Falling Apart?

This just in:  Vancouver has been ranked fourth on the world’s list of least affordable cities.  This is well ahead of cities like Manhattan, San Francisco, London, Paris, and Hong Kong.  As most rational people know, the city’s thundering real estate market has been bolstered by rampant speculation and constant construction of new condominiums.. but salaries, and the city’s economic development, have not kept pace.

The survey quoted in the article cites research indicating that the cost of housing in Vancouver is massively disproportionate to median salaries earned by its residents, specifically when compared to other cities around the world.  The median house price in Vancouver as of the time of the survey is 8.4 times the median income — 8.4 years’ average income to purchase a house, compared to the average median in Canada: 3.5.

What this tells you is that the fundamentals that support high real-estate prices are simply not there in Vancouver.  People just don’t earn enough income to sustain this market at such lofty prices whereas in cities like New York and San Francisco, where real estate prices are indeed higher, median incomes are substantially higher and thus can support high prices.

Vancouver is plagued by a number of problems that keep the salaries of its citizens low:

1. Affordable commerical real estate is hard to come by in the city — leading in some cases to a perverse reverse-commute where urbanites must schlep out to the suburbs to their workplaces — but more importantly this discourages companies from locating here.
2. Most large cities with expensive downtown cores operate as financial centres — the aforementioned London, Hong Kong, and New York spring to mind.  Vancouver does not, except for our storied love affair with ponzi schemes.  Without the sustaining flow of capital through our city there is highly limited opportunity for local investment.
3. We’re still a bunch of tree-cutting, pickaxe-wielding hicks.  And BC’s resource industries, the bread and butter of Vancouver for more than 150 years, are weak thanks to everything from the US softwood lumber tarriffs to Kyoto to a number of key mining company collapses.  Our province has failed to diversify its economic base substantially away from resource businesses.
4. The advanced industries like software and aerospace that keep California sizzlin’ have failed to grow in scale in this city.  Investment in this area is weak, with very little private investment and weak government support (nearly all of the Venture Capital in Vancouver is government-derived).  We did however blow >$500 million on a handful of useless fast ferries, though.  Two notable exceptions are alternative energy and biotech.  For now, at least, they are humming along.
5. The film industry, which we in BC have courted for decades, is a fickle bride.  Since productions are built for each project and torn down when completed with little long-term planning, unfavourable economic winds mean that producers can pull up stakes and shoot in South Carolina, Mexico, or wherever they can cost-optimize.  In any case, the profits are retained in New York and LA… like a Mumbai call centre, we’re just an outsourcer.
6. Drugs, and by “drugs” I mean the cultivation and distribution of marijuana, constitutes probably the largest industry in BC and it flies completely under the regulatory / taxation radar.  Conservative estimates peg this at between $5Bn and $7Bn per year.  These people have a hard time getting mortgages.  They also tend to be undesireable tenants, since they tend to get arrested/shot at/sent into hiding — that is if they don’t blow up their penthouse with a meth lab.
7. Our transportation infrastructure is pathetic, particularly when compared with major metropolitan areas (of which Vancouver is now one) such as Boston, Montreal, Toronto, New York, London, Tokyo, and others.  If we wish to become a center of commerce then we need to be able to move people around better.  Skytrain is a laughing stock and the West Coast Express, which goes to a handful of proximate suburbs from the downtown core twice a day each way, doesn’t even merit comparison with the British Urban Railway system.  Our highways (such as they are) subject people to multi-hour commutes to travel 20km.  We have failed, failed, FAILED to build infrastructure and it will continue to haunt the city for decades to come.

For those of us in the technology industry, certainly during this housing price spike, Vancouver seems an illogical place to locate our startups or ply our trades in information technology.  While the average condo price can be as high as 2x-2.5x the price of a comparable condo in Toronto or Montreal, our salary variance is just 103.5% the national average, versus 104.2% for Toronto and 103.9% for Montreal (this according to the 2009 Robert Half Salary Guide for Technology Professionals).  While we spend more to live here in Lotus Land, we sure don’t make up for it in income.

Comparing Income to Housing Prices

So how high is too high?  Right now we are finding out.

If you were blindsided by the Vancouver Real Estate crash then you were clearly in a profound state of self-delusion.  Evidently that list of deluded fools includes our civic leaders who played russian roulette with the city’s finances, underwriting the now disastrous Olympic Village project in which the taxpayers stand to lose as much as $750 Million.  Still, even amid the free-falling values, Realtors and Developers are outright lying to you… inviting you to join in their deathmatch with catch phrases like “don’t wait too long” and “strong fundamentals“.  Where have we heard that before?  Oh right, it was John McCain, about the US Economy in September – days before it collapsed.  Oops.

UPDATE: In a passionate article, former mayor Sam Sullivan says the Olympic Village is not a clusterf*ck.

Speculators and developers will beg to differ (they’re invested in fostering positive vibes) but remember:  they’re betting with your money, not their own.  Condos down the street from ours were forced into liquidation at 40% off, and there have been stories of other developers dumping their inventory at similar price cuts.  This is the beginning of a trend, not a sign of the bottom, so if you’re foolishly lining up to jump in at this point, you get what you deserve.

Not until a software engineer making $60K-$70K per year can buy a 1-Bedroom apartment in the city will the fundamentals be aligned and the market be stabilized.  This means mortgage + maintenance of less than $1500 per month using the 30% rule.  On a 25-year mortgage that probably means this 1BR apartment has to be less than $200K.  If the research that started this article can be believed, we should expect an adjustment of as much as 60% across the board to bring Vancouver back to the Canadian mean.

So in other words, wait ’til the bottom really drops out, Vancouverites..

And then we can start figuring out why no one in this city (not even the property developers, after 2007) makes any real money.

Consumers strike back, sue RIAA By Liane Cassavoy, PC World.com September 12, 2003 9:35 am ET

After taking its antipiracy campaign to court, the music industry is finding itself on the receiving end of a lawsuit that challenges its purported amnesty program as a fraudulent business practice.

The Recording Industry Association of America Inc. announced its Clean Slate program Monday, when it filed suit against 261 people for copyright infringement as a result of excessive use of peer-to-peer services. The Clean Slate program purports to offer amnesty to repentant file-swappers who promise to stop using peer-to-peer services to illegally download copyrighted works and to destroy any copies of downloaded audio files.

To qualify for the amnesty program, applicants must fill out a sworn affidavit that requires a full name, address, telephone number and e-mail address, have it notarized, and send it to the RIAA. In turn, the RIAA agrees not to “support or assist in any copyright infringement suits based on past conduct,” according to the organization.

But the offer is neither clean nor a sweep, says Ira Rothken, the Marin County attorney who filed the consumer lawsuit Tuesday in California Superior Court.

Not the RIAA’s Call?

The RIAA claims the amnesty program “would provide people with a clean slate, but after a further reading of the legal documents, it became apparent that this Clean Slate program didn’t provide any such thing,” Rothken says.

“The legal document provides no release of claims, no promise not to sue you. It offers no promise to actually clean the slate by destroying the data that these people provide,” he adds. “All it says is that the RIAA simply will not cooperate in any lawsuit brought against you. That on its face is a deceptive business practice.”

And the offer is deceptive because the RIAA does not own the copyrights in question, Rothken says. The music labels — RIAA members — are the plaintiffs, he says. But because the RIAA is leading the charge, people think the RIAA has the power to promise not to sue them, when it doesn’t, Rothken says.

“Any of the RIAA’s members could file suit against these individuals who have participated in the Clean Slate program, and subpoena the information they need from the RIAA about this person’s guilt,” Rothken says. “So, in the end, the person who supplies all this information to the Clean Slate program will have a dirtier slate than they would have if they never participated.”

RIAA Stands Firm

The RIAA disputes this interpretation, saying the affidavit form, which is available on MusicUnited, is not deceptive.

“Read the form, it’s pretty clear what’s being offered and who’s offering it,” says Jonathan Lamy, an RIAA spokesperson.

“Apparently no good deed goes unpunished,” Lamy adds of the criticism. “It’s also unfortunate and ironic that some lawyer would try to prevent others from getting the assurance that they want, that they won’t be sued.”

Rothken’s law firm is not the first organization to warn people about potential danger in the RIAA’s amnesty program. Last week, before the RIAA formally announced its plan, the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation warned users against accepting the RIAA’s amnesty offer.

“Stepping into the spotlight to admit your guilt is probably not a sensible course for most people sharing music files online, especially since the RIAA doesn’t control many potential sources of lawsuits,” Wendy Seltzer, EFF staff attorney, said in a statement last week.

Murky Music

Cary Sherman, the RIAA’s president, addressed these concerns Monday when announcing the copyright crackdown and amnesty deal. He rebutted suggestions that participating in the Clean Slate program could prove costly.

“We have pledged to keep this information solely for our use, for our records of people who should not be sued,” Sherman said. He said the RIAA would not release the data to copyright holders who might intend to sue.

Unconvinced, Rothken went a step further than simply warning consumers about the program’s potential pitfalls and filed a complaint under the California Business and Professions Code. His lawsuit asks the court to end the RIAA’s program as “unlawful, unfair, and deceptive.” The RIAA’s “guarantee not to sue file sharers” is designed to mislead the public into incriminating themselves by giving the RIAA “admissions of wrong-doing.”

The RIAA’s intentions remain unclear, says Deborah Peckham, a partner in the Patent and Intellectual Property Practice Group at Testa, Hurwitz & Thibeault in Boston.

“It’s really too soon to say whether these people are putting themselves at risk by participating in this program, but the allegations made in (Rothken’s lawsuit) are not without some merit,” Peckham says. “In essence, what the RIAA is doing apparently is collecting these affidavits and storing the information somewhere. The concern is that that information is going to be spread among the music companies, and there’s nothing in the agreement that would bar those companies from suing the users.”

Peckham has reviewed some of the suits filed Monday, and confirms that the RIAA is not named as plaintiff in any she has seen.

California’s Standards

Rothken’s complaint cites California law that says fraud may exist not only if a consumer is injured by the business practice in question, but if there is the potential for injury.

“The only standard is that the business practice in question is likely to deceive reasonable members of the general public,” Rothken says.

This law also allows one citizen to be named as a plaintiff to represent the general population. In this lawsuit, that citizen is Eric Parke, a former paralegal who has not used peer-to-peer networks to download music illegally, according to Rothken.

“In California, our law allows people who are unaffected by the business practice in question, people who would not have traditional standing to sue, to serve as the plaintiff,” he says. One reason for this, Rothken says, is that people who stand up against large organizations could be retaliated against, and may be unwilling to come forward.

The lawsuit now goes to the California Superior Court, but Rothken cannot guess when the case might be heard. He does expect the court will insist that the RIAA make good any amnesty offer.

“The court will likely tell the RIAA that if they’re going to promise amnesty and a clean slate, then you have to do something that delivers on that promise; for example, you have to offer a release of all claims. Or, if you can’t do that, you have to stop the promise, don’t call it amnesty,” Rothken says. “It’s likely the RIAA will have to admit that they don’t have the authority to release all claims, because they don’t have the power to stop these lawsuits, because they don’t own the copyrights.”

Genuity Files for Bankruptcy Protection Wed Nov 27,10:22 PM ET Add Technology – AP to My Yahoo!

By JUSTIN POPE, AP Business Writer

BOSTON (AP) – Internet backbone company Genuity Inc. filed for bankruptcy protection Wednesday as part of an agreement that will transfer its assets to Level 3 Communications Inc. for $242 million.

Genuity, which operates one of the key components of the infrastructure that supports the Internet, became the latest high-profile telecommunications company to file for bankruptcy protection, following WorldCom, Global Crossing and others.

Genuity’s fall into bankruptcy began in July, when Verizon Communications said it would not exercise an option to regain control of the Broomfield, Colo.-based company, putting Genuity in default of a $2 billion line of credit.

Genuity, Verizon and lenders negotiated for months, and Genuity managed to pay back more than $200 million, but ultimately failed to negotiate a settlement that avoided bankruptcy.

The companies said Level 3 would operate Genuity as a separate business still based in Woburn, Mass. If the plan is approved by a U.S. Bankruptcy Court judge, creditors would receive Level 3’s $242 million. They would also get any cash left over on Genuity’s balance sheet after it funds operations. The company currently has $800 million in cash.

“This was triggered by Verizon’s decision, because of changing business needs and market conditions … not to exercise their option on Genuity,” Paul R. Gudonis, Genuity’s chairman and chief executive officer said in a telephone interview.

Genuity shares fell 43 percent, or 20 cents, to 26 cents each on the Nasdaq Stock Market. Level 3 shares rose 8 percent, or 41 cents, to $5.60 each.

Federal regulators required GTE and Bell Atlantic to spin off Genuity as part of their merger agreement two years ago, but said the new company, Verizon, could maintain a stake and take back Genuity by 2005 under certain conditions.

Verizon, facing an already glutted market for networking capacity, declined.

Besides Verizon, Genuity’s biggest customer is America Online, which uses Genuity’s network for both its dial-up and high-speed DSL service, though the share of Genuity’s total revenue from AOL has fallen, from 52 percent in 1999 to 35 percent of the $1.2 billion it brought in last year.

Gudonis said customers would feel no impact from the bankruptcy filing and acquisition.

But, he said, more layoffs were likely. Genuity has laid off more than 3,000 workers, and revenues for its most recent quarter were $222 million, down almost a third from a year ago.

He declined to speculate about his own future.

“My responsibility is to lead the company through this acquisition to the benefit of our creditors, customers and employees,” he said. “After that, it’s just inappropriate to talk about my personal plans.”

The AOL business and Genuity’s other assets now fall into the hands of Level 3, which has its own 20,000-mile broadband fiber-optic network.

