Remora

The flame is on under CFO magazine's 99 CFO of the year --- everybody's favorite, Andrew Fastow! Yes, Enron's man with the plan -- the plan to loot the company's resources for his own benefit -- is edging close to the bonfire of the Vanities currently being lit in a court in Houston. This WP article is clearly a prosecutor's ploy,
but it does include one interesting detail for the Enron-maniac: the focus on Braveheart, the deal whereby Enron sold its potential profits to a Canadian bank in order to realize a sum in its books for 2001, coming up with a 100 million dollar profit. This deal is so incredible that it certainly needs to be examined -- and the heads of the execs at the Canadian company that made it need to be examined twice as hard. Only Enron would make a deal selling its potential profit to a third party, in order to mark down an immediate profit. In '99, CFO caught the great man himself explaining his tricks:

"When Andrew S. Fastow, the 37-year-old CFO of Enron Corp., boasts that "our story is one of a kind," he's not kidding. In just 14 years, Enron has grown from a heavily regulated domestic natural-gas pipeline business to a fully integrated global energy company with thriving activities in natural gas, electricity, infrastructure development, marketing and trading, energy financing, and risk management. And much of that growth has been fueled by unique financing techniques pioneered by Fastow.

"When I came here in 1990, Enron was a company with a $3.5 billion market capitalization," says Fastow. "Today, we're around $35 billion, and that's without issuing a whole lot of equity. We've increased shareholder value, grown the balance sheet, maintained a stable outlook from the rating agencies, and achieved a low cost of capital."

In fact, when energy stock analysts look for paradigm companies to vaunt, they point resolutely in the direction of Houston-based Enron, with $31 billion in revenues last year. And when they seek to explain how Enron has remade itself so completely, they point to "remarkably innovative financing." Says Ted A. Izatt, senior vice president at Lehman Brothers Inc. in New York: "Thanks to Andy Fastow, Enron has been able to develop all these different businesses, which require huge amounts of capital, without diluting the stock price or deteriorating its credit quality-- both of which actually have gone up. He has invented a groundbreaking strategy."

As Raymond Chandler might say, that's cute as a pair of tarantula pyjamas. Inventing those groundbreaking strategies for hiding huge amounts of capital -- hey, a round of applause right here!

If the prosecutors have any sense, they have sharpened their knives for the head of Enron's Broadband division, Ken Rice. The royal road to the conviction of Jeff Skilling might well lie through Mr. Rice, an amiable lout, by all accounts, who made off with 76 million dollars in cashed out stock options. A man who never, at any time, understood fiber optic cable, which is what his division was supposedly about. Luckily, he was only involved in it as its president - most of his billable time, at least according to Robert Bryce's book on Enron, he spent racing motorcycles.

Although you might think the piggy bank is broken, the new CEO of Chapter 11 Enron is still poking around for loot. Maybe it is something about the name, or maybe it is something about Houston business culture, but according to the Houston Chronicle,


"Stephen Cooper wants to hire 15 more managers from Zolfo Cooper, in a move that could earn him a rich reward. In a request filed with the bankruptcy court Tuesday, Enron asked to pay the restructuring firm founded by Stephen Cooper $864,000 a year per manager, the same rate as 15 Zolfo directors already with Enron." Cooper has apparently decided that his firm should staff Enron's skeletal crew, where they rub shoulders with highly compensated lawyers and such. And that, incidentally, he will receive money both from the company which he is running, Enron, and the firm he was running, Zolfo. Sweet, a deal like that. I mean, how do you squeeze more juice out of a dead carcass? See, Enron is pioneering entrepeneurial bankruptcy -- are we happy now?

