In an interview in the German newspaper Der Spiegel, Adidas Chairman and CEO Herbert Hainer makes the same basic point as the one Jeff Immelt, GE Chairman and CEO, has made regarding their companies’ sponsorship of this summer’s Olympic games in China.
“The Olympic Games have been a part of our brand for years,” he said. In China, he said, the company is seeking to establish an emotional bond with consumers. “It is our goal to have over €1 billion in sales in China per year by 2010,” Hainer said.
He said it was his opinion that in sports you had to deal with countries “who don’t share our views of a democratic society.” Human rights groups have been pressuring Adidas to issue a statement on human rights questions encouraging China to take up a dialogue with the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. Hainer characterized the calls as an “effort to drag us into politics, and we will not allow that to happen. Otherwise, we would have to speak out against (separatist Basque terror group) ETA in Spain and we would have to tell the government in the USA what we think of Guantanamo.”
Hainer said he didn’t believe his company had suffered any image damage because of its involvement in the Chinese Olympics. “In any case, we’ve had more e-mail complaints in recent days about the use of kangaroo leather in our shoe products than about China,” he said.
Click here for the entire story.
Now that I am in my 30’s, I am looking to join AARP soon. Actually, I found this interesting article from some other source. Ms. Curtis (she is married, but has retained her name – so what does one call her?) does have some pearls of wisdom from her crazy life. I have included some excerpts. You can find the entire article here.
“Getting older means paring yourself down to an essential version of yourself,” says Curtis. Not only has the author and actress distilled her own style down to a simple, black-and-white wardrobe; she has restricted her own activities to those that mean the most to her: raising her children with her husband of 23 years, Christopher Guest; volunteering at her son’s school; writing children’s books; and helping raise funds and awareness for children’s charities. She does enjoy acting but no longer allows it to interfere with her personal life, declining film work that requires long hours or extensive travel without her family. Says Curtis: “If you told me I was doing a movie and I had to shoot tomorrow night, all night, I’d go, ‘No, I go to bed at 8:30. I get up at 5:00. No, I can’t, so sorry.’ ”
“I want to be older. I actually think there’s an incredible amount of self-knowledge that comes with getting older. I feel way better now than I did when I was 20. I’m stronger, I’m smarter in every way, I’m so much less crazy than I was then.
“The one benefit of being around fame my whole life is I’ve seen the façade of it. I know what people look like before they get all duded up. I see these people duded up and they’re talking differently, as if they’re titled aristocracy. They’re a girl from New Jersey, and it’s just hilarious. What are you doing in the gown, with the fake English accent?
Having spent the last several days in Indiana, I have seen a few of the political ads where Obama accuses Hillary and vice versa while always claiming superiority. Senator Obama states that his plan to place a windfall tax on the big oil companies is far superior to Senators Clinton’s and McCain’s obvious political pandering to save each American family roughly $30 this summer by repealing the gas tax between the summer holiday bookends. Actually, all three plans demonstrate each candidate’s misunderstanding of basic economic principles. (Actually, I think they do understand these principles, but are just trying to buy votes since they think most Americans won’t think about it hard enough.)
Here is the article (and the link):
This is one strange debate the candidates are having on energy policy. With gas prices close to $4 a gallon, Hillary Clinton and John McCain say they’ll bring relief with a moratorium on the 18.4-cent federal gas tax. Barack Obama opposes that but prefers a 1970s-style windfall profits tax (as does Mrs. Clinton).
Mr. Obama is right to oppose the gas-tax gimmick, but his idea is even worse. Neither proposal addresses the problem of energy supply, especially the lack of domestic oil and gas thanks to decades of Congressional restrictions on U.S. production. Mr. Obama supports most of those “no drilling” rules, but that hasn’t stopped him from denouncing high gas prices on the campaign trail. He is running TV ads in North Carolina that show him walking through a gas station and declaring that he’ll slap a tax on the $40 billion in “excess profits” of Exxon Mobil.
The idea is catching on. Last week Pennsylvania Congressman Paul Kanjorski introduced a windfall profits tax as part of what he called the “Consumer Reasonable Energy Price Protection Act of 2008.” So now we have Congress threatening to help itself to business profits even though Washington already takes 35% right off the top with the corporate income tax.
You may also be wondering how a higher tax on energy will lower gas prices. Normally, when you tax something, you get less of it, but Mr. Obama seems to think he can repeal the laws of economics. We tried this windfall profits scheme in 1980. It backfired. The Congressional Research Service found in a 1990 analysis that the tax reduced domestic oil production by 3% to 6% and increased oil imports from OPEC by 8% to 16%. Mr. Obama nonetheless pledges to lessen our dependence on foreign oil, which he says “costs America $800 million a day.” Someone should tell him that oil imports would soar if his tax plan becomes law. The biggest beneficiaries would be OPEC oil ministers.
There’s another policy contradiction here. Exxon is now under attack for buying back $2 billion of its own stock rather than adding to the more than $21 billion it is likely to invest in energy research and exploration this year. But hold on. If oil companies believe their earnings from exploring for new oil will be expropriated by government – and an excise tax on profits is pure expropriation – they will surely invest less, not more. A profits tax is a sure formula to keep the future price of gas higher.
Exxon’s profits are soaring with the recent oil price spike, but the energy industry’s earnings aren’t as outsized as the politicians seem to think. Thomson Financial calculates that profits from the oil and natural gas industry over the past year were 8.3% of investment, while the all-industry average is 7.8%. And this was a boom year for oil. An analysis by the Cato Institute’s Jerry Taylor finds that between 1970 and 2003 (which includes peak and valley years for earnings) the oil and gas business was “less profitable than the rest of the U.S. economy.” These are hardly robber barons.
This tiff over gas and oil taxes only highlights the intellectual policy confusion – or perhaps we should say cynicism – of our politicians. They want lower prices but don’t want more production to increase supply. They want oil “independence” but they’ve declared off limits most of the big sources of domestic oil that could replace foreign imports. They want Americans to use less oil to reduce greenhouse gases but they protest higher oil prices that reduce demand. They want more oil company investment but they want to confiscate the profits from that investment. And these folks want to be President?
Late this week, a group of Senate Republicans led by Pete Domenici of New Mexico introduced the “American Energy Production Act of 2008″ to expand oil production off the U.S. coasts and in Alaska. It has the potential to increase domestic production enough to keep America running for five years with no foreign imports. With the world price of oil at $116 a barrel, if not now, when? No word yet if Senators Clinton and Obama will take time off from denouncing oil profits to vote for that.
trenchant:
4 May 2008
- searching: having keenness and forcefulness and penetration in thought, expression, or intellect; “searching insights”; “trenchant criticism”
- hard-hitting: characterized by or full of force and vigor; “a hard-hitting expose”; “a trenchant argument”
- clear-cut: clearly or sharply defined to the mind; “clear-cut evidence of tampering”; “Claudius was the first to invade Britain with distinct…intentions of conquest”; “trenchant distinctions between right and wrong”
Welcome to my first post!
4 May 2008
This is my first post on my new blog. The intended purpose is to be a repository of things that have struck my interest. If anyone else find interest herein, that will just be gravy.
