Category: Business

Corporate news from all over

Cellphone Gripes Worthy of Congress’s Time

Seth Anderson0 comment

David Pogue has a long list of issues that could be discussed at the Senate Commerce Committee hearings about cellphone exclusivity contracts. Questions such as: why is text messaging charged at such a higher rate than email messaging? and my pet peeve: why is there that annoying 15 second automated voice before you can leave or listen to a voicemail? So irritating.

Cell phone-iphile

The carriers can’t possibly argue that transmitting text-message data costs them that much money. One blogger (http://bit.ly/gHkES) calculated that the data in a text message costs you about 61 million times as much as the same message sent by e-mail.

…

15-SECOND INSTRUCTIONS This one makes me crazy. When I call to leave you a voicemail message, the first thing I hear, before I’m allowed to hear the beep, is 15 seconds of instructions. “To page this person, press 5.” Page this person!? Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize this was 1980! “When you have finished recording, you may hang up.” Oh, really!? So glad you mentioned that! I would have stayed on the line forever!

And then when I call in for messages, I’m held up for 15 more seconds. “To listen to your messages, press 1.” Why else would I be calling!?

(Yes, there are key-presses that can bypass the instructions. But they’re different for each carrier. When you call someone, you’re supposed to know which carrier that person uses and which key to press? Sure.)

Is this really so evil? Is 15 seconds here and there that big a deal? Well, Verizon has 70 million customers. If each customer leaves one message and checks voicemail once a day, Verizon rakes in — are you sitting down? — $850 million a year. That’s right: $850 million, just from making us sit through those 15-second airtime-eating instructions.

And that’s just Verizon. Where’s the outrage, people?

[Click to continue reading David Pogue – Cellphone Gripes Worthy of Congress’s Time – NYTimes.com]

There are other topics too, like the subsidy game (once your contract is over, you don’t get a reduction in your monthly bill, even though your bill helped lower the cost of your phone for 24 months or whatever). Of course, the telecom corporations are huge donors to Congress, so the odds of meaningful consumer-friendly legislation emerging from the Senate Commerce Committee is slim to none.

Kiva Loan Number 9

Seth Anderson0 comment

Gladys Odoom from Ghana has fully repaid a Kiva loan

Location: Kasoa, Ghana

Repayment Term: 8 months (more info)

Activity: Jewelry

Repayment Schedule: Monthly

Loan Use: To purchase assorted jewelry

Currency Exchange Loss: Covered       Default Protection: Covered

Gladys is a trader who sells assorted jewelry. She hawks from one community to the next. She is 28 years old and married with two children. Gladys has insufficient working capital to run her business. With this loan, she plans to inject more working capital into the business to scale it up. She believes the loan will enable her to purchase good quality jewelry in large quantity to upgrade her inventory. She will use part of her profit to finance her kids’ education. She is grateful for the assistance.

(click to continue reading Kiva – Gladys Odoom from Ghana has fully repaid a Kiva loan.)

Country: Ghana
Avg Annual Income: $2,643
Currency: Ghana Cedis (GHS)

Kiva Loan Number Seven

Seth Anderson0 comment

Moufid from Lebanon has fully repaid a Kiva loan. This was probably actually my first Kiva loan, but I didn’t keep good records/dates when I began.

Location: Aley – Chouf, Lebanon

Repayment Term: 14 months (more info)

Activity: Barber Shop

Repayment Schedule: Monthly

Loan Use: Moufid will use the loan to purchase tools for his salon

Currency Exchange Loss: N/A       Default Protection: Not Covered

Moufid is a 54-year-old man who lives in Aley, Mount Lebanon, with his wife and their three children. Moufid has owned a barber shop for 30 years. He requested a loan of $1,000 from Kiva’s partner Al Majmoua in order to purchase tools for his salon. This is his third cycle and he has always paid on time.

