There was something refreshing in the political scene Wednesday when congressional sponsors ran away, as fast as they could, from two ill-considered bills that sought to stamp out Internet piracy by more or less stamping out the Internet.

Maybe it was the bipartisanship of the online smackdown’s target. Most Americans are fed up with the never-ending electioneering between Republicans and Democrats, who seem to launch the next campaign as soon as the polls close. Last year, the two parties and the two houses of Congress could not seem to get together on anything. But legislators of both persuasions were elbow-deep in the muck of somehow trying to apply U.S. copyright laws to web sites located everywhere except inside the United States. It was fun to watch them scurry together in search of cover.

Or maybe it was the public humiliation inflicted on the nation’s two most ham-handed defenders of intellectual property, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America. Most of us know the RIAA for its past practice of suing teenagers, their moms and grandmothers, and dorm-dwelling college students for illegally sharing and downloading music files. Earlier, the good folks at the MPAA were behind the film industry’s attempt nearly three decades ago to squelch video cassette recorders because they feared owners would retain copies of movies that were broadcast on television. Fortunately for the film industry, it lost the Betamax case, and a profitable market for pre-recorded videos developed as a result. These days the studios seem almost deft by comparison, with their public service announcements featuring union-scale crew members who urge viewers not to download videos illegally.

Music and movie companies are not wrong to want to protect their products from theft. They just have a remarkable talent for making themselves look nasty in the process.

I think the most satisfying aspect of this week’s developments is the way the online community rose up to fight back. The most visible blow came from Wikipedia, which blacked out its English-language site for 24 hours to protest the two bills. Some of Wikipedia’s contributing editors reportedly objected to the service, which strives for impartiality in its articles, injecting itself into a public policy debate. But as a financial contributor to Wikipedia, I had no complaints. Precisely because it is non-commercial and user-supported, Wikipedia has no vested interest in the tug of war over copyrighted content, and its point of view (and vast user base) added a powerful voice to the political debate.

Still, Wikipedia could not seem to help itself from being helpful, despite the blackout. It left its articles about the two bills, the Stop Internet Piracy Act and the Protect IP [Intellectual Property] Act, accessible during the outage. It even told users that they could circumvent the 24-hour blockade by disabling javascript on their browsers.

Elsewhere, Google covered the logo on its home page with a black patch. Visitors who clicked on the patch or on a separately labeled link were directed to an online petition opposing the legislation. Wired.com blacked out the headlines on its home page. Popular blogging site WordPress.com censored its “Freshly Pressed” highlights page. By at least one estimate, as many as 7,000 sites may have joined the protest. The protest attracted worldwide attention, as outlets like the United Kingdom’s Guardian newspaper rounded up some of the more interesting screen shots.

To its credit, the Obama administration got ahead of the curve when it announced last weekend that the president would not sign the legislation in its original form. The first drafts of the bills would have demanded that U.S.-based service providers corrupt the net’s domain name service, which is the system that translates a name such as Google.com into a sequence of numbers that point to a particular data server. This would be a technical nightmare and could open all sorts of new possibilities for the thieves, hackers and other genuine black hats who prowl the online world from the most lawless corners of the globe.

But even with last-minute changes, the legislation would have allowed the U.S. attorney general to create a blacklist of foreign sites that allegedly infringed U.S. intellectual property. There would have been limited court review and even more limited avenues for appeal. Search engines would have been required to withhold results from such sites; service providers would be required to prevent American web surfers from reaching them; and payment services such as Paypal would be barred from remitting funds to them. The easiest way for U.S. residents to see the entire Internet, once such legislation is passed, would be to check into a hotel in Canada.

Though the legislation did not explicitly target U.S. providers like Google, those organizations noted that it would impose major headaches, such as vetting every site that hosts a source document or, in some cases, it would force them to lie to users by stating that no relevant search results are available. Also, the American approach to censoring foreign sites would be an invitation for other democratic governments to impose their own restrictions. Britain would likely assert its Official Secrets Act and pre-trial crime reporting restrictions against Americans. France would want to impose its hate speech limits on documents that Google indexes and archives, and Germany’s anti-Nazi laws would get extraterritorial heft. Not to mention the field day that information-restrictive countries such as Singapore would have. The United States would go from being a global role model for free speech to the global standard-bearer for cross-border censorship.

