Masterbisnis.com

BT broadband gets billions in subsidy, claims Virgin Media boss

Master — Mon, 21 May 2012 17:05:16 +0000

Andrew Barron to tell Lords communications committee that most of £980m government development cash will go to rival

The government is spending “hundreds of millions of pounds of public money” subsidising BT Group, the House of Lords will hear on Tuesday.

A total of £980m has been earmarked for improving Britain’s broadband network, including £530m during this parliament to get a basic 2Mbps broadband service to Britain’s hardest to reach areas. But rivals fear most of the money will go to BT.

“The noble ambition of locally procured rural broadband networks is protracted and likely to favour the incumbent, freezing out new entrants,” the Virgin Media chief operating officer, Andrew Barron, said in a letter to the master bisnis the day before giving evidence to the Lords communications committee‘s inquiry in to the UK’s broadband strategy. He claimed true competition with BT existed only in areas where Virgin Media’s cables provide an alternative. Cable now reaches half the UK population, but mostly in urban locations.

“The outcome of current government policy,” writes Barron, “is likely to be the subsidy of already dominant infrastructure in areas where we are not, to the sum of hundreds of millions of pounds of public money.”

Public funds are being awarded via the Broadband development UK (BDUK) process. BT and Fujitsu are the only two bidders left from an original longlist of nine suppliers in the BDUK framework agreement, which covers 35 local authorities.

Cable & Wireless withdrew, as did Geo Networks, claiming BT had an unfair advantage. Rivals had wanted cheaper and more extensive access to BT’s ducts and telephone polls, which reach most homes and bisnises in the UK.

A further nine areas are running their own procurement outside the BDUK framework, with multiple bidders. BT has won the only two contracts awarded so far, in Lancashire and Rutland, and Fujitsu is only bidding for two, in Cumbria and North Yorkshire.

Barron writes: “If we agree competition is the best way to encourage further sustainable investment, and that embedding dominance in markets is bad for consumers, we must also accept that providing the vast majority of available public funding to an incumbent is not in the UK’s best interests.”

He criticises the lack of an ambitious national broadband strategy, saying the UK needs an equivalent to the 1984 Cable and Broadcasting Act which effectively created Virgin Media’s network by allowing predecessors like Telewest and NTL to build franchises around the UK.

Public money should be used to promote alternative infrastructures to BT, including the use of 4G mobile networks as an alternative to fixed line broadband, and a national framework for Wi-Fi to get better out of home internet coverage.

Barron will be giving evidence alongside Labour’s communications infrastructure spokesperson Chi Onwurah, and the former chief executive of BT Openreach, Steve Robertson.

Juliette Garside

Reality dawns for Facebook investors

Master — Mon, 21 May 2012 17:05:06 +0000

Facebook’s valuation at 25-times revenues was asking for trouble and it’s good it has arrived sooner rather than later

We will only know what the market thinks Facebook is really worth when the IPO dust has settled, which will take several weeks or months. But Monday’s 11% fall in morning trading is an encouraging development. It suggests that reality is dawning already that Facebook was grossly overpriced at 25-times last year’s revenues – yes, revenues, not profits. That valuation was asking for trouble, and it’s good that it has arrived sooner rather than later.

Facebook and its promoters were too greedy. Almost every detail of this IPO demanded a conservative approach to valuation. Insiders were selling heavily; the bisnis is immature; founder Mark Zuckerberg is keeping voting control even though his economic stake was “only” 28%; the general stock market backdrop is weak; and the almighty sum of $16bn had to be raised. Yet the pricing of the shares was lifted in the closing week to satisfy demand that turned out to be wafer-thin.

Would-be buyers of shares at an IPO should always ask themselves a simple question: out of the universe of stocks I can invest in, is this the cheapest? In the case of US technology stocks, buyers at IPO seem preoccupied by second-guessing others’ intentions in the hope of making a quick killing. The Facebook flop should serve as a useful reminder that there are no guaranteed winners and that the Wall Street-led hype machine can push its luck too far.

