The New Republic

It was February 2002, and Frits Bolkestein, the European Commission's (EC) chief financial regulator, was feeling more than a touch of schadenfreude. At the height of the Enron scandal, financial misdeeds were becoming public at WorldCom, Tyco, Adelphia, and a host of other U.S. companies--proof to Bolkestein that U.S. capitalism was hopelessly corrupt. In an interview with Financial Times, Bolkestein gloated, "If you look at the various scandals in the financial field, it seems they have occurred more READ MORE >>

City in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center By James Glanz and Eric Lipton (Times Books, 428 pp., $26) Click here to purchase the book. Timeless Cities: An Architect's Reflections on Renaissance ItalyBy David Mayernik (Westview, 274 pp., $26) Click here to purchase the book. I. READ MORE >>

Ask folks in Silicon Valley these days about their biggest fear, and you likely won't hear about Osama bin Laden, global warming, or failing schools. These days, everyone's afraid of offshore outsourcing--the movement of white- collar jobs, especially in the high-tech sector, from the United States to foreign countries, where the labor is cheap, plentiful, and, increasingly, well- educated. "There's an increased level of anxiety about what the economy's going to be like," says Marcus Courtney, president of the READ MORE >>

If Richard Grasso was the obvious villain in last month's upheaval at the New York Stock Exchange (nyse), Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair William Donaldson was the unsung hero. After all, Grasso's obscene compensation package might never have come to light if Donaldson had not requested in March that the heads of the country's stock exchanges review their management structures. When it emerged a few months later that, as nyse chair, Grasso had received a $140 million compensation package in 2003, Donaldson let READ MORE >>

On July 8, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer shocked the business world by announcing that, starting in September, the trend-setting software giant would stop compensating its employees with stock options--the right to buy a given quantity of stock at a fixed price--and instead hand out restricted shares of the company itself. What's more, he announced that the millions of options Microsoft granted during the last 20 years, which turned middle managers into millionaires and helped launch the dot-com boom, would be READ MORE >>

This January, the Bush administration nominated James Leon Holmes, a Little Rock lawyer, to sit on Arkansas's Eastern District Court. On April 10, however, Holmes's nomination was delayed indefinitely in the Judiciary Committee after a group of Democrats, along with moderate Republican Arlen Specter, balked at his religious-right provenance. (As the former president of Arkansas Right to Life and a longtime anti-abortion activist, Holmes had authored articles arguing that "the woman is to place herself under the authority of READ MORE >>