Well before night fell on Washington, the legislation’s former backers were peeling away from it. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, called the Senate bill “not ready for prime time,” The New York Times reported. Hatch had been one of its original sponsors.

It is tempting to say that the legislation is dead, killed by a grassroots rebellion of Internet users, but I would not bet on that. Online piracy is not the vast scourge that the old-line media companies pretend that it is when they count each free download as a lost full-price sale, but neither is the theft of American-generated content a trivial matter. Right here at Palisades Hudson, we have had some of our online content lifted and even altered without permission, and in some cases without attribution. Since we are fussy about what we say and where we say it, we take such violations seriously. Our reputation is worth a lot to us.

So the big content publishers will be back. You can sense it in the churlish tweet that RIAA executive Jonathan Lamy posted in the midst of Wednesday’s protest: “After Wikipedia blackrout (sic), somewhere, a student today is doing original research and getting his/her facts straight. Perish the thought.”

As I said, even when they have a valid point, these folks make themselves look nasty. You can’t get far in show business without having some sort of talent.

Larry Elkin is President and Founder of Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC.

The young people who started the Occupy Wall Street protest a few weeks ago are about to learn some important lessons about life in the grown-up world.

Lesson One: If you don’t have an objective, someone else will be glad to give you one. In this case the “someone else” means both labor unions, which have been fighting a losing battle to mobilize popular support, and the Democratic Party, which is searching for ways to feed public antagonism toward the financial industry without reducing the value of anybody’s 401(k).

Lesson Two: Protesting against something is useful if you want to prevent change. If you don’t want Wal-Mart coming to your town, you protest against Wal-Mart. But if you actually want change, you have to be for something. Until the union activists moved in, Occupy Wall Street was not for any particular thing that I could determine. It was just against Wall Street, whatever that means.

Lesson Three: You don’t drive a car from the outside. You need to have your hands on the controls. This, incidentally, requires you to learn how to drive. People marched for civil rights, which was good and important, but the civil rights movement ultimately progressed because Congress changed laws, lawyers brought lawsuits and judges made judgments. If you want to make an individual impact, rather than just be part of the crowd, you have to acquire skills that put you in the driver’s seat. Most protest gatherings, like the anti-austerity protests ongoing in Greece, simply vent public frustration without ultimately changing anything. Change requires an achievable goal and the know-how to achieve it.

There is both naiveté and cynicism surrounding the Occupy Wall Street protest. It reminds me in many ways of the protests by young French citizens in 2005 and 2006 against “précarité,” or precariousness, in their lives. A photo of a Paris march from that time shows a banner that reads, “No to précarité, for a real increase in buying power, no to dismantling the labor code,” as though the state could somehow guarantee jobs for life and rising productivity. There were similar sentiments here at the time, and many complaints about rising income inequality and a stagnant minimum wage (which was raised in 2007). Now, a lot of people look back on 2005 or 2006 as the good old days.

I suspect a more direct inspiration for the current protest was the tent city that sprouted this summer on one of Tel Aviv’s most fashionable boulevards. It was started by young Israelis who were upset at the high cost of housing in Israel, though it morphed into a broader demand for “social justice,” apparently defined as some combination of higher wages and lower prices.

Even in the current post-bubble era for U.S. real estate, young people in New York City have much to complain about when it comes to housing prices. They seldom make the connection between the absurdly tight rental market, which makes New York one of the few places where renters customarily pay commissions to brokers, and the price controls on rents that have been in effect (in varying forms) since the city declared a housing emergency in 1947.

Many of these young people are saddled with debt left over from college, and they are struggling in a stagnant economy and stalled job market. It is probably safe to say that many were Obama supporters in 2008 and that most will still favor him next year – if they are motivated enough to vote at all. And I suspect a lot have a history of “progressive” sympathies, such as advocating for living wage laws back on their college campuses. I apologize for the generalizations, but there is, as yet, no “Occupy Wall Street” platform that I can quote.