———–

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. – Ben Franklin (1706-1790) Historical Review of Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania.

On 27 October 2002

The Observer, London

The ENEMY WITHIN by Gore Vidal

On 24 August, 1814, things looked very dark for freedom1s land. That was the day the British captured Washington DC and set fire to the Capitol and the White House. President Madison took refuge in the nearby Virginia woods where he waited patiently for the notoriously short attention span of the Brits to kick in, which it did. They moved on and what might have been a Day of Utter Darkness turned out to be something of a bonanza for the DC building trades and up-market realtors.

One year after 9/11, we still don’t know by whom we were struck that infamous Tuesday, or for what true purpose. But it is fairly plain to many civil libertarians that 9/11 put paid not only to much of our fragile Bill of Rights but also to our once-envied system of government which had taken a mortal blow the previous year when the Supreme Court did a little dance in 5/4 time and replaced a popularly elected president with the oil and gas Cheney-Bush junta.

Meanwhile, our more and more unaccountable government is pursuing all sorts of games around the world that we the spear- carriers (formerly the people) will never learn of. Even so, we have been getting some answers to the question: why weren1t we warned in advance of 9/11? Apparently, we were, repeatedly; for the better part of a year, we were told there would be unfriendly visitors to our skies some time in September 2001, but the government neither informed nor protected us despite Mayday warnings from Presidents Putin and Mubarak, from Mossad and even from elements of our own FBI. A joint panel of congressional intelligence committees reported (19 September 2002, New York Times) that as early as 1996, Pakistani terrorist Abdul Hakim Murad confessed to federal agents that he was learning to fly in order to crash a plane into CIA HQ.

Only CIA director George Tenet seemed to take the various threats seriously. In December 1998, he wrote to his deputies that “we are at war” with Osama bin Laden. So impressed was the FBI by his warnings that by 20 September 2001, “the FBI still had only one analyst assigned full time to al-Qaeda”.

From a briefing prepared for Bush at the beginning of July 2001: “We believe that OBL (Osama bin Laden) will launch a significant terrorist attack against US and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against US facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning.” And so it came to pass; yet Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Advisor, says she never suspected that this meant anything more than the kidnapping of planes.

Happily, somewhere over the Beltway, there is Europe-recently declared anti-semitic by the US media because most of Europe wants no war with Iraq and the junta does, for reasons we may now begin to understand thanks to European and Asian investigators with their relatively free media.

On the subject, “how and why America was attacked on 11 September 2001”, the best, most balanced report, thus far is by Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed… Yes, yes, I know he is one of Them. But they often know things that we don1t-particularly about what we are up to. A political scientist, Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development “a think-tank dedicated to the protection of human rights, justice and peace” in Brighton. His book, The War on Freedom, has just been published in the US by a small, but reputable publisher.

Ahmed provides a background for our ongoing war against Afghanistan, a view that in no way coincides with what the administration has told us. He has drawn on many sources, most tellingly on American whistle-blowers who are beginning to come forth and bear witness ? like those FBI agents who warned their superiors that al-Qaeda was planning a kamikaze strike against New York and Washington only to be told that if they went public with these warnings under the National Security Act. Several of these agents have engaged David P. Schippers, chief investigative counsel for the US House Judiciary Committee, to represent them in court. That majestic Schippers managed the successful impeachment of President Clinton in the House of Representatives. He may, if the Iraqi war should go wrong, be obliged to perform the same high service for Bush, who allowed the American people to go unwarned about an imminent attack upon two of our cities as preemption of a planned military strike by the US against the Taliban.

The Guardian (26 September 2001) reported that in July 2001, a group of interested parties met in a Berlin hotel to listen to a former State Department official, Lee Coldren, as he passed on a message from the Bush administration that “the United States was so disgusted with the Taliban that they might be considering some military action the chilling quality of this private warning was that it came-according to one of those present, the Pakistani diplomat Niaz Naik-accompanied by specific details of how Bush would succeed…” Four days earlier, the guardian had reported that “Osama bin Laden and the Taliban received threats of possible American military action against them two months before the terrorist assaults on New York and Washington… (which) raises the possibility that bin Laden was launching a pre-emptive strike in response to what he saw as US threats.” A replay of the ‘day of infamy’ in the Pacific 62 years earlier?

Why the US needed a Eurasian adventure

On 9 September 2001, Bush was presented with a draft of a national security presidential directive outlining a global campaign of military, diplomatic and intelligence action targeting al-Qaeda, buttressed by the threat of war. According to NBC News: ‘President Bush’ was expected to sign detailed plans for a worldwide war against al-Qaeda but did not have a chance before the terrorist attacks… The directive, as described to NBC News, was essentially the same war plan as the one put into action after 11 September. The administration most likely was able to respond so quickly… because it simply had to pull the plans “off the shelf”.”

Finally, BBC News, 18 September 2001: “Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani foreign secretary, “was told by senior American officials in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October. It was Naik1s view that Washington would not drop its war for Afghanistan even if bin Laden were to be surrendered immediately by the Taliban.”

Was Afghanistan then turned to rubble in order to avenge the 3,000 Americans slaughtered by Osama? Hardly. The administration is convinced that Americans are so simple minded that they can deal with no scenario more complex than the venerable lone, crazed killer (this time with zombie helpers) who does evil just for the fun of it ’cause he hates us, ’cause we’re rich ‘n and free ‘n he’s not, Osama was chosen on aesthetic grounds to be the frightening logo for our long-contemplated invasion and conquest of Afghanistan, planning for which had been “contingency” some years before 9/11 and, again, from 20 December 2000, when Clinton1s outgoing team devised a plan to strike at al-Qaeda in retaliation for the assault on the warship Cole. Clinton1s National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, personally briefed his successor on the plan but Rice, still very much in her role as a director of Chevron-Texaco, with special duties regarding Pakistan and Uzbekistan, now denies any such briefing. A year and a half later (12 August 2002), fearless Time magazine reported this odd memory lapse.

Osama, if it was he and not a nation, simply provided the necessary shock to put in train a war of conquest. But conquest of what? What is there in dismal in dry sandy Afghanistan worth conquering? Zbigniew Brzezinski tells us exactly what in a 1997 Council on Foreign Relations study called The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperitives.

The Polish-born Brzezinski was the hawkish National Security Adviser to President Carter. In The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski gives a little history lesson. “Ever sense the continents started interacting politically, some 500 years ago, Eurasia has been the centre of world power.” Eurasia is all the territory east of Germany. This means Russia, the Middle East, China, and parts of India. Brzezinski acknowledges that Russia and China, bordering oil rich central Asia, are the two main powers threatening US hegemony in that area.

He takes it for granted that the US must exert control over the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia, know to those who love them as “the Stans”: Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikstan and Kyrgyzstan all ‘of importance from the standpoint of security and historical ambitions to at least three of their most immediate and most powerful neighbors-Russia, Turkey and Iran, with China signaling’. Brzezinski notes how the world’s energy consumption keeps increasing; hence, who controls Caspian oil/gas will control the world economy. Brzezinski then, reflexively, goes into the standard American rationalization for empire. We want nothing, ever, for ourselves, only to keep bad people from getting good things with which to hurt good people. It follows that Americas primary interest is to help ensure that no single (other) power comes to control the geopolitical space and that the global community has unhindered financial and economic access to it.”

Brzezinski is quite aware that American leaders are wonderfully ignorant of history and geography so he really lays it on, stopping just short of invoking politically incorrect manifest destiny. He reminds the Council just how big Eurasia is. Seventy-five percent of the worlds population is Eurasian. If I have done the sums right, that means weve only got control, to date, of a mere 25 percent of the world1s folks. More! Eurasia accounts for 60% of the worlds GNP and three-fourths of the world1s known energy resources.”

Brzezinskis master plan for our globe has obviously been accepted by the Cheney-Bush junta. Corporate America, long over-excited by Eurasian mineral wealth, has been aboard from the beginning.

Ahmed sums up: Brzezinski clearly envisaged that the establishment, consolidation and expansion of US military hegemony over Eurasia through Central Asia would require the unprecedented open-ended militarisation of foreign policy, coupled with an unprecedented manufacture of domestic support and consensus on this militarisation campaign.

Afghanistan is the gateway of all these riches. Will we fight to seize them? It should never be forgotten that the American people in either of the twentieth century1s world wars but President Wilson maneuvered us into the first while Roosevelt maneuvered the Japanese into striking the first blow at Pearl Harbor, causing us to enter the second as the result of a massive external attack. Brzezinski understands all this and, in 1997, he is thinking ahead-as well as backward. “Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multicultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.” Thus was the symbolic gun produced that belched black smoke over Manhattan and the Pentagon.

Since the Iran-Iraq wars, Islam has been demonised as a Satanic terrorist cult that encourages suicide attacks – contrary, it should be noted, to the Islamic religion. Osama has been portrayed, accurately, it would seem, as an Islamic zealot. In order to bring this evil-doer to justice (“dead or alive”), Afghanistan, the object of the exercise, was made safe not only for democracy but for Union oil of California whose proposed pipeline from Turkmenistan to Afghanistan to Pakistan and the Indian Ocean port of Karachi, had been abandoned under the Taliban1s chaotic regime. Currently, the pipeline is a go-project thanks to the junta’s installation of a Unocal employee (John J. Maresca) as US envoy to the newly born democracy whose president, Hamid Karzai, is also, according to Le Monde, a former employee of a Unocal subsidiary. Conspiracy? Coincidence!

Once Afghanistan looked to be within the fold, the junta, which had managed to pull off a complex diplomatic-military caper, abruptly replaced Osama, the personification of evil, with Saddam. This has been hard to explain since there is nothing to connect Iraq with 9/11. Happily, “evidence” is now being invented, but it is uphill work, not helped by stories in the press about the vast oil wealth of Iraq which must ? for the sake of the free world- be reassigned to us and European Consortiums.

As Brzezinski foretold, “a truly and massive and widely perceived direct external threat made it possible for the president to do a war dance before congress. “A long war!” he shouted with glee. Then he named and incoherent axis of evil to be fought. Although Congress did not give him the FDR Special-a declaration of war-he did get permission to go after Osama who may now be skulking in Iraq.

Bush and the dog that did not bark

Post – 9/11, the American media were filled with pre-emptory denunciations of unpatriotic conspiracy theorists, who not only are always with us but are usually easy for the media to discredit since it is an article of faith that there are no conspiracies in American life. Yet, a year or so ago, who would have thought that the most corporate America had been conspiring with accountants to cook their books since ? well, at least the bright dawn of the age of Reagen and deregulation. Ironically, less that a year after the massive danger from without, we were confronted with an even greater enemy from within: Golden Calf Capitalism. Transparency? One fears that greater transparency will only reveal armies of maggots at work beneath the skin of a culture that needs a bit of a lie-down in order to collect itself before taking its next giant step which is to conquer Eurasia, a potentially fatal adventure not only for our frazzled institutions but for us the presently living.

Complicity. The behavior of President George W. Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to all sorts of not unnatural suspicions. I can think of no other modern chief of state who would continue to pose for warm pictures of himself listening to a young girl telling stories about her pet goat while hijacked planes were into three famous buildings.

Constitutionally, Bush is not only chief of state, he is commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Normally, a commander in such a crisis would go straight to headquarters and direct operations while receiving the latest intelligence.

This is what Bush actually did-or did not do-according to Stan Goff, a retired US Army veteran who has taught military science and doctrine at West Point. Goff writes, in The So-called Evidence is a Farce: “I have no idea why people arent asking some very specific questions about the actions of Bush and company on the day of the attacks. Four planes get hijacked and deviate from their plan, all the while on FAA radar.”

Goff, incidentally, like the other astonished military experts, cannot fathom why the government’s automatic ‘standard order of procedure in the event of a hijacking’ was not followed. Once a plane has deviated from its flight-plan, fighter planes are sent up to find out why. That is law and does not require presidential approval, which only needs to be given if there is a decision to shoot down a plane. Goff spells it out: The planes were hijacked between 7:45 and 8:10 am. Who is notified? This is an event already that is unprecedented. But the President is not notified and going to a Florida elementary school to hear children read.

By around 8:15 am it should be very apparent that something is terribly wrong. The President is glad-handing teachers. By 8:45 when American Airlines Flight 11 crashes into the North Tower, Bush is settling in with children for his photo op. Four planes have obviously been hijacked simultaneously and one has just dived into the twin towers, and still no one notifies the nominal Commander-in-Chief. ‘No one has apparently scrambled (sent aloft) Air Force interceptors either. At 9:03, Flight 175 crashes into the South Tower. At 9:05 Andrew Card, the Chief of Staff whispers to Bush (who) ‘briefly turns sombre’ according to reporters. Does he cancel the school visit and convene an emergency meeting? No. He resumes listening to second graders… and continues the banality even as American Airlines Flight 77 conducts an unscheduled point turn over Ohio and heads in the direction of Washington DC.

‘Has he instructed Card to scramble the Air Force? No. An excruciating 25 minutes later, he finally deigns to give a public statement telling the United States what they have already figured out ? that there1s been an attack on the World Trade Centre. There1s a hijacked plane bee-lining to Washington, but has the Air Force been scrambled to defend anything yet? No.

At 9:35, this plane conducts another turn, 360 degree over the Pentagon, all the while being tracked by radar, and the Pentagon is not evacuated, and there are still no fast-movers from the Air Force in the sky over Alexandria and DC. Now the real kicker: a pilot they want us to believe was trained at a Florida puddle-jumper school Piper Cubs and Cessnas, conducts a well-controlled downward spiral descending the last 7,000 feet in two-and-a-half minutes, brings the plane in so low and flat that it clips the electrical wires from across the street from the Pentagon, and flies it with pinpoint accuracy into the side of the building at 460 knots.