His previous loans helped him improve his work. Moufid is special in his work because he knows how to treat his clients. His clients are his friends and neighbors. When he first started his business, he had difficulty building networking. Ziad decided on doing his business because he wanted to have independent work. In the future, he plans on expanding his store.

(click to continue reading Kiva – Moufid from Lebanon has fully repaid a Kiva loan.)

 

Carbon Credit Market and Goldman

Seth Anderson0 comment

As I said earlier, I don’t whether the new Cap and Trade legislation is a good step or not, I don’t have enough knowledge on the details, yet. However, I’m suspicious as to who is going to take most of the profits, namely Goldman Sachs.

Midas Touch

As Matt Taibbi writes:

The new carboncredit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that’s been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won’t even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.

Here’s how it works: If the bill passes, there will be limits for coal plants, utilities, natural-gas distributors and numerous other industries on the amount of carbon emissions (a.k.a. greenhouse gases) they can produce per year. If the companies go over their allotment, they will be able to buy “allocations” or credits from other companies that have managed to produce fewer emissions. President Obama conservatively estimates that about $646 billion worth of carbon credits will be auctioned in the first seven years; one of his top economic aides speculates that the real number might be twice or even three times that amount.

The feature of this plan that has special appeal to speculators is that the “cap” on carbon will be continually lowered by the government, which means that carbon credits will become more and more scarce with each passing year. Which means that this is a brand new commodities market where the main commodity to be traded is guaranteed to rise in price over time. The volume of this new market will be upwards of a trillion dollars annually; for comparison’s sake, the annual combined revenues of all electricity suppliers in the U.S. total $320 billion.

Goldman wants this bill. The plan is (1) to get in on the ground floor of paradigmshifting legislation, (2) make sure that they’re the profitmaking slice of that paradigm and (3) make sure the slice is a big slice. Goldman started pushing hard for capandtrade long ago, but things really ramped up last year when the firm spent $3.5 million to lobby climate issues. (One of their lobbyists at the time was none other than Patterson, now Treasury chief of staff.) Back in 2005, when Hank Paulson was chief of Goldman, he personally helped author the bank’s environmental policy, a document that contains some surprising elements for a firm that in all other areas has been consistently opposed to any sort of government regulation. Paulson’s report argued that “voluntary action alone cannot solve the climatechange problem.” A few years later, the bank’s carbon chief, Ken Newcombe, insisted that capandtrade alone won’t be enough to fix the climate problem and called for further public investments in research and development. Which is convenient, considering that Goldman made early investments in wind power (it bought a subsidiary called Horizon Wind Energy), renewable diesel (it is an investor in a firm called Changing World Technologies) and solar power (it partnered with BP Solar), exactly the kind of deals that will prosper if the government forces energy producers to use cleaner energy. As Paulson said at the time, “We’re not making those investments to lose money.”

The bank owns a 10 percent stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange, where the carbon credits will be traded. Moreover, Goldman owns a minority stake in Blue Source LLC, a Utahbased firm that sells carbon credits of the type that will be in great demand if the bill passes. Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, who is intimately involved with the planning of cap-and-trade, started up a company called Generation Investment Management with three former bigwigs from Goldman Sachs Asset Management, David Blood, Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris. Their business? Investing in carbon offsets. There’s also a $500 million Green Growth Fund set up by a Goldmanite to invest in greentech … the list goes on and on. Goldman is ahead of the headlines again, just waiting for someone to make it rain in the right spot. Will this market be bigger than the energyfutures market?

“Oh, it’ll dwarf it,” says a former staffer on the House energy committee.

[Click to continue reading The Great American Bubble Machine : Rolling Stone]

Suspicious, indeed.

Satanic Gift

Why are we privatizing cap and trade and not just making a straight tax on carbon emission?

Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap-and-trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private taxcollection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it’s even collected.

“If it’s going to be a tax, I would prefer that Washington set the tax and collect it,” says Michael Masters, the hedgefund director who spoke out against oilfutures speculation. “But we’re saying that Wall Street can set the tax, and Wall Street can collect the tax. That’s the last thing in the world I want. It’s just asinine.”