But outsiders will be happy to provide one soon enough. Unions have taken a drubbing in elections and state legislatures all over the country, and they are happy to make common cause with the protesters. Unlike unemployed twentysomethings, however, the unions know exactly what they want: card-check organizing rules, collective bargaining rights for public servants (who bargain against the politicians they help elect), pension and health benefits that don’t exist in the private sector, and higher taxes – which most of the Occupy Wall Street protesters will someday pay – to cover the bill.
Some friends told me last weekend that their 23-year-old son was among the marchers in lower Manhattan. I don’t know the young man, but he is unemployed and looking for work as a computer programmer. Knowing his parents and his educational background, I am certain he is very smart, and probably going to earn a good living for himself someday.

Which makes me wonder: If some of those Wall Street firms being protested set up a table and held a job fair across the street from the protests, would they draw a crowd? It’s an interesting mental image.

Such events always pose the risk that fringe elements, such as the clowns who rioted in Seattle during a 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization, will subvert the protest to their own agenda. Police overreaction, the granddaddy of which was at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, is also a risk, but one which – in a mild way – protesters would welcome for its publicity value, as in last week’s arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge.

The more likely outcome, though, is that these protests will simply be co-opted by the existing power structure of the political left. Democrats are eager to find someone to run against in 2012 as they struggle with their party’s own record on the economy. The bogeymen of choice have thus far been the Tea Party, the elusive “millionaires and billionaires” and, intermittently, Wall Street. The party that produced the economy that left these young people frightened and unemployed will tap them to protest their own fear and unemployment.

That’s the cynical part.

I have a warm spot in my heart for young people. It’s hard to make your way in an adult world where you gradually, but inevitably, learn that a lot of people will cheerfully lie to you or manipulate you to their own purposes. You find out that there are at least two sides to every story, that there are very few pure heroes or villains, and that problems are easy to identify but maddeningly complicated to solve. And you find out that despite all your parents may have done to make your life secure, the world is, indeed, filled with précarité, and that no amount of protest can make it go away.

Larry Elkin is President and Founder of Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC.

Photo Credit: CriticalLegalThinking.com

When a hotel investment firm decided a 10-block stretch of Miami Beach needed a name, the easy part was coming up with SoBe 10, to catch a little of the cachet of South Beach. The hard part was getting the name to catch on.

The firm, Jones Lang LaSalle Hotels, decided the best way to get people to use its made-up name was to pretend people were already using it. Not long after he dreamed up SoBe 10, Gregory Rumpel, the firm’s executive vice president, inserted it into Wikipedia’s South Beach page. The modified entry read, “The ten blocks along Collins Avenue, from 15th Street to 24th Street, also known as the SoBe 10 or Power Mile, are considered to be the epicenter of South Beach nightlife and entertainment.”

Wikipedia’s openness makes it a tempting target for those looking to create their own versions of reality. But while most people know that Wikipedia is not 100 percent reliable, readers still expect entries to have some basis in fact.

Even when the “information” promoters add to Wikipedia is actual, rather than aspirational, it decreases the value of the site. Wikipedia articles are intended to be neutral and objective, like the content of traditional encyclopedias. Business owners and publicists who write or edit where their own interests are concerned are therefore acting deceitfully, implying a neutral perspective they do not actually have.

Wikipedia’s page on Wikipedia spam offers clear guidelines on how interested parties can avoid inadvertently interfering with the site’s mission. Would-be editors are instructed, “If you are here to tell readers how great something is, or to get exposure for an idea or product that nobody has heard of yet, you are in the wrong place.” The page also cautions users against creating pages for their own products and websites, explaining that “Most often, when a person creates a new article describing his or her own work, it is because the work is not yet well-known enough to have attracted anyone else’s attention.” Just as few employers go to candidates’ parents to get letters of recommendation, few Wikipedia readers want to hear that something is noteworthy from its creator.