When the theory about learning to fly this well at the puddle-jumper school began to lose ground, it was added that they received further training on a flight simulator. This is like saying you prepared your teenager for her first drive on the freeway at rush hour by buying her a video driving game There is a story being constructed about these events.

There is indeed and the more it is added to the darker it becomes. The nonchalance of General Richard B. Myers, acting Joint Chief of Staff, is as puzzling as the Presidents campaigning-as-usual act. Meyers was at the Capitol chatting with Senator Max Cleland. A sergeant, writing later in the AFPS (American Forces Press Service) describes Myers at the Capitol. While in an outer office, he said, he saw a television report that a plane had hit the World Trade Centre. “They thought it was a small plane or something like that,” Myers said. So the two men went ahead with the office call.

Whatever Myers and Cleland had to say to each other (more funds for the military?) must have been riveting because, during their chat, the AFPS reports, the second tower was hit by another jet. “nobody informed us of that,” Myers said. “But when we came out, that was obvious. Then, right at that time, somebody said the Pentagon had been hit.” Finally, somebody thrust a cellphone in Myers hand and, as if by magic, the commanding general of Norad ? our Airspace Command ? was on the line just as the hijackers mission had been successfully completed except for the failed one in Pennsylvania. In later testimony to the Senate Armed Forces Committee, Myers says he thinks that, as of his cellphone talk with Norad, the decision was at that point to start launching aircraft, It was 9:40 AM. One hour and 20 minutes after air controllers knew that Flight 11 had been hijacked; 50 minutes after the North Tower was struck.

This statement would have been quite enough in our old serious army/air force to launch a number of courts martial with an impeachment or two thrown in. First, Myers claims to be uninformed until the third strike. But the Pentagon had been overseeing the hijacked planes from at least the moment of the strike at the first tower: yet not until the third strike, at the Pentagon, was the decision made to get the fighter planes up. Finally, this one is the dog that did not bark. By law, the fighters should have been up at around 8:15. If they had, all the hijacked planes might have been diverted or shot down. I don1t think Goff is being unduly picky when he wonders who and what kept the Air Force from following its normal procedure instead of waiting an hour and 20 minutes until the damage was done and only then launching the fighters. Obviously, somebody had ordered the Air Force to make no move to intercept those hijackings until… what?

On 21 January 2002, the Canadian media analyst Barry Zwicker summed up on CBS-TV: That morning no interceptors responded in a timely fashion to the highest alert situation. This includes the Andrews squadrons which are 12 miles from the White House Whatever the explanation for the huge failure, there have been no reports, to my knowledge, of reprimands. This further weakens the “Incompetence Theory”. Incompetence usually earns reprimands. This causes me to ask whether there were “stand down” orders.?? On 29 August 2002, the BBC reports that on 9/11 there were only four-fighters on ready status in the north-eastern US. Conspiracy? Coincidence? Error?

It is interesting how often in our history, when disaster strikes, incompetence is considered a better alibi than well, yes, there are worse things. After Pearl Harbor, Congress moved to find out why Hawaiis two military commanders, General Short and Admiral Kimmel, had not anticipated the Japanese attack. But President Roosevelt pre-empted that investigation with one of his own. Short and Kimmel were broken for incompetence. The truth is still obscured to this day.

The medias weapons of mass distraction

BUT PEARL HARBOR has been much studied. 11 September, it is plain, is never going to be investigated if Bush has anything to say about it. In January 2002, CNN reported that Bush personally asked Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to limit the Congressional investigation into the events of 11 September The request was made at a private meeting with Congressional leaders Sources said Bush initiated the conversation He asked that only the House and Senate intelligence committees look into the potential breakdowns among federal agencies that could have allowed the terrorist attacks to occur, rather than a broader inquiry Tuesdays discussion followed a rare call from Vice President Dick Cheney last Friday to make the same request

The excuse given, according to Daschle, was that resources and personnel would be taken away from the war on terrorism in the event of a wider inquiry. So for reasons that we must never know, those breakdowns are to be the goat. That they were more likely to be not break- but stand-downs is not for us to pry. Certainly the one-hour 20-minute failure to put fighter planes in the air could not have been due to a breakdown throughout the entire Air Force along the East Coast. Mandatory standard operating procedure had been told to cease and desist.

Meanwhile, the media were assigned their familiar task of inciting public opinion against bin Laden, still not the proven mastermind. These media blitzes often resemble the magicians classic gesture of distraction: as you watch the rippling bright colours of his silk handkerchief in one hand, he is planting the rabbit in your pocket with the other. We were quickly assured that Osamas enormous family with its enormous wealth had broken with him, as had the royal family of his native Saudi Arabia. The CIA swore, hand on heart, that Osama had not worked for them in the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Finally, the rumour that Bush family had in any way profited by its long involvement with bin Laden family was ? what else? ? simply partisan bad taste.

But Bush Jrs involvement goes back at least to 1979 when his first failed attempt to become a player in the big Texas oil league brought him together with one James Bath of Houston, a family friend, who gave Bush Jr. $50,000 for a 5 per cent stake in Bushs firm Arbusto Energy. At this time, according to Wayne Madsen (In These Times ? Institute for Public Affairs No. 25), Bath was the sole US business representative for Salem bin Laden, head of the family and a brother (one of 17) to Osama bin Laden In a statement issued shortly after the 11 September attacks, the White House vehemently denied the connection, insisting that Bath invested his own money, not Salem bin Ladens in Arbusto. In conflicting statements, Bush at first denied ever knowing Bath, then acknowledged his stake in Arbusto and that he was aware Bath represented Saudi interests after several reincarnations, Arbusto emerged in 1986 as Harken Energy Corporation.

Behind the junior Bush is the senior Bush, gainfully employed by the Carlyle Group which has ownership in at least 164 companies worldwide, inspiring admiration in that staunch friend to the wealthy, the Wall Street Journal, which noted, as early as 27 September 2001, If the US boosts defence spending in its quest to stop Osama bin Ladens alleged terrorist activities, there may be one unexpected beneficiary: bin Ladens family is an investor in a fund established by Carlyle Group, a well connected Washington merchant bank specialising in buyouts of defence and aerospace companies Osama is one of more than 50 children of Mohammed bin Laden, who built the familys $5 billion business.

But Bush pere et fils, in pursuit of wealth and office, are beyond shame or, one cannot help but think, good sense. There is a suggestion that they are blocking investigation of the bin Laden connection with terrorism. Agence France Press reported on 4 November 2001: FBI agents probing relatives of Saudi-born terror suspect Osama were told to back off soon after George W. Bush became president According to BBC TVs News-night (6 Nov 2001), just days after the hijackers took off from Boston aiming for the Twin Towers, a special charter flight out of the same airport whisked 11 members of Osamas family off to Saudi Arabia. That did not concern the White House, whose official line is that the bin Ladens are above suspicion. Above the Law (Green Press, 14 February 2002) sums up: We had what looked like the biggest failure of the intelligence community since Pearl Harbor but what we are learning now is it wasnt a failure, it was a directive. True? False? Bush Jr will be under oath during the impeachment interrogation. Will we hear What is a directive? What is is?

Although the US had, for some years, fingered Osama as a master-mind terrorist, no serious attempt had been made pre-9/11 to bring him to justice dead or alive, innocent or guilty, as Texan law of the jungle requires. Clintons plan to act was given to Condoleezza Rice by Sandy Berger, you will recall, but she says she does not.

As far back as March 1996 when Osama was in Sudan, Major General Elfatih Erwa, Sudanese Minister for Defense, offered to extradite him. According to the Washington Post (3 October 2001), “Erwa said he would happily keep close watch on bin Laden for the United States. But if that would not suffice, the government was prepared to place him in custody and hand him over (US officials) said, “just ask him to leave the country. Just dont let him go to Somalia”, where he had once been given credit for the successful al-Qaeda attack on American forces in 93 that killed 18 Rangers.” Erwa said in an interview, “We said he will go to Afghanistan, and they (US officials) said, “Let him.”

In 1996 Sudan expelled Osama and 3,000 of his associates. Two years later the Clinton administration, in the great American tradition of never having to say thank you for Sudans offer to hand over Osama, proceeded to missile-attack Sudans al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory on the grounds that Sudan was harboring bin Laden terrorists who were making chemical and biological weapons when the factory was simply making vaccines for the UN.

Four years later, John ONeill, a much admired FBI agent complained in the Irish Times a month before the attacks, “The US State Department-and behind it the off lobby who make up President Bushs entourage ? blocked attempts to prove bin Ladens guilt. The US ambassador to Yemen forbade ONeill (and his FBI team) from entering Yemen in August 2001. ONeill resigned in frustration and took on a new job as head of security at the World Trade Centre. He died in the 11 September attack.” Obviously, Osama has enjoyed bipartisan American support since his enlistment in the CIA1s war to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. But by 9/11 there was no Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, indeed there was no Soviet Union.

A World Made Safe for Peace and Pipelines

I watched Bush and Cheney on CNN when the Axis of Evil speech was given and the long war proclaimed. Iraq, Iran and North Korea were fingered as enemies to be clobbered because they might or might not be harboring terrorists who might or might not destroy us in the night. So we must strike first whenever it pleases us. Thus, we declared “war on terrorism” ? an abstract noun which cannot be a war at all as you need a country for that. Of course, there was innocent Afghanistan, which was leveled from a great height, but then whats collateral damage ? like an entire country ? when youre targeting the personification of all evil according to Time and the NY Times and the networks?

As it proved, the conquest of Afghanistan had nothing to do with Osama. He was simply a pretext for replacing the Taliban with a relatively stable government that would allow Union Oil of California to lay its pipeline for the profit of, among others, the Cheney-Bush junta.

Background? All right. The headquarters of Unocal are, as might be expected, in Texas. In December 1997, Taliban representatives were invited to Sugarland, Texas. At that time, Unocal had already begun training Afghan men in pipeline construction, with US government approval. BBC News, (4 December 1997): A spokesperson for the company Unocal said the Taliban were expected to spend several days at the companys (Texas) Headquarters a BBC regional correspondent says the proposal to build a pipeline across Afghanistan is part of an international scramble to profit from developing the rich energy resources of the Caspian Sea. The Inter Press Service (IPS) reported: some Western businesses are warming up to the Taliban despite the movements institutionalization of terror, massacres, abductions and impoverishment. CNN (6 October 1996): The United States wants good ties (with the Taliban) but cant openly seek them while women are being oppressed.

The Taliban, rather better organized than rumoured, hired for PR one Leila Helms, a niece of Richard Helms, former Director of the CIA. In October 1996, the Frankfurter Rundschau reported that Unocal has been given the go ahead from the new holders of power in Kabul to build a pipeline from Turkmenistan via Afghanistan to Pakistan This was a real coup for Unocal as well as other candidates for pipelines, including Condoleezzas old employer Chevron. Although the Taliban was already notorious for its imaginative crimes against the human race, the Wall Street Journal, scenting big bucks, fearlessly announced: “Like them or not, the Taliban are the players most capable of achieving peace in Afghanistan at this moment in history.” The NY Times (26 May 1997) leapt aboard the pipeline juggernaut. The Clinton administration has taken the view that a Taliban victory would act as counterweight to Iran and would offer the possibility of new trade routes that could weaken Russian and Iranian influence in the region.

But by 1999, it was clear that the Taliban could never provide us the security we would need to protect our fragile pipelines. The arrival of Osama as warrior for Allah on the scene refocused, as it were, the bidding. New alliances were now being made. The Bush administration soon buys the idea of an invasion of Afghanistan, Frederick Starr, head of the Central Asia Institute at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in the Washington Post (19 December, 2000): The US has quietly begun to align itself with those in the Russian government calling for military action against Afghanistan and has toyed with the idea of a new raid to wipe out bin Laden.

Although with much fanfare we went forth to wreak our vengeance on the crazed sadistic religious zealot who slaughtered 3,000 American citizens, once that war was under way, Osama was dropped as irrelevant and so we are back to the Unocal pipeline, now a go-project. In the light of what we know today, it is unlikely that the junta was ever going to capture Osama alive: he has tales to tell. One Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld1s best number now is: “Where is he? Somewhere? Here? There? Somewhere? Who knows?” And we get his best twinkle. He must also be delighted ? and amazed ? that the media have bought the absurd story that Osama, If alive, would still be in Afghanistan, underground, waiting to be flushed out instead of in a comfortable mansion in Osama-loving Jakarta, 2,000 miles to the East and easily accessible by the Flying Carpet One.

Many commentators of a certain age have noted how Hitlerian our junta sounds as it threatens first one country for harbouring terrorists and then another. It is true that Hitler liked to pretend to be the injured ? or threatened ? party before he struck. But he had many great predecessors not lest Imperial Rome. Stephen Gowans War in Afghanistan : A $28 Billion Racket quotes Joseph Schumpeter who, “in 1919, described ancient Rome in a way that sounds eerily like the United States in 2001: “There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Romes allies; and if Rome had no allies, the allies would be invented The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbors.” We have only outdone the Romans in turning metaphors such as the war on terrorism, or poverty, or Aids into actual wars on targets we appear, often, to pick at random in order to maintain turbulence in foreign lands.

As of 1 August 2002, trial balloons were going up all over Washington DC to get world opinion used to the idea the Bush of Afghanistan had gained a title as mighty as his fathers Bush of the Persian Gulf and Junior was now eager to add Iraq-Babylon to his diadem. These various balloons fell upon Europe and the Arab world like so many lead weights. But something new has been added since the classic Roman Hitlerian mantra, they are threatening us, we must attack first. Now everyone is more or less out in the open. The International Herald Tribune wrote in August 2002: The leaks began in earnest on 5 July, when the New York Times described a tentative Pentagon plan that it said called for an invasion by a US force of up to 250,000 that would attack Iraq from the north, south and west. On 10 July, the Times said that Jordan might be used as a base for the invasion. The Washington Post reported, 28 July, that “many senior US military officers contend that Saddam Hussein poses no immediate threat” And the status quo should be maintained. Incidentally, this is the sort of debate that the founding fathers intended the Congress, not the military bureaucrats, to conduct in the name of we the people. But that sort of debate has, for a long time, been denied us.