Nils Pratley

Ellen Cantarow: How Rural America Got Fracked

Master — Mon, 21 May 2012 17:00:44 +0000

The Environmental Nightmare You Know Nothing About

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

If the world can be seen in a grain of sand, watch out. As Wisconsinites are learning, there’s money (and misery) in sand — and if you’ve got the right kind, an oil company may soon be at your doorstep.

March in Wisconsin used to mean snow on the ground, temperatures so cold that farmers worried about their cows freezing to death. But as I traveled around rural townships and villages in early March to interview people about frac-sand mining, a little-known cousin of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” daytime temperatures soared to nearly 80 degrees — bizarre weather that seemed to be sending a meteorological message.

In this troubling spring, Wisconsin’s prairies and farmland fanned out to undulating hills that cradled the land and its people. Within their embrace, the rackety calls of geese echoed from ice-free ponds, bald eagles wheeled in the sky, and deer leaped in the brush. And for the first time in my life, I heard the thrilling warble of sandhill cranes.

Yet this peaceful rural landscape is swiftly becoming part of a vast assembly line in the corporate race for the last fossil fuels on the planet. The target: the sand in the land of the cranes.

Five hundred million years ago, an ocean surged here, shaping a unique wealth of hills and bluffs that, under mantles of greenery and trees, are sandstone. That sandstone contains a particularly pure form of crystalline silica. Its grains, perfectly rounded, are strong enough to resist the extreme pressures of the technology called hydraulic fracturing, which pumps vast quantities of that sand, as well as water and chemicals, into ancient shale formations to force out methane and other forms of “natural gas.”

That sand, which props open fractures in the shale, has to come from somewhere. Without it, the fracking industry would grind to a halt. So big multinational corporations are descending on this bucolic region to cart off its prehistoric sand, which will later be forcefully injected into the earth elsewhere across the country to produce more natural gas. Geology that has taken millions of years to form is now being transformed into part of a system, a machine, helping to drive global climate change.

“The valleys will be filled… the mountains and hills made level”

Boom times for hydraulic fracturing began in 2008 when new horizontal-drilling methods transformed an industry formerly dependent on strictly vertical boring. Frac-sand mining took off in tandem with this development.

“It’s huge,” said a U.S. Geological Survey mineral commodity specialist in 2009. “I’ve never seen anything like it, the growth. It makes my head spin.” That year, from all U.S. sources, frac-sand producers used or sold over 6.5 million metric tons of sand — about what the Great Pyramid of Giza weighs. Last month, Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Senior Manager and Special Projects Coordinator Tom Woletz said corporations were hauling at least 15 million metric tons a year from the state’s hills.

By July 2011, between 22 and 36 frac-sand facilities in Wisconsin were either operating or approved. Seven months later, said Woletz, there were over 60 mines and 45 processing (refinement) plants in operation. “By the time your article appears, these figures will be obsolete,” claims Pat Popple, who in 2008 founded the first group to oppose frac-sand mining, Concerned Chippewa Citizens (now part of The Save the Hills Alliance).

Jerry Lausted, a retired teacher and also a farmer, showed me the tawny ridges of sand that delineated a strip mine near the town of Menomonie where he lives. “If we were looking from the air,” he added, “you’d see ponds in the bottom of the mine where they dump the industrial waste water. If you scan to the left, you’ll see the hills that are going to disappear.”

Those hills are gigantic sponges, absorbing water, filtering it, and providing the region’s aquifer with the purest water imaginable. According to Lausted, sand mining takes its toll on “air quality, water quality and quantity. Recreational aspects of the community are damaged. Property values [are lowered.] But the big thing is, you’re removing the hills that you can’t replace. They’re a huge water manufacturing factory that Mother Nature gave us, and they’re gone.”

It’s impossible to grasp the scope of the devastation from the road, but aerial videos and photographs reveal vast, bleak sandy wastelands punctuated with waste ponds and industrial installations where Wisconsin hills once stood.