Unfortunately, often publicists are more concerned with promoting products than they are with protecting the reliability of third-party websites. As we increasingly get our information from user-generated content – from Wikipedia rather than the Encyclopedia Britannica or from Yelp rather than newspaper restaurant reviews – we gain access to new voices and to more comprehensive data, but we lose important information about authors’ interests and motivations. A Wikipedia entry could be written by an expert, or by someone looking to introduce new “facts.” A good review on Yelp may come from a satisfied customer, but it may also come from the business’s owner or from someone who has never even visited the business.

A recent column in The New York Times revealed that a company called Softline Solutions, which provides reputation management among other online services, paid 25 cents for positive reviews posted on Yelp about its client, Southland Dental. Yelp filters reviews that appear to be fake, placing them on a separate page, but acknowledges that some legitimate content gets incorrectly filtered out and some less-than-legitimate content slips through.

Wikipedia’s vigilant editors and administrators, for the most part, ensure that profit motives are kept in line with the site’s mission, preserving reliability. By strictly enforcing community standards and deleting promotional content, Wikipedians send the message that any attempt to take advantage of the site is unlikely to succeed. In a 2010 press release, the public relations company Punch Communications advised other firms to avoid marketing on Wikipedia, not because it lowers the quality of the site, but because the risk of getting caught is too high. “While it may seem like a quick hit at first, once [a] post is deleted, the agency finds themselves having overpromised and under-delivered; something we all hate to do,” Pete Goold, a managing director at the company, said.

The same openness which allows promotional content to enter Wikipedia also helps to weed it out. Shortly after the mention of SoBe 10 appeared on Wikipedia’s South Beach page, an anonymous editor removed it, with the concise justification, “I’ve deleted the following, which is a made-up designation inserted for marketing purposes.”

As wikis become a bigger part of our lives, we owe ever greater thanks to those who keep them as clean and accurate as possible. In a letter on the site, Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, writes, “Commerce is fine. Advertising is not evil. But it doesn’t belong here. Not in Wikipedia.” Keeping advertising out, however, requires hard work and dedication. And surviving without advertising requires the support of readers. Not everyone who reads Wikipedia can afford to donate to its mission, but it’s worth remembering the amount of work that goes into keeping the site free of promotional content, and also keeping it just plain free.

Larry Elkin is President and Founder of Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC.

The Library of Congress has given iPhone users a get-out-of-jail-free card.

As part of a periodic review, the agency determined that “jailbreaking” the iPhone is allowed under American copyright law. Owners of iPhones (and other smartphones) have the right to unlock their devices and use applications not approved by the manufacturer or seller.

The decision is important in a variety of ways, not all of which are directly related to phones, or even to the wider goals of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which sought a smartphone exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Basically, the Library of Congress reinforced the idea that when you buy a device, you own that device. This concept should apply to all sorts of technologies.

Automobiles are one example. Between built-in DVD navigational systems and the impenetrable engine service codes, drivers have to rely on the manufacturer for updates and service more completely than ever before. The days of teenagers in garages tinkering with their cars are all but over. Any owner, however, should be able to buy a third-party DVD database for the navigation system, or a program that can interrogate a car’s onboard computers to learn which malfunctioning gewgaw is making the “check engine” light flash ominously.

The world of e-books is another arena where the rules of ownership are fuzzier than they ought to be. A year ago, Amazon incensed its customer base when it wirelessly deleted certain previously purchased books from Kindle users’ libraries. Though the customers owned their Kindles, the files were apparently not so clear cut. And, while Amazon has since acknowledged that it was wrong to handle the matter the way it did, the company still has recall-enforcement mechanisms that are not available to merchants who sell more traditional merchandise.

Technology changes quickly, but some concepts ought to be enduring. One is that you own what you buy. Yesterday’s ruling means that, if you wish, you can install unauthorized applications on your own device, or make changes to the firmware.

Be careful. These modifications can have consequences much worse than a copyright violation notice. Jailbreaking your phone will almost always void its warranty. The practice can also open the door to spyware and viruses. But those choices are now firmly in the hands of the individual user, as they should be.

Apple claimed that permitting iPhone owners to jailbreak their phones would destroy the company’s technological protection for software on the device. But the Copyright Office noted that jailbreaking involves changing fewer than 50 bytes out of 8 million. It’s a small change that yields a lot of flexibility.

