-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- Year 2000 Senate Study Says Y2k Risks Widespread The main risk is from lawyers A report on the Year 2000 computer problem prepared by a special Senate panel warns that a number of foreign countries and U.S. economic sectors, especially the health care industry, appear at significant risk for technological failures and business disruptions. The report, scheduled for release this week by Sens. Robert F. Bennett (R-Utah) and Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), includes a letter to Senate colleagues describing the problem of computers' ability to recognize dates starting on Jan. 1, 2000, popularly known as Y2K, as a "worldwide crisis" and as "one of the most serious and potentially devastating events this nation has ever encountered." The prospect of widespread computer glitches and lobbying by industry groups have galvanized bipartisan groups in the Senate and House to press for legislation protecting companies that fail to deliver goods and services on time because of Y2K problems. Rep. David Dreier (R-Calif.) estimated yesterday there might be $1 trillion in lawsuits filed because of the glitch and urged adoption of an industry-backed House bill to allay "a great deal of fear regarding out-of-control litigation." A draft copy of the Senate report, provided by staff aides to The Washington Post, describes in vivid detail the scope of the potential Y2K problem and the frustrations that Senate investigators encountered as they tried to gather information from industries reluctant to describe what progress they have made in fixing computer and telecommunication systems. But the report represents the most comprehensive assessment of the Y2K problem to appear as companies and governments scramble to fix their computer systems. In addition to health care, the report portrays the oil, education, farming, food processing and construction sectors as seriously lagging on computer repairs. Among the report's findings: More than 90 percent of doctors' offices and 50 percent of small- and medium-sized companies have not addressed the Y2K problem; telephone systems are expected to operate; and planes will not fall out of the sky. The Senate panel also worries that communities will not be able to provide "911" and other emergency services. Even though governments and corporations have mobilized technology staffs and consultants to sift through millions of lines of software code looking for Y2K glitches, the 161-page draft also underscores how little experts know about the potential impact of the so-called millennium bug. "The interdependent nature of technology systems makes the severity of possible disruptions difficult to predict. Adding to the confusion, there are still very few overall Year 2000 technology compliance assessments of infrastructure or industry sectors. Consequently, the fundamental questions of risk and personal preparedness cannot be answered at this time," the draft said. Clinton administration officials have portrayed the Y2K problem as similar to a severe winter snowstorm that causes inconveniences but little lasting harm. Yesterday, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan assured Americans that they can keep their money in the bank over New Year's 2000 without fear. "There's almost no conceivable way . . . that computers will break down and records of people's savings accounts would disappear," he told the Senate Banking Committee. Still, almost all government agencies are drawing up emergency plans, including the Fed, which plans to stockpile an extra $200 billion in cash for banks, about a third more than usual. The Senate report, which grew out of a series of hearings last year by the Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem, concludes "that the biggest Y2K impact will occur internationally." Two important trading partners, Japan and Venezuela, seem to have miscalculated the time and money needed to fix the computer glitch, according to the draft report. Relying on surveys by consultants, the report suggests that Japan "may have underestimated the resources needed to address the problem," noting that major Japanese banks have indicated far lower repair costs than U.S. banks. Venezuela and Saudi Arabia lag from a year to 18 months behind the United States in Y2K preparations, raising concerns about the availability of oil and other critical imports, the report said. International ports are widely described as far behind in their Y2K efforts, prompting worries that the maritime industry will face shipping problems that could interrupt commerce, the report added. International aviation and foreign airports also appear at risk, and "flight rationing to some areas and countries is possible," the report said. Overall, the report said, "the least-prepared countries are those that depend heavily on foreign investment and multinational companies to supplement their economies. Panic over Y2K concerns may cause investors to withdraw financial support. Lack of confidence in a country's infrastructure could cause multinational companies to close their operations." The Y2K problem exists in millions of lines of software code that uses two digits to represent four-digit years. Unfixed, computers will assume that dates occurring after Dec. 31 use the prefix "19," leading software programs to read "00" not as 2000 but