The latest from The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com
- Les Leopold: One Year After Lehman: Another Crash Coming?
- Dan Agin: Dangerous Hours: Toxic Tap Water and the Fetus
- Chip Ward: Red Snow Warning: The End of Welfare Water and the Drying of the West
- Tamara Conniff: Why We Are Subjected to Beatlemania, Again
| Les Leopold: One Year After Lehman: Another Crash Coming? | Top |
| "What I think will change, what I think was an aberration, was a situation where corporate profits in the financial sector were such a heavy part of our overall profitability over the last decade.... That means that more talent, more resources will be going to other sectors of the economy. I actually think that's healthy. We don't want every single college grad with mathematical aptitude to become a derivatives trader. We want some of them to go into engineering, and we want some of them to be going into computer design." President Obama, May 2, 2009, Reuters ( http://www.reuters.com/article/bondsNews/idUSN0236208120090502 ) Obama's statement seems so passé. Now the stock market is rising. Our 401ks no longer are on life-support. The financial sector is showing resilience. And the Great Recession is ending. Then why should we fear another crash? Maybe the most sophisticated economic models all point upward, but our sense of history should be flashing warning lights. There are a few enduring lessons we can't avoid: any nation that fails to find enough work for its people, and that doesn't rein it its obscene distribution of income, is courting catastrophe . Consider these problem areas: 1. As Larry Summers recently said, unemployment will remain, "unacceptably high." (see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/11/summers-unemployment-will_n_284293.html .) Truer words were never spoken. He's telling us that the recovery will be so anemic that current massive job shortfall is likely to continue for years. According to the most recent government numbers, there are about 29 million Americans out of work or forced into part-time work. If that continues, as Summers predicts, consumer demand will be low and misery for millions will be high. That's bad economics. 2. We have done almost nothing about financial institutions that are too big to fail. Supposedly we're supervising them more carefully. But all the evidence suggest that they are off and running into a new round of fantasy finance. Goldman Sachs already is selling repackaged synthetic securities, precisely the kind that crashed the system last time around, (and Moody's again is rating them AAA.) Large banks are making a move into "Death Bonds," finding new ways to skim profits by buying up and securitizing life insurance policies of the elderly and ill. (see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/les-leopold/please-president-obama-st_b_279357.html . ) We could stop this madness either by nationalizing the largest institutions entirely, or breaking them down so that they truly were small enough to fail. Trust-busting Teddy Roosevelt would have understood what to do. But in today's Washington such a discussion is off limits. 3. There still are no controls on the specialty derivatives that caused the last crash and likely to contribute to the next one. In fact, I've been told by reliable sources that derivative traders are pooling a bit of their upcoming bonus money to fund a billion dollar lobbying effort to make sure no serious reforms take place. 4. Despite President Obama's insightful words last May, nothing has been done to shrink Wall Street's size, let alone its political power. The Pay Czar was supposed to crack the whip on outrageous compensation packages. Instead, Mr. Czar immediately said that it's ok for Andrew J. Hall, an oil speculator, to receive $100 million in trading fees from CitiGroup, a bank which we basically own. What a Wall Street recruiting poster for new math whizzes! 5. Most importantly, we've failed to address the major cause of the entire mess: the underlying distribution of income and wealth. The fantasy finance casino and its bubbles grew from the fact that the super-rich accumulated too much capital after years and years of tax "reforms" that gushed money to the top. When they ran out of real world investments, their capital rushed to Wall Street's speculative securities. And they are doing it again. You can't limit catastrophic speculation without returning excess capital to society. And there is plenty of excess: The latest tax data shows we have the worst income distribution since 1929. Not only are we failing to learn from history, we are begging to repeat it. The failure of Washington to clamp down on Wall Street is also creating a very negative political feedback loop between government and the public. Most Americans are furious about Wall Street's outsized pay and profits. They are also furious about the inability of the administration and Congress to act. There's a growing sense that the rich and powerful are in control of financial policy and of the political process. This fuels anti-government anger which undermines the things we need government to do: raise taxes on the super-rich; put in place a windfall profits taxes on Wall Street; cap outrageous financial compensation packages; and enact public programs and national industrial policies that create real jobs for the unemployed. Given the failure to enact serious reforms, it wouldn't take much to push the economy off the cliff again: a severe pandemic flu, a terrorist attack, a major weather event or an unexpected failure of a company that is too big too fail could set off a major economic relapse. I sure hope I'm wrong. I hope we're not again betting our future in the fantasy finance casino. I hope the miracle of the markets will lead to a massive boom in jobs and incomes for everyone. I hope everyone's 401ks will prosper. And I hope President Obama will succeed. But as Wall Street recycles the money we have given it to lobby against any and all reforms, it's obvious that hope is not enough. We also need a very strong dose of audacity. Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It , Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009. More on Barack Obama | |