Vendors are usually eager to invoke the digital copyright law to the maximum extent. Apple understandably wants to keep its iPhone customers tied as closely as possible to its own iTunes and App stores, and to the wireless carriers (in this country, AT&T) with which it makes exclusive marketing arrangements. But hardware customers are not serfs. A car company cannot tie its customers to a certain brand of gasoline. Television makers cannot select only certain channels that will appear on their screens. (I am old enough to remember when the Federal Communications Commission mandated that all TVs must be able to receive UHF signals.) Even my shaving razor accepts third-party blades.

Our mothers taught us that we can’t “eat our cake and have it, too.” The Library of Congress now has delivered the same message to smartphone makers: You can’t sell a device and still behave as though you own it.

Larry Elkin is President and Founder of Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC.

Photo Credit: Apple-Phone-Hacks.com

As many observers and bloggers have noted, this year’s Super Bowl commercials featured an unusual number of henpecked men.

In an ad for Chrysler’s Dodge Charger, a male voiceover recites a long list of husbandly duties, including putting down the toilet seat and carrying his wife’s lip balm, while blank-faced men stare mutely at the camera. At the end, the speaker concludes that, after doing so many good deeds, he deserves to get the car he wants.

If the commercials revealed that guys are feeling a bit uneasy about their gender’s position, new studies show that they have good reason to think they are living in a woman’s world.

The Pew Research Center recently reported that more women now have higher incomes than their husbands than in 1970. In 2007, 22 percent of women out-earned their husbands, compared to just 4 percent in 1970. Paul Fucito, spokesman for the Pew Center said, “Men now are increasingly likely to marry wives with more education and income than they have, and the reverse is true for women.”

Thanks to the recent recession, which put more men than women out of work, the number of female breadwinners has probably increased even further. Construction and manufacturing, both of which are still predominately male industries, were both hit hard by the downturn. In December, 11 percent of men were unemployed, compared to just 8.8 percent of women.

The growth of female economic power is likely to continue, as more women than men pursue higher education. According to a recent report by the American Council on Education, for nearly the past decade women have consistently represented about 57 percent of undergraduate enrollments at American colleges. Women earn more master’s degrees than men and earn just as many professional and doctoral degrees.

Fortunately, if the Super Bowl ads are any indicator, men at least have a sense of humor about their changing situation. Advertising agencies were betting that guys whose wives hold the purse strings would be willing to laugh about it.

One spot, however, did strike me as having a nasty undertone. In the FloTV ad a man accompanies a woman on a shopping trip. He stands with a bra draped over his shoulder at the lingerie store and reluctantly sniffs candles in the housewares department. At the end of the commercial, a narrator tells him to “change out of that skirt.”

Rather than inviting us to laugh along with the hapless man, FloTV portrays his position as womanly and, by the commercial’s logic, therefore degrading. The commercial suggested that, while it would be fitting for a skirt-wearing woman to cater to her mate’s whims, a man should not let himself be put in that position.

But most of the ads took a good-natured approach to the bad times that have been particularly bad for men. Underneath the ribbing, it seems, most of today’s men appreciate how much worse off they would be without the accomplished women in their lives. And if they have any complaints, they usually keep them private.

My wife sometimes tells me to “just smile and nod” when voicing my opinion is going to get me into trouble. On my better days, I have enough sense to take her advice. It looks like I have a lot of company.

Larry Elkin is President and Founder of Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC.

There were only a few channels on TV when I was a kid. Everyone watched them, and we watched the commercials that came with them, too.

Now the business model of advertising-supported broadcast television is breaking down. Customers with cable or satellite service pick from a huge number of channels, drastically reducing the audience that any single cable or broadcast station can hope to deliver to advertisers. And, with customers increasingly able to bypass advertisements using services like TiVo, the payoff for TV spots is dwindling. At the same time, the recession has tightened companies’ advertising budgets.

“Good programming is expensive,” Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. owns the Fox television network, told shareholders this fall. “It can no longer be supported solely by advertising revenues.”

