Our partners in 'Free trade'

China has built the world’s largest solar panel manufacturing industry by exporting over 95 percent of its output to the United States and Europe. But when China authorized its first solar power plant this spring, it required that at least 80 percent of the equipment be made in China.

The U.S. led the effort to bring China into the WTO because of their economic power but also supposedly because of their pledge to respect free and open trade.

Apparently 'free and open trade' only applies to the West's end of trade.

Globalization will bring the world together, but for economic warfare ?

July 14, 2009

Drawing Critics, China Seeks to Dominate in Renewable Energy

By KEITH BRADSHER

BEIJING — When the United States’ top energy and commerce officials arrive in China on Tuesday, they will land in the middle of a building storm over China’s protectionist tactics to become the world’s leader in renewable energy.

Calling renewable energy a strategic industry, China is trying hard to make sure that its companies dominate globally. Just as Japan and South Korea made it hard for Detroit automakers to compete in those countries — giving their own automakers time to amass economies of scale in sheltered domestic markets — China is shielding its clean energy sector while it grows to a point where it can take on the world.

Steven Chu, the American energy secretary, and Gary Locke, the commerce secretary, are coming here to discuss clean energy and global warming with Chinese leaders, and to see if progress can be made toward getting China to agree to specific targets for reductions in greenhouse gases. Agreement proved elusive during the Group of 8 summit meeting last week in Italy.

But Mr. Chu and Mr. Locke arrive as Western companies, especially Europeans, are complaining increasingly about Beijing’s green protectionism.

China has built the world’s largest solar panel manufacturing industry by exporting over 95 percent of its output to the United States and Europe. But when China authorized its first solar power plant this spring, it required that at least 80 percent of the equipment be made in China.

When the Chinese government took bids this spring for 25 large contracts to supply wind turbines, every contract was won by one of seven domestic companies. All six multinationals that submitted bids were disqualified on various technical grounds, like not providing sufficiently detailed data.

This spring, the Chinese government banned virtually any installation of wind turbines with a capacity of less than 1,000 kilowatts — excluding 850-kilowatt designs, a popular size for European manufacturers.

Lu Hong, the program officer for renewable energy in the Beijing office of the Energy Foundation, a nonprofit group seeking to support sustainable energy, said that China was willing to invest heavily in renewable energy industries precisely because it helps the Chinese economy.

“The Chinese government won’t consider such a big solar industry without considering the building up of the domestic industry,” she said, adding that China’s policies will also help address global warming.

Zhou Heliang, the president of the China Electrotechnical Society, a government entity that plays a broad role in national and provincial technology policy, predicted at the Wind Power Asia conference here on Friday that Chinese-owned companies would increase their share of the Chinese market by an additional 10 or 20 percentage points this year.

That would give them almost three-quarters of the domestic market, compared with a quarter for European and American companies — the reverse of the ratio four years ago.

This year, China passed the United States as the world’s largest market for wind energy. It is now building six wind farms with a capacity of 10,000 to 20,000 megawatts apiece, using extensive low-interest loans from state-owned banks.

By comparison, T. Boone Pickens delayed his plans to build a 4,000-megawatt wind farm in Texas, once promoted as the world’s largest.

Some foreign companies, particularly European businesses, are starting to express misgivings about China’s promotion of the local manufacturers.

European wind turbine makers have stopped even bidding for some Chinese contracts after concluding that their bids would not be seriously considered, said Jörg Wuttke, the president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China.

European turbine manufacturers are especially disappointed because they built factories in China in order to comply with the country’s requirement that turbines contain 70 percent local content, Mr. Wuttke said. Yet all the multinational manufacturers were disqualified on technical grounds within three days of bidding for wind farm contracts this spring, even as Chinese companies that had never built a turbine were approved, he said.

European solar power companies are also unhappy. “This is not a level playing field,” said Boris Klebensberger, the chief operating officer of SolarWorld AG, which is based in Bonn.

Mr. Wuttke said he was encouraged that Premier Wen Jiabao of China told Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany in a telephone call on June 25 that China would not discriminate against foreign enterprises, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

But no new Chinese renewable energy regulations have been issued since then on local content requirements or other rules.

American companies play a smaller role in the global renewable energy industry, but some of them are also growing exasperated with the Chinese market. “That has been a tough market for non-Chinese manufacturers,” said Victor Abate, General Electric’s vice president for wind energy.

Kevin Griffis, a Commerce Department spokesman, said that the agency had not heard from American companies about difficulties in the Chinese market for renewable energy.

“Generally speaking,” Mr. Griffis said, “we support a business environment that is open, transparent, and fair so that all companies are able to compete based on product performance, not country of origin.”