One refreshing note is now being struck in a fashion unthinkable in imperial Rome: the cheerful admission that we habitually resort to provocation. The Tribune continues: Donald Rumsfeld has threatened to jail anyone found to have been behind the leaks. But a retired army general, Fred Woerner, tends to see a method behind the leaks. “We may already be executing a plan,” he said recently. “Are we involved in a preliminary psychological dimension of causing Iraq to do something to justify a US attack or make concessions? Somebody knows. That is plain.

Elsewhere in this interesting edition of the Herald Tribune wise William Pfaff writes: A second Washington debate is whether to make an unprovoked attack on Iran to destroy a nuclear power reactor being built with Russian assistance, under inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency, within the terms of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty of which Iran is a signatory No other government would support such an action, other than Israil’ (which) would do so not because it expected to be attacked by Iran but because it, not unjustifiably, opposes any nuclear capacity in the hands of any Islamic government.

Suspect states and the tom-toms of revenge

Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. As the parent of armies, war encourages debts and taxes, the known instrument for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the executive is extended and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, or the people Thus, James Madison warned us at the dawn of our republic.

Post 9/11, thanks to the domination of the few, Congress and the media are silent while the executives, through propaganda and skewed polls, seduces the public mind as hitherto unthinkable centres of power like Homeland Defence (a new Cabinet post to be placed on top of the Defence Department) are being constructed and 4 percent of the country has recently been invited to join Tips, a civilian spy system to report on anyone who looks suspicious or who objects to what the executive is doing at home or abroad?

Although every nation knows how ? if it has the means and the will ? to protect itself from thugs of the sort that brought us 9/11, war is not an option. Wars are for nations not rootless gangs. You put a price on their heads and hunt them down. In recent years, Italy has been doing just that with the Sicilian Mafia; and no one has yet suggested bombing Palermo.

But the Cheney-Bush junta wants a war in order to dominate Afghanistan, build a pipeline, gain control of the oil of Eurasias Stans for their business associates as well as to do as much damage to Iraq and Iran on the grounds that one day those evil countries may carpet our fields of amber, grain with anthrax or something.

The media, never much good at analysis, are more and more breathless and incoherent. On CNN, even the stolid Jim Clancy started to hyperventilate when an Indian academic tried to explain how Iraq was once our ally and friend in its war against our Satanic enemy Iran. None of that conspiracy stuff snarled Clancy. Apparently, conspiracy stuff is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.

As of August, at least among economists, a censensus was growing that, considering our vast national debt (we borrow $2 billion a day to keep the government going) and a tax base seriously reduced by the junta in order to benefit the 1 per cent who own most of the national wealth, there is no way that we could ever find the billions needed to destroy Iraq in a long war or even a short one, with most of Europe lined up against us. Germany and Japan paid for the Gulf War, reluctantly ? with Japan, at the last moment, irritably quarreling over the exchange rate at the time of the contract. Now Germanys Schroder has said no. Japan is mute.

But the tom-toms keep beating revenge; and the fact that most of the world is opposed to our war seems only to bring hectic roses to the cheeks of the Bush administration (Bush Snr of the Carlyle Group, Bush Jnr formerly of Harken, Cheney, formerly of Halliburton, Rice, formerly of Chevron, Rumsfeld, formerly of Occidental). If ever an administration should recluse itself in matters dealing with energy, it is the current junta. But this is unlike any administration in our history. Their hearts are plainly elsewhere, making money, far from our mock Roman temples, while we, alas, are left only with their heads, dreaming of war, preferably against weak peripheral states.

Mohammed Heikel is a brilliant Egyptian journalist-observer, and sometime Foreign Minister, On 10 October 2001, he said to the Guardian: Bin Laden does not have the capabilities for an operation of this magnitude. When I hear Bush talking about al-Qaeda as if it were Nazi Germany or the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, I laugh because I know what is there. Bin Laden has been under surveillance for years: every telephone call was monitored and al-Qaeda has been penetrated by US intelligence, Pakistani intelligence, Saudi intelligence, Egyptian intelligence. They could not have kept secret an operation that required such a degree of organization and sophistication.

The former president of Germanys domestic intelligence service, Eckehardt Werthebach ( American Free Press, 4 December 2001) spells it out. The 9/11 attacks required years of planning while their scale indicates that they were a product of state-organized actions. There it is. Perhaps, after all, Bush Jnr was right to call it a war. But which state attacked us?

Will the suspects please line up. Saudi Arabia? No, no. Why we are paying you $50 million a year for training the royal bodyguard on our own holy if arid soil. True the kingdom contains many wealthy well-educated enemies but Bush Snr and Jnr exchange a knowing look. Egypt? No way. Dead broke despite US baksheesh. Syria? No funds. Iran? Too proud to bother with a parvenu state like the US. Israel? Sharon is capable of anything. But he lacks the guts and the grace of the true kamikaze. Anyway, Sharon was not in charge when this operation began with the planting of sleepers around the US flight schools 5 or 6 years ago. The United States? Elements of corporate America would undeniably prosper from a massive external attack that would make it possible for us to go to war whenever the President sees fit while suspending civil liberties. (The 342 pages of the USA Patriot Act were plainly prepared before 9/11.) Bush Snr and Jnr are giggling now. Why? Because Clinton was president back then. As the former president leaves the line of suspects, he says, more in anger than in sorrow: “When we left the White House we had a plan for an all-out war on al-Queda. We turned it over to this administration and they did nothing. Why Biting his lip, he goes. The Bushes no longer giggle. Pakistan breaks down: I did it! I confess! I couldnt help myself. Save me. I am an evil-doer!

Apparently, Pakistan did do it ? or some of it. We must now go back to 1979 when the largest covert operation in history of the CIA was launched in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Central Asia specialist Ahmed Rashid wrote (Foreign Affairs, November-December 1999): With the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistans ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) who wanted to turn the Afghan jihad into a global war, waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union, some 35,000 Muslim radicals, from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistans fight between 1982 and 92 more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals were directly influenced by the Afghanistan jihad. The CIA covertly trained and sponsored these warriors.

In March 1985, President Reagan issued National Security Decision Directive 166, increasing military aid while CIA specialists met with the ISI counterparts near Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Janes Defence Weekly (14 September 2001) gives the best overview: The trainers were mainly from Pakistans ISI agency who learnt their craft from American Green Beret commandos and Navy Seals in various US training establishments. This explains the reluctance of the administration to explain why so many unqualified persons, over so long a time, got visas to visit our hospitable shores. While in Pakistan, mass training of Afghan (zealots) was subsequently conducted by the Pakistan army under the supervision of the elite Special Services In 1988, with US knowledge, bin Laden created al-Qaeda (The Base); a conglomerate of quasi-independent Islamic terrorist cells spread across 26 or so countries. Washington turned a blind eye to al-Qaeda.

When Mohammed Attas plane struck the World Trade Centres North Tower, George W. Bush and the child at the Florida elementary school were discussing her goat. By coincidence, our word tragedy comes from the Greek: for goat tragos plus oide for song. Goat-song. It is highly suitable that this lament, sung in ancient satyr plays, should have been heard again at the exact moment when we were struck by fire from heaven, and a tragedy whose end is nowhere in sight began for us.

Copyright Gore Vidal

www.karalla.com eme [at] karalla [dot] com 212 860 8900

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October 6, 2002 The De Facto Capital By FRANK RICH The New York Times

They got it right the first time. New York was the capital of the nation at its birth. The first presidential inauguration, in 1789, wasn’t far from ground zero, and the first presidential residence, at 3 Cherry Street, was on a spot now occupied by one of the supports for the Brooklyn Bridge. George Washington slept there, but not for long. In a political deal purportedly made on a downtown sidewalk, Alexander Hamilton traded away the location of the capital to Thomas Jefferson to entice the South to give the federal government power to assume state debts. A year later, Congress and the president decamped to Philadelphia, and a decade after that, they settled into a new federal city next to which the City of Brotherly Love seems like Shangri-La. As Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, two New York tabloid reporters of a later day, would assess the fateful final choice of a national capital in their 1951 best seller, ”Washington Confidential”: ”The founding fathers, whose infinite wisdom gave us a Constitution and form of government well nigh perfect, located the seat of that government in a stinking, steaming swamp.”

The country’s seat may still be mired in that swamp, but its heart, soul and brains are more evident than ever in its first capital, 200 miles to the north. While New York has long been the nation’s center of culture, finance, fashion and media, the city in the aftermath of Sept. 11 cohered into something more than the sum of its perennially celebrated parts. After its highest towers were taken down, New York rose from its initial shock to illustrate in real time what America actually is, a huge and resilient democracy animated by citizens of every conceivable stripe, pursuit and ethic (from those who gave their lives for others at the World Trade Center to those who looted its shopping mall). Instead of seeming, as it often had, like an eccentric island adrift from the rest of the country, the city found itself valued instead as a concentrated representation of the whole. That outsiders would regard it as the true American capital was proof that Americans now define themselves far more by their cultural choices, most of which are tweaked and marketed by the information factories of Manhattan, than by their choice (if any) of political party. Not that New York is shy about offering political leadership if it spots a vacuum. When the White House’s occupant was nowhere to be found on the day the country needed him most, New York went so far as to offer up its own chief executive as the nation’s paterfamilias. America is still grateful.

Even at the literal level, New York is more representative of American political values than the official capital. Washington, where I grew up and where my family has lived since the Civil War, is still a colony where the voters are denied the full rights of self-determination. Its citizens and public officials alike remain in thrall to a federal government over which they have virtually no say, in the shadow of a president who serves as the de facto prince regent of the tourist precincts, the only part of the city most Americans see. Washington is less an exemplar of democracy than an agglomeration of marble facades paying unctuous tribute to that aspiration. George W. Bush, and he is hardly the first president to do so, treats it as a politically obligatory diorama that he can flee any and every chance he gets.

New York doesn’t think of itself as competing with Washington — the same cannot be said of the reverse — but periodically it does so, if only to let the world know who’s really boss. After World War II, suburban Virginia tried to lure the fledgling United Nations to metropolitan Washington, until someone belatedly realized that an international citizenry would not take kindly to segregated schools. In 1959, the Washington Board of Trade mounted an elaborate campaign to make the ”Capital of the Free World” the site of the 1964 World’s Fair. According to one account, the D.C. advocates’ hard sell leaned heavily on the annual cherry-blossom festivals, the ”colorful parades constantly held when distinguished foreign guests visit the city” and ”the elaborate and dignified presidential inauguration celebrations.” That was all it took to persuade the World’s Fair Commission to reach unanimity in awarding the plum to Robert Moses’s posse from New York.

This year brought the Olympics bake-off. To increase its odds as a site for the 2012 summer games, Washington entered into a shotgun marriage with the more plausibly urban Baltimore. The capital’s confidence was such that it took for granted a Washington Post report in July that D.C. and San Francisco were ”the apparent front-runners,” beating out New York and Houston. The next month brought the shocking news that it was Washington that had been eliminated along with Houston (the only other city that can match both its toxic summer weather and complement of former Enron executives). After this defeat, there was much local muttering that ”politics” was the culprit and that Washington might have been punished because of the unpopularity abroad of the incipient war on Iraq.

How much easier for Washingtonians to blame Saddam than to take a hard look at their own city. D.C. may have talked a good game about sports to the U.S. Olympic Committee, but for three decades it has lacked a major-league team in the most American sport of them all. It purports to be as up to date as the new economy, but the signature digital-era companies to put down roots there, AOL and MicroStrategy, are synonymous with the dot-com bust. The capital’s Maryland and Virginia suburban enclaves are famous for having some of the country’s most over-the-top houses as measured by square footage but none of the most imaginative architecture.

Such is Washington’s appeal to tourists that it did not make the list of the Top 10 North American cities in this year’s Travel and Leisure magazine readers’ poll. (New York came in first.) The capital’s restaurants can’t compete with those of Vegas, let alone New York, Chicago and the Seattle-to-Los Angeles culinary axis of the West. Its taxicabs have a suspect fee structure as gerrymandered as the map of Congressional voting districts. While New York has contributed to the American language such joyous words as ”whoopee” and ”hot dog,” Washington has coined ”inside the Beltway” and ”Department of Homeland Security.” America’s songwriters and poets have repeatedly celebrated Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island too — not to mention San Francisco, Chicago and St. Louis — but where is that romantic lyric about the capital? ”Hail to the Redskins” will have to do.

First appearances can be deceptive to new visitors to D.C. Edmund Wilson once observed that Washington, ”after other American cities, seems at first such a relief, so agreeable,” but ”turns out, when one has stayed there any length of time, to have little personality of its own and to come to taste rather flat.” Or as Cindy Adams wrote this year: ”Even folks who live in Washington don’t want to be there. The high point for a visitor? Catching a glimpse of Trent Lott in Person? I mean, please.”

By contrast, you have to pry people away from New York. The gaping wound only deepened the citizenry’s already intimate connection to their city. In the poignant opening episode of the post-9/11 season of ”Sex and the City,” Carrie went so far as to choose the city over sex, spurning the advances of a Fleet Week sailor after he committed the sin of knocking her town. It was the patriotic thing to do.