While traditional broadcast networks are struggling, cable channels are doing fairly well. These channels have two revenue streams. Cable companies like Time Warner Cable and Comcast Corp. charge consumers monthly subscription fees. These fees are then used to purchase the right to carry cable channels, providing the channels with an important source of funding in addition to advertising.

Broadcasters may be forced to follow the dictate, “If you can’t beat them, join them.” Fox has already started going after fees from cable providers. With its contract with Time Warner Cable expiring at the end of 2009, Fox threatened to pull its programs if Time Warner did not offer the network more money.

The two companies managed to reach an agreement before screens went dark. Though the terms were not disclosed, they most likely compromised somewhere between the 30 cents per subscriber Time Warner offered to pay and the $1 per subscriber that Fox originally demanded.

Of course, cable companies do not always see eye-to-eye with cable programmers, either. After talks between Cablevision and non-broadcast Scripps Network broke down, The Food Network and HGTV disappeared on New Year’s Day from Cablevision’s lineup in metropolitan New York. Cablevision told customers that it had “no expectation” of carrying the network’s programming again “given the dramatic changes in their approach to working with distributors to reach television viewers.”

Nonetheless, some now-free networks may switch over completely to the cable model. Jeff Zucker, who runs NBC and its sister cable channels such as CNBC and Bravo, told investors this month “the cable model is just superior to the broadcast model.”

This switch would not necessarily be a bad thing. As technology makes it easier to avoid advertising, consumers will have to get used to paying for their information and entertainment. Those who enjoy quality programming ought to help shoulder its costs (as public television and radio broadcasters have reminded us for years).

In the old advertising-supported model, you “paid” for programming by lending your ears during commercial breaks. Only the channels that aired shows you wanted to watch could count you as part of the audience they delivered to advertisers.

With cable, however, consumers generally have to pay for many channels they do not care about. Rather than allowing consumers to select the specific channels they want to buy, cable companies usually offer different service tiers, meaning that, if you absolutely have to have one of the channels in the top service tier, then you have to pay for all of the other channels that also come in that tier.

This practice is known as bundling. In some cases, bundling can be illegal. When films with sound were still new, Hollywood studios relied on a form of bundling known as block booking. In order to show popular films, movie theaters had to agree to also screen a studio’s other, lesser-quality films, often without even seeing them in advance.

The theaters, stuck with the duds, grouped high quality and low quality films together into double features, ensuring that they would be able to get moviegoers to munch popcorn and other profitable concessions through the bad flicks.

In the 1948 case of United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. et al., the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the practice of block booking violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, since it prevented studios that were not able to produce A-list movies from competing in the low-budget market.

Bundling is not always illegal, but, even when it is legal, it is often bad business. Time Inc., which publishes a variety of magazine titles, including Time, Fortune, People, Entertainment Weekly and GOLF Magazine, does not require Fortune subscribers to also purchase People and Entertainment Weekly, because those customers would probably forego the package altogether instead of paying for glossies they don’t plan to read.

The same thing may happen with television programming. If cable companies continue to force customers to pay for programming they don’t want, viewers may turn off their television sets for good, finding other ways to see what they want to see. Those who want to stick with a more old-fashioned method can buy shows when they come out on DVD. Others will make their purchases from iTunes and the like. Still others will watch shows online, either on network sites or on third-party sites like Hulu.

That is, of course, assuming that cable companies that offer both television and Internet service don’t slow down online video sites in order to draw customers back onto the sofa. In order for the net to provide a true alternative to television, we need strong net neutrality rules to prevent cable companies from using their control over customers’ Internet service to squash those who dare to threaten their hold on TV viewers.

As we transition away from a system in which advertising supports most of our programming, consumers will have to start paying for what they watch. But they should not have to pay for everything that a cable company decides to throw into the package.

Larry Elkin is President and Founder of Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC.

My little brother started kindergarten in the fall of 1965, which allowed my mother to go back to work full-time. Our family needed the money. I was 8 years old and in third grade, and it was my job after school to walk my brother back to our Bronx apartment and look after him until our parents got home.

I had plenty of help. My mother’s friends in neighboring apartments would look in on us. I could reach both of my parents by telephone if I needed them. And there was Soupy Sales and his cast of zany characters on Channel 5, WNEW-TV in New York, every afternoon, to entertain us.

