It means millions in salary and stock. It means power. It means perks. IT DOESN’T MEAN I don’t know or I didn’t understand or I relied on others. A CEO isn’t entitled to STUPID as a defense. S-o-o-o…after they pack you off to ‘the big wieners in the shower club,’ please drop George W’s friend, Kenny Boy, a line and let him know how it works.
Chop Suey! Try a stunt like this in America and someone goes to jail. The cast: Wang, a Chinese investment banker; Fang, Mayor of Beijing; Goldman Sachs, the august New York investment bank; and $200 million good old George Washington’s composed of a $67 million donation to cover losses at a Hainan Securities(a failed Chinese brokerage firm whose officials, apart from possibly having political ties to Wang and Fang, have been accused of embezzling millions from investor accounts), a $100 million loan to Fang (security not disclosed), and $30 million for a 1/3rd stake in a new joint venture with Wang and Fang from which Goldman Sachs who hopes to reap billions.
And then faster than one can skip five fen across the Sea of Japan, Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, the man one Japanese station called more powerful than God (but remember Shinto and Buddhism are Japan’s major religions), gets his butt hauled out of one of his luxury hotels and taken away in a police van for suspicion of insider trading and filing false financial statements. (Martha’s cell is empty.) Can Goldman Sachs be far behind?
South of the border down Argentine way, president Nestor Kirchner gleefully announced restructuring $102.6 billion—B as in billion baby—in bonds mostly held by foreigners. Why the glee? Thirty cents on the dollar, that’s why. And who got stuck holding the bag full of three dimes? Besides retail holders like you and me who didn’t have a prayer, the usual suspects were Switzerland, Italy, United States, Germany and Japan. You don’t like it. Tough. The Argentine Congress passed a law making it illegal to improve the existing terms. People in the business call this sovereign risk—I call it getting screwed. If you don’t understand the language, stay out of the bordello.
Closer to home, across the Potomac from Virginia in that cozy cuckoo’s nest we call Washington, DC, some of the same banks involved in the $70 billion Argentine bath managed to get their rich senator friends to pass a law that prevents you and me from declaring the kind of bankruptcy that lets us dump our lousy credit card debt. Let’s see: how many one-thousand dollar credit card users will they have to sue to get $70 billion? Hmmmm? Seventy with nine zeros divided by one with three zeros equals seventy with six zeros. That’s seventy million poor souls just like you and me.

AIG might soon be better known as American Investment Gougers rather than American International Group. First, AIG gave us the Marsh McLennan scandal that cost its shareholders $850 million though AIG doesn’t acknowledge any wrongdoing. ($850 million is a hell of a price for doing nothing wrong.) Now it seems C.V. Starr, a private holding company owned by top AIG executives and directors, is pocketing big profits on lucrative insurance business, profits that could be earned by AIG investors. How much? A cool hundred to two hundred million since 1999. AIG’s comment…“The company does not comment on matters in litigation.” Don’t you just feel like slapping someone silly every time you hear that?
Viacom took an $18 billion—that’s B as in BILLION—non-cash write down for its radio and outdoor advertising businesses purchased in 2000. With 18 billion carat gold chutzpah, Viacom’s octogenarian chief executive, Sumner Redstone, said Viacom couldn’t be accused of overpaying. Oh, and the ‘non-cash charge’ crap: someone’s paying, like shareholders whose stock took a dump and tax payers as in you and me baby.
Rather than wasting time trying to hijack Uncle Sam for big bucks, American-based airlines should boogie to Bombay where Jet Airways India’s $400 million (+) IPO sold out in ten minutes and ended up being oversubscribed 18.7 times.
Color-coded Tom Ridge of Homeland Security fame has been named a director of Home Depot. Who knew duct tape and plastic sheeting sales had gone so well.
Was Scott A. Livengood, ousted ceo of Krispy Kreme, liven too good? The United States Attorney’s office and the SEC seem to think so and are poking around for more than a dozen to go.
I wonder if Dracula or one of his pals might have eased the tension between Vladimir and George when they met yesterday at Bratislava Castle in Slovakia. It would seem G may have been Put in his place by V.
So Karen R. Hitchcock, president of SUNY at Albany, about to be tarred with the brush of questionable ethics, scoots north to become principal of Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. Canada may need to tighten its border crossings.
Oy robot! MIT has designed a knee-high guy with clothespin like arms, mouse trap feet, a cylinder shaped head the size of a D cell battery, a chrome ring for shoulders and chest from which dangle a handful of crayon-like appendages (one of which must surely be the spare rib for the Eve version) and two metal pegs for legs. The reported beauty of this generation of robots is that they walk more naturally—I guess that’s so they can blend in.