Amazon pulls a 1984 on its Kindle clients

Seth Anderson2 Comments


“Amazon Kindle Leather Cover (fits 2nd Generation Kindle)” (Amazon.com)

Sounds like an April Fools joke, but it isn’t.

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

…

As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.

You want to know the best part? The juicy, plump, dripping irony?

The author who was the victim of this Big Brotherish plot was none other than George Orwell. And the books were “1984” and “Animal Farm.”

[Click to continue reading Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others – Pogue’s Posts Blog – NYTimes.com]

This is a really really compelling reason to avoid purchasing a Kindle, no?

In George Orwell’s “1984,” government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the “memory hole.”

On Friday, it was “1984” and another Orwell book, “Animal Farm,” that were dropped down the memory hole — by Amazon.com.

In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.

An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. “When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers,” he said.

[Click to continue reading Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle Devices – NYTimes.com]

I don’t see how this can be covered in PR pixie-dust. Amazon is going to be the butt of a lot of jokes for a long time. Sneaking in and deleting 1984 of all books? Seems like there could have been a less obnoxious way to handle this, perhaps a note to those Kindle owners who had downloaded 1984? a coupon? Something, not just zapped down the memory hole…

We almost bought a Kindle a few months ago, thinking it might be a way to subscribe to periodicals without all the paper waste, no longer would we consider it. Annotating articles is a work-product, and Amazon could just remove it without asking.

Amazon’s published terms of service agreement for the Kindle does not appear to give the company the right to delete purchases after they have been made. It says Amazon grants customers the right to keep a “permanent copy of the applicable digital content.”

Retailers of physical goods cannot, of course, force their way into a customer’s home to take back a purchase, no matter how bootlegged it turns out to be. Yet Amazon appears to maintain a unique tether to the digital content it sells for the Kindle.

Justin Gawronski, a 17-year-old from the Detroit area, was reading “1984” on his Kindle for a summer assignment and lost all his notes and annotations when the file vanished. “They didn’t just take a book back, they stole my work,” he said.

Amazon hasn’t changed the wording of their terms of service, yet

Use of Digital Content. Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless otherwise expressly provided by Amazon.

[Click to continue reading Amazon.com: Help > Digital Products Help > Amazon Kindle Wireless Reading Device > Amazon Kindle Terms, Warranties, & Notices > License Agreement and Terms of Use]

Sinclair Broadcast Group nearing bankruptcy

Seth Anderson0 comment

Clear Channel is in a bit of financial trouble, and apparently so are their cohorts in “Republican-slanted news is the only news people want” category, Sinclair Broadcasting. Good, I hope they both become nothing more than a footnote to future histories of the George Bush administration.

Lonely Zenith

you’ll remember Sinclair Broadcast Group as the TV group that carried the anti-Kerry smear documentary in prime time, just before the November 2004 election. You may also remember them for the infamous “The Point” editorial segments during their stations’ newscasts — featuring the right wing rantings of corporate management.

Perhaps you even recall their experiment in “central casting” — firing most of the news departments at their local stations, and instead running “local” newscasts from all over the country out of a central studio in Baltimore.

Well, it now appears that Sinclair is on the verge of bankruptcy

…

Five years ago, Sinclair was also the darling of the right for running that anti-Kerry documentary on all 58 of their stations, and for conservative editorials on all of those stations as well. Those who saw ever greater consolidation as the road to maximizing corporate profits were enamored of Sinclair’s experiment with producing “local” newscasts for their stations from a central studio at corporate headquarters in Baltimore.

Unfortunately for Sinclair, viewers were unimpressed by “local” newscasts that were produced hundreds or even thousands of miles from home — and tuned out in droves. And the right wing editorials created negative publicity for Sinclair’s stations. Ultimately. the central studio for producing newscasts was shut down, and the right wing editorials were cancelled. And the group has, by and large, floundered in mediocrity ever since. So far as I’m aware, none of Sinclair’s 58 stations is a market leader, and few are even in the top three — when you run a group on the cheap and attempt to push a national agenda onto your local stations, the result is predictable: poor ratings and a weak identity in your local markets.