New Yorkers who were out of town on 9/11 felt desperate to return. Since then, we seem inexorably drawn to the watering holes and restaurants and merchants downtown, as if to fill in the shadow of death with the lubricious glow and laughter of irrepressible life. We are more aware of our neighbors than before: not just the firemen and the cops and the family that lost someone, but the guy who lost his business in the undertow, the guy who is trying to rebuild, the all-American Sikh cabbie who bedecks his windshield with flags lest he be victimized (as in New York he has generally not been) by guilt-by-turban. The fate of ground zero is, inevitably, a noisy political and aesthetic debate, but whatever acrimony may attend it, it is also a classic American project: a battle between money and values, between commerce and art, between powerful interests and upstart citizenry, between past and future, all staged on an open 16-acre expanse that is urban America’s largest frontier.

Not only were the dire predictions of a mass exodus wrong, but the reverse may be happening. A New York Times/CBS News poll in August found that the number of inhabitants who think that New York will be a better place to live in 10 or 15 years is the same as it was the month before the attack. Manhattan’s residential real-estate values were clocked this summer at 15 percent higher than they had been pre-Sept. 11; signed contracts on apartments were up this July over last, too, reflecting the possibility that more people are arriving than leaving, even during an economic downturn. Neighborhoods reinvent themselves faster than anyone can keep count, from Harlem to the Lower East Side. Queens, generally an also-ran in any five-borough hipness sweepstakes, shows signs of becoming the new Brooklyn (though it still lacks its own Zagat). The Museum of Modern Art lives in Queens now, and so do a disproportionate number of artists, writers, dancers and musicians — including the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, who is only the latest in a long list of Washington-spawned talents (from Duke Ellington to Paul Taylor) who fled the capital’s culturally parched environment to reach full bloom in the enriching concrete of New York.

In Washington, there is far more culture than there used to be, but spectacle, in keeping with the town’s own bombastic aesthetics, tends to be the hottest ticket — blockbuster shows at the National Gallery, Disney musicals and the Bolshoi on tour. Cities as small as Minneapolis and Seattle have a more lively indigenous arts scene than Washington. The plight of culture in the capital is symbolized by the Kennedy Center, an afterthought not even deemed worthy of its own stop on the city’s part-time Metro system. A world-class impresario, Michael Kaiser, has at last been imported to revive the place, and this summer he performed a Heimlich maneuver in the form of the well-received Sondheim Celebration. But half the weekend audience was New Yorkers, to whom Kaiser may have to continue to cater. The low-slung performing arts barn on the Potomac has for so long been isolated from the best American culture, high, middle and pop, that its annual low-rated televised honors have of late been reduced to bestowing some of their medallions on Brits rather than native genius. (This year’s Kennedy Center knight, Paul McCartney, has taken a rain check.) Such is President Bush’s respect for the capital’s temple of culture that among his first appointments to its board was Bo Derek.

With the exception of the B-list Hollywood names who get all dressed up (once, anyway) for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, artists turn up in the city en masse only when Congress is posturing about the arts and humanities endowments. As for what American pop culture thinks of Washington as a city, as opposed to a government, one need only look at ”Minority Report,” in which the capital’s defining trait, even years in the future, is its historically high crime rate. The movie’s point seems to be that nothing short of the ability to arrest suspects before they commit a crime would have enabled D.C.’s benighted police force to crack a case like Chandra Levy’s.

New York is hardly without crime, but it also has the positive side of urban friction: the manifest humanity that results when millions of people of all kinds are packed together to make a go of it. The fundamental DNA of the city has never changed. It has always been a gateway for immigrants as well as an arena for big money. Its crowds have been large and raucous from the start. That ”culture of congestion,” in the phrase of the architect Rem Koolhaas, leads to a nonstop chain reaction of serendipitous human fusion, creative and sexual and economic, that is as American as you can get. The byproducts include hyphenated talents, melting-pot families, a constant, bubbling hands-on laboratory for social, political and cultural change in which the experiments alternately succeed big and fail catastrophically, in full public view.

At some point, Washington had its own dreams of being a sizzling capital. In ”Political Terrain,” Carl Abbott writes of how in the late 19th century it was still hoped that D.C. ”could aspire to be the Rome of America in the arts, the Berlin of America in education and the Paris of America as a city of beauty and pleasure.” But the city stood still while those roles were respectively claimed by New York, Boston and San Francisco. (Though George Washington had offered to help endow a major university for the new capital, few of its grandees seconded his enthusiasm.) Despite early hopes that the federal district might be an economic hub, it was as hard for capitalism to take root as culture. As Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace write in ”Gotham,” it became apparent early in the 19th century that the United States ”would have two centers, one governmental, the other economic.” It was a ”separation of powers as emphatic as anything in the Constitution” with ”no parallel in the Western world.” The American capital that emerged was, in John Kennedy’s famous formulation, a city of ”southern efficiency and northern charm” — a rare point of agreement between him and Richard Nixon, who pronounced Washington ”a city without identity” and voted with his feet to spend most of his political exile in New York prior to his 1968 comeback.

If Washington has an indistinct identity, it does have its own DNA — that of a town of transients. When legislative sessions were far briefer than they are now, Congress and the Supreme Court took residence in temporary quarters, then fled to better climes (as they still do when in recess). ”The greatest and most respectable business that is done in Washington is keeping boarding houses,” said an 1829 handbook for new arrivals. It wasn’t until well into the 20th century, as the federal government expanded during the New Deal (with its hefty infusion of F.D.R. New Yorkers) and World War II, that the city’s population did as well. By then it had long since missed out on the great wave of turn-of-the-century immigration that gave New York and every other East Coast metropolis their human and cultural variety. Even now, the capital lacks the ethnic spectrum of other major American cities. In the 2000 census, the Asian population of New York — almost 10 percent of the city’s eight million inhabitants — was substantially larger than the entire population of D.C., where the Asian population is only 2.6 percent. Though the number of Hispanics is rising in Washington as elsewhere, in 2000 they still made up, at most, 9 percent of the city, as opposed to a quarter of New York.

When the W.P.A. assembled its guidebook to the capital during the Depression, the authors seemed almost desperate to imbue their subject with distinction. One wistful accolade paid tribute to the city’s ”profusion of shade trees.” When the book was revised in 1942, the district’s most distinctive aspect was played down — the references to the second-class citizenship of its black residents, who like all Washingtonians had no right to vote, even in presidential elections, but who also continued to suffer many of the deprivations of slavery, from discrimination to poor public health and schools. In a 1983 reissue, a new editor set the record straight, but noted as compensation that ”it is easier to find one’s bearings in Washington than in other American cities.” (So true, and so what?)

Though opponents of full home rule for the District then and now can give all sorts of highfalutin constitutional arguments for their position, the perennial sub rosa reason for its substatus remains the same as it was before anyone had heard of Marion Barry’s coke bust or of the hapless current mayor, Anthony Williams, whose fraudulent nominating petitions contained ”signatures” from New York celebrities like Martha Stewart and Billy Joel. In 1965, Washington became the first major American city in which blacks outnumbered whites by more than 10 percent. Given the Republican Party’s inability to attract large numbers of black voters, it has hardly been in any rush to empower more of them at the price of likely handing the Democrats two voting seats in the Senate and one in the House.

The only time the capital’s residents had true self-rule was during a short-lived biracial governance experiment during Reconstruction, soon ended by white resistance. Though Washingtonians can now vote for president (since 1961), they have but a single nonvoting member of Congress. Under their limited form of home rule, in place only since the early 1970’s, the City Council, the mayor, the budget and even citizen-passed ballot initiatives can all be overruled by congressmen from states whose constituents’ firsthand knowledge of the capital may be limited to the compulsory school trip. It could be argued that nowhere in the country is the plantation mentality still more embedded in civic life than in an African-American city whose citizens lack the full rights of citizenship, even as their Army National Guard units are called on active duty for the war on terrorism. This antediluvian, or at least antebellum, state of affairs makes D.C. a strikingly anachronistic capital of America in the 21st century, whatever its validity as a capital before the passage of the 13th Amendment. Indeed, America’s capital has less democratic autonomy than President Bush this year demanded of the Palestinians.

Whatever Washington lacks in actual democracy, it makes up, of course, in monuments. But what represents the spirit of modern America more than the Statue of Liberty? The view of Lait and Mortimer, Washington’s churlish chroniclers of the 1950’s, still holds. They likened the city’s tourist appeal to that of Hollywood’s Forest Lawn cemetery, where busloads of Americans come to visit the movie stars’ graves. ”Its gleaming public buildings of white marble are like so many mausoleums,” they wrote. ”Where it doesn’t look like a cemetery it resembles a movie set. It has a feel of unreality.” But if politics is show business for ugly people, as the old joke has it, you can’t push the Hollywood analogy too far. ”Washington is dominated by elected and appointed functionaries who are schooled to believe they must never be caught having fun,” Lait and Mortimer wrote. ”Therefore, after dark, it is more like Paducah than Paris.” Unlike New York, which has winked at mayoral girlfriends from Jimmy Walker’s to Rudolph Giuliani’s (and doesn’t care where its current bachelor mayor spends his weekends), Washington was the last to discover John Kennedy’s sex life and is still as open-mouthed as an Edvard Munch screamer when contemplating Bill Clinton’s.

Washington’s idea of a Hollywood sex symbol is a cast member in ”The West Wing” — no matter whom — because what could be more erotic than a powerful government bureaucrat? The city’s idea of an intellectual is a Sunday-morning talking head; its literary apotheosis is the trade journal. Its loudest academic posturing emanates from the so-called university without students, the think tank, invented by the Brookings Institution in 1927 and a major Washington growth industry since the 1970’s. The think tanks’ tenured ”professors,” with grandiose titles that might have been lifted from the Marx Brothers’ ”Duck Soup,” are often out-of-office ideologues with more position papers than books to their credit. Only in this heady environment could William Bennett be mistaken for Harold Bloom and CNN’s ”Capital Gang” for the Algonquin Round Table. Unlike decision makers in other capitals, Washington’s power elite don’t routinely commingle with top-rung scholars, scientists, novelists, artists and musicians who might broaden their thinking beyond the parameters set by the city’s army of lobbyists and single-issue advocates.

Though Washington suffered its own grievous wound on Sept. 11, it remains as insular as it was before the attack. As the country’s official capital, it is to New York as Ankara is to Istanbul, Canberra is to Sydney, Brasilia is to Rio. Strolling through downtown and past the alabaster public buildings on a beautiful afternoon, you find that the sparse pedestrian traffic is often limited to government workers in cookie-cutter garb and cadres of tourists hoping to find some semblance of urban brio after having had their fill of the National Air and Space Museum. (They’d be better advised to hightail it to the city’s black or gay enclaves or even the suburbs.)

Take a similar walk through the central commercial districts of New York, whatever the borough, and you’ll find not just animated sidewalks packed with locals but also signs of a city in perpetual renewal, pursuing creation and demolition with equal abandon, always testing the limits. That hope, that drive, that hunger to keep moving no matter what, is America at its highest throttle. Should the Olympians come to the true capital, they won’t automatically own the town, as they would if they had landed in Washington. In New York, they’ll find that no sooner do the games begin than they are locked into the even tougher competition of winning the city’s favor, just like every other newcomer who has ever come here with dreams of going for the gold.

Frank Rich is a Times columnist and a senior writer for the magazine.

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—— http://www.nationalpost.com/home/story.html?id={08164C9D-5C06-490A-A4C1-ED6E833B9DE4} Sniper a ‘psychopath playing god’ FBI profiling: Killings are like ‘psychological Viagra’ for shooter Jan Cienski, with files from Michael Friscolanti National Post

BETHESDA, MD. – The sniper terrorizing suburban Washington after killing as many as six people with a high-powered rifle in less than a day is likely a stone-cold psychopath who is relishing the “heroin-like high” of deciding who lives and who dies, says a former FBI profiler. Despite a massive law enforcement effort, hundreds of calls to a tip line, aerial searches with helicopters and police pulling over dozens of suspicious vehicles, authorities were still stumped about the identity of the killer or killers. “We’re operating under the pretence that they are still in the area,” said Charles Moose, the Montgomery County Police Chief. Late yesterday afternoon, police got word the sniper may have struck again. A woman loading purchases into her minivan at a mall near Fredericksburg, Va., about 60 kilometres south of the U.S. capital, was shot in the back but survived. The other shootings occurred about 10 km north of Washington. Investigators were being sent from Maryland to see if the cases were related.

Police were also investigating whether the killer or killers had claimed a sixth victim: a 72-year-old man killed by a single shot to the chest Thursday night while standing on a street corner in the District of Columbia, a few blocks from the Maryland state line. Few other clues emerged over the course of the day, but police speculated the shooter is teamed up with a driver, and the two may have been using a white delivery truck, seen by a witness leaving the scene of one of the killings. “You’ve got a driver, you’ve got a shooter,” Chief Moose said.

Although only fragments of bullets were found at the murder scenes, police were fairly certain the killer or killers were using a .223-calibre high-velocity rifle. Each of the victims shot Wednesday and Thursday was killed with a single bullet. “We’re dealing with someone shooting from a distance, someone using a high-velocity round,” Chief Moose told reporters. At a press conference yesterday, police and agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms showed several weapons that could shoot the small-calibre rounds, including a hunting rifle mounted with telescopic sights and a semi-automatic military-style rifle called the Colt AR15, similar to the U.S. Army’s M-16s. Unfortunately for police, such rifles are commonly available throughout the United States, although authorities were checking gun-store records to see whether there have been any recent purchases. The fact all the victims were killed with a single shot, and at least one died from a shot to the head, indicates the killer could have military training, said Clinton Van Zandt, a former profiler for the Federal Bureau of Investigations. “The more evidence we see of a head shot, the more evidence we have of military or paramilitary experience, rather than a hunter who shoots at the broad side of a deer and not the head of a human,” he said. That still does not give police much to go on.

