A Pitch Obama Wants Back

Now the conservatives have Obama where they want him – on the defensive.

Oh, boy. The boy wonder who blazed the trail to the White House on the wave of millions chanting “Yes we can!” is now reeling under the attack of a different set of slogan key words – “Government-run health care”, “Socialized medicine”, “Rationing”, “Euthanasia”, “Private insurance killer”.

Well, you live by the slogan, you die by the slogan.

Who would have thought that a wildly popular Democratic president, with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, would have difficulty passing legislation designed to reform a health care system that more than half the American population think is too costly, too inefficient, too profit-driven and too messed up to be allowed to continue?

Probably nobody, specially during the heady post-election days of November last year.

But now it is happening. Obama is losing this battle and here are the reasons why:

First, Obama did not learn his lesson from the failure of Bill Clinton’s health care reform initiative in the early 1990s.Everyone in the Obama administration who has something to do with the current legislations in Congress would say they did actually learn from Clinton’s mistakes. No they did not.

Their plan was just to do the opposite of whatever Clinton did. Clinton’s team, on its own, without input from Congress, drew up an ambitious, detailed plan to wean the country away from the current system, introduce a public health insurance option and eventually make the transition to a single-payer universal health care system. To Obama’s team, this was a no-no. So they announced the broad intent to improve health care by waving a blank slate, then asked if parties involved would like to come forward and help fill in the details.

In effect, they announced a party then asked who would secure the venue, bring the food, provide the music and run the party games.

Who took up the call for ideas? Predictably, parties representing the big players of the health care industry, each one promising to bring down their costs by x million dollars now that legislation to reform health care and rein in its cost seemed imminent.

Today, months after those promises were made – and at a time the health care discussion has grown into a full-blown polarizing debate – where are those promises? Where are the numbers to back up the assumption that those promises are more than lip service – and that those who made the commitment will deliver on them? Has it ever occurred to anybody that it is not in the interest of a health care insurer to bring down the cost of premium and deductibles? That it is not in the interest of health care providers to slash their own earnings?

Not the way to lead

The morale of the story here is … you do not lead this way. This is not the way to lead. You do this and you invite all sorts of suggestions, more than enough to confuse you and make you wonder how you got into this mess. Some call it consensus-building; it is not. It is plainly a failure to lead.

You lead this way and, yes, you show an openness and willingness to listen to other ideas on the way to forging cooperation. But you also come across as unprepared, indecisive, and worse, bereft of ideas.

The second reason for the faltering health care initiative is the failure of the Obama team to figure out that the issue is best dealt with when broken up into two manageable parts –one, overhauling the existing inefficient and wasteful system, and two, finding a way to finance the overhaul.

Presenting the issue as a single complex problem invites questions of funding, which has the effect of diluting the main message and shoving it aside. Not that funding is not very important – it is – but arguing spiritedly about money and where it will come from tends to dominate the discussion and leave the core issue in a fog. A few voices raised loud enough, repeatedly, and most everyone forgets what they were arguing about.

Exactly the scenario preferred by the opponents of health care reform.

Look back at what has happened over the past several weeks– hundreds coming to town hall meetings on health care reform to boo speakers and shoot down proposals; a swastika spray-painted on the office of a town advocate of health care reform; or red-faced seniors on Medicare and Medicaid coverage denouncing government involvement and decision-making in health care – hurling invectives at the very government-run system that keeps them protected beyond what their meager social security checks can cover.

Ignorance is bliss

It has been observed that many Americans tend to make decisions that work against their own interests. Whether it is the deplorable standard of education or the desperate desire to cling to what worked in generations past, this inability to make informed decisions based on facts is just not helping.

This country bombed Iraq without worrying about the cost. No one raised a hue and cry about how many millions of dollars a day it would cost to contain the insurgency and keep the killing beyond the protected zone. It is still costing billions now that the Bush-Cheney gang of bullies has been voted out of power.

