Thomas Steyer of Farallon Capital Management responds to students’ call for a meeting about the devastating impact of Farallon Capital Management‘s investments with patronizing and empty rhetoric:

We work hard to live up to our values, and we appreciate the confidence of our investors and partners, who know us well. It is abundantly clear from your work that we disclose a great deal of information to our limited partners. As you may not know, we also voluntarily register with the SEC as an investment advisor.

Thank you for your letter. We communicate extensively with our investors, including universities, on these and all other investment issues and concerns. Therefore, we do not believe a meeting with you is appropriate.

Meanwhile, in a letter to limited partners, he wrote:

In a recent letter to investors, Thomas Steyer, Farallon’s senior managing member, fired back at the students and tried to reassure investors.

We did review all of the charges, and discovered no issues of concern of which we had not previously been aware. Many of the charges are factually inaccurate; even more are misleading. We did take the Web site seriously enough to compile all the relevant facts, and are happy to discuss any particular questions you may have. […] We wish to minimize the problems these controversies may cause you or any others with whom we do business. I am hopeful that this issue will quiet down, though we will of course work vigorously to protect our reputations, if need be.

As the Alternative Investments News reported:

“The letter sent yesterday indicates that Farallon is still not willing to engage in a fair and open discussion with us,” said Justin Ruben, a spokesman for unfarallon.info. He added that the Web site would correct any inaccuracies if Farallon pointed them out. “In the meantime, we’re committed to intensifying our efforts, and today we’re launching a new outreach effort to involve students at other universities, including Farallon clients and potential clients, beginning with those with the largest endowments,” Ruben said.

Steyer’s letter also contained his trademark writing style, as he evoked a scene from the Owen Wister novel The Virginian. The scene involves a poker game whereby the protagonist is being insulted by another player. “The table falls silent, and the Virginian–trying to avoid a fight–remarks, ‘When you call me that, smile.'” “As students we share Mr. Steyer’s obvious love of classic American literature, but we wish that he shared our commitment to free and open public debate,” said Ruben.””

Among the critics of the Yassin assasination, apparently, is the head of the head of the Shin Bet, who argued, based on his mandate to protect Israelis, that this move would only make it more difficult:

Shin Bet Chief Avi Dichter was opposed to assassinating Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Channel Two TV reported Monday evening. At last week’s security cabinet meeting, during which the decision was made to target Yassin, Dichter argued that the costs of killing the Hamas leader outweighed the benefits to Israel, the report said.

Given the largely symbolic nature of Yassin’s role in Hamas, there’s reason to see his assasination as a largely symbolic act , the brainchild of Israel’s political establishment rather than its military one, framed to build support from an increasingly skeptical Israeli public by offering a symbolic victory which on the ground is likely to inflame further violence towards Israelis and further distance the potential for a real settlement that would offer both sides real security.

From a Business Week piece on the AFL-CIO’s filing against China’s exploitation of workers:

Even some ardent free traders think the AFL-CIO’s petition must be taken seriously. “You can’t just dismiss it as protectionist. In a market economy, wages are set by the free interaction between workers and management, which
doesn’t exist in China,” says William A. Reinsch, the President of the National Foreign Trade Council, which represents 300 large U.S. multinationals such as Boeing (BA ).

Labor’s argument is so elementary that it’s astonishing no one has ever spelled it out in such detail before. The brief contends that China’s well-documented labor repression allows its factory owners to pay less than they would if the government enforced its own labor laws. These savings in turn lower the price of China’s exports to the U.S., giving it an unfair trade advantage — much as a direct government subsidy to a factory owner would do.

The truth behind this is one which to many workers is intuitive but remains inscrutable to the likes of Thomas Friedman: No trade is free. Relationships between trading nations, like relationships between employers and employees, take place in a context constructed by prevailing law, asymetrical power relations, and the real degree of autonomy for the actors. A “free trade” internationally which rewards exploitation of workers at home and abroad and drives down wages for everyone is as much a farcical freedom as an “economic freedom” agenda which privileges the opportunity of one mega-corporation to merge with another over the opportunity for one of its employees to get medical care for illness.

The White House tries to fend off allegations from its former Counter-Terrorism Co-ordinator:

Clarke said he asked for a Cabinet-level meeting in January 2001, shortly after the president took office, to discuss the threat al Qaeda posed to the United States. “That urgent memo wasn’t acted on,” Clarke told CBS. Instead, he said, administration officials were focused on issues such as missile defense and Iraq.