As a result, Sinclair was poorly positioned for dealing with the advertising downturn of the past 18 months.

[Click to continue reading Daily Kos: Sinclair Broadcast Group nearing bankruptcy]

Bwa-ha-ha! Couldn’t happen to nicer corporations1

Footnotes:
  1. and by nicer I mean of course the opposite. Sinclair Broadcasting is just scum, plain and simple. [↩]

The Great American Bubble Machine – Gasoline

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Matt Taibbi’s putdown of Goldman Sachs is finally online if you didn’t get a chance to read it yet. He places Goldman Sachs at the scene of several crime scenes, also known as stock market bubbles. For instance, the summer of 2008’s massive gas price increase. Reserves of crude oil were as high as they had ever been, demand was lower because of a world-wide economic slowdown, why then did gasoline prices exceed $4?

Gas At Last

Taibbi explains:

As is so often the case, there had been a Depression-era law in place designed specifically to prevent this sort of thing. The commodities market was designed in large part to help farmers: A grower concerned about future price drops could enter into a contract to sell his corn at a certain price for delivery later on, which made him worry less about building up stores of his crop. When no one was buying corn, the farmer could sell to a middleman known as a “traditional speculator,” who would store the grain and sell it later, when demand returned. That way, someone was always there to buy from the farmer, even when the market temporarily had no need for his crops.

In 1936, however, Congress recognized that there should never be more speculators in the market than real producers and consumers. If that happened, prices would be affected by something other than supply and demand, and price manipulations would ensue. A new law empowered the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — the very same body that would later try and fail to regulate credit swaps — to place limits on speculative trades in commodities. As a result of the CFTC’s oversight, peace and harmony reigned in the commodities markets for more than 50 years.

All that changed in 1991 when, unbeknownst to almost everyone in the world, a Goldmanowned commoditiestrading subsidiary called J. Aron wrote to the CFTC and made an unusual argument. Farmers with big stores of corn, Goldman argued, weren’t the only ones who needed to hedge their risk against future price drops — Wall Street dealers who made big bets on oil prices also needed to hedge their risk, because, well, they stood to lose a lot too.

This was complete and utter crap — the 1936 law, remember, was specifically designed to maintain distinctions between people who were buying and selling real tangible stuff and people who were trading in paper alone. But the CFTC, amazingly, bought Goldman’s argument. It issued the bank a free pass, called the “Bona Fide Hedging” exemption, allowing Goldman’s subsidiary to call itself a physical hedger and escape virtually all limits placed on speculators. In the years that followed, the commission would quietly issue 14 similar exemptions to other companies.

Now Goldman and other banks were free to drive more investors into the commodities markets, enabling speculators to place increasingly big bets. That 1991 letter from Goldman more or less directly led to the oil bubble in 2008, when the number of speculators in the market — driven there by fear of the falling dollar and the housing crash — finally overwhelmed the real physical suppliers and consumers. By 2008, at least three quarters of the activity on the commodity exchanges was speculative, according to a congressional staffer who studied the numbers — and that’s likely a conservative estimate. By the middle of last summer, despite rising supply and a drop in demand, we were paying $4 a gallon every time we pulled up to the pump.

[Click to continue reading about the gasoline bubble: The Great American Bubble Machine : Rolling Stone]

Read the entire article here

Minions of Rupert Murdoch illegally hacked 3000 cellphone accounts

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Either Rupert Murdoch is too close a friend of most US media conglomerate CEOs, or else they are scared of incurring Murdoch’s wrath. What other explanation for the lack of coverage of the juicy Guardian UK scoop regarding Murdoch illegality?