| Dan Agin: Dangerous Hours: Toxic Tap Water and the Fetus | Top |
| Thanks to the New York Times , it seems we're beginning a national concern about toxic water, a fearsome chapter in our national Book of Devils -- toxic air, toxic food, toxic life styles, and now toxic drinking water. Of course the people who hawk for various industries will tell us it's all a mirage, just eat, drink, and be merry -- keep the cash registers ringing and all will be well. Regulation by government? Forget about it. That's socialism, they tell us. The hawkers hawk the mantra even when their own children are at risk. That's the way it is, our American insanity. So far the focus is on children already born, hardly a word about the unborn, the embryos, the fetuses, the most vulnerable of the vulnerable. Yes, the embryo and fetus are extremely vulnerable, and the consequences are chilling. The human egg cell (ovum) is the largest cell in the body, on average 145 microns in diameter (average human hair width is 100 microns, or 0.1 millimeters), which means it's visible to the naked eye. The ovum is about 15 times larger than ordinary cells, such as skin cells and liver cells, but it's still no larger than a dot, smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. The profound glory of human reproduction, the wonder of wonders, is that under the right circumstances over about 277 days of gestation, this biological dot is capable of turning itself into a 7-pound infant ready to scream at you to look smart and give it some food and attention. But why is prenatal development so vulnerable to damage? With the fusion of a sperm cell and an ovum at fertilization, the phase of the human life cycle of prenatal development starts the long and wondrous journey from a single cell (the ovum) to the trillions of specialized and organized cells of a new individual at birth. What we're looking at is a cascade of many thousands of events, a cascade with special vulnerabilities at special times -- and the possibility for several vulnerabilities at any single time. A cascade is a succession of sequentially interdependent events, each event both triggered by the event preceding it and itself acting as a trigger for the next event. But the cascade of prenatal development is more complicated. It involves not only multiple events occurring and interacting at any instant before the next set of multiple events is triggered, but also multiple interactions with the local cellular environment. And these local interactions can themselves be necessary triggers in the cascade. The ovum starts with a genome. Throughout development, as the number of cells derived from the ovum continues to increase, the genome in each cell is the same, but which genes are turned on (expressed) changes in time, producing specialized (differentiated) cells or new triggers for subsequent events -- release or take-up of special biochemical entities, rearrangements of cells into tissues and organs, migrations of cells to new locations in the developing embryo and fetus, appearance of specialized cell organelles, and so on. The cascade of development is essentially chemical, involving not just a few kinds of molecules but hundreds of thousands of kinds of molecules, organizing, rearranging, moving from one place to another, enhancing (catalyzing) the synthesis of themselves and other kinds of molecules. The kinds of molecules in the cascade are so numerous that we've hardly yet catalogued even a small fraction of them. Biochemists estimate that a single cell may contain as many as a hundred thousand different proteins, carbohydrates, and lipids, and no one anywhere has yet identified more than a small fraction of that number. The cascade of prenatal development is thus a cascade of gene expression events, chemical events, and cellular events -- and the whole mix moves forward by both internal triggers and triggers brought about by interactions with the local cellular environment. So the first important cause of prenatal vulnerability is complexity: the sheer complexity at many levels of prenatal development means that an enormous number of different and important process points are available for disruptive effects. Another important cause of prenatal vulnerability is pace, the high rate of cellular proliferation necessary to transform a single microscopic cell (the fertilized ovum) into a 6- or 7-pound newborn infant consisting of trillions of cells specialized and arranged to constitute the human body externally and internally -- albeit in the small of the infant. For example, it's estimated that in the developing brain and nervous system of the prenatal human, about 250,000 new neurons are generated each minute at the peak of cell proliferation during