When corporations apply to counties for mining permits, they must file “reclamation” plans. But Larry Schneider, a retired metallurgist and industrial consultant with a specialized knowledge of mining, calls the reclamation process “an absolute farce.”

Reclamation projects by mining corporations since the 1970s may have made mined areas “look a little less than an absolute wasteland,” he observes. “But did they reintroduce the biodiversity? Did they reintroduce the beauty and the ecology? No.”

Studies bear out his verdict. “Every year,” wrote Mrinal Ghose in the Journal of Scientific and Industrial Research, “large areas are continually becoming unfertile in spite of efforts to grow vegetation on the degraded mined land.”

Awash in promises of corporate jobs and easy money, those who lease and sell their land just shrug. “The landscape is gonna change when it’s all said and done,” says dairy farmer Bobby Schindler, who in 2008 leased his land in Chippewa County to a frac-sand company called Canadian Sand and Proppant. (EOG, the former Enron, has since taken over the lease.) “Instead of being a hill it’s gonna be a valley, but all seeded down, and you’d never know there’s a mine there unless you were familiar with the area.”

Of the mining he adds, “It’s really put a boost to the area. It’s impressive the amount of money that’s exchanging hands.” Eighty-four-year-old Letha Webster, who sold her land 100 miles south of Schindler’s to another mining corporation, Unimin, says that leaving her home of 56 years is “just the price of progress.”

Jamie and Kevin Gregar — both 30-something native Wisconsinites and military veterans — lived in a trailer and saved their money so that they could settle down in a pastoral paradise once Kevin returned from Iraq. In January 2011, they found a dream home near tiny Tunnel City. (The village takes its name from a nearby rail tunnel). “It’s just gorgeous — the hills, the trees, the woodland, the animals,” says Jamie. “It’s perfect.”

Five months after they moved in, she learned that neighbors had leased their land to “a sand mine” company. “What’s a sand mine?” she asked.

Less than a year later, they know all too well. The Gregars’ land is now surrounded on three sides by an unsightly panorama of mining preparations. Unimin is uprooting trees, gouging out topsoil, and tearing down the nearby hills. “It looks like a disaster zone, like a bomb went off,” Jamie tells me.

When I mention her service to her country, her voice breaks. “I am devastated. We’ve done everything right. We’ve done everything we were supposed to. We just wanted to raise our family in a good location and have good neighbors and to have it taken away from us for something we don’t support…” Her voice trails off in tears.

For Unimin, the village of Tunnel City in Greenfield township was a perfect target. Not only did the land contain the coveted crystalline silica; it was close to a rail spur. No need for the hundreds of diesel trucks that other corporations use to haul sand from mine sites to processing plants. No need, either, for transport from processing plants to rail junctions where hundreds of trains haul frac-sand by the millions of tons each year to fracture other once-rural landscapes. Here, instead, the entire assembly line operates in one industrial zone.

There was also no need for jumping the hurdles zoning laws sometimes erect. Like many Wisconsin towns where a culture of diehard individualism sees zoning as an assault on personal freedom, Greenfield and all its municipalities, including Tunnel City, are unzoned. This allowed the corporation to make deals with individual landowners. For the 8.5 acres where Letha Webster and her husband Gene lived for 56 years, assessed in 2010 at $147,500, Unimin paid $330,000. Overall, between late May and July 2011, it paid $5.3 million for 436 acres with a market value of about $1.1 million.

There was no time for public education about the potential negative possibilities of frac-sand mining: the destruction of the hills, the decline in property values, the danger of silicosis (once considered a strictly occupational lung disease) from blowing silica dust, contamination of ground water from the chemicals used in the processing plants, the blaze of lights all night long, noise from hundreds of train cars, houses shaken by blasting. Ron Koshoshek, a leading environmentalist who works with Wisconsin’s powerful Towns Association to educate townships about the industry, says that “frac-sand mining will virtually end all residential development in rural townships.” The result will be “a large-scale net loss of tax dollars to towns, increasing taxes for those who remain.”