Clarke said Bush “probably” shares some of the blame for the attacks. He is scheduled to testify this week before the independent commission investigating 9/11. “Frankly, I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he’s done such great things about terrorism,” Clarke said in the CBS interview. “He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We’ll never know.”

My letter to the editor ran in the Inquirer this morning.

From the Chroncicle of Higher Education:

Graduate-student unions won three separate battles last week, in California, New York, and Washington, strengthening the movement to organize teaching and research assistants.

In a third win for such unions, a regional director for the National Labor Relations Board ruled last week that some graduate students who work for the Research Foundation at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry, in Syracuse, may unionize. The Research Foundation is a nonprofit organization that handles external grants and research contracts for SUNY.

The Israeli government assasinates the founder of Hamas:

Police forces were put on higher alert and their presence in major cities was beefed up Monday. A full closure was imposed on the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. All crossings into Israel were closed. In the police’s Judea and Samaria district all vacations and leaves were suspended and presence was beefed up around schools, bus stops and roadblocks.

The IDF confirmed that Yassin had been killed in the IAF strike, saying he was directly responsible for dozens of “terrorist attacks.”…Prime Minister Ariel Sharon oversaw the entire operation, receiving constant updates from military officials at his Negev ranch.

Israeli leaders respond:

“This is a difficult struggle that all the countries of the enlightened world must participate in. It is the natural right of the Jewish people, like that of all nations in the world that love life, to hunt down those who rise to destroy it,” Sharon said. Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz…called Yassin a Palestinian Osama bin Laden who sent hundreds of terrorists and suicide bombers to murder civilians, and said it was Israel’s right and duty to protect its citizens.

MK Ahmed Tibi (Hadash-Ta’al) said in response to the assassination that the Israeli government and its leader had committed a war crime. MK Taleb a-Sana (United Arab List) said it was “a crazy act that sends the entire region into the chaos of bloodshed. The person behind the order is a blood-thirsty criminal.”

Sam Smith on the FCC’s newly-voted half-a-million dollar fines for uncouth language:

Then why the restrictions and the punishments? It is not to protect the ears of our children who readily use language on the playground that would result in a half-million dollar fine for Howard Stern. It is specifically to placate an extremist religious minority of excessive influence and miniscule tolerance. It is a covert establishment of religion, also barred by the once applicable aforementioned Constitution.

As a writer, I believe such words should be used with restraint. To put in terms a lawyer could understand, I don’t believe in crying “fuck” in a crowded orgy. I was, however, the only person ever to get the word into the Illustrated London News during that sturdily proper publication’s 150 year history. It just seemed the right word much as it seems now fit and proper to tell Congress and Michael Powell to fuck off.

Any Democratic politicians wondering why their party is losing the youth vote should consider spending more time making it possible for young adults to go to college and less time trying to make it impossible for them to hear bad words.

From the frontlines in the corporate struggle for profit abroad:

The restaurant workers were brought together by a company named Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), a subsidiary of Halliburton of Houston, Texas. Halliburton has contracts in Iraq worth more than $8 billion that range from cooking meals, delivering mail, building bases to repairing Iraq’s oil industry.

The company can’t hire workers fast enough to fulfill their commitments, but the pay scales fluctuate wildly depending on the country of citizenship of the employee. Americans, who work at dead-end, low-wage jobs at home, get paid handsomely even by US standards. Iraqi salaries start at $100 a month and imported South Asian workers get three times that. Meanwhile Halliburton is being investigated by the US military for overcharging US taxpayers to the tune of at least $16 million.

Just following orders:

Bush, wearing a green Army jacket, received an enthusiastic welcome from the troops, who stood on the post’s muddy parade grounds under bright sunshine and chanted “U.S.A.!” Before Bush appeared, small U.S. flags were handed out, and an officer gave instructions to the troops on how to receive the commander in chief. “We’re going to show him a lot of love by waving flags,” the officer said. Telling the troops not to salute, he added: “You’re going to wave and clap and make a lot of noise. . . . You must smile. We are happy campers here.”

From the AP:

Carbon dioxide, the gas largely blamed for global warming, has reached record-high levels in the atmosphere after growing at an accelerated pace in the past year, say scientists monitoring the sky from this 2-mile-high station atop a Hawaiian volcano. The reason for the faster buildup of the most important “greenhouse gas” will require further analysis, the U.S. government experts say.

“But the big picture is that CO2 is continuing to go up,” said Russell Schnell, deputy director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s climate monitoring laboratory in Boulder, Colo., which operates the Mauna Loa Observatory on the island of Hawaii.