gestation. The high rate of cell proliferation means a high rate of metabolism, chemical synthesis, cellular rearrangements and migrations, conversion of maternal nutrients into fetal cells and tissues, and so on. In prenatal development, everything is happening rapidly. If any special process has its rate changed up or down by an unscheduled impact with the local environment, the consequence may be anything from a subtle bending of development in one direction or another to a lethal corruption that kills the embryo or fetus. In general, the metabolism of embryos is different from that of adults, and the fetal construction of an organ can be affected by chemicals that have no apparent damaging effect on the normal adult functioning of that organ. The third major cause of prenatal vulnerability involves size and simple physics. If a small permeable mass -- a cluster of cells, for example -- is exposed to a chemical, that chemical can reach all parts of the mass quickly by simple random diffusion. With larger masses, the diffusion time to reach all parts increases dramatically. But as late as the 6th week of gestation, the human embryo is still only a quarter of an inch in length and has no developed circulatory system, and any freely permeating chemical that gets into the embryo by any route will quickly diffuse throughout the embryo to affect every embryonic cell. Throughout the embryonic period, until the 10th week of gestation, the situation is not much better. At the 10th week--when we begin to call the developing embryo a "fetus" -- we're dealing with an embryo/fetus only about two inches in length, indeed recognizable as a vaguely human form, but still small enough for simple diffusion to quickly distribute any permeating chemical entity throughout its body. Small size facilitating distribution by simple diffusion is one of the reasons the early weeks of prenatal development are so vulnerable to certain chemical effects. The other important reason is that those early effects can be multiplied as the cascade of development proceeds. For example, there's mounting evidence that a critical window of vulnerability for fetal alcohol spectrum disorder occurs very early--during and shortly after the blastocyst stage--and that alcohol affects early gene expression in the developing embryo. It appears that concentrations of alcohol too low to produce gross morphological disruptions may still cause subtle changes in the connections between nerve cells in the developing brain. Evidence indicates that among the results of those changes are cognitive deficits in children whose mothers drank alcohol during pregnancy. The high vulnerability of embryos and fetuses to toxic chemicals is known to every biologist on the planet. Maybe now it will be known to everyone else and something will be done to reduce these insidious dangers to unborn children. We will see what happens. (Portions of the above text are adapted from Dan Agin: More Than Genes: What Science Can Tell Us About Toxic Chemicals, Development, and the Risk to Our Children . Oxford University Press. October 2009. ) | |
| Chip Ward: Red Snow Warning: The End of Welfare Water and the Drying of the West | Top |
| Crossposted with Tomdispatch.com Pink snow is turning red in Colorado. Here on the Great American Desert -- specifically Utah's slickrock portion of it where I live -- hot n' dry means dust. When frequent high winds sweep across our increasingly arid landscape, redrock powder is lifted up and carried hundreds of miles eastward until it settles on the broad shoulders of Colorado's majestic mountains, giving the snowpack there a pink hue. Some call it watermelon snow. Friends who ski into the backcountry of the San Juan and La Plata mountain ranges in western Colorado tell me that the pink-snow phenomenon has lately been giving way to redder hues, so thick and frequent are the dust storms that roll in these days. A cross-section of a typical Colorado snowbank last winter revealed alternating dirt and snow layers that looked like a weird wilderness version of our flag, red and white stripes alternating against the sky's blue field. The Forecast: Dust Followed by Mud Here in the lowlands, we, too, are experiencing the drying of the West in new dusty ways. Our landscapes are often covered with what we jokingly refer to as "adobe rain" -- when rain falls through dust, spattering windows or laundry hung out to dry with brown stains. After a dust "event" this past spring, I wandered through the lot of a car dealership in Grand Junction, Colorado, where the only color seemingly available was light tan. All those previously shiny, brightly painted cars had turned drab. I had to squint to read price stickers under opaque windows. All of this is more than a mere smudge on our postcard-pretty scenery: Colorado's red snow is a warning that the climatological dynamic in the arid West is changing dramatically. Think of it as a harbinger -- and of more than simply a continuing version of the epic drought we've been experiencing these past several years. The West is as dry as the East is wet, a vast and arid landscape of high plains and deserts broken by abrupt mountain ranges and deep canyons. Unlike eastern and midwestern America, where there are myriad rivers, streams, lakes, and giant underground lakes, or aquifers, to draw on, we depend on snowpack for about 90% of our fresh water. The Colorado River, running from its headwaters in the snow-loaded mountains