Sure, reforming health care will cost trillions of dollars over the next 10 to 20 years. But it is already costing billions now with about 45 million Americans walking around without insurance, with no solution in sight.

The biggest defeat for the President himself would be the demise of the proposed public insurance option – the core of the proposed legislation, everything else is just detail – which he promised during the campaign and which opponents of health care reform are now taking apart even as we speak. What would be left would be the status quo.

Of course, health care reform opponents would always cite figures saying a large majority of Americans who have health insurance cannot be happier with their situation and prefer to keep it that way. Yes, the same working Americans who, in this recession, are just one layoff away from the poor house. They can afford it now, no problem, but let’s hear them sing that tune when the pink slip arrives.

The travails of Obama and the Democrats as they fumbled their way into announcing their health care initiative can be best described in baseball parlance: President Obama, the self-confessed Chicago White Sox fan, stood on the pitcher’s mound, his 98-mile-an-hour fastball cocked and ready. He could just let it loose, straight down the pipe, and dare the batter to catch up with it.

But what did he do? He nibbled on the sides, throwing a puny breaking ball that did not break sharply enough and ended up in the middle of the strike zone. In the blink of an eye, the hitter pounced. The ball was airborne and into the hands of a fan 450 feet out in straightaway center field. Home run.

Obama and company want that pitch back. But in life, as in baseball, that is not going to happen.

A Page Off the Mob Handbook

The release of two American journalists captured at the Chinese-North Korean border in March this year invites another glimpse into the enigma that is the North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il.

The two female journalists, Laura Ling, 32, and Euna Lee, 36, were picked up by North Korean soldiers while they were making a TV documentary about the trafficking of North Korean women to China. They were accused of illegal entry into North Korea.

Upping the ante

In the two women, the eccentric North Korean leader saw two unwilling pawns that opened up a few strategic moves for him in this protracted chess match he had long been playing with the United States and the world. There had been a long, droning pause in the game and Kim Jong-Il saw that America had not been an enthusiastic combatant. So he decided to up the ante by slapping the U.S. with a direct threat on two of its citizens.

Not satisfied, Kim decided to dial up the action a little bit more. To the chagrin of an Obama administration that is just getting its feet wet on Pyongyang’s weapon-infested pond, North Korea conducted on Aug. 3 an underground testing of a new nuclear weapon – a missile supposed to be more powerful and more technologically advanced than the one it tested in October 2006. Russian missile experts estimated the power of the blast to be between 10 to 20 kilotons – about the size of of the atomic bombs that were dropped by U.S. forces on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II.

For sure, the irony of rubbing the nose of the world’s lone superpower on the magnitude of nuclear destruction it once unleashed on an enemy – something no U.S. leader wants to be part of again – is not lost on Kim.

Respect

Since he assumed absolute power over his country in 1998, four years after the death of his father Kim Il-Sung, the “Eternal President”,  Kim Jong-Il has tried to position his country as a force to reckon with in the geopolitical arena, commanding more respect – and therefore fear – than other players the free world would not entrust with a nuclear toy or two – Iran, Iraq, maybe Libya. But as he was posturing, nobody was paying attention.

For the past eight years, Kim wanted to dance, but the Bush administration was not obliging. Kim craved an audience with America but wanted it to look like the U.S. was dying to have an audience with him. It did not help that Bush the Cowboy, with his six-shooter loaded and cocked, did not make a good impression on the North Korean despot. Kim, was waving a dance card but Bush’s name was not on it.

Which brings us to the extraordinary 22-hour effort that finally freed the two journalists from Kim’s prisons. Both Ling and Lee were allowed to communicate to folks back home and relay the message – that the “Dear Leader” might be persuaded to sit down with an American leader of world stature and discuss what it would take to send the two women home. This time, the name on the dance card was Bill Clinton, former U.S. president.

