Corporations

Halliburton Corp., Vice President Dick Cheney's troubled former company, has hired spin doctor Michael Sitrick, whose firm was most recently hired by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles to manage its pedophile-priests scandal. "Halliburton, being sued by shareholders for alleged fraud, is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission and might face a financial meltdown if it can't negotiate a global settlement over asbestos litigation," notes the Washington Post.

"Sustainable Development is dead. Its demise came, ironically, at the World Summit on Sustainable Development," CorpWatch's Kenny Bruno writes in his report from the UN meeting in Johannesburg. "It's not that the phrase wasn't invoked. It was, ad nauseum. But it was hardly discussed. Instead, sustainable development was deemed to be whatever compromise governments happen to reach on trade, subsidies, investment and aid, and whatever projects corporations see fit to finance. 'Sustainable Development' is now officially meaningless."

Dot-com CEOs, day traders and other leading icons of the roaring 1990s are passing from the scene along with the economic bubble that created them, but Baffler editor Tom Frank notes that "one group remains untouched: the public intellectuals of the bull market. The writers of Dow-worshipping books and commentators who handed down daring pronunciamentos from the silicon heights are still cruising from one posh gig to the next.

WorldCom may be a bad example of how to run a company, but it's doing a good job of reputation management, according to Idil Cakim of the Burson-Marsteller PR firm. "WorldCom is a good example of how crisis could be managed, or at least the public could be answered, via the Internet," Cakim said, praising the web site which WorldCom has created to share information with the public about its bankruptcy.