of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, is the principal water source for those states, and downstream for Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and southern California as well. While being developed into a crucial water resource, the Colorado became the most dammed, piped, legislated, and litigated river in America. Its development spawned a major federal bureaucracy, the Bureau of Reclamation, as well as a hundred state agencies, water districts, and private contractors to keep it plumbed and distributed. Taken altogether, this complex infrastructure of dams, pipelines, and reservoirs proved to be the most expensive and ambitious public works project in the nation's history, but it enabled the Southwest states and southern California to boom and bloom. The downside is that we are now dangerously close to the limits of what the Colorado River can provide, even in the very best of weather scenarios, and the weather is being neither so friendly nor cooperative these days. If Portland soon becomes as warm as Los Angeles and Seattle as warm as Sacramento, as some forecasters now predict, expect Las Vegas and Phoenix to be more like Death Valley. If the Colorado River shut down tomorrow, there might be two, at most three, years of stored water in its massive reservoirs to keep Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and dozens of other cities that depend on it alive. That margin for survival gets thinner with each passing year and with each rise in the average temperature. Imagine a day in the not so distant future when the water finally runs out in one of those cities -- a kind of slow-motion Katrina in reverse, a city not flooded but parched, baked, blistered, and abandoned. If the Colorado River system failed to deliver, the impact on the nation's agriculture and economy would be comparable to an asteroid strike. Too Much Too Soon, Then Too Little Too Late Hot and dry is bad enough; chaotic weather only adds to our problems. As we practice it today, agriculture depends on cheap energy, a stable climate, and abundant water. Those last two are intimately mixed. Water has to be not just abundant, but predictable and reliable in its flow. And the words "predictable," "reliable," and "water" go together ever less comfortably in our neck of the woods. Here's the problem. Despite the existence of the Colorado River's famous monster-dams like Hoover in Nevada and Glen Canyon in Utah and the mega-reservoirs -- Lake Mead and Lake Powell -- that gather behind them, we really count on the vast snowfields that store fresh water in our mountains to melt and trickle down to us slowly enough that our water lasts from the first spring runoff until the end of the fall growing season. Dust-covered snowpack, however, absorbs more heat, melts sooner, and often runs down into streams and rivers before our farmers can use it. In addition, as the temperature rises, spring storms that once brought storable snow are now more likely to come to us as rain, which only makes the situation worse. This shift in the way our water reaches us is crucial in the West. Not only is snowpack shrinking as much as 25% in the Cascades of the Northwest and 15% in the snowfields of the Rocky Mountains, but it's arriving in the lowlands as much as a month earlier than usual. Farmers can't just tell their crops to adjust to the new pattern. Even California's rich food basket, the Central Valley, fed by one of the most complex and effective irrigation infrastructures in the country, is ultimately dependent on Sierra snowpack and predictable runoff. We need a new term for what's happening -- perhaps "perturbulence" would describe the new helter-skelter weather pattern. In my Utah backyard, for example, this past May was unusually hot and unusually cold. At one point, we went from freezing to 80 degrees and back again in three short days. Not so long ago, seasonal changes came on here as if controlled by a dimmer switch, the shift from one season to the next being gradual. Now it's more like a toggle switch being abruptly shut on and off. To add to the confusion, our summer monsoon season arrived six weeks early this year. A surprisingly wet spring seemed like good news amid the bigger picture of drought, but it turned out to mean that farmers had a hard time getting into their muddy fields to plant. Then when spring showers were so quickly followed by summer storms, some crops were actually suppressed, according to local gardeners and farmers. The West at Your Doorstep? Our soggy spring and summer, however, masked an epic drought that has touched almost every corner of the nation west of the Mississippi at one time or another over the past decade. Southern Texas right now is blazingly bone-dry. Seattle had a turn with record-breaking temperatures earlier this summer. In New Mexico, the drought has been less dramatic -- more like a steady drumbeat year after year. A trip to the edge of Lake Powell in the canyon country of southern Utah in June revealed the bigger picture. A ten-story-high "bathtub ring" -- the band of white mineral deposits left behind on the reservoir's walls as the waterline dropped -- stretches the almost 200-mile length of the reservoir. Recreational boat users, hoping against hope that the reservoir will refill, have regularly been issuing predictions about a return to "normal" levels, but it just hasn't happened. Side canyons, once submerged under 100 feet of water, have now been under the sun long enough to have