But this was no ordinary sit-down of the Tony Soprano-John Sacramoni variety. This one involved cameras, studio lighting and a wavy backdrop, among many things. This was a giant photo op for Kim, a chance to show his people their supreme leader at his finest – sitting smug across the table from the leader, albeit a former one, of the free world, working to settle an international dispute that every news outlet in the planet should be reporting.

This was huge.

And to think Kim did not even have to fire a single Taepodong missile to get this result.

Face-saving

In hindsight, it does not really make a difference whether or not Clinton really apologized to Kim Jong-Il. What is clear is that Clinton appealed for leniency on the matter – and he got it. America was on its best behavior on the negotiating table, Kim got his face-saving tableau going, the two journalists were freed and everybody is happy.

Some would say the U.S. was a sucker for Kim’s antics. But the lives and freedom of two Americans should be reason enough to leave the sword in the scabbard and, for a change, negotiate like a responsible, pragmatic leader.

Whether North Korea has finally started to recognize and respect international law, or whether it would now be a willing participant in multilateral talks on nuclear disarmament, is yet to be seen.

Kim Jong-Il maybe crazy, delusional, petulant, inscrutable – and his bouffant hairdo maybe the most hideous thing since Jim Carey’s abominable coiffure in Ace Ventura, Pet Detective – but one thing he is not is stupid. He saw that his pissing match with America was not getting him anywhere, so he tore a page off the Mob’s handbook. He showed that he knows how to get things done.

Originally published in http://www.cometomarket.com

The Legacy of Cory Aquino

While the incumbent Philippine president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, was exchanging pleasantries with U.S. President Barack Obama in the White House, a former Philippine president an ocean away was succumbing to cancer and barely clinging to dear life. And as July 31 turned into August 1 in the Pacific, Corazon Aquino, Philippine president from 1986 to 1992, passed into history.

This is a sad day for many, but an inspirational one for even more. Cory, the reluctant president, symbolized most of what is good about the country, what is endearing and what is worth fighting for.

Cory did not personify efficient government; her six-year presidency did not turn out as hoped for, notable for what it failed to achieve than what it did accomplish. She restored democratic institutions and processes but failed to enact sweeping land reform in rural Philippines where discontent was fueling a raging insurgency.

She did not break the stranglehold of the landed and the wealthy on the Philippine economy. She wanted to but could not. She belonged to one of the country’s wealthiest families – the Cojuangcos of Tarlac –  and was educated in the Philippines and the United States. She knew what it meant to be a powerful clan in her country and how much sway it held in politics and government. Even as president, she understood – and many people did, too – that she was overmatched by the impossible task.

Drunk with victory

To be fair to her, the country she pulled out from the nightmare of 21 years under Ferdinand Marcos, was not as willing to start afresh as it was willing to kick Marcos out. The whole nation, intoxicated by the exhilarating victory, went to party all night but was in no shape the next morning to clean up the mess.

Disgruntled military elements, aware of their new clout in the power vacuum, were itching for a test-drive. So they flexed their muscles and threw the country into chaos. During Cory’s administration, renegade army men staged a half dozen coup de etats, disrupting the fragile democracy and laying bare the possibility that this country might never again be peaceful.

Cory fought back. She unleashed the military to crush the malcontents each time they tried to take over. She also unleashed the military against the New People’s Army, the lead group of the insurgency movement. Many critics would point out that Cory went back on her promise to extend an olive branch to the NPA and to never use the military against the rebels the way Marcos did.  She did briefly, but when urban guerillas brought the war to the cities by gunning down politicians and cops in broad daylight, the president felt she had to answer force with force.

Cory’s term also saw some of the most destructive natural disasters to hit the country, notable of which was the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in central Luzon, which brought havoc to the lives and livelihood of hundreds of thousands.

She also presided over the phasing out of a major military agreement between the Philippines and the U.S. which allowed for American use of Clark Air Base, once the largest air force base in the Far East, and Subic Naval Base, the largest natural, deep-water home for U.S. aircraft carriers and other ships in Asia. Both installations saw plenty of action during the Vietnam War. Under Cory Aquino’s watch, these assests were converted to export processing zones where foreign capital was lured to set up manufacturing operations to capitalize on the country’s low labor cost.