A US$50,000 reward is being offered for information leading to an indictment. Police have received more than 200 telephone tips, many of them about loud noises and bangs that were investigated but turned up no more leads. Faced with the daunting prospect of a killer who may have gunned down his victims from up to 600 metres away, then driven off before anyone noticed, authorities are turning to FBI profilers to try to sketch the kind of personality behind the killing spree. According to Mr. Van Zandt, the statistical likelihood is that the killing has been done by two people, probably young white men. If that is correct, the shooter is the dominant partner in the relationship and the driver is subordinate. “They would feed off each other,” said Mr. Van Zandt, “giving each other high-fives and saying, ‘Wasn’t that a good shot!,’ giving each other emotional fuel.” Jack Levin, director of the Brudnick Centre on Violence & Conflict at Northeastern University at Boston, said the pair likely consider the crimes to be nothing more than “a team sport.” The men are inspired by one another, Mr. Levin said, finding “insanity within the relationship.” “A lot of people will do things with their friends that they wouldn’t dream of doing alone,” he said. “They don’t want to let down their buddy. It’s a sign of loyalty; it’s a common bond.” Mr. Levin, who has written numerous books on murderers, said the men are probably social outcasts who desperately crave the international attention their killing spree has triggered. “They were very likely rejected, had suffered a lot — especially the shooter — and they decided to get even, while at the same time having a good laugh at our expense,” he said. But Mr. Van Zandt says it’s too early to say exactly what set off the killings. “It’s one or two individuals who for whatever reason decided to level the playing field, thumbing their nose at law enforcement and society,” he said. “This is someone who is playing God. He can sit there with a rifle and point it at two or three people say, ‘Click … Click … Bang.’ This is psychological Viagra.” The first shooting happened Wednesday night, when James Martin, 55, was shot while crossing a grocery store parking lot. Forty minutes earlier someone had fired a round through a nearby store window, but no one was hurt. Then the killers “punched out and went to bed and stopped killing,” Mr. Van Zandt said. “That takes it past someone who is angry, frustrated and went out and shot someone and then said, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’ This is someone much more cold-blooded. “The next day they go back to work like you, and I would go to the office. Their job is shooting people down. This is a stone-cold anti-social personality.” About 13 hours after Mr. Martin died, landscaper James “Sonny” Buchanan, 39, was killed at 7:41 on Thursday morning while cutting grass at a car dealership. Prenkumar Walekar, 54, was shot at about 8:12 a.m., while pumping gas into his cab. About 30 minutes later, Sarah Ramos, 34, died while sitting on a bench outside a Post Office waiting for a ride. In the fifth shooting, Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera, 25, was shot and killed at about 10 a.m. while she vacuumed her van at a gas station. The apparently random shootings set off a panic in the U.S. capital equalled only by the terror instilled by the Sept. 11 attacks. Schools kept students indoors for recess and lunch yesterday and Thursday. Panicky parents refused even to let their children play in the yard. Many businesses noticed a drop off in customers. As a nervous and unarmed security guard stood watch outside a grocery store in Rockville, Md., a passer-by noted, “He’s not going to be much help if there’s a guy with a rifle 500 yards from here.” Despite the panic, Mr. Van Zandt said the crimes were “eminently solvable,” especially if someone who knows the killer or the killer calls police. Once the authorities get close, there is nothing about the crimes to suggest the killers intend to surrender. “I don’t think they will willingly go to jail,” Mr. Van Zandt said.

“If they are able to they will force the police into a confrontation in which they will be killed.” jcienski [at] nationalpost [dot] com

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‘Ultimate supplier’ Nortel may be out of demand By DAVID AKIN Monday, September 30, 2002 – Print Edition, Page B1

In 1885, just four years before American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson noted that the world beats a path to the doors of inventors of better mousetraps, Bell Telephone Co. of Canada spun out its manufacturing operations, creating a company called the Northern Electric and Manufacturing Co.

Emerson’s famous phrase seemed to have been a guiding light at Northern Electric, later to be Northern Telecom and, most recently in 1998, Nortel Networks Corp. of Brampton, Ont.

For most of its history, Nortel made its shareholders tremendously wealthy by building better mousetraps in the form of whatever passed for advanced technology of the day. In the 1880s it was sleigh bells, fire alarms and telephone switchboards. In the 20th century it was radios, telephones, TV sets and, during both world wars, ammunition.

“Nortel has always been a technology company that took advantage of opportunities. It’s the ultimate supplier,” said Elliot Schreiber, who now teaches at the business school at McMaster University in Hamilton, but was Nortel’s senior vice-president of corporate marketing and communications, from 1995 to 1999.

For the past few years, Nortel excelled at building and selling fabulously complex machines built out of laser generators, mirrors and hundreds of microprocessors.

These are the optical switches that are at the heart of the all-optical Internet, the network that would ring the globe and that could carry digitized voice traffic, data bits, videos, sound files and much more at fabulous speeds and in mind-bending quantities.

And the world did indeed beat a path to its door for these machines. Sales at Nortel ballooned to more than $30-billion (U.S.) in 2000. But in 2001, the world stopped buying these fabulous machines as abruptly as it had started. Revenue for 2001 was just more than $17-billion. For the first six months this year, revenue has climbed to only $5.5-billion.

“What does an opportunistic company do when there’s no more opportunities?” Mr. Schreiber said. “What do you do when no one needs anything supplied?”

All three main segments of Nortel’s business — metro and enterprise networks, wireless, and optical — have slowed. Metro and enterprise networks are typically geographically concentrated computer networks within metropolitan urban areas or at large enterprises or companies, respectively.

But slow is one thing — bleeding buckets of money is another.

Nortel said its metro and enterprise segment contributed $739-million to the company’s profit margin in the first half of 2002. The wireless segment was good for $173-million of margin. The optical sector’s margin, though, was a negative $1.02-billion. In other words, the cost of selling whatever the optical segment sold exceeded the revenue it earned by more than $1-billion.

And so, just as it was once time for Nortel to stop making sleigh bells and TV sets, it may now be time for Nortel to shut down — or at least suspend — that part of its business involved in the next-generation all-optical Internet.

There’s one simple reason for this: What Mr. Emerson said is not true. A better mousetrap does not necessarily result in customers beating a path to your door. No one wants to buy what Nortel became so good at making.

“You have to build the business case now for your customers. They won’t buy it just on faith,” Mr. Schreiber said.

In Nortel’s glory days in 1999 and 2000, telecom customers were buying the big fancy optical components because their competitor was. No one ran the numbers to see if the equipment would pay off for the service providers. It was purchased on faith, a build-it-and-they-will-come attitude that has sunk companies such as Teleglobe Inc., Global Crossing Ltd., 360networks Inc., and others.

There is now enough capacity on the world’s Internet backbones, some experts say, to last 50 years. Nortel’s equipment was used to build 75 per of those backbones. Demand is just not going to catch up to supply for a very long time.

But in an interview Friday, Nortel chief executive officer Frank Dunn said optical network equipment is central to the company’s product portfolio, particularly when it comes to the metro and enterprise category.

There is rough consensus among analysts and some of Nortel’s institutional investors that the company must shutter at least one of its business divisions. But there is less agreement about which one. Some say Nortel should get out of the metro market and avoid competing with Cisco Systems Inc.; others say wireless won’t pay off fast enough as Nortel must finance the purchases made by cash-poor countries such as China, and those in Latin America. Still, optical seems to come up as the likeliest candidate for pruning.

“I think now is the time to be more aggressive than less aggressive and more focused,” said Steve Levy, managing director and telecom analyst at Lehman Brothers Inc. of New York. “Businesses that are not likely to be profitable in the next year, you should be getting out of. New products like [Nortel’s] HDX, the optical cross-connect, I think they’ve given it a shot. Shut the thing down.”

Mr. Levy also said there are some optical gear products aimed at the metro and enterprise market (Nortel recently started accounting for these products in its optical segment) that are showing little signs of life.

“Unless they’ve got businesses we’re not aware of, that’s a key candidate,” Mr. Levy said.

As a percentage of the firm’s overall revenue, optical made up 11.7 per cent of the company’s sales in 2001, down from 26.3 per cent in 2000. Wireless, though, grew to 29.3 per cent in 2001 from about 18 per cent the year before. The metro and enterprise portion has stayed at about 45 per cent through 2000 and 2001.

As far as this year goes, wireless continues to grow as a portion of Nortel’s overall sales while metro/enterprise and optical have formed a smaller share of sales.

Nortel’s customers are no longer thinking about a bright shiny future of an all-optical Internet. Analysts say they want gear that will cut their costs right now on the kind of networks they already operate.

“Unless they are going to get a 12-month payback, they’re not buying the equipment. That is a very short payback for these carriers historically,” Mr. Levy said.

Mr. Dunn, though, says the optical gear is at the centre of the company’s product strategy.

“Having [optical] in the network is critical and Nortel’s the leader. What I need to do in optical is get the business that does not lose money at this kind of sustaining level. That business is a business that’s viable, that’s important, and that is fundamental to transform networks. I just can’t afford to have a huge infrastructure when no one’s buying that.”

Nortel once had 1,000 customers for its optical gear and the average size of a deal was, well, monstrously huge. Now, Mr. Dunn says, he’s got 60 customers who buy optical gear. Analysts say the deal size is also getting smaller.

“So how we were organized to do what we did in the past has to be adapted to what’s coming in the future,” Mr. Dunn said. “Some of our development programs we’ve adjusted as well. We were bringing out new technologies that no one was going to put in the network for a while. So we’ve managed those profiles.”

That “profile management” led, last week, to the company’s decision to quietly — that is to say, without a press release — shut down its CoreTek business, a unit it acquired in 2000 for $1.16-billion (U.S.) in stock.

The 160 employees in the Boston-based unit made — and here we must rely on the company’s description — “very advanced tunable products, including lasers, filters and optical performance monitoring products for use by Nortel Networks in its own products and for sale to the external market.”

In other words, CoreTek was on the bleeding edge of research into products for the all-optical Internet, the very thing that Nortel and others can no longer afford to sell any longer for the simple reason that no one is buying. David Akin is national business and technology correspondent for CTV News and a contributing writer to The Globe and Mail.

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Inside the Rolling Stones Inc. The Rolling Stones are an astounding moneymaking machine. Here’s how Mick Jagger & Co. have perfected the business model behind the most successful act in rock & roll today. FORTUNE Monday, September 30, 2002 By Andy Serwer

Mick Jagger is wearing a cool pink shirt, slim black trousers, and bright red socks. His hair is–well, there’s a lot of it. But don’t let the look fool you. Mick is all business. That’s business with a capital “B,” as in the stuff we write about all the time in the pages of FORTUNE.

I’m up in Jagger’s suite in Boston’s Four Seasons hotel just before the Stones kick off their worldwide Licks tour. Mick turns down the volume on a boom box, packs off two of his young kids with their nannies, and then holds forth on product pricing, economics, and business models. Jagger is eloquent and informed, but he has a disclaimer: “I don’t really count myself as a very sophisticated businessperson,” he says as he leans back on the couch. “I’m a creative artist. All I know from business I’ve picked up along the way. I never really studied business in school. I kind of wish I had, kind of, but how boring is that?” he says with a grin.

Like the protagonist in one of his most devilish songs, Mick has been around for many a long year. He had plenty of smarts to begin with, and now he has 40 years of music industry experience under his belt. Jagger may be getting a trifle old to rock & roll–he’ll turn 60 next July–but from a business perspective he’s at the top of his game. Which makes sense in a way. After all, that’s a typical age for a CEO of a large, multinational organization. (Okay, so most of the CEOs we follow don’t have to swivel-hip their way through “Midnight Rambler,” but you get the point.)

There are, of course, plenty of detractors who say the Rolling Stones should pack in their guitars and drumsticks. “Way old,” they sniff, “and way irrelevant.” I have two responses, one subjective and one objective. Subjectively, the Rolling Stones sound pretty damn good, even after all these years. And objectively, if they’re such has-beens, then how do you explain the band’s phenomenal commercial success over the past decade? No, they aren’t writing groundbreaking songs anymore–in fact they haven’t really recorded any new material of note in 20 years–but we sure are listening to their old stuff. A lot. And buying concert tickets. Millions and millions of them. And that’s the wrinkle here. Even though the Stones have been in what you might call a creatively fallow period, we want to hear them more than ever. Couple that with the fact that they have perfected their business model, and it’s easy to understand why they are such an astounding moneymaking machine.

The bottom line is this: “The only rock & roll band that matters,” or “the greatest rock & roll band in the world,” or whatever you want to call Mick, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, and Ronnie Wood, they are far and away the most successful act in rock today. Since 1989 alone–the beginning of the modern age of the Rolling Stones (more on that later)–the band has generated more than $1.5 billion in gross revenues. That total includes sales of records, song rights, merchandising, sponsorship money, and touring (see charts: Hot Licks and Packing Them In). The Stones have made more money than U2, or Springsteen, or Michael Jackson, or Britney Spears, or the Who–or whoever.

Next: The Rolling Stones Inc. runs on a combustible mix of talent and labor…

Unlike some other groups, the Stones carry no Woodstock-esque, antibusiness baggage. The group has tendrils deep in American business, cutting sponsorship and rights deals with stalwarts like Anheuser-Busch, Microsoft, and Sprint. Remember the old Boston Consulting Group matrix of the four types of businesses? Well, if the Stones were a traditional company, they would be the cash cow.