Town-Busting Tactics

Frac-sand corporations count on a combination of naïveté, trust, and incomprehension in rural hamlets that previously dealt with companies no larger than Wisconsin’s local sand and gravel industries. Before 2008, town boards had never handled anything beyond road maintenance and other basic municipal issues. Today, multinational corporations use their considerable resources to steamroll local councils and win sweetheart deals. That’s how the residents of Tunnel City got taken to the cleaners.

On July 6, 2011, a Unimin representative ran the first public forum about frac-sand mining in the village. Other heavily attended and often heated community meetings followed, but given the cascades of cash, the town board chairman’s failure to take a stand against the mining corporation, and Unimin’s aggressiveness, tiny Tunnel City was a David without a slingshot.

Local citizens did manage to get the corporation to agree to give the town $250,000 for the first two million tons mined annually, $50,000 more than its original offer. In exchange, the township agreed that any ordinance it might pass in the future to restrict mining wouldn’t apply to Unimin. Multiply the two million tons of frac-sand tonnage Unimin expects to mine annually starting in 2013 by the $300 a ton the industry makes and you’ll find that the township only gets .0004 percent of what the company will gross.

For the Gregars, it’s been a nightmare. Unimin has refused five times to buy their land and no one else wants to live near a sand mine. What weighs most heavily on the couple is the possibility that their children will get silicosis from long-term exposure to dust from the mine sites. “We don’t want our kids to be lab rats for frac-sand mining companies,” says Jamie.

Drew Bradley, Unimin’s senior vice president of operations, waves such fears aside. “I think [citizens] are blowing it out of proportion,” he told a local publication. “There are plenty of silica mines sited close to communities. There have been no concerns exposed there.”

That’s cold comfort to the Gregars. Crystalline silica is a known carcinogen and the cause of silicosis, an irreversible, incurable disease. None of the very few rules applied to sand mining by the state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) limit how much silica gets into the air outside of mines. That’s the main concern of those living near the facilities.

So in November 2011, Jamie Gregar and ten other citizens sent a 35-page petition to the DNR. The petitioners asked the agency to declare respirable crystalline silica a hazardous substance and to monitor it, using a public health protection level set by California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. The petition relies on studies, including one by the DNR itself, which acknowledge the risk of airborne silica from frac-sand mines for those who live nearby.

The DNR denied the petition, claiming among other things that — contrary to its own study’s findings — current standards are adequate. One of the petition’s signatories, Ron Koshoshek, wasn’t surprised. For 16 years he was a member of, and for nine years chaired, Wisconsin’s Public Intervenor Citizens Advisory Committee. Created in 1967, its role was to intercede on behalf of the environment, should tensions grow between the DNR’s two roles: environmental protector and corporate licensor. “The DNR,” he says, “is now a permitting agency for development and exploitation of resources.”

In 2010, Cathy Stepp, a confirmed anti-environmentalist who had previously railed against the DNR, belittling it as “anti-development, anti-transportation, and pro-garter snakes,” was appointed to head the agency by now-embattled Governor Scott Walker who explained: “I wanted someone with a chamber-of-commerce mentality.”

As for Jamie Gregar, her dreams have been dashed and she’s determined to leave her home. “At this point,” she says, “I don’t think there’s a price we wouldn’t accept.”

Frac-Sand vs. Food

Brian Norberg and his family in Prairie Farm, 137 miles northwest of Tunnel City, paid the ultimate price: he died while trying to mobilize the community against Procore, a subsidiary of the multinational oil and gas corporation Sanjel. The American flag that flies in front of the Norbergs’ house flanks a placard with a large, golden NORBERG, over which pheasants fly against a blue sky. It’s meant to represent the 1,500 acres the family has farmed for a century.