This brings us round to yesterday's post. If you will remember, fair reader, we were discussing John Cassidy's New Yorker article, The Greed Cycle. One thing especially impressed LI about that article: the place of Michael Jensen in it. Jensen, Cassidy claims, was the academic godfather of the amazing inflation in top executive compensation packages. Jensen is currently hatching an academic paper to explain the collapse of Enron that blames it on -- get this -- the Wall Street bubble mentality. Why -- the universal solvent of explanations, now, that bubble. Once upon a time, the conservative view was that there are no bubbles -- this was, after all, the orthodoxy of efficient markets theory. Time moves on, however, and as it has become apparent that something has to be to blame for the crash -- and as it becomes apparent that the clash laid bare the irrationality of radical free market doctrine -- there's been a noticeable shift in that plank of the doctrine. Suddenly, there are bubbles -- and they are all the fault of Clinton! How convenient.

According to Cassidy, Jensen's idea is that Enron had to do what it did to maintain its stock prices because of pressure from Wall Street jockeys. It is the familiar story of trying to meet higher and higher expectations, and at some point going to the shadow side in order to do so.

Well, that is, to put not too fine a word upon it, bull shit.

Enron had to maintain its stock at a high level because much of its dealing depended on the stock being at that price. That guaranteed credit. Why was the need for credit so pressing? Because cash flow was so radically out of synch with claimed earnings. This occured because Enron made a systematic attempt, under Jeff Skilling, to institute mark to market accounting, a financial instrument by which it could aggregate future earnings as present earnings. Why did it do this? Well, among other things, such an accounting system could justify huge bonuses for execs. These bonuses were not postponed until the real profit was realized -- since in the vast majority of the deals Enron pursued, profit either never appeared, or was eaten up by costs. In fact, in the vast majority of those deals, including those being made by the thousands at Enron's famous energy trader's desk, Enron was losing money. So it was not Wall Street expectations that caused Enron to engage in the massive distortion of its financial position, but the need to justify grossly inflated compensations -- which of course brings the ball home into Jensen's court, doesn't it?

Jensen, who is working for something called Monitor, has posted a version of his version on the site. Here's the first three grafs -- and a word to the wise: notice that the "problem", as Jensen carefully designs it, is "fixed" by a courageous CEO. Jensen is the type of guy any CEO would be proud to have in his court -- a natural born syncophant:

Once, companies gave whispers and informal advisories to favoured analysts of what to expect in coming earnings announcements. Then the conversations became more elaborate, engendering a kind of twisted logic. No longer were analysts only trying to understand a company so as to predict what it might earn. The analysts' forecasts themselves became the centre of discussions. The forecasts no longer represented a financial by-product of the company's strategy but came to drive that strategy.

Yet as the case of Enron suggests, when companies scramble too hard to meet unrealistic forecasts by analysts they often take highly risky value-destroying bets. The process - euphemistically referred to as "earnings guidance" - is a high-stakes game, with management seeking to hit the targets set by analysts and being punished severely if they miss.

But a few courageous chief executive officers have wisely decided to put an end to the game by saying "no". Managing Wall Street's expectations may be a decades-old game but Barry Diller of USA Networks and Jim Kilts, Gillette's CEO, have decided to end it."

Jensen is a typical Chicago economist. He uses mathematical models to achieve results that he wants -- such as the model that shows why executives, as agents of the shareholders, must be compensated in such a way that their "interests are aligned with the company." Unlike, say, secretaries and technicians, I guess. When this model, in the real world, produces bad results -- when it is tested, that is, and found wanting, because of an insufficient attention to other, structural variables -- he reaches immediately for psychological terms. In other words: cue the mind when the going gets tough. That's always a good strategy to detract from your pisspoor mathematical models. Thus, his suggestion that Enron executives, hitting their targets, are driven by "egotism:" "High share prices stoked already amply endowed managerial egos.." Psychology intrudes when, embarrassingly, rational self-interest is really the parameter at stake. If compensation is set up to award performance without any index for performance -- if, that is, compensation is set up in the absense of those constraints that come with a competitive job market -- then guess what? performance will be skewed to justify compensation. This happens over and over again -- merger and acquisition is substituted for entrepeneurship, accounting shenanigans for true cost cutting, and pensions are looted in place of products being innovated. You would have to be a fool -- or an economist -- not to see that something in the system must be causing this systematic effect.