ED is rearing its ugly head again, and those of us in the target market for Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra know all too well it can’t be raised enough. But should Medicare pay for a bunch of guys over sixty-five to run around like sex-craved teenagers? That is the question.
Not yourself lately? Maybe it’s because Choice Point, a gatherer of background information, has sold somewhere between 145,000 and 500,000 private information files, maybe yours and mine, to fake companies that outsmarted its…credentialing process? But take heart, Choice Point hired a—as in singular—retired Secret Service agent to help revamp its verification process—I guess that would be its ‘credentialing process.’
Quick, what do the Saab R-7X, Chevy Trailblazer, GMC Envoy, Buick Rainier and Isuzu Ascender have in common? Answer: same production line. What does the R-7X cost? Answer: $39,000 (+-). What does the Trailblazer cost? Answer $28,000 (+-).
Headline: Lawsuits Are Not the Only Reason for Higher Malpractice Insurance Premiums. Doh! Would the other reason be malpractice?
Nielsen is finally going to change its research to something more in tune with what its clients want—talk about independent research. Anyway, the company did propose setting aside $2.5 million to pay for a year’s worth of methodological research. Wow, a whole $2.5 million for methodological research! Maybe they’re going to use the same Secret Service agent that Choice Point hired to revamp its ‘credentialing process.’
Forget all the other definitions of nanometer—this is the only one you’ll ever need: meter is to 400 miles as nanometer is to 1 inch. Oh sure, you could use the old billionth of a meter or one 25-millionth of an inch definitions, but they’re so passé don’t you think?
Have you ever wondered why crickets travel in crowds?
And finally, you’ll be pleased to know that rather than call a newly discovered female cockroach chemical—one that (finally?) might actually work as bait—gentisyl quinine isovalerate, you may call it blattellaquinone. Whew! Glad they got that resolved. Alas, 15,000 virgin female cockroaches (I wonder how they knew they were virgins), probably about one gazillionth of those in NYC alone, had to be dissected in this noble cause. No mention made of the male cockroaches that raced crazily into these baited sex traps. Poor buggers.

Once again Deep Throat has reared his ugly voice and re-enters our consciousness. He’s now very ill, at least according to John Dean, Nixon’s former White House counsel. Remember, if Deep Throat dies, Bob Woodward has said he will tell all, so wash off your Watergate brain cells—it’s time for the guessing game to start afresh. WHO IS DEEP THROAT?
Is Social Security the WMD of Bush’s second term? What’s going on? What can Cheney, Rummy, Wolfie, and Condoleezza with two z’s, the dove dream team, be scheming while sending Dubya out to leave us to fretting about our retirement. War in Iran, anyone?
While the Democrats might be guilty of dumping all over the President’s budget, the Republicans are at least guilty of using it as toilet paper. Here’s how I see it: one giant step for the rich, one small step for the disappearing middle-class, one large finger for the poor.
Heather Ross, founder of Munki, Munki, a clothing company, has come out with a line of women’s panties with imbedded cartoon-like olfactory patches that, when scratched, will emit a favorite guy scent. So far she’s got handy man (cedar), BBQ guy (tangy sauce), mower man (grass – the fresh cut variety), couch potato (popcorn), carnie (cotton candy), and surfer (suntan lotion). Hard to know what scent she might come up with when she gets to lawyers and politicians—Chunki Munki?
Do we really want Bin Laden and al Zarqawi thinking they’re worth $50 million? Not according to Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times who says Bin Laden should be marked down to one penny and an autographed picture of George Bush and al Zarqawi should be marked down to a pistachio and autographed picture of Cheney. Why waste the penny and the pistachio?
I’m so dumb. I thought Million Dollar Baby was one of the best movies I’d ever seen, but thanks to the good people who want to wring the queerness out of SpongeBob, I now realize that Clint Eastwood was really trying to trick us into embracing euthanasia.