“When you start talking about industrial mining, to us, you’re violating the land,” Brian’s widow, Lisa, told me one March afternoon over lunch. She and other members of the family, as well as a friend, had gathered to describe Prairie Farm’s battle with the frac-sanders. “The family has had a really hard time accepting the fact that what we consider a beautiful way to live could be destroyed by big industry.”

Their fight against Procore started in April 2011: Sandy, a lifelong friend and neighbor, arrived with sand samples drillers had excavated from her land, and began enthusiastically describing the benefits of frac-sand mining. “Brian listened for a few minutes,” Lisa recalls. “Then he told her [that]… she and her sand vials could get the heck — that’s a much nicer word than what he used – off the farm. Sandy was hoping we would also be excited about jumping on the bandwagon. Brian informed her that our land would be used for the purpose God intended, farming.”

Brian quickly enlisted family and neighbors in an organizing effort against the company. In June 2011, Procore filed a reclamation plan — the first step in the permitting process — with the county’s land and water conservation department. Brian rushed to the county office to request a public hearing, but returned dejected and depressed. “He felt completely defeated that he could not protect the community from them moving in and destroying our lives,” recalls Lisa.

He died of a heart attack less than a day later at the age of 52. The family is convinced his death was a result of the stress caused by the conflict. That stress is certainly all too real. The frac-sand companies, says family friend Donna Goodlaxson, echoing many others I interviewed for this story, “go from community to community. And one of the things they try to do is pit people in the community against each other.”

Instead of backing off, the Norbergs and other Prairie Farm residents continued Brian’s efforts. At an August 2011 public hearing, the town’s residents directly addressed Procore’s representatives. “What people had to say there was so powerful,” Goodlaxson remembers. “Those guys were blown out of their chairs. They weren’t prepared for us.”

“I think people insinuate that we’re little farmers in a little community and everyone’s an ignorant buffoon,” added Sue Glaser, domestic partner of Brian’s brother Wayne. “They found out in a real short time there was a lot of education behind this.”

“About 80 percent of the neighborhood was not happy about the potential change to our area,” Lisa adds. “But very few of us knew anything about this industry at [that] time.” To that end, Wisconsin’s Farmers’ Union and its Towns Association organized a day-long conference in December 2011 to help people “deal with this new industry.”

Meanwhile, other towns, alarmed by the explosion of frac-sand mining, were beginning to pass licensing ordinances to regulate the industry. In Wisconsin, counties can challenge zoning but not licensing ordinances, which fall under town police powers. These, according to Wisconsin law, cannot be overruled by counties or the state. Becky Glass, a Prairie Farm resident and an organizer with Labor Network for Sustainability, calls Wisconsin’s town police powers “the strongest tools towns have to fight or regulate frac-sand mining.” Consider them so many slingshots employed against the corporate Goliaths.

In April 2012, Prairie Farm’s three-man board voted 2 to 1 to pass such an ordinance to regulate any future mining effort in the town. No, such moves won’t stop frac-sand mining in Wisconsin, but they may at least mitigate its harm. Procore finally pulled out because of the resistance, says Glass, adding that the company has since returned with different personnel to try opening a mine near where she lives.

“It takes 1.2 acres per person per year to feed every person in this country,” says Lisa Norberg. “And the little township that I live in, we have 9,000 acres that are for farm use. So if we just close our eyes and bend over and let the mining companies come in, we’ll have thousands of people we can’t feed.”

Food or frac-sand: it’s a decision of vital importance across the country, but one most Americans don’t even realize is being made — largely by multinational corporations and dwindling numbers of yeoman farmers in what some in this country would call “the real America.” Most of us know nothing about these choices, but if the mining corporations have their way, we will soon enough — when we check out prices at the supermarket or grocery store. We’ll know it too, as global climate change continues to turn Wisconsin winters balmy and supercharge wild weather across the country.

While bucolic landscapes disappear, aquifers are fouled, and countless farms across rural Wisconsin morph into industrial wastelands, Lisa’s sons continue to work the Norberg’s land, just as their father once did. So does Brian’s nephew, 32-year-old Matthew, who took me on a jolting ride across his fields. The next time I’m in town, he assured me, we’ll visit places in the hills where water feeds into springs. Yes, you can drink the water there. It’s still the purest imaginable. Under the circumstances, though, no one knows for how long.