Most importantly, she presided over changing the Constitution to limit the president’s eligibility in office to a single six-year term. No re-election. That was to make sure there would never be another Marcos.

Transition

But while her presidency finished with uneven results, her difficult time at the helm laid the ground for a more stable phase that followed when Gen. Fidel Ramos, a Johnny-come-lately brother-in-arm during the struggle to oust Marcos, stepped in to take his shot at running this troubled country. The cigar-chomping Ramos, a natural leader of men in uniform, never had the sincerity and purity of heart that Cory had, but exuded the confidence that Cory could never muster.

Cory bore the weight of a nation suffering withdrawal symptoms, a people aware of its newfound freedom but still unsure of what to make of it. Ramos took the helm when the country had grown a little wiser, weary of uprisings and power grabs, and just wanting to pick up the pieces and move on. Both presidents did what they had to do.

Ramos, limited to a six-year term, led the country to a period of relative prosperity in the mid-1990s, leading then Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien to comment, during a visit to the Philippines,  that in his opinion, Ramos deserved a second term so he could continue the good work he was doing. For his comment, Chretien got into trouble with the Philippine media. But this episode brought into focus the irony of having a good term-limited leader step down – prompting the country, in a period of stability, to roll the dice on a successor.

That successor turned out to be movie actor Joseph Estrada, elected in 1998, and then overthrown by a popular revolt – the way Marcos was forced out in 1986 – in early 2001. “People power,” which toppled Marcos and installed Cory, brought down another corrupt leader.

Her place in history

Prayers will be said, tributes will be read, and the world will honor the passing of a shining advocate of non-violent struggle against tyranny and oppression. What Cory Aquino leaves her beloved country and the world – the legacy of a life spent fighting for what is right, fighting injustice, no matter what the cost – no one can take away.

She saw what the tyranny of one-man rule did to her husband, the late Senator Benigno Aquino Jr., who was gunned down by uniformed soldiers as he was being escorted out of the plane that brought him home from years of political exile.  She saw how injustice disenfranchised the poor and the needy, how corruption brought the country’s economy to its knees, how bad government brought shame to the nation’s pride and how apathy and indifference kept the tyrants in power.

She faced the daunting power of the Marcos machinery and she stared it straight n the face. She did not budge. She did not blink. In the slight woman in yellow dress, who spoke with the voice of 70 million people, the Marcos juggernaut found its match.

She – in that one scintillating moment in February 1986 – restored pride among her people all over the world.

She made this Filipino-Canadian proud of his roots.

The Lazy Spin of Brett Favre’s Retirement

If Brett Favre is in the news, the football season must be drawing near.

Legendary quarterback Brett Favre announced recently that he is not getting out of retirement to play with the Minnesota Vikings when the NFl season starts in the fall. Yes, you heard it right, he is not getting out of retirement.

Recite the above paragraph to anybody remotely knowledgeable about football and, most likely, you’d be met with any of the following – a blank stare, feigned disbelief, a disinterested shrug, a smirk or maybe suppressed laughter.

Didn’t we see this movie already?

Reaction to a Brett Favre retirement depends on where you float in the universe of America’s richest professional sprots league. Some wish him the best, some say the sport will miss him, and some say “Can you just change the channel?”

Favre retired from the game in a tearful farewell in March last year. The greatest quarterback of the Green Bay Packers, who holds almost all of the significant passing records in the league after 16 seasons of play, said he was stepping into the shadows, heading to his tractors and weed whackers in his native Hattiesburg, Mississippi where retirement beckoned.

Then he unretired. He wanted to play again but the Packers had other ideas. After an acrimonious split with the team, he was traded to the New York Jets who salivated at the prospect of having a Hall of Fame quarterback who throws 45-yard touchdowns, someone the Jets never had in a long, long time.