turned into lush, mature habitats filled with willows and brush, birds and pack rats. A view from a cliff high above the once bustling, now ghostlike Hite Marina on the receding eastern side of Lake Powell shows the futility of chasing the retreating shoreline with cement: the water's edge and a much-extended boat-launching ramp now have 100 acres of dried mud, grass, and fresh shrubs between them. After decades of frantic urban development and suburban sprawl across the states that draw water from the Colorado, demand has simply outstripped supply and it's only getting worse as the heat builds. Not surprisingly, a debate is building over what to do if there isn't enough water to fill both Lakes Powell and Mead, the principal reservoirs along the Colorado. Should the seven states that depend on the river live with two half-full reservoirs or a single full one, and if only one, which one? River managers have now realized that both massive "lakes" were always giant evaporation ponds in the middle of a desert and only more so as average temperatures climb. There is no sense in having twice as much water surface as necessary, which means twice as much evaporation, too. Given the stakes, the debate over what to do if there isn't enough water is playing out like the preview to the all-out water war to come when the reality actually hits. Westerners are well aware that, as always, there will be winners and losers. The constituency for Lake Mead will no doubt prevail because of its proximity to Las Vegas and Phoenix, two cities that grew bloated on cheap but, as it has turned out, temporary water from the dammed Colorado. Already desperate to make up for their lost liquid, they will surely muster all their power and influence to keep the water flowing. Las Vegas is now aiming to tap into an aquifer under the Snake Valley that straddles eastern Nevada and western Utah. Recently, a rancher friend who ekes out a precarious living there mentioned the obvious to me: the dusty surface of that arid high desert is barely held in place by a thin covering of brush, sage, and grass. Drop the water table even a few more inches and it all dies. The dust storms that would be generated by a future parched landscape like that might make it all the way to the Midwest or even farther. After decades in which Easterners ritualistically visited the American West, the West may be traveling east. Those we pay to look ahead are now jockeying like mad for position in a future water-short West. A new era of ever more pipelines, wells, and dams is being dreamed up by the private contractors and bureaucrats swelling up like so many ticks on the construction and maintenance budgets of the West's heavily subsidized water-delivery infrastructure. It is unlikely, however, that their dreams will be fully realized. The low-hanging fruit -- the river canyons that could easily be dammed -- were picked decades ago and, unlike in the good ol' days when water simply ran towards money, citizens of our western states are now far more aware of the ecological costs of big dams and ever more awake to the unfolding consequences of dependence on unreliable water sources. Making more water available never led to prudent use. Instead, cheap and easy water led to such foolishness as putting a golf course with expanses of irrigated green in every desert community, not to speak of rice and cotton farming in the Arizona desert. Rip Your Strip All of this is now changing. Fast. The airways across the Southwest are loaded these days with public service announcements urging us to conserve our water. "Rip your strip" may be a phrase unknown in much of the country, but everyone here knows exactly what it means: tear out the lawn between your front yard and the street and put in drought-resistant native plants instead. Everyone is increasingly expected to do his or her part. In my little town of Torrey, Utah, we voluntarily ration our domestic water on weekends when the tourists are in town, taking long showers and spraying the dust and mud off their tires. Xeriscaping -- landscaping with drought-resistant native plants instead of thirsty grasses and ornamental shrubs -- is now fashionable as well as necessary, even required, in some western towns, a clear sign that at long last we get it. Yes, we live in a desert. Unfortunately, it's unlikely that this sort of thing, useful as it is, will be nearly enough. Our challenge is only marginally to take shorter showers. After all, 80% of Utah's water goes into agriculture, mostly to grow alfalfa to feed beef cows raised by ranchers heavily subsidized by federal grants and tax write-offs. They graze their cows almost for free on public lands and have successfully resisted even modest increases in fees to cover the costs of maintaining the allotments they use. Utah legislators passed a law last session that gives agriculture precedence when there's not enough water to go around. Consider that a clear signal that the agricultural interests in the state don't have any intention of changing their water-profligate ways without a fight. Sure, everyone agrees that we have to change, but we in the West are fond of focusing blame on personal bad habits that waste water -- and they couldn't be more real -- rather than corporate habits that waste so much more. The fact is that we Westerners have never paid anything like what our water truly costs and we lack disincentives to waste water and incentives to conserve it. Behind all that fuss you hear