World Trade Organization rules ban countries from using local content requirements to force companies like the wind turbine manufacturers to set up factories in a country instead of exporting to it. But much of China’s power industry, although publicly traded, is majority owned by the government.

While China promised to sign the W.T.O. side agreement on government procurement “as soon as possible” when it joined the free trade group in 2001 and won low-tariff access to foreign markets, it has never actually signed the side agreement. So its huge state sector remains largely exempt from international trade rules.

Other rules are also making it hard for foreign manufacturers and investors to compete in China.

China’s renewable energy standard requires that renewable energy account for at least 3 percent of the generating capacity of each large power company, excluding hydroelectric power, by the end of next year. But the rules do not dictate how much electricity must actually be generated from that capacity.

So power companies have an incentive to buy the cheapest wind turbines available, so as to increase their renewable energy capacity — even if the turbines break down frequently and do not produce that much electricity.

Turbines from Chinese-owned companies tend to have slightly lower purchase prices than foreign-brand turbines, but have higher repair costs, so the life cycle costs are similar, according to Chinese experts. United Nations data from the trading of carbon credits shows that the Chinese-brand turbines produce less electricity because they are more frequently out of action.

Financial regulations for wind farms also make it harder for foreign-owned farms than domestic-owned farms to borrow money or to sell carbon credits. Even well-connected international funds like Nature Elements Capital have to look hard for projects, while less-connected funds have struggled to find any at all.

Mr. Zhou said that China was also working hard to develop its own capability to manufacture high-tech materials that can withstand the torque, humidity and other stresses that affect wind turbines.

Two American companies are leading suppliers of materials: PPG Industries of Pittsburgh, the leading maker of fiberglass and protective coatings for the wind turbine housings and blades, and the Zoltek Corporation of Bridgeton, Mo., the world’s dominant supplier of carbon fiber for the support struts inside the most high-tech blades.

A report last month by IHS, a global data company, concluded that Chinese wind turbine makers would soon start exporting. That is because Chinese wind farm installations could level off temporarily as the power grid struggles to install enough high-power lines to use all the electricity wind produces.

Asked whether European turbine manufacturers risked sharing Detroit’s overconfidence in the 1970s in the face of challenges from Japan, Mr. Wuttke said that European makers believed that their reputations for quality and reliability would protect them.

Merit Alone

Looks like NYTimes reporters don't understand what the term 'merit alone' means which makes this article a very funny read.

Affirmative action is the single thread throughout her life. This is not 'merit alone'.

And with each new job that affirmative action got her , she gained a new 'Rabbi' or two.

Just check all the references to affirmative action and powerful personal recommendations in the article.

And look at how they portray Moynihan. A precursor of Obama; one of the first to use 'empathy' in decision making. A fellow Catholic and an Ivy Leaguer, how grand !

Just change the references a bit and it gets a bit more odious ... a fellow Jew and from the same school, who would think this good decision making?... or a gentleman from the 'right' type of family from the 'right' private schools and an Alumni of Princeton .

Merit Alone. Indeed !

June 5, 2009

Sotomayor Rose on Merit Alone, Her Allies Say

By MICHAEL POWELL and SERGE F. KOVALESKI

New York City in the 1980s was a place defined by party fiefs and political bosses, and high-profile public jobs were a coin of their realm.

But Sonia Sotomayor, a young woman from the Bronx projects with two Ivy League degrees, had no boss — no rabbi, as the New York saying goes — to guide her as she set out on her career.

Driven by her own ambitions, she worked as an assistant district attorney and a corporate lawyer, all the while building her public résumé: a seat on a city commission, another on a state board, which might allow her to take a bigger step in years to come.

The Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, who recruited her from Yale Law School, said the comforts of corporate law held no great attraction for her. And Ms. Sotomayor’s lifelong struggle with diabetes lent a sense of urgency.

“It made her think, ‘I’m not going to be around forever, I have to keep moving,’ ” Mr. Morgenthau said. “I remember talking with her about how much time each day, about an hour, she spent giving herself shots of insulin.”

If one wants to understand Ms. Sotomayor’s journey from boutique corporate lawyer to strikingly young federal judge, the eight-year stretch from 1984 to 1992 offers the best window into her maturation as a public figure. Her service on the city’s Campaign Finance Board was vigorous, as she joined decisions that challenged three present or future mayors of both parties.

She rose with remarkably little help from the traditional arbiters of power. Party bosses recall nothing of her, and aides to Gov. Mario M. Cuomo and Mayor Edward I. Koch lay no claim to having discovered her.