Things did not work out as well as hoped for. Although Favre started on fire, his cannon of an arm had lost some velocity as the season wore on and he could no longer take the pounding on his 39-yearl old body. He was hurt. He led the Jets to its first winning season in years, 9 wins and 7 losses, but could not take them to the Promised Land. So when the season ended, it was al academic that Favre’s run was, finally, over.

It ain’t over until it’s over.

But here we go again. Many have become cynical of Brett Favre’s antics – retiring, unretiring, retiring again … when will it ever be final?

They say a sucker is born every minute but in Brett Favre’s world, a sucker is born every time he confirms this retirement he is announcing now is final – but he feels he can still fire those howitzers downfield. Not surprisingly, many believe that a team will offer him a suitcase-full of money and he will play again. He had shoulder surgery earlier in the year year  but is still bothered by pain in the left knee and both ankles. Some are still hoping that, on a cold, crisp afternoon in November, the familiar Number Four would be bursting out of the tunnel, wearing Viking purple, to take his position under center.

What is driving this hope, or even longing, for a Brett Favre comeback?

Maybe it’s the fact that the league really needs a quarterback as colorful and exciting as Brett Favre – preferably a young Brett Favre, but yes sir, the older edition will do.

Tom Brady has won more Superbowls for the New England Patriots, and is arguably the best quarterback of the last five seasons. Peyton Manning has been the steady force behind the Indianapolis Colts’ championship a few years ago and the team’s continued competitiveness. Tony Romo of the Dallas Cowboys has come within the periphery of top-echelon quarterbacking.

But none of them is Brett Favre. Maybe none will ever be.

So like a ritual – walking the dog, getting the car an oil change, going to the dentist, making small talk about the weather with the next guy in the elevator – the Brett Favre soap opera “Will He Or Won’t He?” begins its dizzying spin. Just like one of those lazy spirals Brett Favre unleashes in a practice game.

America’s Nightmare

When about 45 million people living in the world’s largest economy do not have health insurance, something is wrong.

When a nation’s health policy is, by design, geared not to delivering quality health care and treatment to the most people possible but to deriving profits for hospitals, doctors and other health care providers, drug manufacturers and the health insurance industry, something must be wrong.

And when the whole system itself, flawed and wasteful and discriminatory as it is, remains oblivious to meaningful reform, remains tone-deaf to the popular clamor for an efficient, publicly-financed system, and remains steadfast in its defense of the status quo where profit motive is king, then something is definitely wrong.

But the problem is few of those who can really make a difference would even accept that the above assumptions are true. This is not a case of “nobody knows what to do.” This is a case of apathy and indifference getting the better of conviction and the desire to do what is right.

Even supposed-to-be principled leaders who vowed to slay this health care are now finding out how formidable this monster really is, and how close to impossible it is to even attempt to fight it.

U.S. President Barack Obama swept to office on the strength of his promise of change, and health care reform is one of his promised priorities. Now, half a year into his administration, the realities of how difficult it is to reform health care have come into full view and Obama and company appear to be in for a long-drawn battle. Health care reform bills in the U.S. Congress are running against opposition from Republicans. Obama and the Democrats are hesitant to use their majority to get the bills passed, instead trying get bipartisan support.

The laws may or may not pass. But even if they do, the unified version of the health care package will be so watered down as to effect any real, meaningful change.

First, because the bill does not advocate for a single-payer universal health care system, as practiced in such countries as the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Japan and most industrialized countries in Europe. Voices calling for a single-payer system are systematically being marginalized. America wants to be unique – and that is understandable – but there is a very steep price to pay. Americans have been paying through the nose for several decades now, and the health insurance-medical-pharmaceutical complex has merrily run up the tab.

A conservative senator once said that the U.S. health care problem is an American problem that requires an American solution. Big words – but empty. Just plain, unadulterated hubris. If by “American solution,” he is means the current patchwork of Medicare-Medicaid and other well-meaning but mostly ineffective incentives masquerading as cost-saving efforts, it is a wonder he has not awakened to the reality that this patchwork is not working. It is not working.