Discussion of corporate performance and its relation to compensation is on a truly childish level in the business press. Take General Electric. LI has seen, compulsively repeated, justifications of Welch's swollen compensation package by reference to how vastly GE grew under his leadership. No attention is paid, in this analysis, to the growth of other, similarly structured companies during the same period, or the patterns of organizational adjustment common to all of them. In other words, no argument is made that Welch added some unique value that, in the boom that began in 1982, distinguished his operations in some special way. As an instance of Welch's genius, measured by capitalization, take GE Credit, which contributed significantly to GE's profit in the last ten years. Was this some unique contribution of Welch's? By no means. Disintermediating from orthodox financial institutions -- ie banks -- is a common pattern in American industry. If I truly wanted to bore my readers, I would allude to Alfred Steinherr's exhaustive treatment of this in Derivatives: the Wild Beast of Finance. GM, Ford and Sears have all done it, and it wasn't due to the genius of CEOs. It was due to the opportunity presented, accidentally, by the confluence of two events: pools of capital that came into these companies from various sources (like pensions) that could more profitably be used as a financing instrument, and the peculiarities of the American financial structure due to regulations deriving from the Glass-Steagall act. Does anybody really want me to go into this? No. But the fact is, a pattern is found in various similarly capitalized companies that strongly implies no one CEO was the innovator in this area. So when the market soared, in the long boom from 82-2000, guess what? Those companies started overflowing with apparent money, as they "managed" financial assets. Of course, the flow depended, to a large extent, on two things: the equity bubble, and the enlargement of financial services, like loans to customers. Well, the equities bubble collapses, and the loans begin to bite back as interest rates lowered, customers defaulted, and returns in other areas of company activity slowed. Welch hopped off before the full bust hit, but his final days, riding the Honeywell fiasco, might well tell us what his CEO-ship would look like now if he had stayed on.

So, Welch is paid genius bonuses for non-genius work. Competent, even excellent some years, but not great -- and certainly not something to give him compensation equivalent to one of the founding capitalist fathers, like Carnegie. Yet I have never seen an article in the financial press make this simple comparative point. The point needs to be made because the question should be: could GE have acquired its financial position cheaper -- ie, with a cheaper leadership? This is, of course, taboo for the CEO apologist, and the multitudes that labor to create the uber-management myth.

Remora

Notes from all over

BW offers a "scourging" of the business press for its lickspittle attitude towards the New Economy boys during the bubble years. Readers of LI have already been here -- of course, they are all secretly sneaking glances at this weblog and ripping us off! The brutes! Isn't it stifling in this cabin? Where's my bundle of ivory... The snakes! The snakes!

Uh, forgive us, a touch of that old tropical fever, you know.

Anyway, Ciro Scotti winds into a denunciation of the biz press from the very odd angle of Pat Buchanan's rhetoric. Scotti borrows Buchanan's phrase about Bush -- that he is a corporation bellhop. While this is about as nice an image as you can expect on the hustings nowadays, I don't see it as being so insightful that Scotti needs to press it. And though Scotti wishes to come off as suitably tough and disgusted in the column, Mr. Take no prisoners, he actually --- takes no prisoners. That is, he names no names, but contents himself with generally derogating the young. Young guys, infatuated with young dot-commers, are to blame for everything. We advise you not to buy that story. The credulity of the business press derived from their general Reaganite faith in deregulation and the power of the markets, in themselves, to produce utopian outcomes. The business press suffered from a structural deficit of scepticism which was not confined to young tech enthusiasts. Blinded by rhetoric, and attached to a particularly insolent version of the managerial class -- the class indoctrinated, since the 80s, with the idea that their greediest impulses were synonymous with good business -- the business press has suffered a collapse in credibility that the managers of that press still don't understand. We recommend that Mr. Scotti read a few of our previous posts, instead of old Pat Buchanan speeches: our Glassman nominee of July 23 was Nelson Schwartz, and on August 2 we named James Glassman himself (although the latter is, we admit, a pretty obvious call -- it is like calling Bozo a clown). We've thought of pursuing some other journalists, notably Geoffrey Colvin, the Welch apologist at Fortune Magazine whose puff piece on Welch (with a heading that has the true, bullying ring of a General MacArthur explaining his Korean strategy: "VALUE DRIVEN Welch's Decision: The Inside Story. Most advisors told Jack Welch to shut up and tough out the news reports. He didn't. Here's why") is in the line of his general attitude towards Welch. Down on your knees about sums it up. Eventually we will do that. LI's motto is: what if they held an inquisition and nobody came? Because, of course, this is where we release our inner Torquemada.