But so far the Guardian, which last Wednesday broke the news of how two newspapers belonging to Rupert Murdoch illegally hacked into the mobile phone accounts of “two or three thousand” people, as well as “gaining unlawful access to confidential personal data, including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemized phone bills [belonging to] Cabinet ministers, MPs, actors and sports stars” has the story pretty much to itself.

On the surface this is surprising. Here, after all, is a story that combines boldface names like Gwyneth Paltrow, Elle MacPherson, Nigella Lawson and George Michael with the official spokesman of the Conservative Party (Andy Coulson, media strategist for Tory leader David Cameron, was editor of the News of the World when the paper allegedly paid private investigators for access to the celebrities’ accounts) and Rupert Murdoch, the world’s most powerful media baron. The BBC put the story at the top of its world news lineup, and followed up the next day with a story about how some of famous targets were contemplating lawsuits. So why has the Guardian’s incredible scoop turned out to be a 2 day wonder?

[Click to continue reading  The Dog That Didn’t Bark]

Quite curious, no?

Rupert Murdoch’s News Group News papers has paid out more than £1m to settle legal cases that threatened to reveal evidence of his journalists’ repeated involvement in the use of criminal methods to get stories.

The payments secured secrecy over out-of-court settlements in three cases that threatened to expose evidence of Murdoch journalists using private investigators who illegally hacked into the mobile phone messages of numerous public figures as well as gaining unlawful access to confidential personal data, including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemised phone bills. Cabinet ministers, MPs, actors and sports stars were all targets of the private investigators.

Today, the Guardian reveals details of the suppressed evidence, which may open the door to hundreds more legal actions by victims of News Group, the Murdoch company that publishes the News of the World and the Sun, as well as provoking police inquiries into reporters who were involved and the senior executives responsible for them.

[Click to continue reading Murdoch papers paid out £1m to gag phone-hacking victims | Media |The Guardian]

such as

When the high court last summer ordered the News of the World to pay damages to Max Mosley for secretly filming him with prostitutes, the paper was furious. In an angry leader column, it insisted that public figures must maintain standards. “It is not for the powerful and the influential to run to the courts to gag newspapers from publishing stories that are TRUE,” it said. “This is all about the public’s right to know.”

Even as those words were being published, lawyers and senior executives from News International’s subsidiary News Group were preparing to run to court to gag Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, who was suing the News of the World for its undisclosed involvement in the illegal interception of messages left on his mobile phone.

By persuading the high court to seal the file and by paying Taylor more than £400,000 damages in exchange for his silence, News Group prevented the public from knowing anything about the hundreds of pages of evidence which had been disclosed in Taylor’s case, revealing potentially criminal behaviour by journalists on its payroll. It also protected some powerful and influential people from the implications of that evidence.

[Click to continue reading  Trail of hacking and deceit under nose of Tory PR chief guardian.co.uk ]

Red Light Night

names like:

Scotland Yard disclosed only a limited amount of its evidence to Taylor. The Guardian understands that the full police file shows that several thousand public figures were targeted by investigators, including, during one month in 2006: John Prescott, then deputy prime minister; Tessa Jowell, then responsible for the media as secretary of state for culture; Boris Johnson, then the Conservative spokesman on higher education; Gwyneth Paltrow, after she had given birth to her son; George Michael, who had been seen looking tired at the wheel of his car; and Jade Goody.

When Goodman, the News of the World’s royal editor, was jailed for hacking into the mobile phones of Palace staff, News International said he had been acting without their knowledge. One of the investigators working for the paper, Glenn Mulcaire, was also charged with hacking the phones of the Lib Dem MP Simon Hughes, celebrity PR Max Clifford, model Elle MacPherson and football agent Sky Andrew as well as Taylor. At the time, the News of the World claimed to know nothing about the hacking of these targets, but Taylor has now proved that to be untrue in his case. Others who are believed to have been possible targets include the Scottish politician Tommy Sheridan, who has previously accused the News of the World of bugging his car; Jeffrey Archer, whose perjury was exposed by the paper; and Sven-Göran Eriksson, whose sex life became a tabloid obsession.