Otherwise how can one explain the inability of 45 million Americans to afford health insurance? Against all the other big players in the industry who have successfully commoditized health care – insurance companies, Big Pharma, hospitals and providers – the patchwork is not working. Never even had a chance.

The U.S. model of putting the burden on companies, public and private, to provide coverage for workers had its good days in the 1950s up to maybe the 1980s. Today, this model is as bankrupt as bankrupt General Motors, once the world’s largest corporation but is now just hanging by the skin of its teeth to survive. There is no question that GM’s mind-boggling legacy costs – capped by billions in health care bills for its active and retired employees – contributed to its downfall.

On the other side of the fence, a single-payer system, funded by people’s taxes and run by the government, will ensure universal coverage for every American. Yes, run by the government just like the military, police and fire services. Britain, France, Canada and Australia, among many countries, are living proof of that.

The single-payer system is not perfect, nobody says it is, but it much more cost-efficient than America’s patchwork. A patient may have to wait in the emergency room for a length of time, depending on the urgency of the case, or longer for some scheduled procedure, such as an MRI. But no patient is going to be turned away because he does not have health insurance.

For every health care dollar spent in Canada, about 75 cents pay for actual health care service such as treatment and diagnosis. In the U.S. the figure is about 45 cents. In other words, more than half of the U.S. cost goes to pay the salaries of the millions of paper-shufflers and pencil-pushers employed by the industry, most of them working with insurance companies and whose job it is to be on the phone to deny coverage to claimants. The whole PPO-HMO mess is a prime example of how the unbridled quest for profit has destroyed an industry that is originally aimed at providing help for the sick.

From the extreme right, one of the most vocal arguments put forward against a single-payer national health program is that it will blunt innovation in the medical field. That it will discourage competition, the bedrock of free enterprise. But when 45 million people do not have health insurance because they cannot afford it, this argument about innovation and competition just does not make sense. What’s the point in having the latest medical procedure, the best doctors, the stiffest and liveliest competition for profit among the hospitals, if people who need care cannot afford health insurance?

Everything boils down to this: if America is serious about overhauling health care, it should be prepared to embrace the single-payer model – people pay taxes, doctors and hospitals provide the care and bill the government-run insurance agency for the cost, the government pays and keeps the cost under control. Everybody is covered. Private insurance is still an option, but the public option is supreme because it ensures that nobody falls through the cracks.

If the country is not prepared to be bold and embrace this concept once and for all, too bad.

Of course, there is always the hope, fed mainly by the industry profiteers, that the current patchwork system could, miraculously, find ways to cuts costs and make health insurance more affordable. How and by how much, nobody knows. But seriously, judging from how the industry has allowed costs to go out of control in the last 20 years, what are the odds?

In some countries using the single-payer universal system, such as Canada, access to affordable health care is considered a human right, enshrined up there with the right to live, the freedom of speech, the freedom of religion and the pursuit of happiness. It is too important to leave in the hands of the profit-driven private sector. People understand this concept fully and would never have it any other way.

Defiant industry refuses to write “30″

The grave has been dug and the undertaker is just waiting for his cue. But the cadaver in the casket somehow refuses to go into the hole and be done with it. If only it could summon all the powers it used to command, this dead body would break free of the contraption, flex its muscles defiantly and proclaim to the world that it is back.

How nice and heroic that would have been. But it is not going to happen.

Not today.

Not for America’s newspapers.

Many will dispute that newspapers are dead. They are going through very difficult times, some experts would say, but they will survive. That is hoping, and we know that hoping is not a strategy. A courageous thing to do, no doubt, specially in these difficult times, maybe deserving of some poetic praise, but nevertheless futile.

Steady decline

Since 2000, daily newspaper circulation among U.S. metropolitan dailies has plunged from 55 million to 50 million. Consequently, advertising revenue has nosedived at a 28% clip, accounting for a loss of $11 billion. That’s a large chump of change that could have kept the profit trough in good shape, raised the value of shares, and kept newsrooms humming and journalists working. But none of these happened because the profit losses came in an unstoppable flurry, and the job losses that followed was palpable.