as 1900. That defect could cause computers to crash or spew out incorrect data. In assessing U.S. preparedness, the draft report reserved some of its strongest language for the health care industry, concluding it "is one of the worst-prepared for Y2K and carries a significant potential for harm." The industry relies on computers for patient treatment, insurance claims and pharmaceutical manufacturing and distribution. While large hospitals are pushing to fix their computers, the report described hospital management as "playing a catch-up game." Many hospitals are relying solely on medical device manufacturers to certify products as Y2K-compliant, which the report said "could be a serious mistake." The report cited rural and inner-city hospitals as at special risk because they do not have the staff or money to find and fix Y2K glitches. In an effort to head off a potential avalanche of lawsuits caused by Y2K glitches, a bipartisan group of House members yesterday introduced a bill to address litigation issues. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has introduced a similar bill, and Sens. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) plan to announce their version today. Although the House bill has the support of major business organizations, Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), the measure's principal author, stressed that the measure was "pro-consumer" because it will "encourage businesses to come in and fix their problems." The Year 2000 Readiness and Responsibility Act would require plaintiffs to give notice to potential defendants about their difficulties, wait 30 days for a response and give the defendant an additional 60 days to fix a glitch before suing. Under the bill, plaintiffs may recover actual damages, but punitive damages would be capped. The Washington Post, Feb. 24, 1999 Financial Markets in Japan Japan Slowly Nationalizing Its Banks More Tax Dollars Added to Bank Capital A planned injection of at least ¥7,450bn ($64bn) of public funds into Japanese banks could leave the government with substantial stakes in several big financial institutions. Preliminary calculations by government officials and bank analysts suggest that the government's stake in Daiwa Bank, Chuo Trust, Mitsui Trust and Sakura Bank may rise to between 30 and 60 per cent. Officials stress that these estimates are preliminary because the government has not yet decided how much of the ¥7,450bn will be used to buy shares or simply remain in the form of non-convertible loans. The final details of the capital injection are still being negotiated between the banks and the Financial Reconstruction Commission, the government body responsible for implementing reform. But the scale of potential state ownership is likely to raise questions about how the government will manage such stakes and ensure that public funds are not wasted. Yukiko Ohara, banking analyst at Morgan Stanley, believes the capital injection could lead to government ownership of about 50 per cent of six banks. "And we anticipate another injection of public funds in fiscal 1999," she said. The FRC has already indicated that it hopes to inject at least ¥7,450bn into banks' capital bases by the end of March. This will come out of ¥25,000bn made available for this purpose. The FRC is still unsure whether this injection will take the form of convertible preference shares, or how long it will hold the shares before selling them into the market. It is also undecided about the conversion price. However, government officials admit that, if the FRC converted its capital injections into shares at current market prices, the government could end up holding about 60 per cent of Mitsui Trust and Chuo Trust, 50 per cent of Daiwa Bank, 45 per cent of Sakura Bank, and 30 per cent in each of Tokai Bank and Toyo Trust. Even if the largest banks press ahead with their plans to raise about ¥2,000bn of capital from the markets and companies with which they are linked, analysts warn that more public injections will be needed later, which could further increase the government's stake. Sakura, for example, is planning to raise at least ¥350bn of capital from related companies in addition to the ¥800bn it is requesting from the government. But some banking analysts and western diplomats fear such capital injections will be inadequate to cope with the scale of bad loans. Andrew Smithers, a consultant, said: "The amount of capital needed by Japan's banks and other financial institutions is widely disputed. But sources within the regulatory authorities put the figure at about ¥100,000bn - which means that the public funds earmarked for recapitalisation may be inadequate." The government has already nationalised two banks, Long Term Credit Bank of Japan and Nippon Credit Bank. Although the government yesterday said it hoped to sell LTCB within three months, it has agreed to remove only a small proportion of LTCB's bad loans from the bank. The Financial Times, Feb. 24, 1999 NBC Chicken Feathers NBC Shows Its True Colors by Michael Harris OTTAWA -- What ever will America do about Juanita Broaddrick? What will those Clinton sycophants in the feminist movement do? What will the sorry U.S. senators do who acquitted the president on political cue? And what will a cowardly mainstream media do, now that Jane Doe No. 5 has finally been permitted to tell her story to the