Kiva Loan Number 13

Seth Anderson0 comment

Atsu Mlaga from Togo has fully repaid a Kiva loan

Location: Avetonou, Togo

Repayment Term: 7 months (more info)

Activity: Agriculture   Repayment Schedule: Monthly

Loan Use: To buy fertilizers   Currency Exchange Loss: Covered       Default Protection: Covered

Atsu Mlaga is a rice grower in Avetonou. He is 49 years old, married, and the father of five. He would like to use this loan to buy fertilizers to increase his yields and also to hire sharecroppers, in order to expand his arable land. He is counting in this opportunity to improve his family’s living conditions.

(click to continue reading Kiva – Atsu Mlaga from Togo has fully repaid a Kiva loan.)

Country: Togo
Avg Annual Income: $1,700
Currency: Communauté Financière Africaine Francs BCEAO (XOF)
Exchange Rate: 470.5172 XOF = 1 USD

Kiva Loan Number 14

Seth Anderson0 comment

Moussa Innocent Ngirabega from Rwanda has fully repaid a Kiva loan

Location: Kicukiro/kigali, Rwanda   Repayment Term: 10 months (more info)

Activity: Clothing Sales

Repayment Schedule: Monthly

Loan Use: To buy more clothes

Currency Exchange Loss: Possible       Default Protection: Covered

Greetings from Ngirabega Moussa Innocent, a 38-year-old married man with four children aged nine, seven, four and two years old, and one dependent orphan, who is sixteen years old. His family live in the Kicukiro district of Kigali city, the capital of Rwanda.

Moussa Innocent owns a plot in Nyarugenge market where he sells clothes, particularly for women and girls. Innocent started this business sixteen years ago. He is seeking his first loan worth 500,000 RWF from Kiva partner, Vision Finance Company, in order to buy more clothes to expand his store. Before he received this loan, he was earning a monthly salary of 150,000 RWF, and from increased profit he will have more savings and reinvest in his business.

(click to continue reading Kiva – Moussa Innocent Ngirabega from Rwanda has fully repaid a Kiva loan.)

Country: Rwanda Avg Annual Income: $1,000 Currency: Rwanda Francs (RWF) Exchange Rate: 568.2000 RWF = 1 USD

Kiva Loan Number 10

Seth Anderson0 comment

– Flor De Maria from Peru has fully repaid a Kiva loan

Location: Ayacucho, Peru

Repayment Term: 8 months (more info)

Activity: Retail   Repayment Schedule: Monthly

Loan Use: To buy wine and pecans

Currency Exchange Loss: Covered       Default Protection: Covered

Flor de Maria is a member of the community bank “Luz Divina”. She is 50 years old, divorce and has 4 children; Flor was born in the city of Ica and works as a nurse at the City Hospital. Flor de Maria sells pecans and wine to employees of various institutions. She is asking for a loan of $675 that will be invested in the purchase of wines and pecans. Flor dreams are to expand her business, to have a pecan’s crop and export them.

Translated from Spanish by Adriana Pierce, Kiva Volunteer

Flor de Maria es socia del Banco Comunal Luz Divina. Flor de Maria es separada, tiene 50 años y 4 hijos, natural de la ciudad de Ica, de profesión enfermera y trabaja en el hospital de la ciudad, Flor de Maria vende vinos y pecanas que adquiere en la ciudad de Ica, sus ventas los realiza a los trabajadores de diferentes instituciones. Flor de Maria necesita un préstamo de 2000 soles dinero que será invertido en la compra de vinos y pecanas. Los sueños de Flor de Maria son ampliar su negocio, tener su pecanal y vender al extranjero.

(click to continue reading Kiva – Flor De Maria from Peru has fully repaid a Kiva loan.)