Rather, she found an influential patron in Mr. Morgenthau. Even after she left his office in 1984 and entered private practice, he would make the phone calls that helped her gain a seat on the Campaign Finance Board and catch the eye of United States Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan as a candidate for federal judge at age 38.

Her generational timing, too, was fortuitous. She was an accomplished Latina lawyer at a time when officials sought to diversify the white power structure by promoting more blacks, Latinos and women.

“If you live in the end of the 20th century, there was nothing incompatible between diversity and excellence,” said Judah Gribetz, the lawyer who ran the judicial search committee for Senator Moynihan, who proposed Ms. Sotomayor for the federal bench. “Obviously we were looking for people who were representative, and with the right credentials.

“She,” he added, “fit the bill.”

Ms. Sotomayor put her foot in public waters in 1987, while she worked at the law firm of Pavia & Harcourt. A partner there, David Botwinik, and his childhood friend Mr. Gribetz mentioned her interest in public service to Governor Cuomo. She explored applying for the counsel’s job at the state’s Urban Development Corporation, where she talked with the departing counsel, Susan Heilbron.

“She blew my socks off,” recalled Ms. Heilbron, who said she told Ms. Sotomayor, “With all due respect, the kind of public service you ought to be doing is bigger than this.”

So the governor’s appointments secretary, Ellen E. Conovitz, recommended that Ms. Sotomayor serve as a board member of Sonyma, the state mortgage agency, which provided below-market-rate mortgages for the needy. After several years of lackluster leadership, the board needed a new direction. As well, Ms. Conovitz said, the Cuomo administration sought more blacks, Latinos and women.

Ms. Sotomayor, by the account of board members, was a dogged member, pushing to direct more funds to lower-income homeowners. “She was the youngest board member but extremely involved in the details,” recalled William B. Eimicke, then the state’s housing czar.

Ms. Sotomayor’s political persona hewed carefully to the contours of New York, liberal but not particularly ideological. And, unusual in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans five to one, she registered as an independent; her lack of a party label played a role in her next appointment, to the Campaign Finance Board in 1988.

Responding to the city’s corruption scandals, the mayor and City Council had created the board as an institutional sheriff, which regulated campaign spending and doled out matching funds.

Mayor Koch was given two appointments, a Democrat and an independent or Republican. Peter L. Zimroth, who was the mayor’s corporation counsel, wanted a board member with a prosecutorial background and called Mr. Morgenthau.

Mr. Morgenthau mentioned Ms. Sotomayor. She would be the only candidate interviewed by Mr. Zimroth.

“I remember when I finished the interview thinking that we had found a gem, that this was a straight shooter, a very serious lawyer who seemed absolutely independent,” he said.

In the next four years, the board ruled toughly in cases that chastised, fined or audited the campaigns of Mayor Koch, his successor, David N. Dinkins, and a future mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, and Ms. Sotomayor emerged as a demanding member. “She had no patience for candidates who tried the ‘dog ate my homework’ defense,” said Nicole A. Gordon, a former executive director of the board.

Nor was she inclined to cut herself physical slack.

“She was very tenacious,” a former board chairman, the Rev. Joseph A. O’Hare, recalled with a chuckle. “We would be in a tense interview with a candidate and she would be shooting herself with insulin in the back of the hand.”

In 1992, Ms. Sotomayor entered a prestigious sweepstakes, submitting an application for federal judge. In what is a recurring theme, two friends say it was an almost accidental elevation. “She didn’t talk about the next step being a judgeship,” said Dawn Cardi.

But familiar patrons made her case and her timing was good. Senator Moynihan had made it clear he wanted more female and minority candidates.

Mr. Gribetz and Mr. Botwinik again forwarded her name, this time to Senator Moynihan. Mr. Morgenthau called as well.

Mr. Gribetz is blunt. “Let’s talk about how judges are made,” he said. “Sonia had no political connections and did not come through the political process, but these were social friends of mine. I trusted them.”

Connections of a different sort aided her with the senator. They both hailed from Catholic working-class neighborhoods and had achieved academic honors: He had been a Harvard professor, and she had won the highest award given to undergraduates at Princeton.

“He told me he was absolutely convinced she would end up on the Supreme Court,” said a top former aide to the senator. “He got his bet in early on that one.”

Subtle subjectivity for sympathetic strugglers

The choice of words or the choice of numbers/statistics is what makes writing more subjective than it has to be.

Here's an article from one Manny Fernandez in the NYTimes... I remember this guy wrote an article about the Binghamton shooter last month where he described Binghamton as a little backwater town with no experience dealing with immigrants (like they do in NYC), implying that it was an unwelcoming place for newcomers.