Since we are going over old posts and new business articles, we read John Cassidy's New Yorker article, The Greed Cycle, yesterday, and we're impressed with it -- as apparently a lot of people have been. It is not, unfortunately, on line. Here's a preview of it at the Connection. The kicker at the end of it is Paul Volcker coming out for abolishing stock options. What attracted interest in the piece, however, was the seemingly rational explanation of how executive pay suffered the fortunate elephantiasis that now routinely produces Nicks tickets for the exec and wastepaper baskets from France for his mistress. Althought I have heard the statistic a thousand times, apparently Cassidy's discovery that that the Fortune 500 CEO earns 500 times more than the average employee he CEO-s has gotten spread about. I've heard the figure misquoted on NPR this morning (by an oddly cheerful commentator who defended Jack Welch) and seen it in editorials.

We have ambiguous feelings about Cassidy: his articles on Marx and Hayek were fascinating, but he, too, seemed to swallow much of the new economy propaganda during the bubble years. The core of the article is about the academic justification for changes in the compensation structure of the executive class from the seventies (when the corporation structure was pretty much as described in Galbraith's New Industrial State) to the nineties, and the part played in that by academic gun Michael Jensen. We want to read Jensen's '91 piece in the Harvard Business Review (which Cassidy quotes for its inspirational line about not compensating the CEO like a bureaucrat -- oh my no, you have to compensate him like an entrepeneur! like a movie star!) for an upcoming dissection of same. Suffice it to say that Cassidy takes up the issue of compensation by referring, ever so discretely, to the matter of competition in the executive labor market. Jensen, a Chicago alum, should, of course, have been a true fan of competition, but his work showed that the exec market was different, due to what the executive did. It was more like paying a contractor than paying an employee. We think that this is a fatally mistaken analogy. And we also think that the unspoken class bias in the Chicago school, which invariably lays the onus of competition in the labor markets on the poor or the middle class, and invariably sees the augmentation of the wealth of the wealthy as an automatic good, must be pointed to -- again and again.

Remora

Trickle Up

The conventional wisdom -- which is only shorthand for, the chatter among the governing class -- is that the upcoming election is going to be a Republican fest. The focus, now, is firmly on Iraq, and Bush is the maestro who has put this all together.

Well, the governing classes do govern, so one would think that they would know about such things. Elections, after all, are to be manipulated in such a way that there is no disturbance in the well ordered diffusion of power among the people who already have it, and no doubt feel they deserve it.

But isn't it possible, LI would like to know -- speaking out of turn, in his best Oliver Twist wants some more gruel tones -- isn't it slightly possible that the populace will look at the events of the past year in terms of their deteriorating economic situation? A story in the WP about the latest data on income and poverty brings up this point. The census bureau reports that income inequality is again on the rise, that median household incomes are declining, and that more people have officially become poor.

"This report signals a significant reversal of what had been a very positive trend in terms of income and poverty," said Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the union-backed Economic Policy Institute in Washington. "It also underscores the point that the recession was deeper than many had thought."

Other data indicates that the decline in household income came largely as a result of falling employment and loss of overtime hours, offsetting continued gains in hourly wages.

