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Friday, February 14, 2003

Saint Valentine’s day, tomorrow, all over the world.marchers will be protesting the war
that starts in three weeks, after the full moon, as the guy on Cable TV said last night. It seems, all the high tech night vision stuff will work better in the dark. The cable TV also makes the claim that France and Germany protest the war because they have deals in place to exploit what America is going to take by invasion, and that they have been selling guns and ammo and the technology for Saddam’s toys of mass destruction to for a long time now. They claims that we’ll find all the of it if we just invade, as if nobody else is selling those bastards the excuse we have to raid the kitchen on them. Hinky's hunch is that these spots on TV that are giving us all the detail (like how many bomb, the full moon, the Godfather DVDs), are crafted to get back to Saddam, and his friends all over the world to scare the shit out of them so they will get the hell out before a single bomb drops. Hinky's hunch is based on the old rule of "too much info," which states that when the picture is painted too well, well, the odds are that it less a picture of reality and more something they say to get the crowd moving this or that way. Hinky is feeling like he's been watching a magic show since 9/11, and Hinky has hated magic since he was a kid.

This morning, the radio said that in Jacksonville, FL, the 101st Airborne is shrink-wrapping and loading ships with their Hell-o-copters. The shrink-wrap keeps the salt water off the works. Hinky wonders if Tyco makes the shrink wrap too. They make all this Duck tape; but we still do see the run on Duck tape moving the stock price. There are still revelations coming out this week in that piece by James Stewart in the New Yorker.

He’s the guy who does a great job writing like, well, the “It’s a wonderful life” Jimmy Stewart would write about people who get crowned notorious greedy via the national media. He’s done Ivan Bosky, Michael Milken, Leona, and now Dennis the menace, former CEO of Tyco who treated his wife to a 16 million dollar party on the Island of Sardinia. Outrageous, huh? Not really. If you sat down, and looked thru public information about most of the public companies that trade in the American markets, you’d find that executive pay is outsized and has been for years. If you did it enough, stories like the one about Dennis wouldn’t even phase you. In fact, you might root for a guy like Dennis, who worked his way from blue collar life to, as Frankie put it, “A number 1, King of the Hill.” I mean, let’s face it, it’s never the Ivy League guy who gets vilified like this, is it? Nope, it’s always a pack of over read, and over fed journalists, tearing the flesh of some poor sucker who bothered to hustle and bust his ass to make it to the top but whose waxed wings melted and sent him back down to the cover of the nypost, the same way those photographer’s go to town on poor people for reaction shots. And who got fucked? Anyone who bought into the horse shit roll-up Dennis pimped for 10 years, as he and his top gun, side-show accountant bought anything that looked like it could make any kind of money. The regulators stood by as the money poured in, and the markets powered up. Accounting standards were a punch line, and now, we need to sacrifice this bloated toad to something in order to re-create the illusion that something can be done to stop this in the future. Humpty Dumpty had a great run, humpty humpty had lots of fun, and now that it’s over, and war is at hand, Hinky has a hunch that nobody really cares enough to put the bull shit story back together again.

Hinky 6:00 PM

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Thursday, February 13, 2003

The photo on the Post will break you heart this morning, a picture of a woman arriving at her sisters house to find it burned down with her 8 year old inside, cell phone in hand, helpless and hopeless. Reaction shots.

I always wonder why they get these shots of working people in the middle of it, as the shit hits the fan. But you so seldom see a shot of a Kennedy, coming out of the water at the bridge, or hearing the news at the compound; or say a Bush, dropping the kids off at De-tox. Maybe the photographers pick the low hanging fruit. And that's not gross marxism; just what the hell ever happened to rooting for the underdog in the place?

Chelsea Clinton has an offer to work from both The McKinsey Consulting firm, and The Boston Consulting firm for $100,000 right out of college (that’s a BA). Nice to see that someone is benefiting from a College education, what with her father’s NAFTA kicking in and all. It goes to show you that the sky is the limit in these big corporate body shops, if you have the right training (and no public schoolin), and if your father was a two term President, and your mother used to write speeches for Richard Nixon before taking over for the Daniel Patrick Moyni- hand-off in Manhattan to become the last big D democrat. Can you feel the pain?

Another WaMu bank was robbed yesterday in Brooklyn. That’s twice this week. On Friday, Americans will buy an estimated $1.3 billion of Chocolate for Valentine's Day. Meanwhile in the US Congress, Republicans were busy trying to pass legislation putting limits on the amount of time most welfare recipients can spend in education or training to overall benefits to five years over their lifetimes. They are also looking to spend $16.5 billion a year overall including up to $300 million per year for experiments promoting marriage and $50 million of that on programs promoting abstinence from sex until marriage. Does that make you Horny baby?

Hinky 5:56 PM

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Wednesday, February 12, 2003

Amazing, speak of the devil, and who’se on the Post’s business page. The Weinstein brothers, INC look slated to win a pack of Oscars for various films this year at Disney’s Miramax (believe that?), and here I was renting the Bad and the Beautiful and talking about sleezy movie moguls from another age. Hinky feels that the movie business is amusing America to death, but you have to give the bloated devil his due. Harvey really has his ear to the winds that blow, and usually gets it right.