It is not unusual to hear the story of a newspaper company that used to be a $3-billion business in 2002 but is now worth less than $150-million. A large, boisterous newsroom bustling with 700 journalists now eerily quiet, its fewer than 300 people quietly updating resumes hopefully to be sent to who knows where.

In assigning blame for the decline of the newspaper, industry experts have devoted barrels upon barrels of ink on paper – forgive the pun – to various causes natural and man-made, preventable and inevitable: the Internet, Google, craisglist, young people who don’t read the newspaper and can’t be bothered to pay for it, old people who just grew older and could no longer keep up their subscriptions.

Generations ago, people grew up with television and cable, and they bought into the concept of having to pay monthly subscriptions for cable packages. But a whole generation that grew up on the Internet never accepted having to pay for content, whether it is news or music. The Recording Industry Association of America, as early as 2000, came down hard on young people who downloaded over the Internet copyrighted music owned by the music labels. But this action did not convince this generation that they have to pay for stuff.

Later, Apple Corp. introduced iTunes, an online music store where songs can be downloaded legally for 99 cents each. But while illegal music downloading slowed down, the concept of having to pay for content still did not sink in on this generation older folks refer to as freeloaders. If it can be had for free – and the Internet makes that possible – why bother to pay?

It is this demographic that newspapers had fight for to stay viable and, in its ensuing confrontation with cyberspace for this market, it was clobbered: Internet 1, Newspapers 0.

First of all, newspapers did not take this freeloader market seriously, perhaps hoping – again, not a strategy – it will come around eventually. In the late 1980s and through the 1990s, newspapers were generating annual profits as high as 22%. Those were heady days. The World Wide Web became a reality in the early 1990, just when top news executives, usually white men in their 60s, were sitting on virtual cash cows. So what did they do to counter the Internet onslaught and plan for the future? Nothing much.

Apathy and indifference

Up to a few years ago, way before this recession flattened the economic landscape for everyone, many of these tone-deaf executives were dismissing the Web as just a short-term nuisance. In their mind, this institution of the press, that once brought down a sitting president, will not be threatened by something that lives in the minds of computers and shows up as pages on a screen. The newspaper will live and thrive, the popular line went, because the newspaper is the only source of original reporting that Web aggregators package and claim as their own.

But the numbers did not favor the newspapers. Circulation dropped and advertisers fled to the Web. Newspapers abandoned the youth market – they lost them many years ago, anyway – and tried to shore up their defenses by trying to hold on to their traditional readers comprised mainly of folks averaging 57 in age. In some papers, this is working to a limited extent but admittedly not a long-term solution. When the recession hit, the bleeding accelerated.

Last month, the Rocky Mountain News, the smaller of Denver’s two dailies, folded. Next to go was the print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the smaller of two papers in Seattle. The Web edition is still around. Somebody put together a top 10 hit list on America’s most endangered metro dailies, a list that includes the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Miami Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle and the two Detroit papers. This does not include newspapers of the Tribune chain – the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times – which have earlier filed for bankruptcy protection. The Boston Globe, which is owned by the publishers of the New York Times, is in real danger of shutting down for good if management cannot cobble together and agreement with the unions.

And while this carnage is on, a group of so-called experts, mostly battle-weary newsmen, are bouncing ideas around on which sections a typical newspaper should jettison so it could survive in the new order.

Sounds like a discussion that should have taken place in 1995. Not now when the undertaker is just awaiting his cue.

So AIG means “Aren’t I Greedy?”

The troubled American International Group, after receiving $170 billion dollars in bailout money from the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve, is going to distribute $165 million in bonuses to its executives.

What is wrong with this sentence?

Everything.