In terms of class breakdown, only households with incomes above $150,000 were able to post gains, with the greatest losses in percentage terms occurring at the bottom of the income ladder, the report showed."

Perhaps the G.C., living as it does mostly on the East Coast, is more sheltered than usual from these figures. Apparently the income lost has been heaviest in the Midwest and the West.

"Geographically, incomes also fell the most in the Midwest (3.7 percent) and the West (2.3 percent), reflecting the recession's heavy impact on manufacturing in the high tech sectors. Household incomes actually increased 1.7 percent in the Northeast."

This is obviously a stealth recession, but as the market falls, and as it becomes apparent that the Bush economic plan, like Enron's bonuses, is oriented solely towards lavishing perks on those who have already obtained, by various obscene tricks, lavish perks, there will be a backlash. Republicans are reportedly sitting pretty right now, thinking that Iraq will be rubbed in the faces of the Dems. The Dems are nervous, and have adopted a robotic attitude of yes-sir to the odious commander in chief and his henchmen. But maybe they will gain a little spine from the November results.

LI has to have a little hope, after all.

Remora

LI has been desperately searching for something else to write about besides the upcoming war. The reason, of course, is that the war has become naturalized in American politics -- there are no parties that oppose it; like Winter, or the next storm, it is simply coming. This sense of onset -- of a thing that is impervious to human will, even as it is foreseeably disastrous to human beings -- is crucial to power as it is envisioned by dreamers of total authority. Total authority, after all, is a piece of nature. Death, flood, storm, lightning -- the bit players in mad Lear's dance on the heath -- these, once associated, as though by necessity, with the "leader', insinuate themselves into the mood of dissent, turning dissent from the expectation of persuasion to the easy desperation of emotional expression. So dissenters turn to invective and alienating names -- Bush as fascist, or the like. When the opposition indulges wholeheartedly in caricature, it loses its force as opposition. Better to play Lear's fool -- to make that narrow passage between outrageous and salient comments.

Robert Fiske, in the Independent, has some interesting comments on the weapons inspectors -- the supposed dupes of whose works the likes of Cheney (in his incarnation as V.P., not in his incarnation as the Iraq-friendly CEO of Haliburtan) is so scornful. The direction of their dupehood is given a spin by Fiske.



"But for now, the Americans have been sandbagged. It will take at least 25 days to put the UN inspection team together, another 60 for their preliminary assessment � always assuming they are given "unfettered" access to all Iraqi government facilities -- then another 60 days for further inspections. In other words, George Bush's latest war has been delayed by more than five months. Saddam, of course, must have his own worries. Back in 1996, the Iraqis were already accusing the UN inspectorate of working with the Israelis.

Major Scott Ritter, Iraq's nemesis-turned-saviour, was indeed � as an inspector � regularly travelling to Tel Aviv to consult Israeli intelligence. Then Saddam accused the UN inspectors of working for the CIA. And he was right. The United States, it emerged, was using the UN's Baghdad offices to bug Iraq's government communications. And once the inspectors were withdrawn in 1998 and the US and Britain launched "Operation Desert Fox", it turned out that virtually every one of the bombing targets had been visited by UN inspectors over the previous six months. Far from being an inspectorate, the UN lads � though they didn't all know it � had been acting as forward air controllers, drawing up an American hit list rather than monitoring compliance with UN resolutions."

Bush is going to get a fearful opposition to go on record supporting a war in spite of UN inspectors, with the really silly mantra that the UN goal is disarmament, and that the U.S. will be the instrument of that goal in spite of the U.N. The silliness resides in the fact that the two sides are certainly not separate. As the Bush people know, if S.H. did "disarm," the claim would have to be verified by -- arms inspection. In fact, we all know that. The beserk tilt against logic itself, and the demand for encouragement from the Democrats, is a sad spectacle quite in keeping with the beginnings of the Bush regime: from usurpation to tin star militarism. Haven't we seen this Western before?

