Ben Slade

From a 9/28/05 Wash Post article talking about the book End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation by Barry Lynn:

As Lynn sees it, our age is defined by two epochal decompositions -- that of the nation that sought to steer its own economic policy, and that of the vertically integrated corporation in which shareholders, managers, workers and the community all had a stake and from which they all benefited. "Even as we were busting open the borders of the nation, we were also busting open the borders of the traditional firm," Lynn writes. "The two great economic planning entities of the twentieth century were chased from the stage at almost the exact same moment. So far no one has taken their place."

By Paul Krugman. Originally from the NYTimes 9/5/05. Republished on TruthOut.org:

..the federal government's lethal ineptitude wasn't just a
consequence of Mr. Bush's personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of
ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the
public good. For 25 years the right has been denigrating the public
sector, telling us that government is always the problem, not the
solution. Why should we be surprised that when we needed a government
solution, it wasn't forthcoming?

Orgnet.com's Divided We Stand web page has a fascinating graphic showing book "connectedness". The more people who buy two books, the more those two books are connected. The not so surprising, but still disturbing point made by the graphic is that book readers are ideologically divided in what they read. I.e., people are reading what fits their political point of view.

The people at MayFirst.org have created a utility which lets you create static file copies of a Drupal home page, and the most recent 20 nodes (pieces of content). It's called "Drupal File Cache Generator" (dfcg) You can see the various files for this utility at:

At a presentation at the 2005 Take Back America Conference, Gar Alperovitz speaks to the issue that neither Democrats nor Republicans have coherent responses to the rampant inequities in the distribution of wealth and the immense power corporations and special interests wield in Washington.

What is ultimately needed and possible, according to Alperovitz, amounts to a radically different economic and political system.

In the Aug 2005 NY Times article That Hissing Sound (free registration required to view), Paul Krugman makes the points that:

• Looking at the overall rise in real estate prices is not meaningful because the pricing bubbles occur in "Zoned Zones" (areas where the housing supply is constrained by space). In those areas, prices have already reached speculative proportions.
• Real estate does not crash quickly like the stock market. It takes several years.
• "..news that the U.S. housing bubble is over won't come in the form of plunging prices; it will come in the form of falling sales and rising inventory, as sellers try to get prices that buyers are no longer willing to pay. And the process may already have started."
• "..the U.S. economy has become deeply dependent on the housing bubble... everyone should be worried."

An article in The Washington Post (p. F4, May 8 2005) talks about how Warren Buffett's company, Berkshire Hathaway, might have to pay dividends in the future because he can't find any good deals in the stock market to invest in. The article also speculates (apologies for the pun) that too many people in the market might be the problem.

By Bill Bradley for the NY Times, Mar 30 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/30/opinion/30bradley.html?
(free reg required)

To understand how the Democratic Party works, invert the pyramid. Imagine a pyramid balancing precariously on its point, which is the presidential candidate.

Democrats who run for president have to build their own pyramids all by themselves. There is no coherent, larger structure that they can rely on. Unlike Republicans, they don't simply have to assemble a campaign apparatus - they have to formulate ideas and a vision, too. Many Democratic fundraisers join a campaign only after assessing how well it has done in assembling its pyramid of political, media and idea people.

This story from the April 1980 Washington Monthly, provides a scathing review of the problems and progress of NASA's space shuttle program a year before Columbia's first launch in 1981.

The whole shuttle program is painted as a politically motivated technological overreach where nobody wanted to be the one to say that the shuttle wouldn't come close to achieving it's goals (ie., launching into space cheaply and safely)