Of course this is the EXACT opposite of the truth.

Now he has this article and I was struck by this paragraph, where he tries to subtly manipulate the sympathies of the reader:

Kevin Brewster-Streeks, 29, and his partner, Greg Armstrong, 22, struggled to pay their $1,650 rent on Mr. Armstrong’s $18-an-hour salary as a medical assistant after Mr. Brewster-Streeks’s $36,450 job as a records clerk at a law firm was eliminated last year.

What's the problem with this paragraph?

It implies that one guy is a poorly paid hourly worker making less than the other person who has a more substantial job and salary. One guy is hourly and the other is salaried, and salaried is always a higher level, more prestigious position AND gets paid more right?

In actuality $18/hr = $36,000 a year, or the EXACT same amount that the other guy was earning. Most readers would not notice this fact but instead be led to have extra sympathy for these two who are struggling to get by on the salary of the 'lesser paid' guy .

May 5, 2009

Once ‘Very Good Rent Payers’ Now Facing Eviction

By MANNY FERNANDEZ

A registered nurse came close to losing her $1,550-a-month apartment on the Upper East Side after being let go from two jobs in three months. A woman found herself dipping into a 401(k) to keep her $3,375 unit in Peter Cooper Village after her husband was laid off in February from his six-figure marketing job. A father of two with an M.B.A. and a law degree owed $5,400 in back rent in Stuyvesant Town after he struggled to find steady work and lent money to his wife’s family.

Lawyers, judges and tenant advocates say the staggering economy has sent an increasing number of middle-class renters across New York City to the brink of eviction, straining the legal and financial services of city agencies and charities. Suddenly, residents of middle-class havens like Rego Park in Queens and Riverdale in the Bronx are crowding into the city’s already burdened housing courts, long known as poor people’s court.

Even some affluent people in high-end places are finding themselves facing off with landlords. One man, laid off by Merrill Lynch, was forced to move out of his $5,700 apartment in TriBeCa, owing $20,000 in back rent. Todd Nahins, a lawyer who represents owners of luxury residential buildings, has been busy negotiating payment plans for tenants in arrears.

“There’s definitely an uptick of people who were basically very good rent payers until the economic downturn,” Mr. Nahins said. “There’s so many of them. People who at one point had made money are now not earning enough to pay their rent.”

No one knows exactly how many of those kinds of tenants are facing eviction; the city’s five housing courts, and two smaller community courts that hear similar cases, do not keep data on the income level of litigants. Overall, court records show that the number of cases filed citywide for nonpayment of rent jumped about 19 percent in the first two months of 2009 from the same period last year, to 42,257 from 35,588.

“It’s cutting across all lines,” said Jaya K. Madhavan, supervising judge of Bronx Housing Court. “The economy is really taking a toll on everyone.”

While the downturn has certainly put plenty of lower-income people at risk of eviction, those involved in the housing court system say the growing numbers of accountants, salespeople, small business owners, construction project managers and other white-collar professionals being pursued for nonpayment is striking.

Lawyers for District Council 37, the city’s largest public employee union, provided free legal assistance to members on 2,572 housing court cases last year, up from 2,277 in 2006. “People who never had eviction cases before are coming through our doors now,” said Joan L. Beranbaum, director of the union’s Municipal Employees Legal Services.

On the Upper East Side, the nonprofit Eviction Intervention Services has seen a spike in phone calls and office visits from tenants in rent-stabilized or rent-controlled apartments. In Bronx Housing Court, Room 360, which handles cases concerning units in co-ops and condominiums — which are often more expensive than those in rental apartment buildings — had 10,205 cases last year, up from 7,818 in 2007.

Landlords typically start nonpayment proceedings in housing court after a few months of missed rent, depending in part on a tenant’s previous payment history; the goal is usually not eviction. “It’s not about, ‘If you don’t have the money, get the hell out,’ ” Mr. Nahins said. “It’s about, ‘Look, we want to work it out.’ Nobody wants vacancies in high-end apartments.”

Diane Scott, a single mother on Staten Island, lost her home to foreclosure in 2007 after she was laid off as a $72,000-a-year legal recruiter, only to be threatened with eviction from her $1,750 apartment when her $40,000-a-year bookkeeping job was eliminated in June. After appearing in housing court in February, Ms. Scott, 42, said she had been unable to tell her three sons they might again have to move.

Kevin Brewster-Streeks, 29, and his partner, Greg Armstrong, 22, struggled to pay their $1,650 rent on Mr. Armstrong’s $18-an-hour salary as a medical assistant after Mr. Brewster-Streeks’s $36,450 job as a records clerk at a law firm was eliminated last year.

