The Department of Justice has been seven times more likely to investigate or indict Democrats than Republicans since the Bush administration came to power.
—The Washington Spectator, March 15, 2007

A BRECHTIAN DAY: FROM EBITA TO MAN IS MAN
BRITISH SAILORS APPEAR ON TEHRAN TV
WILL AMERICAN IDOL PROGRAMMING SAVE IRAQ

I seem to be always moving between worlds. Yesteray morning I started the day in midtown at a breakfast for small businesses interested in finding merger partners or being acquired. I ended the day downtown at a lively performance of Bertolt Brecht’s anti-war play MAN IS MAN at NYU.

In the morning, I was downing bagels and listening to a man who tracks deals explain how they are done and what a company has to do (ie. make lots of money) to be a desirable acquisition target.

In my world the initials M & A referred to the Music and Art High School in New York where my first real girlfriend went to School. Today that School has itself merged into another high school and M & A stands for mergers and acquisitions.

Our speaker at the I Breakfast brought tons of charts with him to explain the way big companies gobble up small ones. He told us about EBDITA, valuations, multiples, and how companies have to plan for their own sale when they are first being organized. I learned about how private equity firms like Blackstone and the dreaded Carlysle Group are pumped full of bank money to go out and but up what they can. I learned that the deal makers prefer the multi-billion dollar merger to a smaller acquisition because both take as much time to do, and the former is more profitable for the investment bankers than the latter.

The scene seems bleak for a small media company like Globalvision despite our twenty years in business and record of achievements. What we do is not really valued in the world or big finance. I knew that going in but I always like to see how the big guys think and I was particularly interested in the way debt drives many of these deals. By end of breakfast, I ate too much cream cheese and was more depressed than when I started. This business theater was fascinating—and offered little for the fight for a small media company for survival.

Ten hours later, I was in another type of theater watching some excellent NYU actors play the great Brecht, an anti-war play written in l925.

The director Paul Binnerts noted that “it is a play about greed, or about loyalty or the lack of it, or about the impossibility to make proper choices for your life when you are poor, or about violence and brutality in the face of violence and brutality of other or about brainwashing and manipulation> Man is Man is probably about all that.” And it also was written the years of Germany’s Weimar Republic “with its heritage of a lost war and an unpayable war debt/…”

We know what happened in the next decade there as that debt triggered inflation and economic collapse. For many in our country, that’s a reality here. I spoke with a Black community activist in Columbia South Carolina who is as fixated on the debt issue as I am. He told me that 50% of those living in homes bought by sup-prime loans face foreclosure. He is lobbying black leaders to call for a moratorium on foreclosures.

In mid day I worked on that issue too, produing this viral video which is now up on You Tube and the Stopthesqueeze.org website.

Here it is:

FED TO BORROWERS: TOO BAD

Whats our government saying about all this? Not much. This story appears in the NY Times today:

FED CHAIRMAN: NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT

WASHINGTON, March 28 — Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, said Wednesday that he did not expect the escalating problems in the mortgage lending business to spread to the rest of the economy, but noted that the Fed had given itself the “flexibility” to adjust interest rates should the outlook change for better or for worse.

In his first remarks on the economy since the Fed decided last week to leave interest rates unchanged, Mr. Bernanke did not stray far from the monetary policy statement the central bank issued with its decision. Inflation is still the predominant concern, and the economy does not appear to be in danger of slowing too much, he said in testimony to the Congressional Joint Economic Committee.