Ellen Cantarow’s work on Israel/Palestine has been widely published for over 30 years. Her long-time concern with climate change has led her to investigate the global depredations of oil and gas corporations at TomDispatch. Many thanks to Wisconsin filmmaker Jim Tittle, whose documentary, “The Price of Sand,” will appear in August 2012, and who shared both his interviewees and his time for this article.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and join us on Facebook.

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Is It A Car? Is It A Boat? Yes!

Master — Mon, 21 May 2012 17:00:27 +0000

Finally you can channel your inner-Aquaman, with your own multipurpose vehicle to cruise land and sea. The new amphibiously minded Sea Lion from the California-based Fantasy Junction and inventor Mark Witt is capable of speeds of up to 45 miles per hour at sea and 180 miles per hour on land. The price of this car-boat hybrid comes in at a cool $259,500.

A true entrepreneurial venture, the Sea Lion has been developed over the past six years by Mark Witt Applied Design — a one-man operation housed in San Francisco. The original intention of the product was an attempt to set records for speed on land and in water. Considering there is no governing body to objectively evaluate the “fastest amphibious car claim”, the Sea Lion will continue competing in unofficial style with other homegrown inventors of similarly diverse cars. Fantasy Junction says that there are currently 25 contenders in the world with similar creations, featuring some differences in design and capabilities.

“For the most part, a GPS display with a YouTube recording is internationally accepted as ‘valid’ for speed documentation,” Witt adds in the Fantasy Junction listing for the Sea Lion. “There has been talk of creating a corporate event, similar to Burning Man or Kinetic Sculpture Race, which records and awards the competitors with specific acknowledgements. This, however, may be more of a detriment than assistance. The addition of Rules and Requirements always diminish scientific achievement and exploration. And it just plain ruins all the fun!”

The Sea Lion was designed using CAD software and “spreadsheet calculations”. The vehicle is primarily constructed using welded aluminum made with CNC plasma burned shapes and other CNC milled components. The Sea Lion fits one and features removable side pods used for floatation and cargo, along with removable fenders front and rear. The Sea Lion features no structural parts borrowed from other vehicles, with a few small exceptions.

“Building Sea Lion has been an enjoyable exploration,” Witt said. “The next chapter of this project is to provide an ultimate engine and begin speed trials. It is best to bring a specialist builder on board for the rest of this endeavor and bring the car up to its full potential. I will remain available as a consultant, engineer, machinist and psychiatrist for whoever decides to venture further into the amphibious record books.”

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Workers To Return To North Sea Gas Platform

Master — Mon, 21 May 2012 17:00:22 +0000

LONDON (AP) — The French oil company Total says it is preparing to put staff back on a North Sea platform after confirming that a gas leak has been stopped.

All 238 workers aboard the Elgin platform, 240 kilometers (150 miles) from Aberdeen, Scotland, were evacuated shortly after the leak was detected on March 25.

Total said Monday that it will be sending workers back to restart a drilling rig to set cement plugs in the well which was the source of the leak.

Initially, the leak was pouring about 7 million cubic feet (200,000 cubic meters) of natural gas into the atmosphere each day.

Also on HuffPost:

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Pursuit Dynamics shares crash 79% after Proctor & Gamble deal fails

Master — Mon, 21 May 2012 17:00:08 +0000

Technology firm sees shares close at 14.75p after admitting that multinational will not be using products

Shares in Pursuit Dynamics crashed 79% after the technology firm admitted a hoped-for deal with Proctor & Gamble will not go ahead.

The fall on Monday followed a tumultuous few days for Pursuit Dynamics’ shares last week. On Friday it was forced to put out a statement saying it knew “no reason” for its share price to fall 30% over two days.

