Business Exegeses

Here are a few business articles of interest that kept me distracted from the subway freaks the past week or so.

Still Marching to Purcell's Drumbeat -- talk about corporate governance gone bad ... here's a case of how not to do it, unless you're Machiavellian. This is a tale of Morgan Stanley's CEO & Chairman Philip J. Purcell, who basically got his friends onto Morgan Stanley's board, then proceeded to run the show, with no critical questions being asked. Screw the shareholders!

Color-Blind Drug Research Is Myopic -- the US FDA just approved the heart failure drug, BiDil, specifically for the use by blacks. There is clear evidence that, for whatever reason, blacks to seem respond to the drug, more so than people with different genetic histories. This is a move towards personalized medicine, however, the implications to race in medical research is uncertain -- after all, there is no such thing as race.

Iran: Rafsanjani's Second Shot at Reform -- what's going on in Iran? Hashemi Rafsanjani, presidential candidate, went on TV to allow himself to be grilled by young Iranians; he was photographed with "inappropriately dressed women;" and would even be okay with some sort of normalized business relationship with the US. This is from the guy who was on the side of the conservative mullahs when he was president from 1989 to 1997.

Stem Cells to Go -- can stem cells be mass produced? ViaCell seems to think so, if they can figure out how to apply growth factors to umbilical cord blood. Umbilical cord cells apparently have some of the same flexibility as stem cells harvested from embryos -- the ability to transform themselves into other types of cells as needed.

The Tobacco Suit That's Going Up in Smoke -- the US Justice Department's suit against the tobacco industry has already spent $135 million, and haven't really accomplished much. Nanette Byrnes of BusinessWeek seems to think that it was a complete waste of time because Justice's case wasn't strong to begin with. I disagree. It was a strong case. The tobacco industry did conspire to hide the truth about tobacco's health effects from the public, and they did engage in a conspiracy of misinformation and specifically targeting children. Justice isn't losing the case because they don't have a strong case -- they're losing because the Bush administration has worked systematically to destroy Justice's chance of killing the tobacco industry.

Old. Smart. Productive. -- the cover article of BusinessWeek looks at the aging population, and their potential to continue contributing to society -- despite society's and business' readiness to embrace an older, working population. For a great review and summary of the article, read this post. If you're an older person and don't buy into the whole retire and die thing, check out the following sites that put retired workers back into the workforce.

AARP, Experience Corps, The Next Chapter, The Transition Network, WomanSage, Score, YourEncore, Retired Brains, The Phoenix Link, and Senior Job Bank.

Global Warming: Suddenly the Climate in Washington Is Changing -- after flipping Kyoto the bird and giving a big fuck-you to the world, all in the euphoria of having elected a moron to office, it appears that the glow is now off the once cozy screw-the-environment relationship Bush once had with his own administration. The administration is realizing that Bush really does believe all the crap he's been spouting about the environment. It's not because "the science is now more certain," as BusinessWeek's columnist John Carey would have you believe. For the rest of the world, the science was enough to make us blink. For the cowboy from Texas, who doesn't back down from a showdown, there was no option to blink. Yes America, you missed your chance to take another leadership position, and have left the rest of the world scratching their heads and wondering, "WTF?"