They borrowed $2,000 from relatives and friends and racked up $8,000 in credit-card debt. Mr. Armstrong withdrew about $4,000 from two pension and retirement accounts, and Mr. Brewster-Streeks started working as a hospital clerk for less than half of his previous pay. But they could not keep up: after two bouts in housing court, they moved out in February, owing nearly $7,000 in back rent.

“It’s kind of dehumanizing,” Mr. Brewster-Streeks said of the experience. “They see you as a certain kind of person. We’ve never been that certain kind of person.”

Mr. Armstrong stopped attending classes at LaGuardia Community College for two semesters and took so much time off from work to deal with the court case that he earned a negative job review. Along with legal help from District Council 37, of which Mr. Armstrong is a member, the couple got an emergency loan from the city’s Human Resources Administration.

They moved from a two-bedroom unit with ample closet space near Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx to a one bedroom with two small closets at the edge of the Cross-Bronx Expressway. The rent is $500 less, but they still have to pay off what they owe on the previous place, along with the $5,650 loan.

“It’s going to take us a couple of years to get back from this,” Mr. Armstrong said.

For months, Christine A. Lewis, 46, has been living a kind of nomadic existence in her own apartment, using borrowed furniture, wearing borrowed clothing. Her own belongings — bed, clothes, computer, television set — were put in storage after a city marshal knocked on the door of her one-bedroom apartment in Co-Op City in the Bronx in June with an eviction order. She managed to quickly negotiate a return, but has been unable to raise $1,600 to pay off the storage company and get her possessions back.

So when her son died from bone cancer in December at age 18, Ms. Lewis had to borrow a suit to wear to the funeral.

Ms. Lewis said she lost her job as a $52,000-a-year hospital lab technologist because she was unable to concentrate during her son’s illness, and has been surviving since on unemployment benefits. She paid off $2,800 in back rent, but still worries about keeping up.

“It’s horrible and all, but I try to look at everything as if the glass is half full, as a learning experience,” she said.

When is $100 million a lot of money?

The U.S. Federal budget for next year is over $3.5 trillion.

Obama campaigned on cutting the many wasteful programs within the gov't.

It appears his estimate of 'waste', now that he is in power, is that there is possibly $100 million not being used effectively, and he is 'challenging' his cabinet to find these poorly spent funds.

My calculator tells me that $100 million out of $3.5 trillion is .00003% .

Which means he now feels that $3.5 trillion is a very lean budget and that the gov't is performing at virtually 100% efficiency.

The budget passed had over 10,000 earmarks amounting to several tens of Billions of dollars and this was deemed insignificant in the context of the overall budget also.

When AIG executives gave themselves hundreds of millions in bonuses this was also deemed insignificant within the context of over $150 billion in bailout money.

If workers were given raises amounting to several hundred million dollars this would be seen as inflationary and causing American industries to be less competitive against workers elsewhere in the world. That is, several hundred million dollars suddenly becomes a very large amount, having a disproportionate effect on the whole world economy, not just the U.S.

If hundreds of thousands of workers get $10 more per week this upsets the economic apple-cart but if 100 execs get $1 million a year this makes economic sense to retain 'talent' , even in failed corporations.

Ridding a $3.5 trillion budget of $100 million is equivalent to buying one less coffee per year for the average worker.

Is $100 million a lot of money ?

Absolutely, at least to most people outside of the Washington beltway, large corporations and Ivy League Universities.

To this group it all depends..... on who is receiving it.

Obama to gather Cabinet, seeking $100 million in cuts

• Story Highlights
• Two top administration officials say president wants $100 million in expenses cut
  
• Agencies would have to report how they saved on expenses after 90 days
  
• House and Senate returns from recess this week to work on $3.67 trillion budget
  
• Obama to also offer examples of how agencies are already planning to save
  

By Suzanne Malveaux
CNN

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Obama returned to Washington on Sunday night with his eye back on his domestic agenda and a plan to save government money.

On Monday, Obama will gather his full Cabinet together for the first time as president and challenge it to cut a total of $100 million in the next 90 days, two senior administration officials said.

The officials spoke anonymously because the announcement had yet to come from the president, who returned Sunday from the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago.

The agencies would have to report how they saved on expenses after 90 days, the officials said.

A senior administration official described the edict as part of Obama's "commitment to go line by line through the budget to cut spending" and "reform the government."

As House and Senate lawmakers return from recess this week, they are expected to start reconciling their versions of the fiscal 2010 budget resolution. The president's budget request is $3.67 trillion.