Remora

Commoditizing exec compensation: a modest proposal

The news about Oracle comes, in LI's opinion, at just the right time. Larry Ellison should be a poster boy for bad corporate behavior. His total compensation package came in at number one in the Forbes CEO pay list. How did he win the greed sweepstakes? By taking home a cool 706 million dollars in stock options that he exercised. Ellison has a little gimmick he plays -- he paid himself, officially, a dollar in salary last year. Well, who needs a salary when your company dilutes its stock to the extent recorded by Mercury News

"Oracle CEO Ellison collected $706 million after exercising stock options and immediately selling the shares in January 2001. The gain meant Ellison set a record in business history for realized annual compensation -- which excludes the value of unexercised options. He received no salary, bonus or other pay last year. Oracle stock fell 61 percent to $15.30 during the fiscal year ended May 2001."

We just wrote a little review for the National Post about an Enron book. It hasn't been published yet. We excized a last paragraph considering extensively the underconsidered reason that executive total compensation has exploded: the insulated nature of the job market in upper management. It is a bit of a joke calling upper management a job market -- it seems more like the Big Fix.

Instead of seeking a market solution -- in other words, how do you make executive culture more competitive -- and letting that drive compensation downward, the idea that executives are something 'special' prevails among compensation reformers. The latest reform is reported this morning in the NYT

"A panel of business leaders proposed changes yesterday in the way corporations pay their top executives. Included in the changes are the prior disclosure of executive stock sales and the uniform treatment of stock options as expenses.

The panel, the Commission on Public Trust and Private Enterprise, was convened in June by the Conference Board, a research group based in New York. The group joined a long list of organizations offering recommendations on overhauling the way corporations govern themselves."

The panel's suggestions are good:

"Other proposals announced yesterday included a recommendation that companies seek shareholders' approval before stock options are repriced and that executives hold shares for a longer period before selling. In addition, the group recommended that compensation committees of corporate boards, not management, retain and direct the activities of outside consultants."

But they merely hint at what is needed to break the monopolistic practices that structure the interlocking interests of corporate boards, top executives, and 'consultants.' What is needed, with execs, was what was needed with electricity, natural gas, and metals: a way of commoditizing them, trading them, and hedging against exec compensation volatility. Is LI suggesting a futures market in executive compensation? Well, something like that. We need to make those compensation packages transparent; we need a way to index them; and we need to use that index to make executives compete among each other for positions, rather than having the holders of positions compete for the executives. It is as simple as that. The way in which corporations compete for executive talent makes sense if, indeed, the corporation is in a relatively new field -- such as PCs, in the late eighties. But as the field matures, prices for those executives should go down. Furthermore, those compensation packages shouldn't lift the compensation awarded to executives in more mature fields. Just that has been happening, however. One of the forces that drives Mergers and Acquisitions is the incentive, among the management class, to create something like a new field, and to then justify inflated compensation as the product of an unstable management situation. This is one of the reasons that M&As are a notoriously bad bet -- historically, they have a well known tendency to create underperforming companies.

However, don't expect LIs suggestion -- or any suggestion that we let the magic of the market-place intrude into the magic kingdoms of CEO-land -- to ever be taken seriously. That is, until boards of directors become real jobs, instead of part time honorariums, and those boards then begin to eye the incipient indexes that already exist -- the annual CEO salary list by Forbes, for instance -- and use it as an opportunity to cut exec cost.

Dope

The politics of war and popularity has been one of the great perils of democracy since Pitt the Younger played the patriot card in 1793. �We cannot arrange with our enemy in the present conjuncture, without abandoning the interest of mankind,� Burke wrote, in his �Letters �on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France,� which was Burke�s way of having it two ways: he simulated a moral interest such that the state could not refuse it, while pretending to decry any who would try to force the state to serve ideological interests. The latter was the letter of his indictment of the French revolutionaries � he claimed that they committed crimes in the name of an abstraction. Notice that the abstraction for which the French Revolutionaries were committing crimes was: the interest of mankind. Burke�s objections to the French Revolution became de facto state doctrine under Pitt - which is when the odd delusion was forged that the British empire was not simply a way of aggrandizing British interest, but was instead, mystically, in the interests of the subdued. This, of course, is the True Doctrine of the Neo-Con believers. The case Burke made carried the burden of legitimacy throughout the British-French conflict, up to 1815, and wrought havoc on the rights of Englishmen, as well as on their money.