world, a story that millions of Internet readers have known about for months? Regrettably, none of the answers is flattering. America will shuffle its feet and look out the window. The feminists will ignore Broaddrick, the better to enjoy their hard-won connections to the male power structure. ALLEGATIONS The senators will prattle, a little nervously, about unfounded allegations, hoping no one asks whether they read Broaddrick's sealed deposition before they cast their impeachment vote. (Many of them did.) The media will shrug and try to remain superior to Matt Drudge. The older I get, the less surprised I am when our institutions fail us spectacularly. Whether it's the Vatican secretly championing the cause of the murderous Augusto Pinochet, or our justice minister cutting loose the victims of the tainted blood scandal, I have seen the movie before: Power protects power, no matter what. Whenever this happens, any living, breathing notion of justice dies a hard death. The Bill Clinton story is about privilege and cowardice. That's why he was able to lie his way out of felonies. That's why he was permitted to bomb aspirin factories and rain missiles on Iraq under the pretense of national security, when the real issue was personal security. And it's why he almost managed to rape a woman in Arkansas without anyone being the wiser -- at least in polite media circles. Whatever small lustre attached to this profession comes from the giant-killer factor. A journalist, a victim and the truth occasionally prevail against the corrupt might of the establishment to the benefit of everyone. For anyone who has actually done it, it is the glory of the business; having the means, the colleagues and the courage to stand up and tell the story when no one in authority wants to hear it. NBC had the means but not the courage in the Juanita Broaddrick affair. Reporter Lisa Myers won Broaddrick's trust and got her terrible story on videotape. It's the account of how Bill Clinton brutally raped the then 35-year-old woman after inviting himself into her hotel room for coffee. When he was finished, he told her not to worry, that he was sterile from a childhood disease. Putting on his sunglasses at the door, the man who was Arkansas' attorney general at the time advised her to put some ice on her swollen lip, a lip he had bitten during the attack. WITNESS At least that's her story. As far as Bill goes, I guess it depends on what you think rape is. Myers did her homework to get the piece to air. She found a corroborating witness who spoke with Broaddrick immediately after the attack. She checked the wealthy woman's past and found no skeletons. NBC even submitted 40 questions to the White House, which went unanswered. But regardless of what she and Washington bureau chief Tim Russert did to confirm the story, NBC brass "raised the evidentiary bar a little higher." Raising the bar for Bill is turning into a favourite American pastime. Despite the felonies for which Clinton was impeached, Democratic senators insisted that they didn't rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanours. It was their conduct that didn't rise to the level of integrity intended in their oath to dispense impartial justice. They let a popular president go for partisan reasons. They pretended that the subject matter of the Lewinsky scandal was too sleazy to even be heard on the Senate floor. By refusing to hear live witnesses at an impeachment trial for the first time in U.S. history, they made the well of the senate sleazier than Monica Lewinsky ever could have. After all, was she so much different from Democratic senators? Both were prepared to protect the president at all costs, even though they knew he was guilty. The craven NBC managers who decided to break the network's word to Juanita Broaddrick can't hide behind the excuse that their journalist didn't have the goods. The media is in the business of presenting legitimate stories, not air-tight legal defences. In the end, one journalist did step to the plate. I wish I could buy Dorothy Rabinowitz a spring bouquet. INTEGRITY It took an editorial writer from the staid Wall Street Journal to do what one of the major U.S. networks and just about everybody else was afraid to do; run the legitimate story of Clinton's alleged rape based on a personal interview with a very believable Juanita Broaddrick. The network still has the taped interview, but so far hasn't aired on the side of justice. Is that a peacock over at NBC, or just a gaudy chicken? The Toronto Sun, Feb. 23, 1999 NBC Chicken Feathers NBC Caves in to Public Pressure Broaddrick Interview to Air Tonight (Wed.) WASHINGTON — NBC News said it would broadcast Wednesday a much-anticipated interview with Juanita Broaddrick, an Arkansas woman who has charged that President Clinton sexually assaulted her 21 years ago. NBC News issued a brief statement late Tuesday saying the interview — which was conducted in mid-January by NBC News correspondent Lisa Meyers but has not been broadcast — would air on its "Dateline NBC'' program at 8 p.m. Wednesday (0100 GMT Thursday). In its statement, the network's news department did not indicate why it had held the potentially explosive interview for over a month rather than air it during the Senate impeachment trial of the president. Clinton lawyer David Kendall last week denied Broaddrick's account of the alleged sexual