Salon: Interview with Harry Shearer
It’s this weird cycle. It’s hard to remember back to the beginning of the ’90s, oddly enough, when everybody was sort of shaking themselves like wet dogs after the go-go cycle of the ’80s. The materialist, greed-is-good, Michael Milken-fueled ’80s saying, “Whew, we’re not going to do that again.” Then within three years, we did it all again, so much bigger and so much grander, at the loss of so much more money to so many more people.
It just makes you kind of tremble at the thought of what lies ahead for us two years from now, when we’ve kind of shaken this off and gone, “Whew, we’re not going to do that again.” I think the four least believable words in American public life are, “once and for all.” When you hear a politician say, “once and for all,” you know he’s lying. It’s going to happen again.
I love Shearer’s “Le Show” on KCRW in Los Angeles- great, great radio.
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NYT: Outrage Is Rising as Options Turn to Dust
Rather than provide investment advice to the WorldCom workers based upon each one’s circumstances or appetite for risk, the dozen or so brokers in the office seemed to push as many clients as they could to use the same strategy: exercise their options, hold onto the WorldCom shares and borrow from Salomon to pay the costs of the transactions and the taxes that were generated. That not only put the clients at substantial risk if Worldcom shares declined but also, because of Salomon’s compensation system, generated big fees to the brokers who recommended them.
I bank with this company. I feel like I can’t trust them and yet you have to be in the system to benefit from it.

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NYT: Once Again, Japan’s Fix Is Short
Prices have fallen for three years in the worst bout of deflation since the Great Depression. Profits have eroded, and companies are having a harder time repaying their debts, swelling the amount of nonperforming loans held by the banks. To keep up, companies are cutting borrowing, wages and jobs, and that depresses spending.
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“Policy-making over the past decade,” said Richard Jerram, an economist at ING Barings Securities in Tokyo, “has been all about system preservation and refusal to face up to the scale of the problems, which seems to be where we are currently heading.”

New Yorker: The Great Terror – In northern Iraq, there is new evidence of Saddam Hussein’s genocidal war on the KurdsÛand of his possible ties to Al Qaeda.
Gosden believes it is quite possible that the countries of the West will soon experience chemical- and biological-weapons attacks far more serious and of greater lasting effect than the anthrax incidents of last autumn and the nerve-agent attack on the Tokyo subway system several years agoÛthat what happened in Kurdistan was only the beginning. “For Saddam’s scientists, the Kurds were a test population,” she said. “They were the human guinea pigs. It was a way of identifying the most effective chemical agents for use on civilian populations, and the most effective means of delivery.”
The charge is supported by others. An Iraqi defector, Khidhir Hamza, who is the former director of Saddam’s nuclear-weapons program, told me earlier this year that before the attack on Halabja military doctors had mapped the city, and that afterward they entered it wearing protective clothing, in order to study the dispersal of the dead. “These were field tests, an experiment on a town,” Hamza told me. He said that he had direct knowledge of the Army’s procedures that day in Halabja. “The doctors were given sheets with grids on them, and they had to answer questions such as ‘How far are the dead from the cannisters?’ ”
Gosden said that she cannot understand why the West has not been more eager to investigate the chemical attacks in Kurdistan. “It seems a matter of enlightened self-interest that the West would want to study the long-term effects of chemical weapons on civilians, on the DNA,” she told me. “I’ve seen Europe’s worst cancers, but, believe me, I have never seen cancers like the ones I saw in Kurdistan.”
According to an ongoing survey conducted by a team of Kurdish physicians and organized by Gosden and a small advocacy group called the Washington Kurdish Institute, more than two hundred towns and villages across Kurdistan were attacked by poison gasÛfar more than was previously thoughtÛin the course of seventeen months. The number of victims is unknown, but doctors I met in Kurdistan believe that up to ten per cent of the population of northern IraqÛnearly four million peopleÛhas been exposed to chemical weapons. “Saddam Hussein poisoned northern Iraq,” Gosden said when I left for Halabja. “The questions, then, are what to do? And what comes next?”
Terrifying and riveting article by Jeffrey Goldberg. Very long but really, really amazing reporting.
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LAT: Toyota Vows to Roll Back Oldometer With New Line
Toyota, whose average customer is older than those of Ford, Honda, Nissan or Mitsubishi, is worried that it has lost touch with the segment of the population that will be the biggest group of car shoppers 20 years from now. Hoping to bridge that gap, company executives displayed a pair of compact, toylike concept cars at the New York International Auto Show, to the tunes of bands such as the Rurals, Fauna Flash and Schooly D.

Joe Masters, 22, a senior English and math major at Williams College has created “EphPod,” (named for “Ephs”, the school’s mascot) which offers much of the same functionality as XPlay.
While XPlay has gone through five public releases, EphPod has had at least 17, each adding a few new features and tweaks to make the PC-iPod relationship a little smoother.
“It seems to be working pretty well for most people, so I haven’t had to fix many bugs lately,” Masters said in an e-mail interview.
Masters said his reason for developing EphPod was simple — he was given an iPod for Christmas but does not have a Macintosh, so he decided to solve the problem himself.
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I’m convinced that horrific stories like this point to two facts: guns are a significant factor in the ease of multiple murders like this and that policemen are often seriously disturbed people.
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The Man Who Paid the Price for Sizing Up Enron
Enron executives pressed UBS PaineWebber to take action against a broker who advised some Enron employees to sell their shares in August and was fired by the brokerage firm within hours of the complaint, according to e-mail messages released today by Congressional investigators.
The broker, Chung Wu, of PaineWebber’s Houston office, sent a message to clients early on Aug. 21 warning that Enron’s “financial situation is deteriorating” and that they should “take some money off the table.”
That afternoon, an Enron executive in charge of its stock option program sent a stern message to PaineWebber executives, including the Houston branch office manager. “Please handle this situation,” the newly released message stated. “This is extremely disturbing to me.”
PaineWebber fired Mr. Wu less than three hours later.
If Wu isn’t suing his previous employer for wrongful termination…frankly this kind of behavior (the management’s behavior) is deeply embedded in Wall Street’s psyche. You can’t, as an individual investor, use the system without being a part of the problem.

Dan Gillmor: Bleak future looms if you don’t take a stand
This is a quiz about your future. It’s about how you view some basic elements of the emerging Digital Age.
1. Do you care if a few giant companies control virtually all entertainment and information?
2. Do you care if they decide what kinds of technological innovations will reach the marketplace?
3. Would you be concerned if they used their power to compile detailed dossiers on everything you read, listen to, view and buy?
4. Would you find it acceptable if they could decide whether what you write and say could be seen and heard by others?
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Here’s my message to the record industry and its allies:
I’m not a thief. I’m a customer. When you treat me like a thief, I won’t be your customer.
Enough is enough.