from us about the damn government and how independent-minded we Westerners are, is a long history of massive dam and pipeline projects financed by the American taxpayer, featuring artificially low prices and not a few crony-run boondoggles. Call it welfare water. The Ruins in Our Future A visit this summer to the most famous ruins in the West, the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde National Park and hollowed out palaces at Chaco Culture National Historic Park, proved a striking, if grim, reminder that we weren't the first to pass this way -- or to face possibly civilization-challenging aridity problems. The pre-Colombian Anasazi culture flourished between 900 and 1150 A.D., culminating in a city in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, that until the nineteenth century contained the largest buildings in the Americas, now uncovered from centuries of drifting sands. Mesa Verde with its "skyscraper" cliffside dwellings, also flourished in the twelfth century and was similarly abandoned and forgotten for hundreds of years. The mysteries of these deserted cities -- their purpose and the reasons they were abandoned -- may never be fully plumbed. This much is undeniable though, as one walks through cobbled plazas and toppled towers, and past sun-blasted walls: cities, dazzling in their day, arose suddenly in the desert, prospered, and then collapsed. Tree-ring data confirm that an epic drought, one lasting at least 50 years, coincided with their demise. Broken and battle-scarred bones unearthed in the charred ruins indicate that warfare followed drought. What the Anasazi experienced -- scarcity, the need to leave homes, and a struggle for whatever remained -- is getting easier to imagine in a water-short West. Only this time at stake will be Las Vegas and Phoenix. Archaeologists at Chaco recently uncovered a sophisticated cistern system under the city. Anasazi builders, they now believe, learned how to harvest the runoff from the summer rains that poured down and spilled over the sandstone cliffs behind the ruins. Think of these as the Lake Meads and Powells of their time, capturing the torrential monsoon rains just as those reservoirs do the Colorado River's flash floods. The cistern system provided temporary water security, | |
| Tamara Conniff: Why We Are Subjected to Beatlemania, Again | Top |
| I love the Beatles, don't get me wrong. I worship and adore. Paul McCartney in concert is a religious experience. But I'm over it. I'm over Beatlemania. I want it to stop. Why? Why now? Ah, a little thing called sound recording copyright. In 2012, the Beatles first recorded single, "Love Me Do," will enter the public domain. Originally released in 1962, under the UK copyright law a sound recording no longer belongs to the artist who recorded it after 50 years. Some big name artists and record company advocacy groups lobbied to get an extension to mirror the United States 95-year term. In April of this year, the European Union approved an extension from 50 to 70 years, however, the U.K. and member states have balked at it and the proposal has gotten lost in the political shuffle. So of course the Beatles, and more specifically their label group EMI, want to exploit the recordings as much as they can before it becomes public property and can be used free of charge. It begs a larger question, what is the use of copyright in today's world? Consumer advocates are against copyright extension because they feel it stifles creativity, stunts innovation and punishes public use of art. If Ringo Starr can continue to profit from recordings made 50 years ago, he'll never record a new song ever again! The entire point of copyright protection is to create and profit for only a set period of time and then let the public enjoy it for free. Of note is that once recordings enter the public domain, artists can also use their recordings for free and not have to pay or license them from the record companies. Back in the day, record companies used the sales and profits of back catalog to fund and develop new artists. Today, most labels are loosing money hand over fist because consumers don't want to spend $15 on round, little disks. Back catalog is the saving grace for the embattled music industry to boost their profit margins -- between the Beatles and Michael Jackson, EMI and Sony, respectively, are having relatively good years. However, the copyright of a song is valid for the life of the author plus 70 years. Ironically, the Beatles don't even own their songs, Michael Jackson's estate does (Jackson purchased the Beatles catalog in 1985 out from under Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono). Poor Jackson is raking in money all over the place. People are even taking bets on who will be the largest selling act of 2009 -- Jackson or the Beatles. It's beyond bizarre. So now we are stuck with Beatlemania. A last ditch effort to make as much money off of the Beatles' sound recordings as humanly possible. We are even stuck with the game "The Beatles: Rock Band." According to published reports, the Beatles' remastered catalog and the game could generate approximately $1.6 billion, which is more that the gross domestic product of some countries. John Lennon, George Harrison and Michael Jackson must be looking down on us quoting Shakespeare (whose works are in the public domain) and saying, "What fools these mortals be." More on Michael Jackson | |
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