This two-fold legitimation of war, which seeks to engraft its justification into the very tissue of the state�s legitimacy, is the path used to make any who oppose war unpatriotic, or enemies of the state. It�s a very fine maneuver, and it is being used now by the Bush regime to shift the boundaries of the war debate: it is no longer about the need for it, but the time we will have it. The social ostracism of the peace party is the practical correlate to the inevitability of war, the last few month�s media Muzak: a pervasive perversion of real reasons which operates much like Muzak, that pervasive perversion of real music, to obstruct thought. So those nations which might oppose our Iraqi action are discredited in sometimes laughable acts of propaganda. In the Sunday NYT, for instance, there was an article about the close ties between Iraq and France � ties that were, of course, cut during the Gulf war. There was even a graf showing the nations that traded with Iraq, and the arms they supplied, from Russia to France. Hey ho, however: there was no place there for the U.S. or the U.K. We�ve already published a partial inventory of products that went to Iraq from the U.S., taken from Jentleson�s book. Our sardonic laughter about the chart was increased by the fact that the Sunday NYT also published an article about businesses using misleading charts to disguise their true financial state.

:While other academic research over the last decade has established that financial charts are often designed to paint a rosier corporate picture than the numbers warrant, a study by Deanna Oxender Burgess, an accounting professor at Florida Gulf Coast University, goes a step further. It examined the effect of the chart design on readers of annual reports, who are mainly investors, stock analysts and shareholders.

"Dr. Burgess found that even slight distortions in a chart changed readers' perceptions of the information. "The danger is that people believe there's more growth than there really is or that performance isn't as poor, which could influence investment decisions," said Dr. Burgess, who conducted focus groups with 80 stockbrokers, bankers, accountants and business students."

Slight distortions in a chart � like the exclusion of two nations that, at one time, were making money on shipping those substances and technologies to Iraq that they now use to justify �regime change?� That's what I call a slight distortion.

Sometimes, coincidence really is the best artist.

Dope

Words written in anger. LI finds this incredible: writers are treated so badly by the media that it either stupifies us, forces us to quit, or demoralizes us beyond repair. This is the second time in the last five days that LI has had to go without food for a day. The reason? No money in the bank. The reason: One company has deliberately floated me -- not paid me -- for work I turned in in June, and that was published in July. One company has "lost" my invoice -- this makes the second time in the last month. For that company, I have reviewed approximately ten to fifteen books in the last five weeks. Result: I am living by leeching on my friends. Leeching only goes so far, however. So, today, I didn't have the money to buy ten dollars worth of groceries from the clerk, who makes more than me, and who is paid biweekly. The time divide is the major divide in this country: a company can take its time about paying you, in spite of the contracts they have you sign in order to spin your work off without you gaining a penny by it, and they can do this repeatedly, and they can do this without penalty. This has happened with Lefty magazines; it has happened with national newspapers. You wouldn't think so, but this is true.The writer cannot make the same bargain with the grocer, the landlord, or the electric company. These are my expenses this week: 30.00 for groceries. 5.00 for a meal -- a big treat for me, going out and getting a sandwich! 4.00 for coffees. I would like to see anybody survive on what I am forced to, with chronic, unexplained shortfalls making me truly unable to say that I can eat tomorrow. In the literal sense, I can't. I will find some body, I hope, who can take me out. Hurray.
This is the life of a beast.
This is the system that makes life beastly. I am living in nineteenth century squalor. I am imprisoned in my conditions, and no amount of labor seems to help. I am being driven mad by this. Literally.
I can howl and scream, I can beat my skinny belly, but nothing, nothing changes.
What to do?