As with most thriving enterprises, the Rolling Stones Inc. runs on a combustible mix of talent and intense labor–the product of four decades of trial and error. The band downplays the effectiveness of the organization: “I’m sure that if you looked at it and analyzed it, you could say, ‘Well, that’s fucked up,'” says Jagger. “That shouldn’t be like that. No, of course it isn’t run well. No show business organization is run well. There’s always too much money paid out.” Keith, for his part, just shakes his head: “It’s a mom-and-pop operation,” he laughs. “Mick is the mom, and I’m the pop, and then we have these offspring that need feeding.” Well, kind of.

The Stones, or at least some members of the band, can still come across as wiggy rock stars. (“You’re talking to the business right now,” Richards tells me, holding up his two hands ceremoniously. “These are the business.”) But in many respects the Rolling Stones are like any other large business. They are global, they pay taxes (grudgingly), and they litigate. The band has a P&L and budgets, and accountants, and lawyers, and bankers, and investments, and software, and hardware. “They know what they’re doing,” says Barry Diller, a Jagger confidant. “That’s what separates them from any other band.”

Spend time with their senior entourage and you quickly realize how the Stones got so market-wise. Sure, Mick attended the London School of Economics (“I mostly studied economic history”), but his greatest talent, besides strutting and singing, is his ability to surround himself and the rest of the band with a group of very able (they probably hate to be called this) executives.

The Rolling Stones are a private and secretive organization. Most of the team, like Joe Rascoff, the band’s business manager, and tour director Michael Cohl, stay out of the public eye. So, too, does Prince Rupert Zu Loewenstein, a London-based banker who carries an old Bavarian title and who’s been the band’s chief business advisor for some 30 years–“and I hope for another 30 too,” he says. (Keith calls Loewenstein “the mastermind of our setup.”) But just because the Stones’ financials aren’t public doesn’t mean there isn’t rigorous benchmarking. “Mick likes to run a pretty tight ship,” Keith says to me with a twinkle in his eye.

The business side of the Stones has several facets. As for any executive running a conglomerate, understanding and managing these diverse businesses are the key, says Jagger. “They all have income streams like any other company,” he says. “They have different business models; they have different delegated people that look after them. And they have to interlock. That’s my biggest problem.” And as we will see, his biggest opportunity.

The touring side of the business produces a torrent of revenue when the band is on the road, and then of course absolutely zilch when the tour is done. The record business also blows hot and cold–depending on if a new album is released or if old ones are promoted–though it’s not as erratic as touring. Music rights, on the other hand–money paid to a band when its songs are played on, say, the radio–are predictable enough that some artists (most famously David Bowie) have been able to securitize these rights and sell bonds backed by their revenue streams.

To harness these businesses, to make them “interlock,” the Stones and Prince Rupert have set up a unique business structure, which looks roughly like this: At the top, not unlike at a blue-chip law firm, is a partnership consisting of the four core members of the group: Jagger, Richards, Watts, and Wood. Do all four get equal shares of touring and new-record sales? No one in the Stones party will touch that one. “In the old days they all got equal splits,” says the Stones’ former manager, Allen Klein, “but I doubt it now.”

Connected to the Stones partnership and Prince Rupert is a group of companies that include Promotour, Promopub, Promotone, and Musidor, each dedicated to a particular aspect of the business. This family of companies is based in the Netherlands, which has tax advantages for foreign bands. When the group isn’t touring, these companies employ only a few dozen employees. At the high-water mark of a tour, on the night the band is playing, say, Giants Stadium, the Stones may employ more than 350. Backstage the enterprise resembles a flourishing startup, with dozens of fast-moving junior employees in black T-shirts running around to make sure the IPO, er, the show, gets off without a hitch. It looks crazy, but it works. Perhaps Keith sums it up best: “With our business, who really knows what’s what. You go and look at Lake Superior, and you say, ‘Look at all that water, and that’s just the top!’ ”

Next: Touring is the biggest moneymaking part of the Stones’ operation….

Today touring is professionalized, complete with immigration lawyers, traveling accountants, and real-time budgets. It is also the biggest moneymaking part of the Stones’ operation. Since the 1989 Steel Wheels tour, the Stones have grossed over $1 billion on the road. Though exact profit margins are hard to come by, it’s safe to say that tens of millions of that total flowed to each of the band members. It wasn’t always this way. “When we first started out, there wasn’t really any money in rock & roll,” says Jagger. “There wasn’t a touring industry; it didn’t even exist. Obviously there was somebody maybe who made money, but it certainly wasn’t the act. Basically, even if you were very successful, you got paid nothing.”

Jagger recalls that in the beginning, “you’d just jump from gig to gig. There’d be no sound or lights or anything.” Gradually, beginning with the Stones’ 1969 American tour–which ended with the debacle at Altamont–the touring business would become modernized, with traveling lights, sound, and stage. Jagger himself had a major hand in this, sometimes negotiating directly with promoters in various regions and countries. But it wasn’t until the 1989 Steel Wheels tour, when Canadian rock promoter Michael Cohl took over managing the band’s shows, that the Stones would begin to fully exploit the economic potential of this business.

Generally speaking, prior to Steel Wheels, the band would hire a tour director–the late Bill Graham of Fillmore West fame once filled this role–who would call local promoters in each city to set up shows. Individual deals would have to be cut with each promoter, who took, say, 10% to 15% of ticket sales after the cost of the show. The tour director would then have to collect $250,000 here, $400,000 there, from promoters all over.

Cohl, who started out as a self-described “drugged-out, late-teens strip-club owner from Ottawa,” had been one of those local promoters. After a run-in with the volatile Graham in 1988, Cohl came up with an idea that he thought would tantalize the Stones, who at the time weren’t on speaking terms with each other, never mind touring. “I knew the guys from Pink Floyd, who knew Prince Rupert, and I asked them if they would call Rupert for me,” he tells me as the sounds of the Stones rehearsing “Street Fighting Man” echo backstage. “Ten minutes later Rupert was on my phone saying, ‘Excuse me, young man’– he talks in this very nice, formal British accent–‘excuse me, I understand you have something to say to me.’ And I said $40 million for 40 shows. He said, ‘Very interesting.’ ”

The way Cohl’s plan worked is that he would book the entire tour himself, dealing with the venues directly and cutting out the local promoters. He would also produce new streams of revenue by selling skyboxes, bus tours, and TV deals, and by taking merchandising to a new level. He would bring in corporate sponsors like Volkswagen and Tommy Hilfiger. And most important, he would help stitch these operations together, through cross-promotion and the like, to maximize their earning power.

After months of negotiations and a desperate, failed bid by Graham to retain the Stones, the band accepted Cohl’s offer. Cohl even ended up signing on as the band’s tour director. There was one small problem: “I didn’t have $40 million,” recalls Cohl with a grin. “I had sold half of my company to Labatts [the Canadian beer company], and the truth of the matter is when I offered Rupert the $40 million, I didn’t have their permission to offer it either.” Ultimately Cohl was able to come up with the money, and he and the Stones put together the tour. (Another wrinkle: Steel Wheels had to be insured–Lloyd’s covered Stones tours–and before the insurer would issue a policy, the band had to take physicals. Keith passed, legend has it, to his own astonishment.)

“First and foremost, the show itself was the seminal, watershed point,” says Cohl. “When you look at what a stadium show was pre-Steel Wheels, it was a bit of a scrim, and a big, wide, flat piece of lumber, and that was it. The band turned a stadium into a theater. It all started with Mick. He simply said, ‘We have to fill the end space.’ It was complicated to the third power and expensive to the fifth. But it worked.”

It was also incredibly hairy. “I think Michael would admit that it was a huge learning curve for him doing Steel Wheels,” says Jagger. “Michael had never done it before really, so it was a bit of a gamble.” The tour began in August, and by October Cohl looked at the numbers and realized they were losing money. Gobs of it. The band and the organization had to cut costs quickly. “It was a deal where I said they could make a whole lot of money, and I would guarantee it ‘subject to,’ and the ‘subject to’s’ made us partners at the end of the day. So we all had to learn how to do it,” says Cohl. And they did.

Next: Ticket prices have been the subject of much grousing….

In the end, the Steel Wheels tour–tickets, merchandising, sponsorship money from Anheuser-Busch–made over $260 million worldwide, then a record for a rock tour. The venues, Cohl, the band, and Labatts all made out bigtime. Steel Wheels became the template, and Cohl has been doing Stones tours ever since, refining the operation each time around.

On the new, E*Trade-sponsored Licks tour, the band, which includes keyboard whiz Chuck Leavell and bassist Darryl Jones, is playing three types of venues: stadiums, arenas, and small clubs, each with a unique set of songs (the band has rehearsed more than 130 for this tour), staging, and lights. “It is an amazing challenge,” says Patrick Woodroffe, the lighting designer on the tour, who’s jumped in a cab with me after the Boston show, “but it’s great for the audiences and it keeps the band fresh.” The props and set are downplayed a bit. The giant, multimillion-dollar videoscreen, the staging, and the lights that change for every song don’t overwhelm but complement.

Because they are doing smaller venues, the Stones and Cohl know revenue from Licks won’t approach the monster Voodoo Lounge Tour in 1994-95, which brought in close to $370 million worldwide. Nor will it eclipse 1997-99’s Bridges to Babylon/No Security tour, which did over $390 million. But merchandising (Jagger’s and Charlie Watts’s domain) will be more sophisticated than ever. Jagger tells me that there will be some 50 products–such as underwear by Britain’s Agent Provocateur and new, expensive items like shirts, jackets, and, yes, dresses. And it will be “our most efficient tour ever,” promises Rascoff, though he refuses to divulge any of the band’s financials. “Doing fewer stadiums this time cuts costs because in previous tours we had to have three stages and three crews. This tour we have one stadium stage with one crew.” In other words, when sales in your core business aren’t maximized, you look to cut costs and boost tertiary revenues.

As usual, ticket prices ($50 to $350) have been the subject of much grousing in the press. But Jagger is happy to delve into the topic. “This is one element of the business thing that I try to really control as much as I can,” he says. “Pricing a concert ticket is very different from pricing a Lexus or toothpaste. It’s more like a sports event. And you are prepared to pay the market price. So if U2 or Madonna costs $100 (I’m making these up), you don’t want to be charging $200. I try to keep ticket prices within the market price range. It’s America. We’re not living in a socialist society where we’re all paid so low and no one can afford it.”

The ticket-pricing controversy burns Cohl up. Athletes like Derek Jeter and Marshall Faulk are free to make whatever they can, “but people complain that Mick and Keith can’t. I think that is the biggest load of crap. We are only charging $50 a night for club shows, which we lose money on. I read on eBay one of the tickets to Roseland Ballroom [in New York] went for $10,000. That makes us schmucks! When we charge $300 for some seats, somebody’s out there selling them for $500. If we were to charge $500, somebody would sell them for more. Come on, what are they complaining about?” It’s true that ticket prices to Stones shows have outpaced inflation (along with health care and college tuition), but you kind of get the feeling that the same people who are complaining about high ticket prices also rue the fact that Blind Boy Fuller died poor.

The Stones are famously tax-averse. I broach the subject with Keith in Camp X-Ray, as he calls his backstage lair. There is incense in the air and Ronnie Wood drifts in and out–it is, in other words, a perfect venue for such a discussion. “The whole business thing is predicated a lot on the tax laws,” says Keith, Marlboro in one hand, vodka and juice in the other. “It’s why we rehearse in Canada and not in the U.S. A lot of our astute moves have been basically keeping up with tax laws, where to go, where not to put it. Whether to sit on it or not. We left England because we’d be paying 98 cents on the dollar. We left, and they lost out. No taxes at all. I don’t want to screw anybody out of anything, least of all the governments that I work with. We put 30% in holding until we sort it out.” No wonder Keith chooses to live not in London, or even New York City, but in Weston, Conn.

Of course, it wasn’t just the taxman’s pinch that forced the Rolling Stones to focus on the bottom line. They also got screwed by record labels. “In the early days you got paid absolutely nothing,” recalls Jagger. “The only people who earned money were the Beatles because they sold so many records.”

By the mid-’60s the Stones had reportedly sold ten million singles, including “Satisfaction,” and five million albums, but the band was still living hand to mouth. “I’ll never forget the deals I did in the ’60s, which were just terrible,” says Jagger. “You say, ‘Oh, I’m a creative person, I won’t worry about this.’ But that just doesn’t work. Because everyone would just steal every penny you’ve got.”

In 1965 the band began to work with Allen Klein, a New York manager, who would help it negotiate a new contract. Klein, now 70, recalls his big day with the band some 37 years later: “I told the guys, ‘I want you to come down with me to Decca. Wear dark sunglasses and look angry but don’t say anything. Leave the talking to me.'” By intimidating the British record execs, Klein helped land the Stones their first million-dollar payday. Klein (whose company, ABKCO, still owns rights to the Stones’ songs from the earliest days through 1971) and the band would have a falling-out and part ways in the early 1970s. With vintage photographs of the Stones covering his office walls, Klein leafs through the old contracts in his office and shakes his head: “The others didn’t look at them that much, but I remember Mick would read every single page.”

Interestingly, the Stones have never had a blockbuster album, like Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours or Michael Jackson’s Thriller. But what they have done is make 42 albums. And they’ve sold tens of millions of those records and CDs, and singles and EPs too. Since 1989 alone, for instance, the band has sold more than 38 million albums at roughly $12 each, for gross proceeds of over $460 million.

The new Stones albums haven’t been as hot as the oldies, obviously, but the band has high hopes for the Forty Licks album, due out this fall. The album has 36 of the band’s biggest hits, plus four new songs. Also, Allen Klein’s ABKCO has just re-released 22 of the band’s earlier albums on SACD hybrid, a new CD format (compatible with traditional CD players), including all of the band’s great records from the 1960s. In a way, the Stones’ older music is like Coke Classic. The band tries to introduce new varieties, some of which do okay, but it’s the original stuff we still love the best.