In context of the federal budget, $100 million in savings is a small amount, but the White House wants to demonstrate fiscal responsibility.

On Monday, Obama will offer examples of how various agencies have started cost-cutting measures, including:

• The Department of Homeland Security's plan to save an estimated $52 million over five years by purchasing office supplies in bulk.

• The Department of Agriculture's effort to consolidate 1,500 employees from seven locations into a single facility in 2011. It's estimated to save $62 million over a 15-year lease.

• The Veterans Affairs Department's move to cancel or delay 26 conferences, saving nearly $17.8 million. Veterans Affairs also will use video-conferencing to cut costs.

A corporate lemming ?

This is similar to actions that Circuit City took which wound up greatly acceleraing it's downfall ...

Circuit City fired and replaced their experienced salespeople who were earning more, with new, less experienced people at minimum wage . Which turned out to be exactly the wrong thing to do at the time. Probably the wrong thing to do at ANY time.

Best Buy actually reported decent results , considering the world economy, the past quarter.

Now it's gonna fire 1000 assistant store managers? This is a typical corporate reaction, layoffs ... who knows what the effect will be, but probably not much for the future growth and health of the company. Just standard operating procedure.

But decreasing the salary of 'Senior Sales Associates' by 25-50% (YIKES!!) .... this is similar but MUCH worse than the Circuit City action ... they have decided not to fire their experienced people but instead keep them around at newbie wages ....

In today's economy it may be that those affected will have to grin and bear it as there are not many job alternatives out there. But, for the medium and long-term effects on Best Buy once the economy comes back, this has got to be a gigantic negative .

I would think that they will suffer the 'Circuit City effect' within the next year if this report is true.


April 16, 2009
Best Buy Cuts Wages, Jobs in Its Stores
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:31 a.m. ET
RICHFIELD, Minn. (AP) -- Thousands of Best Buy store employees will see pay cuts and others will lose their jobs as the consumer electronics chain reorganizes.

Best Buy Co. Inc. would not disclose the number of people affected. A spokesman said the move will put more sales people in front of customers. Many store managers and senior-level sales people will go to jobs where they'll interact more directly with shoppers.

New York investment firm Sanford Bernstein said in a research note Wednesday that as many as 1,000 assistant store managers would lose their jobs. Up to another 8,000 senior sales associates would be demoted to jobs paying 25 percent to 50 percent less.

The numbers are estimates by Sanford Bernstein. Best Buy won't confirm or deny them.

Disney hi-tech

Disney employs a middle-aged woman to figure out what young teenage boys like?

...... and her background? :

The people on Ms. Peña’s team have anthropology and psychology backgrounds, but she majored in journalism and never saw herself working with children. Indeed, her training in consumer research came from working for a hotel operator of riverboat casinos.

And her methodology ? paying the kids family to rummage through his private things and talk to him ... the headline says '... Uses Science ...' .... that's a broad definition of science!

Who does she know to get a job like this for which she has absolutely no relevant experience or training?

And imagine if they employed a middle-aged man to figure out what 12-yr old girls like ... cries of sexism would echo in the press !!

It's also interesting that Disney, a company catering to children for 80 years suddenly doesn't know what children like?
Have kids changed that much in 80 years?
Their toys have, but have they ?

April 14, 2009

Disney Expert Uses Science to Draw Boy Viewers

By BROOKS BARNES

ENCINO, Calif. — Kelly Peña, or “the kid whisperer,” as some Hollywood producers call her, was digging through a 12-year-old boy’s dresser drawer here on a recent afternoon. Her undercover mission: to unearth what makes him tick and use the findings to help the Walt Disney Company reassert itself as a cultural force among boys.

Ms. Peña, a Disney researcher with a background in the casino industry, zeroed in on a ratty rock ’n’ roll T-shirt. Black Sabbath?

“Wearing it makes me feel like I’m going to an R-rated movie,” said Dean, a shy redhead whose parents asked that he be identified only by first name.

Jackpot.

Ms. Peña and her team of anthropologists have spent 18 months peering inside the heads of incommunicative boys in search of just that kind of psychological nugget. Disney is relying on her insights to create new entertainment for boys 6 to 14, a group that Disney used to own way back in the days of “Davy Crockett” but that has wandered in the age of more girl-friendly Disney fare like “Hannah Montana.”

Children can already see the results of Ms. Peña’s scrutiny on Disney XD, a new cable channel and Web site (disney.go.com/disneyxd). It’s no accident, for instance, that the central character on “Aaron Stone” is a mediocre basketball player. Ms. Peña, 45, told producers that boys identify with protagonists who try hard to grow. “Winning isn’t nearly as important to boys as Hollywood thinks,” she said.

