So while Enron, Tyco, and Worldcom are splashed across the airwaves and the front pages, as the stock market plummets and people’s retirement funds are wiped away in a matter of weeks, what’s Congress doing? Why, making it harder for poor people to declare bankruptcy, of course.

A “bankruptcy reform” bill has been moving through Congress for the last year, and the NYTimes reports that it’s finally cleared a conference committee. The most salient point in the bill is that credit card debt would not be discharged in a bankrupcty; it would still have to be paid off.

It should surprise no one that the moving force behind the legislation is MBNA, one of the more aggressive mass-marketers of credit cards — particularly to the “sub-prime” borrowers who have worse credit and fewer financial resources. These people, of course, pay higher rates, tend to carry balances, and default more often. The plan was that the fees these borrowers paid would offset the higher default rate. It didn’t work out that way, and MBNA has successfully gotten Congress to bail out its damaged business plan.

Some interesting points from the Times that should be skipped by those who still respect the legislative process:

• “Ranked by employee donations, MBNA was the largest corporate contributor to President Bush’s 2000 campaign.”
  
• “The company acknowledged that it gave a $447,000 debt-consolidation loan on what critics viewed as highly favorable terms to a crucial House supporter of the bill only four days before he signed on as a lead sponsor of the legislation in 1998. Both MBNA and the lawmaker, Representative James P. Moran Jr., Democrat of Virginia, have denied that there was anything improper about the loan.”
  
• The compromise that moved the bill forward was the elimination of a provision that would have allowed anti-abortion demonstrators to get out from under paying court fines and judgements. Just what that provision was doing in the bill in the first place would make an interesting discussion on its own.

I don’t know if the bankruptcy system does or doesn’t need reforming. But this bill looks like Congress and the financial industry are perfectly willing to step on the necks of the very people whom they helped trip up in the first place.

 

The NYTimes architecture critic, Herbert Muschamp, presents an idea for rebuilding the World Trade Center site, simultaneously fixing another problem with lower Manhattan. Interesting reading.

 

From CNet:

Year-end surge to lift IT spending. A last-minute shopping spree as IT buyers scrape out their budgets will push computer technology spending beyond 2001 levels, predicts research firm IDC.

It’s news to me that IT buyers have budgets to scrape out. But what’s more important to me, frankly, is that IT sellers start to advertise again. Jeez, could magazines get any thinner?

 

When the World Trade Center was destroyed, a big part of downtown Manhattan’s mass transit hub went with it. The weekly broadsheet NY Observer fronts a story about options for rail in the rebuilding.

As with most infrastructure projects in New York, this one is proving difficult, with competing interests from different rail agencies, and divisions of the same agency. The core question is whether commuter rail should be extended from Midtown to Downtown, or should the city keep the current (and prior) system of requiring suburbanites to change to a subway — and pay an extra fare — to get Downtown?

One interesting option — and this is real inside baseball for rail foamers  — will bring a kind of hybrid subway/commuter rail from Long Island to Downtown:, using existing track:

… the plan would require LIRR commuters to switch at the Jamaica station for a special shuttle that would follow existing LIRR tracks to the Atlantic Avenue Terminal in downtown Brooklyn. From there, it would use a “drill track” fifth center track used only in emergenciesn the A line until just before the Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop. There, it would move onto the F line and use the Rutgers Street Tunnel that currently runs between the York Street F stationhe last in Brooklynnd the East Broadway station on Manhattan龝 Lower East Side. From there, it could make any number of switches onto existing tracks into lower Manhattan…. Commuters from Long Island would make only one stop after boarding the shuttle in Jamaicat MetroTech in downtown Brooklynefore barreling towards lower Manhattan.

 

XM Satellite Radio will start carrying Playboy Radio on September 3. Playboy Radio?

 

A story in the Washington Post says administrators at American University are apparently using copyright as a means to suppress a campus gadfly‘s taping of a public lecture by Tipper Gore.

“It is a very technical charge to assert as the basis of campus punishment,” said First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams. “A lawyer can make a case that her copyright rights were violated, but it is a very unattractive case.”

 

Semi‘s gonna have a ball with this one.

There’s a new director of the Pentagon’s new Information Awareness Office, part of the DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. (It was DARPA’s organizational predecessor that gave the world the Internet. But I digress…) This new director is one John M. Poindexter.

Yes, that John Poindexter. Ronald Reagan’s National Security Advisor. The one who was convicted in the Iran-Contra affair. Remember? He sold weapons (illegally) to Iran, and used the cash to (also illegally) fund the Contra insurgency in Nicaragua. Ollie North’s buddy. It was in all the papers.

Poindexter was convicted of conspiracy, lying to Congress, defrauding the government, and destroying documents. The convictions were overturned; Poindexter had been given immunity before Congress (after invoking his Fifth Amendment rights). His testimony, though public and nationally broadcast, was inadmissible, courts said.

So here he comes sliming his way back into public service, this time running an office that is supposed to:

create a new intelligence infrastructure to allow … agencies to share information and collaborate effectively, and new information technology aimed at exposing terrorists and their activities and support systems…. The key to fighting terrorism is information.  Elements of the solution include gathering a much broader array of data than we do currently, discovering information from elements of the data, creating models of hypotheses, and analyzing these models in a collaborative environment to determine the most probable current or future scenario.

To me, this sounds a lot like what the NSA is supposed to be doing. If you read the IOS’s page closely — and there’s no way to read it casually — it looks like IOS is developing ways to massage and pass around raw data that the NSA and the National Reconnaissance Office and all that crew develops.

Which is not a bad thing. And it’s surely a comedown for a past National Security Advisor to have an office that’s probably deep in the bowels of the Pentagon, far from corridors of power. And it speaks well of the man that he still wants to be in public service.

But still. John Poindexter should be in jail, not in the Pentagon. He waged a private war that was contrary to the policy of the government he swore to serve. He should not be pulling a government paycheck — much less with a high security clearance.

Here’s a ton of links about Poindexter and Iran-Contra. Thanks to bOing-bOing for the original link.

 

The S.F. Chronicle carries a story about the Postal Service’s trial of Segway scooters in Bagdhad on the Bay. The USPS bought 40 scooters at $9,000 per.

Scott Tucker, the Postal Service district manager for the San Francisco area, said the Segways would be used on five routes in the Pacific Heights and Steiner Street Station areas, some of the hilliest in the city.

The scooters are apparently sidewalk-legal in 24 states, California not among them. This, San Francisco being San Francisco, is causing some controversy.

 

 

Meow Mix cat food is apparently shopping around a TV program aimed at cats. Not cat lovers. Cats. CNN points out one of the flaws in the concept:

Lacking opposable thumbs, felines will have to rely on their owners to tune in to the half-hour show.

The other major flaw? It’s a stupid idea.

 

Reuters is reporting that scientists in England are on the verge of perfecting really thin-screen televisions:

Roll-up, flexible televisions, akin to the melting watches of Salvador Dali’s surreal landscapes, have become possible thanks to a glowing plastic compound perfected in the laboratories of Britain’s Cambridge Display Technology (CDT).

“You’re effectively printing televisions,” CDT Chief Executive David Fyfe told Reuters. “They can be printed onto thin plastic almost like paper.”

<snip>

“Realistically, you will see roll up displays around 2004 or 2005,” he added.