Country: Peru
Avg Annual Income: $6,715
Currency: Peru Nuevos Soles (PEN)
Exchange Rate:

Talking Points Memo Will Expand Staff

Seth Anderson0 comment

Good news, as TPM is one of the best blogs out there, and one of the few that consistently does its own reporting in addition to sifting through the political reporting of others. Very high signal to noise ratio1

The political news Web site Talking Points Memo this weekend completed a round of investment, of $500,000 to $1 million. The move is intended to increase the number of employees, to roughly 20, from the current 11, in the next 10 months.

The financing is the first part of a three-year plan to increase the site’s staff to 60 employees, Joshua Micah Marshall, the site’s founder, said in an interview at his offices on West 20th Street in New York.

He would not identify his investors, who he said were angel investors, not venture capitalists. One name that has been made public is that of Marc Andreessen, who is investing personally, not on behalf of his new venture capital fund.

“We could have gotten a higher dollar amount — I didn’t think we needed it — but it would have come with strings attached,” Mr. Marshall said. “It would not have been best for the site.”

[From Investment Will Expand Staff at Talking Points Memo – NYTimes.com]

Footnotes:
  1. as opposed to webzines like the Huffington Post which can’t decide if it wants to be a tabloid or a serious journal [↩]

Kiva Loan Number 12

Seth Anderson0 comment

Ganna Levitskaya from Ukraine has fully repaid a Kiva loan

Location: Nadvirna, Ukraine

Repayment Term: 12 months (more info)

Activity: Retail   Repayment Schedule: Monthly

Loan Use: To purchase mineral fertilizer

Ganna is married with four grown children: a son, three daughters and six grandkids. Her whole family lives in Nadvirna, Western Ukraine. She offers various goods for sale. Ganna owns two vending kiosks at two different local markets – central marketplace and farming supply market. Moreover, she has just bought a small store in a village to offer fresh produce to residents of that neighborhood. Ganna started small about 20 years ago. She worked hard to keep her business running. Lending services have helped her grow and expand her small venture. Currently, Ganna has about 30,000 Grivnyas in the vending business. Her net monthly profit is about 6,000 Grivnyas.

Ganna is requesting a loan of 16,000 Grivnyas to purchase mineral fertilizer wholesale for further retail sale at one of her vending locations. She has much experience working in the sphere of trade and commerce for over 37 years. After Ganna retired, she ventured to launch her small vending business and hasn’t been sorry about it. Today her business is the main source of income for her family and kids.

On the photo, Ganna is pictured at one of her vending locations where she offers clothing items for retail sale.

(click to continue reading Kiva – Ganna Levitskaya from Ukraine has fully repaid a Kiva loan.)

Country: Ukraine
Avg Annual Income: $8,000
Currency: Ukraine Hryvnia (UAH)
Exchange Rate: 7.6670 UAH = 1 USD

Chicago Children’s Museum move stalls out

Seth Anderson2 Comments

About a year ago, we had a flurry of posts opposing the move1 /2 /3 /4 /5 /6 /7 of the Chicago Children’s Museum from Navy Pier to a semi-subterranean location in a corner of Grant Park.

Daley Bicentennial Plaza

Just a year after winning hard-fought City Council permission to move to Grant Park, the Chicago Children’s Museum has hit a financial wall, raising a real prospect that its highly controversial new facility in the park’s northeast corner may never be built.

A moribund economy now may have a better chance of blocking the project than lawsuits by parks activists and neighborhood opponents. Fundraising has foundered while projected costs have climbed by tens of millions to $150 million or more, Crain’s has learned. Sources close to the project say odds now are 50-50 at best that the Grant Park plan will proceed.

As a result, the museum is considering its options, including downsizing the proposed facility, getting a cash infusion from the Chicago Park District or extending the lease on its current space at Navy Pier as far as 2025.

…

Museum board Chairman Gigi Pritzker, who was not available for comment, could tap her personal fortune to bail out the project, were she so inclined. But short of that, signs are multiplying that the proposed facility is turning into one more headache for Mayor Richard M. Daley, who spent considerable political capital pushing the museum plan through the council in June 2008 over the opposition of the local alderman, Brendan Reilly (42nd).