Actors have been instructed to tote their skateboards around with the bottoms facing outward. (Boys in real life carry them that way to display the personalization, Ms. Peña found.) The games portion of the Disney XD Web site now features prominent trophy cases. (It’s less about the level reached in the game and more about sharing small achievements, research showed.)

Fearful of coming off as too manipulative, youth-centric media companies rarely discuss this kind of field research. Disney is so proud of its new “headquarters for boys,” however, that it has made an exception, offering a rare window onto the emotional hooks that are carefully embedded in children’s entertainment. The effort is as outsize as the potential payoff: boys 6 to 14 account for $50 billion in spending worldwide, according to market researchers.

Thus far, Disney’s initiative is limited to the XD channel. But Disney hopes that XD will produce a hit show that can follow the “High School Musical” model from cable to merchandise to live theater to feature film, and perhaps even to Disney World attraction.

With the exception of “Cars,” Disney — home to the “Princesses” merchandising line; the Jonas Brothers; and “Pixie Hollow,” a virtual world built around fairies — has been notably weak on hit entertainment franchises for boys. (“Pirates of the Caribbean” and “Toy Story” are in a type of hibernation, awaiting new big-screen installments.) Disney Channel’s audience is 40 percent male, but girls drive most of the related merchandising sales.

Rivals like Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network have made inroads with boys by serving up rough-edged animated series like “The Fairly Oddparents” and “Star Wars: The Clone Wars.” Nickelodeon, in particular, scoffs at Disney’s recent push.

“We wrote the book on all of this,” said Colleen Fahey Rush, executive vice president for research of MTV Networks, which includes Nickelodeon.

Even so, media companies over all have struggled to figure out the boys’ entertainment market. News Corporation infamously bet big on boys in the late 1990s with its Fox Kids Network and a digital offering, Boyz Channel. Both failed and drew criticism for segregating the sexes (there was also a Girlz Channel) and reinforcing stereotypes.

The guys are trickier to pin down for a host of reasons. They hop more quickly than their female counterparts from sporting activities to television to video games during leisure time. They can also be harder to understand: the cliché that girls are more willing to chitchat about their feelings is often true.

The people on Ms. Peña’s team have anthropology and psychology backgrounds, but she majored in journalism and never saw herself working with children. Indeed, her training in consumer research came from working for a hotel operator of riverboat casinos.

“Children seemed to open up to me,” said Ms. Peña, who does not have any of her own.

Sometimes the research is conducted in groups; sometimes it involves Ms. Peña’s going shopping with a teenage boy and his mother (and perhaps a videographer). The subjects, who are randomly selected by a market research company, are never told that Disney is the one studying them. The children are paid $75.

Walking through Dean’s house in this leafy Los Angeles suburb on the back side of the Hollywood Hills, Ms. Peña looked for unspoken clues about his likes and dislikes.

“What’s on the back of shelves that he hasn’t quite gotten rid of — that will be telling,” she said beforehand. “What’s on his walls? How does he interact with his siblings?”

One big takeaway from the two-hour visit: although Dean was trying to sound grown-up and nonchalant in his answers, he still had a lot of little kid in him. He had dinosaur sheets and stuffed animals at the bottom of his bed.

“I think he’s trying to push a lot of boundaries for the first time,” Ms. Peña said later.

This kind of intensive research has paid dividends for Disney before. Anne Sweeney, president of the Disney ABC Television Group, noted it in her approach to rebuilding Disney Channel a decade ago.

“You have to start with the kids themselves,” she said. “Ratings show what boys are watching today, but they don’t tell you what is missing in the marketplace.”

While Disney XD is aimed at boys and their fathers, it is also intended to include girls. “The days of the Honeycomb Hideout, where girls can’t come in, have long passed,” said Rich Ross, president of Disney Channels Worldwide.

In Ms. Peña’s research boys across markets and cultures described the television aimed at them as “purposeless fun” but expressed a strong desire for a new channel that was “fun with a purpose,” Mr. Ross said. Hollywood has been thinking of them too narrowly — offering all action or all animation — instead of a more nuanced combination, he added. So far results have been mixed.

Disney XD, which took over the struggling Toon Disney channel, has improved its predecessor’s prime-time audience by 27 percent among children 6 to 14, according to Nielsen Media Research. But the bulk of this increase has come from girls. Viewership among boys 6 to 14 is up about 10 percent.

“We’ve seen cultural resonance, and it doesn’t come overnight,” Mr. Ross said.