In the horse shit department, the US Chamber of Commerce, that august group with nothing but shareholders’ best interests in mind, says that quelling insider trading is a threat to a ‘free, robust, orderly and democratic society.’ Watch where you step.
During July 2000, HealthSouth financial executive William Owens met Richard Scrushy in the middle of a lake in southeastern Alabama to discuss the company’s worsening cash crisis. It seems the only thing that wasn’t sinking was the boat.
In another chapter of the HealthSouth saga, former president and chief operating officer James Bennett was charged in a 39-count indictment. His lawyers’ response (what else): Bennett “was not involved in any form or fashion…” Now we know the government doesn’t always get it right and maybe Bennett is innocent (pause here for skepticism), but just once I’d like to see one of these overpaid crooks stand up and say, “I’m sorry, I did it.” I guess that story that will start, ‘Once upon a time in America…’
In the oxymoron department, the International Luge Federation wants a ‘safe luge’ track and has called off test events for the 2006 Turin Olympics. What did I miss? Isn’t death the whole idea of luge?
Social Security isn’t difficult. It’s like your bank account. If it’s running out of money, either more has to go in or less has to come out, and it doesn’t matter how much bullshit the government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich throws in the air.
Kenny Lay, W’s one-time good friend and former chairman of Enron, said in March 2001 that market manipulation claims against Enron were conspiracy theories. Well guess what? Want to hear a January 2001 taped conversation between an Enron trader and a Las Vegas energy official agreeing to a power plant shutdown for an afternoon of peak energy demand in California? Of course you do.
“This is going to be a word-of-mouth kind of thing,” Enron employee says. “We want you guys to get a little creative and come up with a reason to go down.”
“OK, so we’re just coming down for some maintenance, like a forced outage type of thing?” the Las Vegas official asks. “And that’s cool?”
“Hopefully.”
Both men laugh.
And Californians sat in the dark and sweated and their electrical bills went through the roof. Thanks Kenny.

The former controller of WorldCom testified that he never knew chief executive Bernie Ebbers to make an accounting decision. You have to wonder if anyone at WorldCom, the largest bankruptcy in US history, ever made an accounting decision.
Dennis Kozolowski, former CEO of Tyco, currently being retried for grand larceny, securities fraud, falsifying business records, and other assorted misdeeds, lived in a thirty-million-dollar apartment bought with Tyco’s money and then had it lavishly furnished, also with Tyco money. Originally, he said it was his apartment, but it seems it’s turned up the company books as an asset. Now he says he bought it for Tyco.
Quick, who knows what SBC stands for? Time’s up. Quick, who knows what AT&T stands for? Time’s up. And the guys at SBC who spent sixteen-billion of shareholder money can’t decide what to call the merged company?
Should shareholders be worried that Disney attributes part of its first quarter earnings recovery to Desperate Housewives and Lost? Having ‘desperate’ and ‘lost’ anywhere near a financial report is a bad idea.
So bread is fighting back. It’s had enough. No more being bullied by healthy foods. Watch for a spate of ads from the behemoth grain industry that say bread prevents cataracts, makes your brain function properly, makes life better, is essential. Why don’t they stop dancing around with the truth and just say it tastes better than all the healthy crap out there? If that doesn’t work, they can bring out the capital B Bible and point to the part that says, ‘Give us this day, our daily bread?’
Is anyone who has .msn or .aol email surprised that the federal government’s one-year-old anti-spam law, the 'Can Spam Act,' has resulted in an increase in spam of from 20% to 30%? Instead of eliminating the problem, it spells out how the spammers can operate within the law, which I guess includes five hundred ways to spell ‘longer penis.’ Good name though, for the act I mean, not for penis although come to think of it, longer penis has a good ring to it.

