The Register: Gates justifies stronger chains for hardware makers. Microsoft is now far more powerful than it has ever been, and is setting the hardware standards for the PCs you will have to buy far more overtly than it ever has before, yet here’s Bill singing that old song again.
Chicago Tribune (registration required): Sweeping SBC rate law signed. A sweeping measure giving telecom titan SBC Communications Inc. greater control over the local phone market powered past consumer concerns and into law Friday, clearing the General Assembly and winning Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s signature in a matter of hours. The bill nearly doubles the rate SBC can charge phone competitors such as AT&T and MCI to lease its lines. Critics complained that forcing up wholesale rates would translate into higher phone bills for consumers and businesses–and possibly drive SBC’s competitors for local service out of the market.
This is how it’s going to work. SBC will get its workers, most of whom are in unions, to lobby for crushing competition as a job-preservation measure.
Never mind the jobs that will be lost among competitors. Never mind the economic loss resulting from vastly higher prices for basic telecommunications services.
And never mind the control SBC and its friends in the cable industry will exert over communications services in general in coming years.
The Democrats in the Illinois legislature should be ashamed for their overwhelming support of a single company’s monopolistic ambitions. But doing the right thing for constituents means little when powerful unions and corporations join forces to rip off the people.
What a scam.
Eric Norlin says “amen” to the truly perverse idea that victims of Wall Street con artists have only themselves to blame.
By that standard, no kind of fraud should be punished. After all, we all know that there are crooks lurking out there, ready to rip us off.
No one is saying that the greedy small investors who did no homework are blameless. But to suggest that we should let the business community do anything it wants, with no constraints, is a pretty dramatic departure from tradition — and I fear the result.
Capitalism has rules. Or does it? If not, good luck in sustaining vibrant capital markets.
I’m amazed by the Visual Thesaurus, but not totally sure I want to run it. This may be a case where the visual metaphor is less efficient than the old-fashioned, plain-text method of looking up words.
Sure is fun, though…
NYT: S.E.C. Chastises Morgan Stanley’s Chief for Comments. Morgan Stanley’s efforts to play down its role in the Wall Street research scandal appeared to backfire yesterday, as the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission released a blistering letter addressed to the firm’s chief executive. William H. Donaldson, the commission chairman, said in a letter dated Wednesday that he was “deeply troubled” by comments from Philip J. Purcell, the Morgan Stanley official, which he said “evidence a troubling lack of contrition.”
The people running Wall Street simply do not grasp how corrupt and arrogant they appear to everyone else — at least everyone outside the insiders’ club that has enriched itself at everyone else’s expense in recent years. Purcell’s statements are just one more example, and the SEC chief’s rebuttal is a welcome change from that agency’s stance in the early days of the scandals.
The market has been rising in the last few weeks. Here’s a prediction. Wall Street and its shills will lure enough small investors back into the fray to run the market up another 10 to 20 percent, at which point reality will intrude and the market will sink again. Another suckers’ game, courtesy of the people who will cheat the little guy every time if they can get away with it.
The can get away with it. This week’s fines are a piddling sum next to the staggering sums the bankers and their pals swindled out of the market. The Congressional leadership doesn’t care anymore, if it ever did.
If you trust this market you are an utter fool.
T.J. Rodgers: T.J. Rodgers: Frank Quattrone is honest and ethical; Credit Suisse is just cowardly. Quattrone’s real crime is that he violated the “Bill Gates law” — his competence made him too much money too fast. Big, new money creates resentment among some, and there’s always a prosecutor — a Joel Klein or a Marcia Clark — ready to move up the food chain to “protect America.”
I almost spit out my morning coffee laughing, in a disgusted sort of way, when I read this op-ed piece by Rodgers. Then again, this guy is always saying ridiculous things.
Frank Quattrone has his defenders. It’s no coincidence that many are people who made money through doing business with him. They have every right to — and should — take his side.
But they can’t wave a wand and make him or his business practices honorable.
Big, new money isn’t what creates resentments. It’s the contempt that Wall Street and its amen chorus have for the non-insiders in this plutocratic economy — their casual ripoffs of the (admittedly gullible) little guy and rigging of the system in their own behalf — that makes people furious.
Rodgers should be careful with statements like the one I quoted above. Marcia Clark, you’ll recall, prosecuted O.J. Simpson. Was his crime making too much money too fast? No, it was murder. The LA. cops were racist and probably framed a guilty man, giving Simpson’s lawyers the reasonable-doubt room they needed to get an aquittal. If Rodgers is really comparing Frank Quattrone and Bill Gates to O.J. Simpson, his friends in high-tech will probably tell him to shut up.
Boston Globe: Working to tame the giants. Still, a group of activists — operating with relatively small budgets, very loud voices, and an inexhaustible supply of energy — wage a lonely battle against consolidation in the name of what they say is diversity, fairness, and public interest. Meet four committed Washington outsiders playing an insider’s game against long odds.
You aren’t hearing or reading much about this issue in the major U.S. media. Here are some of the lonely voices shouting out about a trend that should worry everyone who cares about an informed citizenry in a democracy.