Shattering Glass-Steagall, Redux
The Washington
Post and USA
Today lead with a joint anti-urban-poverty initiative between
President Clinton and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., to be announced
today. The plan will dovetail White House ideas, such as tax credits for banks
that lend to poor neighborhoods, and House GOP ideas, such as the elimination
of capital gains taxes on property sales in these "renewal communities." The
New York Times
runs this story inside, and says the plan is vague and will yield little
until Clinton is out of office. The Los Angeles Times leads with the life-without-parole
sentence given to Aaron McKinney, who on Wednesday was convicted of the
(second-degree) murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming. The NYT reefers
this story with an above-the-fold photograph (the same used by the
LAT ) of Shepard's mother, who argued against the death penalty. The
NYT leads with congressional approval of a landmark bank-overhaul by
362-57 in the House and 90-8 in the Senate.
President Clinton is expected to sign the financial-services legislation, which
reverses the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act by allowing commercial banks, securities
firms, and insurance companies to expand into each other's territory, creating
one-stop financial shopping for consumers. (See the Oct. 23 TP, "Shattering
Glass-Steagall.") The Post 's story focuses almost entirely on what
it sees as the lenient consumer-privacy provisions in the bill. The
Wall Street Journal
notes that, at the last minute, a sentence was inserted in the legislation
exempting the second-biggest credit-card issuer, GE Capital, from even these
privacy provisions. On the Post opinion page, Ralph Nader predicts
that the deregulation will cause another savings-and-loan-type debacle.
The NYT off-leads Pfizer's hostile takeover bid of $82.4 billion for
Warner-Lambert, which had just announced a friendly $72 billion merger with
American Home Products. The Post 's story, run inside, does the best
job of contextualizing: The pharmaceutical industry is fragmented, with
inefficiencies in research and few new products; it also fears that that
Medicare may start to cover prescription drugs, which could lower prices. The
Journal 's online edition reports that early this morning the board of
Warner-Lambert--which already makes the anti-cholesterol drug Lipton in
partnership with Pfizer--opposed the Pfizer bid. The NYT seems to
think that Warner-Lambert will attempt to fend off Pfizer in the courts, but
the Journal notes that Warner-Lambert's anti-takeover defenses are
weak: Shareholders, through a spontaneous mail-in election, can dismiss the
entire board at any time. The Journal waits until the 31st paragraph
to mention that Pfizer's chairman sits on the board of the paper's parent
company, Dow Jones.
The Post fronts George W. Bush's poor performance in a
foreign-policy pop quiz. Asked by WHDH-TV in Boston to name the leaders of
Chechnya, Pakistan, India, and Taiwan, Bush could name only Taiwan's president,
Lee Teng-hui.
On the LAT opinion page, Selig Harrison, a senior fellow at the
Century Foundation, argues that the U.S. should formally end the Korean War as
part of a missile-limitation treaty with the North. (The South signed an
armistice in 1953 but pledged to reunite Korea in the future--and so did not
sign a peace treaty.) In 1998 Pyongyang offered to let the U.S. monitor its
long-range missiles as long as the U.S. takes a neutral role in the
peninsula--that is, guarantees peace regardless of whether it is the South or
the North that invades the other. A report released by a House Republican
advisory group Wednesday made no mention of North Korea's 1998 offer.
The Post reports that NYT columnist Abe Rosenthal, a 50-year
Times veteran, got fired yesterday. In his last column, Rosenthal
touches on his days as the Times ' strong-fisted executive editor in
the '70s and '80s. "When you finish a story, I would say, read it, substitute
your name for the subject's," Rosenthal relates. "If you say, Well, it would
make me miserable, make my wife cry, but it has no innuendo, no unattributed
pejorative remarks, no slap in the face for joy of slapping, it is news, not
gutter gossip, and as a reporter I know the writer was fair, then give it to
the copy desk." The Post notes that Rosenthal was the last of the old
Times bulls, who included Russell Baker and James Reston.
Naomi Wolf tells the NYT that the rumors circulating about her Gore
advising are not true. She never advised him about clothes, she says, and she
mentioned "alpha" and "beta" only in passing, in one memo. As for her
exorbitant fee, she says, "I have written a whole book about how women should
not have to apologize for making the same fees men make. Also, I'm a reasonably
successful writer, and I had to close down my whole shop" to write memos for
Gore. She concedes that it was Gore who wanted the payments concealed. In the
Post 's "Style" section, Ann Gerhart explores the Beltway's fascination
with theWolf story. Why, Gerhart asks, has no one risen to her defense? "Is it
because she's radical? Is it because she's ambitious? Is it because she's not a
card-carrying member of the political consultancy consortium of America?
Because of the money? Because she's a girl? Because she's a girl who writes
about sex all the time?"
The Journal reports that an American staple is making a comeback:
ketchup. Under a new CEO--a Midwesterner and former football coach--Heinz has
transformed its marketing, and last year ketchup sales bested those of salsa,
which had been first for three years running. Where it used to pitch its tomato
paste to moms, Heinz now pitches it to kids. It is airing existential TV
commercials, with teens philosophizing about the "moodiness" of ketchup that
refuses to leave the bottle; forthcoming ads will teach the under-12 set that
ketchup can be "fun" (a campaign sure to draw the appreciation of moms and
day-care workers everywhere). Nationwide food fights among infants: Lets see
Ricky Martin and the Taco Bell Chihuahua top that .