The New York Times crossword puzzle today reminded me that Enron, that icon of American corporate morality and fiscal responsibility—where self-enrichment fraud cost innocent employees, not so innocent creditors, and misled shareholders ten plus billions—had a sixty-four page ‘Code of Ethics.’ And we used to think the ₤75,000 International Impac Dublin Literary Award was the richest fiction prize.
Executive crooks at HealthSouth, a paltry $2.7 billion fraud, told the court that the catch phrase for earnings overstatements was ‘dirt,’ referring to 1997’s overstatement as ‘$400 million worth of dirt.’ That ain’t dirt baby.
Did you smell it? Last month, ten former WorldCom directors agreed to pay $18 million from their own pockets—AWW, FROM THEIR OWN POCKETS—to investors who lost money in WorldCom’s failure. Doesn’t it make you warm and tingly all over knowing such goodness exists in American business? Wait a minute. What’s this fine print? The $18 million caps your liability, shifting future claims to others? Peeeuuuuw!
Youngster Bob Schieffer, 68, will take over from Dan Rather (73) on March 9th, when CBS has its ‘get the hell out of our newsroom’ party for the ridiculed Rather. Sumner Redstone, Owner of Viacom, 83, wanted someone older but Mike Wallace, 86, Morley Safer, 73, and Andy Rooney, 100 and something, were busy with Sixty Minutes and AARP for Seniors.
Ever hear of tight end Jeff Thomasen? OK, so who hasn’t? He’s the guy who chucks his hard hat for a helmet to play for injured Eagle, Chad Lewis. Big deal! So he gets to play in the Super Bowl. But, what about Go Daddy? Or Cosentino? Or Career Builder? Or Emerald Nuts. They’re the real stars. They’ll be vying, alongside well known veterans like beer, cars, junk food, and the legal usury folks, a.k.a. credit cards, for top prize in the $4.8 million a minute Ad Bowl. Now that’s a game, but I will miss JJ.
Here’s one you don’t see every day: Tyco’s board gave its finance chief a $50 million severance package weeks after learning he’d stole four bonuses from the company. Was there a secret codicil attached to Exodus 20:15?

Happy Groundhog Day!
The Gobbler’s Knob famous rodent, euphemistically known as Punxsutawney Phil, saw his shadow today—button down for six more weeks of winter. Capital Hill’s famous rodent, euphemistically known as Alan Greenspan, didn’t see his shadow today—button down for higher interest rates. Bill Murray wasn’t seen at all.
Groundhog Central lists thirty-three weather-predicting rodents, twenty-seven in the US, five in Canada, one in Germany; one mule…in Oxford, MI; and one chicken…in Vancouver BC. Six groundhogs saw their shadow, ten didn’t, and nineteen didn’t know what they saw. Alas, the mule got kicked into the unknown column—I had hoped for something more. The chicken clucked, but didn’t see its shadow. Twelve groundhogs don’t have pictures so their existence is suspect, one is stuffed, and one looks like a bad painting. Apologies to rodents and stand-ins that have chosen to boycott Groundhog Central.
Pennsylvania’s Groundhog Day originated February 2nd, 1886. The State of the Union Address in its current form dates back to 1913. President Bush’s speech tonight has been officially projected to run forty minutes, BEFORE APPLAUSE. Pray for a shadow. Kick this rodent back into his hole!
And speaking of hogs, Richard Scrushy, former head of Health South charged with directing a $2.7 billion fraud, wins the blue ribbon. It seems no trough was too big for this guy.
Al Sharpton, having stumbled on his way to the White House, is now taking his march to the Red and White House. He’s joined forces with Ingrid Newkirk, president of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), to boycott Kentucky Fried Chicken for buying chickens from places that provide cramped cells, that give them too much food too fast, and that don’t put them to sleep before whacking them. Maybe they can take on the federal prison system next.
A new government commercial is coming to a theater near you. The fifty states, DC, PR and the VI got $27 million from a Ford SUV lawsuit. So what have they done? They’ve used the money to create an eponymic hairy beast, Esuvee, an in-theater ad campaign that’s supposed to convince teenage boys that SUV’s are dangerous. What a marvelous idea—just what a teenage boy doesn’t want: a big, hairy, dangerous vehicle.