The firm, whose products improve the mixing of liquids from toothpaste to beer, then said on Monday morning that P&G would not be using its products. It is understood the company did not learn of P&G’s decision until Friday evening.

The shares closed at 14.75p on Monday, down from a high of more than £6 two years ago.

Dan Milmo

Alexis Tsipras watches Greek horizon from Paris and Berlin

Master — Mon, 21 May 2012 16:50:16 +0000

The leftist rising star of Greek politics is not in France and Germany to solve the eurozone’s problems

Alexis Tsipras is the key player in what is shaping up to be Europe’s most fateful election in a very long time. The new 37-year-old star of Greek politics, ever ready with a punchy soundbite, might even hold Europe’s future in his hands.

Tsipras is nothing if not shrewd. His crew of radicals and leftists came second in the inconclusive Greek general election on 6 May. He could do even better in the rerun on 17 June.

His election campaign took him on Monday from the bailed-out, austerity-battered offices of Athens to Paris and on Tuesday he heads to Berlin, as he visits the two capitals where the euro’s future or failure will be decided.

This is not crisis management or problem-solving. It’s electioneering.

Tsipras’s stay in France and Germany will do little to answer the multiple questions haunting the eurozone or influence the policymakers in Berlin and Paris preparing for a bit of a fight over dinner in Brussels on Wednesday evening.

But fielding questions in both capitals, creating a stir in the two biggest countries and looking good on Greek TV will do anything but harm his campaign. To the extent that Tsipras’s foreign jaunt benefits him domestically, it may yet impact on the outcome of the euro crisis, but not directly.

Snubbing fellow EU politicians has become a bit of a trend lately.

President François Hollande of France, already seeking to set the European agenda, was being refused entry into polite governing company in London, Berlin, Warsaw, and Rome only a few weeks ago. Now the peers and rivals are queueing up to bond with the new French leader.

Tsipras, the moral victor of the Greek election earlier this month, is also being given the cold shoulder by policymakers in France and Germany, restricted to meeting with like-minded mates on the outside left of politics who are having zero impact on the crisis management in Germany and minimal influence in post-election France.

In Berlin Tsipras is to hobnob with Gregor Gysi, leader of the east German far left descended from the old communists, the party of the Stasi. They merged with dissident social democrats grouped around Oskar Lafontaine, a once magnetic but now spent force in German politics, to form Die Linke – the Left. In last week’s regional election in North Rhine–Westphalia, they failed to make it into the parliament in Düsseldorf despite the promising territory – a highly indebted post-industrial region down on its luck.

In Paris Tsipras’s main ally was Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the straight-talking French leftist who promised much more than he delivered in the presidential campaign and ended up trailing way behind the far right Front National.

The French and German leftists might be forgiven for envying Tsipras’s success and his obvious talent for resonating with his electorate. The Greek cleverly turned the tables on his German antagonists by quoting their own warnings back at them.

“European governments have to stop asking their taxpayers to throw their money into a bottomless pit,” said Tsipras, directly citing the German finance minister who has used the very same words to characterise the €240bn (£195bn) in European bailouts to Greece.

Tsipras’s European tour amounts to canny campaigning. But if he wants to be prime minister of Greece – he probably doesn’t, who would? – and start tackling the crisis, he spent his time in Paris and Berlin talking to the wrong people.

Ian Traynor

Mancini Kunjungi Markas AC Milan

Master — Mon, 21 May 2012 16:37:52 +0000

MANAJER Manchester City, Roberto Mancini, mengunjungi markas AC Milan di Via Turatti untuk bertemu sang wakil presiden Adriano Galliani. Tapi, bekas pelatih Inter Milan itu membantah, pertemuan membahas transfer Zlatan Ibrahimovic.

“Itu hanya sebuah pertemuan persahabatan, sekadar untuk mengucapkan halo. Ibrahimovic? Ia adalah seorang juara besar. Tapi seluruh fans Milan bisa bersikap tenang,” kata Mancini kepada Sky Sport Italia.