As in everything that has gone wrong with this unbridled capitalism. Everything that has gone wrong with this free enterprise gone wild. Everything that has gone wrong with a business value system that pays homage to the virtues of success but rewards failure and incompetence.

Although AIG’s main business is insurance, it had other things in mind for the quick, big bucks. It was its financial products unit which got the company deep into hundreds of billions of dollars worth of derivatives, those notorious credit-default swaps that almost pushed AIG over the cliff a year ago, and has since bedeviled the U.S. economy over the past several months. Now Edward Liddy, the government-appointed chairman argues that these bonuses are needed to keep AIG’s most skilled executives, or they would leave.

What skilled executives is he talking about? The ones that brought AIG to this pathetic state of asking for a handout from the U.S. taxpayer? And Liddy is afraid these executives would leave?

Or maybe he and his merry bunch of executives just want to be the poster boys for the moral bankruptcy of American business at the turn of the century.

Common decency says kicking a man in the face when he is already down is a shameless, cowardly act. This bunch of glorified thieves in expensive suits – like their Wall Street brothers who went into the bailout till months ago and promptly divvied up the loot – for sure will give shamelessness a new, up-to-date face. One that says, unequivocally, that AIG means “Aren’t I Greedy.”

To a jobless ordinary Joe on the street who is just trying to find a job in this merciless economy, this is a dagger to the heart. This is unacceptable. And this is not what he voted for that cool November morning last year when change was in the air.

President Obama should move mountains to correct this travesty. Failing that, all those believers in change will realize that change, after all is said and done, is just a four-letter word.

What not to write about?

It all starts here.

Yes, after months of procrastinating, this is a go. So here it is. This blog is up and running …

What to write about? The better question would be what not to write about?

Yesterday, we witnessed history. The first black president of the United States sworn into office. Of course, not before the overstaying White House tenant was booed out of the joint. It has been a tumultuous eight years of George W. Bush, and any image of the man not anymore sitting in that presidential chair is most welcome, a real breath of fresh air. President Barrack Obama brings hope, just what the world needs right now.

What not to write about?

The America that Obama inherits is a shambles. The entire world is being brought to its knees by the most brutal economic collapse this planet has seen since the Great Depression. In North America alone, millions lost their jobs in the last six months as some of the pillars of the financial world went belly up on the weight of the sub-prime crisis.

What not to write about?

But while job losses’ material cost to the economy make up the numbers that drive the new – in whatever form it is now consumed, in print, on the Web, on TV or radio, or in a mobile device such as a cell phone or an iPod – it is the direct cost to families all over the world that punctures the heart of mankind and disrupts how humanity functions. A job lost by a breadwinner changes everything in a typical family. Beyond the numbers are countless stories of struggle and making ends meet, a testimony to how the human spirit would put up a fight and not give up.

What not to write about?

The news industry itself is in life support. Yes, many of those newspaper folks – that during the Watergate years put on display the greatness and altruism of journalism as a profession– are now out of a job. Anyone doing a post-mortem on the industry is liable to blame one or a combination of the following:

1) The Web killed the paper.
2) Advertisers found their new love online and abandoned the paper.
3) Newspaper folks, smart people that they were, could not figure out how to deal with declining circulation. Many were in denial about the extent of the circulation drop. Confronted with an image of Niagara Falls, they saw a leaking faucet.
4) Newspaper folks, smart people that they were, actually knew how to deal with the problem. Staffed by armies of designers, artists and visual journalists, newspapers had this problem licked. A redesign. Another redesign! Yeah, right. – changing the fonts on a page that people do not want to pay for anymore. Surveying the carnage industry-wide, we now know how that worked out.
5) Newspaper folks, smart people that they were, did not know how to deal with the online animal, this interactive thing that can move, change color or totally fade out. So they created committees – or task forces! – led by people who did not know how to deal with the online animal. Enough said.
6) The papers killed themselves by having more editors than reporters. In other words, more bosses to do the bossing around than people who actually did the work.
7) More of numbers 3, 4, 5 and 6.

What not to write about?

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