Next: So what keeps the Stones going?…

Serwer: Your income must vary all over the place, year by year, because the tours give you this huge bump and then there’s nothing.

Richards: But there’s always an awful lot of PRS coming in.

Serwer: What the hell is that?

Richards: Performing rights. Every time it’s played on the radio. I go to sleep and make money–let’s put it that way.

Now this is the Microsoft part of the Stones’ business empire. Profitable. Steady. And stretching out to the horizon. “Music publishing is more profitable to the artist than recording. It’s just tradition,” says Jagger. “There’s no rhyme or reason. The people who wrote songs were probably better businesspeople than the people who sang them were. You go back to George Gershwin and his contemporaries–they probably negotiated better deals, and they became the norm of the business. So if you wrote a song, you got half of it, and the other half went to your publisher. That’s the model for writing.”

And Jagger/Richards have written more than 200 songs. The pair has had a few monster hits like “Honky Tonk Woman,” but more significantly they have dozens of songs that are played on FM radio, which is still a vibrant category. And it’s not just the radio. Every time “Shattered” or “Jumping Jack Flash” is played anywhere around the globe when commerce is involved–at an ice-skating rink, on a jukebox, or at a club–the Jagger/Richards cash register goes ka-ching.

Again, Jagger is intimately involved in this business. Perhaps the most famous product rollout of all time used a Stones song–Windows 95 and “Start Me Up.” Microsoft reportedly paid $4 million for those rights. (“Yeah, we met Bill Gates,” says Jagger. “And [Paul] Allen is always around.”) Not to be outdone, Apple used “She’s a Rainbow” to launch the colored iMacs. But, says Jagger, “we don’t really do a lot of commercials. I mean, I’m not against them per se, but we don’t do them that much. We do a lot of film licensing. We get lots of requests, and I usually say yes. It’s a great business. You have a sort of price that you like to keep to, unless it’s a low-budget film and it’s a really interesting film–then you can make a deal maybe.” Though the cost of buying rights to use a Stones song in a film varies, on average it runs a filmmaker in the low six figures.

Over the past decade Fortune estimates that the songwriting team of Jagger/Richards has garnered $56 million from songs being played on radio and in public venues, as well as being used in advertising and movies. A significant chunk of change. “The thing that we all had to learn is what to do when the passion starts to generate money,” says Richards. “You don’t start to play your guitar thinking you’re going to be running an organization that will maybe generate millions.”

The tours, the records, the rights: They’ve all made the Stones the wealthiest rock & roll band on the planet. None more so than Jagger and Richards, who unlike the others enjoy the full fruits of all that licensing. Their portfolios are mostly in the hands of the trusty and tight-lipped Prince Rupert. Though Jagger follows the financial news in the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, he isn’t doing much with stocks these days. “I used to play the market, but I’m not that interested at the moment because I don’t think it’s a very interesting time,” he says.

Keith is more philosophical: “I watch the [Dow] go up and down and wonder. It’s like watching the horses really. How much is that an indication of anything? Oh, the Dow’s up…. And you go, okay, who’s running in the 3:30 at Belmont? I have a small portfolio. I find things I love, like houses–bricks and mortar. Nothing wrong with a bit of land. I’ve invested in my friends’ projects. And there’s Rupert. He is a great financial mind for the market. He plays that like I play guitar. He does things like a little oilwell. And currency–you know, Swiss francs in the morning, switch to marks in the afternoon, move to the yen, and by the end of the day, how many dollars? That’s his financial genius, his wisdom. Little pieces of paper. As long as there’s a smile on Rupert’s face, I’m cool.”

So what keeps the Stones going? Money, yes. But the band could make big bucks simply by doing commercials instead of touring. Going on the road is about ego gratification. “This whole thing runs on passion,” says Richards. “Even though we don’t talk about it much ourselves, it’s almost a sort of quest or mission.”

The Stones and their estates will continue licensing songs and selling records for years. But sooner rather than later, the touring will cease. Jagger’s stage antics are remarkable when you consider his age. But how much longer? Charlie Watts, the oldest Stone, is already 61. The band hasn’t said this is the last tour, though it could be–and of course that kind of speculation is great for ticket sales, particularly in second-tier cities, where this really could be the Stones’ last show.

“How long can we go on?” asks Keith. “Forever. We’ll let you know when we keel over.” And when that day comes, it will mean not only the end of the world’s greatest rock band but also a winding-down of one of the most successful enterprises this crazy business has ever known.

———–

-Ian.

—- http://edwardjayepstein.com/nether_fictoid9.htm

Fictoid #9: Plastic Knives and Box Cutters

Following the September 11th attack, government authorities declared that the weapons used to hijack the planes that crashed into World Trade Center were plastic knives and box cutters. The story about plastic knives and box cutters, implements which passengers then were not legally restricted from bring through security checkpoints at airports, was relentlessly drummed into the public’s mind by two of the highest officials in the government. John Ashcroft, the attorney general, Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense.

Ashcroft told ABC News on September 15th that “investigators believed that each of the commandeered planes had been hijacked by groups of three to six men armed with box cutters and plastic knives.” Donald Rumsfeld told Fox News on September 16th, that the hijackers used weapons that are distinctively different – – plastic knives.” On October 9th, he suggested to Dan Rather on CBS News “plastic knives and the use of a U.S. airliner filled with American people as a missile [were used] to destroy a World Trade Center.” On November 7th, he described to Jim Lehrer on PBS ” One of our planes is used as a missile to fly into our building and into the World Trade Center. It was beyond one’s imagination that plastic knives and our own commercial aircraft filled with our own people would be used as the implement of war.”

Actually, it was their imagination, not established facts, that informed the world that the hijackers had used plastic knives and box cutters to commandeer the two airliners that had destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Not a scintilla of evidence had been found then— or to date— that either plastic knives or box cutters were used by any of the ten hijackers who crashed United Airlines flight 175 and American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center. No box cutters or plastic knives were found in the debris. Nor were the cockpit voice recorders ever found from Flight 11 and Flight 175. No witnesses, either passengers or crew members, on either flight 11 or flight 175 ever reported any hijacker having a box cutter or a plastic knife. Both United Airlines flight 175 and American Airlines Flight 11 had departed from Boston. Once both Boeing 767s had reached their cruising altitudes, the hijackers took control of them by unknown means without any of the four pilots warning the ground controllers, even though they had open radios. Both airliners then turned off their transponders and disappeared from the computerized radar screens.

No message was ever received from flight 175 that mentioned any weapons. So, for all anyone knows, the hijackers may have used guns, grenades, poison gas or any other weapon

An executive summary of an unpublished FAA memo stated:

“At approximately 9:18 am, it was reported that two crew members in the cockpit were stabbed. The flight then descended with no communications from the flight crew members. The American Airlines FAA Principal Security Inspector (PFI) was notified by Suzanne Clark of American airlines Corporate Headquarters that an on board flight attendant contacted American Airlines Operation Center and informed that a passenger located in seat 10B shot and killed a passenger in 9B at 9:20 am. The passenger killed was Daniel Lewin shot by Satam al-Suqama. One bullet was reported to have been fired.”

The information came from two cell phone calls made by flight attendants, Betty Ong and Madeline Amy Sweeney, to Americal Airlines ground controllers. Ong, who was in the first class compartment— and the only witness to the assault on the cockpit. She reported that she had seen four hijackers come from first-class seats, kill a passenger seated behind them, and use a chemical weapon which she described as “some sort of spray” that made her eyes burn and made it difficult for her to breathe.” Madeline Amy Sweeney, the flight attendant in the rear compartment, call was not recorded. According to the ground controller, she said that the pilots, another flight attendant and a passenger had been stabbed or killed.

The FAA subsequently said that the report of a gun shot was an error proceeding from a “miscommunication”. The ground controller did not recall a gun shot or a bullet being mentioned.

In any case, there were no box cutters or plastics knives on flight 11 were used.

Two other flights were hijacked that morning, American Airlines flight 77, a Boeing 757 departing from Virginia, and United Airlines Flight 93, a Boeing 757 departing from Newark. On flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon, one single passenger, Barbara Olsen, reported on weapons that some of the five hijackers had in the back of the plane. She told her husband, Theodore Olsen, on a cell phone that the hijackers who herded her and other the passengers into the back of the plane had two kind of weapons: knives and cardboard cutters (presumably box cutters). She did not say anything about the other hijackers in the cockpit and she apparently did not even know that they were piloting the plane. Nor did any other passenger or crew member on Flight 77 describe the hijackers’ weapons. It cannot be assumed that all the hijackers on the plane had similar weapons. The hijackers assaulting the cockpit might have needed more sophisticated weaponry to rapidly stun or kill the pilots.

On flight 93, the Boeing 757 which crashed near Pittsburgh, the flight attendant reported over a cell phone that a hijacker in her plane had a “bomb strapped on.” Some unidentified person also said over the loud speaker that there was a “bomb” aboard the plane. A passenger, Todd Beamer, talked over a cell phone about the “terrorist with a bomb.” Another passenger, Tom Burnett, told his wife over a cell phone that he had heard that a pilot had been “knifed.” No passenger or crew member described either box cutters or plastic knives as weapons and, as far as is known, no box cutters of plastic knives been recovered from the wreckage.

Similar weapons thus were not reported in the different flights. A paralytic chemical spray was described in the front compartment of flight 11, knives and card cutters was described in the rear compartment of Flight 77 and a bomb was described on flight 93. Nor is there any reason to assume that different hijackers on different planes leaving from different airports would use the same weaponry. Atta and Alomari, for example, having made a detour to Portland, might have obtained weapons unavailable to the hijackers in Virginia and New Jersey.)

In any case, the Ashcroft’s story that the hijackers used box-cutters and plastic knives in the attack on the World Trade Center is a functional fictoid. In this case, the function was diversion. This fictoid serves to divert public attentions from the responsibility, and legal liability, of the government and airlines to prevent major weapons— such as guns, bombs, chemical sprays and hunting knives from being carried aboard airplanes. If such illegal devices had been smuggled aboard the planes, the liability could amount to billions of dollars. If, , on the other hand, it could be disseminated that the hijackers had only used plastic knives, such as those provided by the airlines for meals, or box cutters, which were allowed on planes, neither the airlines, the screeners at the airport, or the FAA, which regulates the safety of airports, could be held legally responsible. Paul Pillar, who had headed the CIA’s counter-terrorism, could thus explain that”the attack that killed almost 4,000 people used box cutters.” This press accepted it as established fact. The New York Times, for example, reported “the hijackers did not use firearms, which would probably have been detected, but apparently wielded box-cutter knives of the type that were then allowed on board but are now banned.”

What made the box cutter and and plastic knives fictoid particularly welcome was that the FAA had found massive failures of airport screeners to find weapons prior to the attacks. Such tests were conducted by FAA undercover “Red Teams.” In 1998, for example, one FAA Read team leader told the New York Times, “we were successful in getting major weapons— guns and bombs–aboard planes at least 85 percent the time.” The failure rate was as high as 97 percent at some airports. Nor was this vulnerability corrected before September 11th. FAA Special Agent Bogdan Dzakovic, according to USA TODAY, said that FAA officials had ignored security problems before the terrorist attacks.

The fictoid successfully deflected from this gaping hole in security.

———–

-Ian.

—- http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/020822/222386_1.html

Thursday August 22, 6:15 pm Eastern Time

Press Release SOURCE: Akamai Technologies

Court Awards Akamai Broad Permanent Injunction Against Cable & Wireless

Cable & Wireless Ordered to Immediately and Permanently Shut Down Digital Island Footprint 2.0 Service

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Aug. 22, 2002–Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM – News) today announced that the Federal District Court in Boston has enjoined Cable & Wireless Internet Services, Inc. from making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing into the United States, the patented inventions of Claims 1, 3, 5, and 9 of U.S. Patent No. 6,108,703, and from active inducement of infringement of these claims. The Court’s Order requires Cable & Wireless to shut down Digital Island’s Footprint 2.0 service as configured and described at trial. That service was recently rebranded under the Exodus name.

“This major victory vindicates our patent rights and the value of Akamai’s industry-leading technology,” said George Conrades, chairman and CEO of Akamai. “We will now turn our attention to seeking full compensation from Cable & Wireless for the long-standing infringement of this patent.”

“The injunction is very broad, and we do not believe that Cable & Wireless’s post-trial attempts to design around these claims have succeeded,” added David Judson, Akamai’s patent counsel. “If Cable & Wireless continues to operate its infringing content delivery service, we will seek to hold them in contempt of the Court’s Order.”

About Akamai

Akamai is the leading provider of edge computing solutions, delivering secure content and distributed applications across the Internet, intranets, and extranets. These solutions enable customers to achieve optimal results from their e-business initiatives, thereby reducing the cost of ownership, improving return on investment, and creating new revenue streams. Akamai’s globally distributed edge computing platform comprises more than 12,900 servers in more than 1,000 networks in 66 countries, ensuring the highest levels of availability, reliability, and performance. Headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Akamai provides services and world-class customer care to hundreds of successful enterprises, government entities, and leading e-businesses worldwide. For more information, visit www.akamai.com.

Akamai Statement Under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act

The release contains information about future expectations, plans and prospects of Akamai’s management that constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions under The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors including, but not limited to, the dependence on Akamai’s Internet content delivery service, a failure of its network infrastructure, the complexity of its service and the networks on which the service is deployed, the failure to obtain access to transmission capacity, our ability to protect our intellectual property rights and inventions from third party challenges and other factors that are discussed in the Company’s Annual Report on Form 10-K and other documents periodically filed with the SEC. * (c)2002 Akamai Technologies, Inc.