Ibrahimovic sering dirumorkan hendak pindah ke City dalam beberapa pekan terakhir ini meskipun yang bersangkutan sudah jauh-jauh hari menegaskan niatnya bertahan di San Siro.

Pertemuan itu bisa juga membahas tentang keinginan Milan memboyong Carlos Tevez dan Mario Balotelli. Tevez hampir didatangkan ke Milanello Januari lalu, akan tetapi gagal gara-gara Alexandre Pato menolak ditransfer ke Paris Saint-Germain.(goal/ICH)

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Ferrari Rayakan 60 Tahun Seri 250

Master — Mon, 21 May 2012 16:37:42 +0000

masterbisnis.com: Yang paling penting dari Ferrari klasik adalah seri 250. Kendaraan yang diproduksi selama lebih dari satu dekade ini memberikan kita beberapa model yang paling terkenal di dalam sejarah. Di antaranya adalah GTO, Testa Rossa, Lusso, dan California Spyder orisinal.

Tahun ini Ferrari menggelar perayaan 60 tahun seri 250 yang dibangun menggunakan mesin 3.0 liter V12 yang dikembangkan oleh insinyur mesin Italia Giacchino Colombo. Menandai peristiwa itu, Museum Ferrari di Maranello menampilkan dua mobil penting dalam arsip sejarah 250.

Model pertama adalah 250 GT SWB Berlinetta yang dikendarai Stirling Moss ketika menyabet kemenangannya di empat lomba pada 1961. Yang kedua adalah Breadvan yang dipesan oleh Count Volpi di Musurata dan dikembangkan oleh Piero Drogo dan Giotto Bizzarrini.

Ferrari 250 Breadvan ini adalah salah satu station wagon asli dan memberikan inpirasi dalam melahirkan model Ferrari FF generasi saat ini.(MI/DNI)

CEO Pay Has Become Sort Of Less Outrageous

Master — Mon, 21 May 2012 15:48:20 +0000

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon speaks to a lunchtime gathering of the Portland Business Alliance, Thursday, Nov. 3, 2011 at the Portland Hilton in Portland, Ore. CEO pay still is extremely high, but it became more tied to company performance in 2011, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal.

It pays to be CEO at some companies, no matter how much money you lose.

Gregg Engles, founder and CEO of Dean Foods, earned $8.5 million in 2011, a 52 percent increase from the year before in spite of the fact that his company lost $1.6 billion, the Wall Street Journal reports.

But CEO paydays last year generally were more aligned with company performance than in 2010, according to a separate WSJ report. CEOs were paid 0.6 percent more on average for every extra 1 percent in shareholder return in 2011, according to the WSJ analysis. In contrast, in 2010, CEOs were paid slightly more for decreases in shareholder return.

That said, CEOs still get paid an astronomical amount. CEO pay grew 127 times faster than worker pay between 1978 and 2011, according to a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute. American CEO pay rose 15 percent in 2011, after rising 28 percent in 2010, according to a report by GMI ratings cited by the Guardian.

CEOs now are getting paid better than they were before the recession, according to an Associated Press analysis of data from Equilar, an executive compensation research firm.

A number of CEOs received huge paydays in 2010 even as their companies’ stock prices tanked. For example, John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, was paid $18.87 million in 2010, even as his company’s stock price plunged 31.4 percent, according to 24/7 Wall St.

More than 21 CEOs even have received severance packages worth more than $100 million since 2000, according to GMI Ratings.

CEO pay recently has come under more scrutiny. Citigroup’s shareholders voted against Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit’s $14.9 million pay package, though it was only an advisory vote. Citigroup shareholders also have sued Pandit and Citigroup’s board of directors for outsized executive pay packages. But the shareholder revolt against bank CEO pay seems to be fizzling out, as shareholders continue to rake in big returns.

So it is perhaps no surprise that 68 percent of CEOs had personal access to a corporate jet last year, according to an analysis by the Hay Group cited by the WSJ.

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