assault. "Any allegation that the president assaulted Ms. Broaddrick more than 20 years ago is absolutely false,'' he said. "Beyond that, we are not going to comment.'' White House spokesman Joe Lockhart declined to comment on NBC's decision to broadcast the interview, referring reporters to Kendall's statement. NBC spokeswoman Alex Constantinople told Reuters that NBC News was airing the interview now because it had finished its reporting on the story. "The story was never on hold. It was always being worked on. ... It was a work in progress,'' Constantinople said. She said "Dateline NBC'' would give viewers the context that would enable them to make up their own minds about the charge. Broaddrick's account surfaced Friday on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, which questioned NBC's decision not to air the interview with her, the first she had granted. In an interview published Saturday by The Washington Post, Broaddrick said Clinton forced himself on her in a Little Rock hotel room in 1978 while he was state attorney general. Broaddrick, 55, a nursing home operator from Van Buren, Arkansas, told the Post she first met Clinton in April 1978, when he was making his first run for governor of Arkansas and she was working as a volunteer in his campaign. Clinton, she said, invited her to visit him sometime at campaign headquarters in Little Rock, and she called him a week later when she was in the state capital for a nursing home seminar. They ended up meeting at the hotel where she was staying, and Clinton suggested they have coffee in her room, according to her account. In the hotel room, Clinton forced her to have sex, Broaddrick told the Post. Broaddrick's name appeared in the 1992 presidential campaign when a friend in whom she had confided revealed her allegations, but she never came forward publicly. She was subpoenaed by lawyers in Paula Jones's sexual harassment suit against Clinton; was interviewed by agents for independent counsel Kenneth Starr, who investigated Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky; and was approached by House of Representative Republican managers prosecuting Clinton at his trial. The Wall Street Journal said Broaddrick's charges, contained in an affidavit under the name of Jane Doe No. 5, helped persuade wavering House Republicans to vote to impeach Clinton in December. Starr briefly looked into Broaddrick's story but dropped it after determining that it did not fit the pattern of obstruction of justice he was trying to establish, since she said Clinton never tried to coerce her to keep quiet, according to the Washington Post report. On Feb. 12 the Senate acquitted Clinton on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in the Lewinsky case. Reuters, Feb. 23, 1999 Silver Market Survey Optimistic: Says Silver to Go to $7.50 This Year But don't believe everything you read Silver prices are expected to reach $7.50 an ounce in the second half of this year and $8-$10 an ounce by 2000, according to an annual silver survey released yesterday by CPM Group, a New-York research group. CPM estimated that stocks of silver bullion declined by 217.2m ounces in 1998 to about 359.8m ounces at the end of the year, more than two years' cover for the expected shortfall. The net deficit in the bullion market amounted to 192.2m ounces last year, more than 11 per cent down on 1997, and is expected to fall to 144m ounces this year. The price target for the second half represented a rise of over one-third on the price fixed in the London bullion market yesterday. Mr Jeffrey Christian of CPM acknowledged in the silver survey that he had been a touch premature in some of his forecasts a year ago. Mr Christian said silver inventories continued to be drawn down, and that silver inventories were approaching critically low levels, although he reckoned the firm's basic analysis still held. "The evidence is everywhere in the market, from the price and contango performance to the degree of difficulty fabricators are reporting in finding metal at times to the behaviour of refiners and dealers," he said Mr Christian said last year's mere 12 per cent rise was due to more factors than just a simple supply and demand mismatch. First, he blamed the considerably larger than declared stocks of silver, which can be used as collateral by people selling silver short. For example, the silver in catalysts used in hundreds of ethylene oxide plants around the world is largely owned by bullion banks and dealers and leased to the chemical companies, running the plants. The companies in turn used the silver as collateral for trades. On top of this supply, the vast majority of activity in the silver market - some 98 per cent - does not relate to physical trades. Any price derived from supply-demand sums based solely on annual physical transactions without considering the remaining 98 per cent paper transactions did not reflect the true state of the market. Mr Christian also commented on the efficiency with which Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway group had quietly accumulated 129.7m ounces between July 1997 and January 1998. The market is waiting eagerly to see what Mr Buffett says about this holding in his chairman's statement next month. The Financial Times, Feb. 24, 1999 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! 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