According to the museum’s latest available income-tax return, filed in May with Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s charitable trust division, the museum had $28.1 million in “pledges receivable” as of June 30, 2008 — just $1 million more than it did a year earlier. Much of that is believed to be a continuing naming-rights commitment for the proposed facility from Northbrook-based Allstate Corp., which says it still backs the project.

[Click to read more details of Museum move stalls out | Crain’s Chicago Business]

Of course, wealthy heiress Gigi Pritzker could fund the construction out of her own vast wealth should she choose to, since she was one of the driving forces behind the whole fiasco, but the whole point was to get taxpayers to pay for the museum’s new location. Kind of like one of those sports stadium deals we fulminate against now and then. The Chicago Children’s Museum is a private museum, thus any profits collected will remain in the museum, and not the City of Chicago.

Footnotes:
  1. for instance: Setback for the CCM juggernaut [↩]
  2. or: Fight for Chicago’s treasured lakefront [↩]
  3. or: Subterranean museum [↩]
  4. or: The Grant Park land-grab [↩]
  5. or: Chicago astroturf alert [↩]
  6. or: Keep childrens museum out of Grant Park [↩]
  7. or: Daley vs Reilly [↩]

Dan Froomkin hired by The Huffington Post

Seth Anderson0 comment

As expected, Dan Froomkin, after being unceremoniously fired by the Washington Post, landed a new high-profile gig: The Huffington Post. According to Glenn Greenwald, Dan Froomkin will have a staff of four reporters, an assistant editor, and will publish at least two articles a week for The Huffington Post’s front page section.

Benjamins back

Though the precise reasons for Froomkin’s firing by The Post remain unclear, there’s no question that his penchant for aggressively criticizing establishment media behavior escalated tensions. In recent months, The Post spiked columns of his that contained pointed media critiques. In the wake of his firing, Post defenders misleadingly focused on (and then rebutted) the obvious strawman argument that Froomkin was fired for being “liberal.” But that, in fact, was something virtually nobody claimed.  Instead, it was Froomkin’s practice of exposing the corrupt practices of establishment journalists (both by his words and deeds) that made him such a unique presence at The Post. Pioneering press critic Bob Somerby put it this way:

Dan Froomkin criticizes the press corps. In the press corps, if you’re a liberal, that just isn’t done. . . . If there’s one thing you’ll never see [E.J.] Dionne or [Eugene] Robinson do, it’s criticize their cohort—the coven, the clan. . . But in the mainstream press corps, liberals don’t discuss the mainstream press. That’s the price of getting those (very good) jobs. It’s also the price of holding them.

Indeed, nothing eliminates the possibility of establishment journalist jobs more quickly or decisively than criticizing the establishment media as being too sycophantic to political power, manipulated by the Right, and, in general, slothfully devoted to doing nothing other than uncritically repeating what “both sides” say (by stark contrast, the tired right-wing grievance about The Liberal Media is not just permitted but welcomed; Bill Kristol spent years depicting The New York Times as an anti-American, Terrorist-loving beacon of left-wing bias, only to be hired by them as a full-time columnist, while right-wing polemicists who voice similarly trite claims about the media — Charles Krauthammer, Jonah Goldberg, Bill Bennett — are routinely heard in the very venues they attack). As Brad DeLong documented in a thorough retrospective on Froomkin’s firing, the first attempt at The Post to remove Froomkin from his status as “reporter” was driven by right-wing complaints that the content of his column was inappropriate for a reporter.

[Click to read more Dan Froomkin hired by The Huffington Post – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com]

Benjamins

I can’t claim to be an unequivocal fan of the Huffington Post business model, but at least they are trying. I hope Arianna Huffington will allow Froomkin the free reign to criticize the Washington press that his beat requires, despite Ms. Huffington being so chummy with so many of them.

Also, will there be a customized Froomkin RSS feed? I’ve tried subscribing to The Huffington Post’s RSS feed before, and soon was overwhelmed with way more information than my brain could handle.