Looks like Russell Simmons shook Pepsi by boycotting because the company pulled some Rap commercial off the national TV. Simmon's crew got a "multimillion dollar partnership" for the Arts. Now that is The Real Thing(tm) to Enjoy(tm), right? Meanwhile, New York gets Pepsi in Reise restaurants this week, for the first time since the 1940's, when Coke established it's lock on nyc. Maybe Pepsi stock is worth a look this week.

Hinky 5:42 PM

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Tuesday, February 11, 2003

What’s got Hinky fuming this morning is part of an ongoing series. It's the damned U-6 again. It’s something that may appear boring, and irrelevant to many many people who are too wrapped up in some national pastime, like CB radio, or surfing the net to find fellow bottle cap collectors, or following Lawn mower racing. It’s something that appears mundane to many, although it measures the misery in the lives of their fellow citizens, you know, the guy at the game next to you who might be spray painting swastikas that are popping up on the NYPD daily blotter lately in his free-time-me-time.

It’s something that the national media covers every month, without reporting what’s really goin on; kind of the way it reports the closing mark of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, without any context each night.

Hinky Unemployment rates have been released again by the Labor Department, as Crudele uncovers in the nypost.com. They are especially Hinky this time because new census data is being used this month, which means the government is comparing apples and Tang again. Crudele, who wins the Least Hinky award, explains the horse hockey that the Labor department put out. He estimates that the true unemployment rate was more like 9.6 last month, and 11% this month.

Of course, the government has reporting lower numbers (Horse hockey numbers: http://www.bls.gov/lau/#news) such as, 5.7% last month, and 6.0% this month, as they continue to operate in the ”2+2=5” mode. They fail to count the army of what’s called the “marginally attached,” part time workers (who may or may not hold advanced degrees in many cases), and they ignore “discouraged workers,” who have given up looking for work perhaps in favor of some new National pass-time, like the lawn mower racing that Hinky saw on cable TV over the weekend. Conclusion: the media is reporting a brain wash, because what’s really goin on is Slow growth, few jobs, and nothing special apart from Mr. Greenjeans sitting down at the Fed playing games with the Labor pool, many of whom are paddling like mad to keep their noses above the waterline, whether or not the national media has decided to go with the flow from Labor department in not counting them for much. And the market bounces along with Bond yields so low one might do better spending like there is no tomorrow and stocks in a “good money after bad mode.”

.

The actual “U-6 unemployment rate” was not widely reported; and is unlikely to be reported, even though (as Michael Douglas put it) the whole “ailing corporation called the United States” is run on these baseline assumptions about what people are actually doing in the Economy. So let’s review. More than one out of 10 people are jobless, even though the chances are good that they would love to work if their best chance at finding a job did not require moving to a jungle far away where they would sew buttons on Oxford shirts for .50 cents per hour. When Hinky took Economics 101, a soft rule was that revolutions ferment when countries allow their jobless rates to break 10%. Then again, with all this multimedia and Monster Lawn Mower racing going on, who can tell how far Economies can bend without breaking. So rest assured, Hinky’s father Hinky, Sr. says: “there’s an ass for every seat.” It’s not like things are better in Norway, right?

For a thumbnail about the historical nature of this particular beast:
see this book proposal.

In any event, Crudele is doing a heroic thing in shedding light on the government’s Hinky bean counting. Make you want to holler?

On a lighter, but related note, the “as seen on TV” Dell Dude who pimps Mike Dell's overpriced black funboxes in the national media was pinched for trying to cop “less than 2 ounces,” (or 56 grams, which cost approximately 10 dollars each, or up to $580.00 worth) on the Lower East side. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeexcellent?

Meanwhile, while people struggle their struggles, Michael Douglas (son of the snake in the Bad and Beautiful, which we managed to not fall asleep on last night) and wife Catherine Zeta Jones (as seen on TV pimping Sprint in the national media, the company that puts the word “less” in “wireless”) was in court talking about the 1.6 million dollars they were paid from a magazine that published his wedding photos. They are suing another magazine that published unauthorized photos of them to get a second bite at the wedding cake. The couple appeared in court yesterday to do a victum act. At issue: a photo of the groom feeding the bride cakes in an unflattering moment. She told the court that 1.6 million may "seem like a lot of money to many people in the court, but it's not a lot to [them]." So the magazine paid 1.6 million, and was scooped by another that may have to pay the couple some of the profit they made off the celebrity wedding content. TThe Wedding business is a multi billion dollar business, what's a few million here or there to the models? Maybe we'll start seeing all sorts of big production marrages between entertainers going forward. We always suspected that the answer is " no," to the question, "is nothing is sacred." But this takes the cake. What's next, a Golden Globe devoted to designer funerals?

Stories like these put Hinky in mind of what one of his teachers once said:

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture death is a clear possibility.” --Neil Postman, from his book: Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)

Hinky 2:53 PM

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