Which is one reason Ms. Peña is still out interviewing. At Dean’s house her team was quizzing him about what he meant when he used the word “crash.” Ben, a 12-year-old friend who had come over to hang out, responded, “After a long day of doing nothing, we do nothing.”

Growing self-conscious, Ben added, “Am I talking too much?”

Not even close.

Race to the bottom accelerates

The most important part of the article is the very last paragraph:

The steps taken by Honda will have the effect of reducing hourly wage costs at its U.S. factories just as GM and Chrysler face pressure to bring their own compensation levels in line with the pay of workers at U.S. plants run by Honda, Toyota and Nissan.

This is an example of the lowering of wages in the West and the U.S. in particular, a trend that has been happening for a while and will now accelerate in this deep recession. Even after the recession 'ends' wages will continue to fall.

Economists are very worried about deflation. Falling wages drives deflation.

The flip side is that the excessive creation of dollars will also cause inflation.

What happens when wages decrease and the dollar in turn buys less? Loss of buying power deepens the recession and if this cycle is not stopped a severe and prolonged depression results.

Honda to cut North American output, pay

Japanese automaker to shut down six factories for nearly two weeks to cut production by 3.4%.

Last Updated: April 1, 2009: 6:21 AM ET

TOKYO (Reuters) -- Honda Motor Co., Japan's No. 2 automaker, said it would cut production in North America by temporarily shutting factories from next month and will reduce pay for workers as sales in the United States plunge to multi-decade lows.

Honda (HMC) will shut down six factories for 13 days, starting in May, to cut production by 62,000 vehicles. Honda does not provide a production forecast, but the reduction would be equivalent to 3.4% of what it built in the region in the year to March.

The decision by Honda comes amid a sharp downturn in auto sales that is threatening the survival of General Motors Corp. (GM, Fortune 500) and Chrysler.

Data due out later are likely to show U.S. auto sales at the weakest monthly rates in more than 27 years.

"U.S. sales look set to fall about 40% in March, and there's no signs of a recovery beyond April either," said Okasan Securities analyst Yasuaki Iwamoto.

"When sales are this bad, it's natural that production is going to be weak," he said, while adding that there was no change to his view that the worst was over for production cuts after Japanese automakers made deep reductions in January-March.

Japan, Korea sales slide

Sales in Asia are also suffering.

In Japan, industry-wide auto sales fell 25% in March from a year earlier to 546,098 vehicles.

Sales at South Korea's five automakers in March fell 19% to 402,563 vehicles, with exports down 20%.

Shares in Honda gained 6.7% in Tokyo on Wednesday along with jumps in other auto stocks.

Market participants cited reasons ranging from the dollar's gradual rise this week to hopes for some resolution for GM and Chrysler, which the New York Times reported might involve some form of controlled bankruptcy.

Honda said it would cut pay for salaried and factory workers and also offered buyouts and early retirement incentives to most of its 32,400 workers in the United States and Canada.

It is the most sweeping program to reduce payroll costs offered by Honda, a spokesman said.

Honda has trailed Japanese rivals Toyota Motor Corp. (TM) and Nissan Motor Co. in reacting to a buildup of unsold cars in the United States, and executives have said it would likely take until the summer to bring inventory back to appropriate levels.

The slow pace is also partly due to Honda's policy of limiting sales incentives, which erode cars' resale value as well as profits. According to research firm Autodata, Honda's average spending on incentives per vehicle in February was the lowest among mass-market brands, at just over $1,300 versus nearly $1,600 for Toyota and $2,900 at Nissan.

Nissan Chief Operating Officer Toshiyuki Shiga said earlier in Tokyo he expected global production at Japan's No. 3 automaker to be 10% higher in the first half of the new business year that started on Wednesday compared with the previous six months.

Honda has assembly plants in Indiana, Ohio and Alabama in the United States, as well as in Canada and Mexico. It also operates two engine plants and two transmission plants in North America.

Pay hit

Like Toyota, Honda previously paid its non-union hourly workers even when it shut down factories to reduce inventory. But Honda said this time hourly workers would not be paid for six of the 13 days, to be scattered between May 1 and July 31.

Salaried workers will also see compensation reduced this financial year, said spokesman Ed Miller.

Miller said Honda told employees it expected bonus payments for both hourly and salaried employees to be reduced or eliminated this year.

The steps taken by Honda will have the effect of reducing hourly wage costs at its U.S. factories just as GM and Chrysler face pressure to bring their own compensation levels in line with the pay of workers at U.S. plants run by Honda, Toyota and Nissan.