Soupy had a personal relationship with his young audience. His shows were done live. He played most of the live-action characters (like his girlfriend, Peaches) himself, while puppets made up the rest of the cast. He would speak directly to his viewers. Sometimes this got Soupy into trouble, like the time he told us kids to go through our parents’ wallets and mail him those funny green pieces of paper that had pictures of dead presidents.

One day I decided I wanted talk to Soupy. I got the number for WNEW from directory assistance (yes, we had 411 back then) and called the switchboard. A kind woman’s voice told me I was too late; Soupy left the studio by 4:30 each afternoon. The next afternoon I called back just after the show ended. A few minutes later Soupy picked up the phone.

I have no idea what I said to him, or what he said to me. But I remember being excited and proud that I had reached my friend Soupy. A few days later, an autographed picture arrived in the mail. It showed Soupy getting hit in the face with a pie, which was his trademark. Soupy later estimated that he took 25,000 pies to the face in the course of his career. I wish I could say I still have the picture, but it got lost with the other debris of my childhood.

Soupy Sales, whose legal name was Milton Supman, died last week at a hospital in The Bronx. Hearing of his death was a bit like learning that a long-lost friend had passed away. It also made me appreciate the way the world, with all its risks and opportunities, was so accessible in that long-ago time.

Soupy Sales had been a local TV personality in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles and finally New York by the time I called him. For several years his show was carried nationally on ABC. The season I called him was the apogee of his career, a year in which Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. would appear on his show and take the requisite pies to the face.

Yet Soupy Sales, at the end of his work day, found time to talk to an 8-year-old latchkey kid, jot down his address and send a picture. On one level this was a small gesture, a personal touch in a more-personal era than today’s. But on a different level Soupy Sales was teaching me to go after things that might seem out of reach. It was a valuable lesson.

A couple of years later I did a school project about India. Most kids would have gone to the library, but I looked up the Indian consulate in Manhattan and persuaded my mother to let me make my first unaccompanied trip on the subway downtown. I was 10 or 11 at the time. It helped that I had memorized the New York City subway map.

At the consulate I was greeted politely and ushered into a meeting room. A turbaned man entered, sat down and gravely spoke with me for a few minutes. I did not get the impression that I was being humored or patronized. About a week later, an amazingly thick envelope arrived, jammed with booklets and brochures about every part of India. I was delighted, and as I recall, so was my teacher.

An 8-year-old home alone with a kindergartner. A fifth- or sixth-grader alone on the subways and streets of New York. Parents who permit these things today might find themselves facing child endangerment charges, especially if anything bad happens. But my parents were not negligent or uncaring, or even unworried. Nor was my childhood unusual for that place and time. We rode bikes without helmets. We played ball in the streets. We got on the subways or buses when we needed to go somewhere, and we looked after younger kids when there was nobody else to do it.

Looking back, it was risky, even if it was necessary. A lot of things could go wrong. Occasionally they did. But most of the time, when we reached out to the grown-up world, it reached back, gently.

Photo Credit: LeftInAboite.blogspot.com

Larry Elkin is President and Founder of Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC.

It is no surprise that a New York Times media columnist would write, and not in glowing terms, about the Tribune Company’s plan to pay $66 million in bonuses to executives who led the company into bankruptcy.

It is a newsworthy item. The company’s creditors support the bonus plan, which is supposed to help retain managers who can turn Tribune’s fortunes around. But there is vigorous opposition from the bankruptcy trustee and the Newspaper Guild, the union that represents newsroom employees at the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and other Tribune papers.

David Carr pulled no punches in his Oct. 5 column. “You’d expect them to walk the plank, or at the very least, spend a good stretch of time in the naughty corner,” he wrote. “But you wouldn’t expect the top 700 managers to collect $66 million in bonuses.”

Carr acerbically described real estate tycoon Sam Zell as a “grave digger” for leading the leveraged buyout that saddled Tribune with debt it could not sustain. Carr recited what he called “a litany of infamies” surrounding the deal, and noted that Tribune has laid off 2,000 employees since the buyout.

Fair enough. Carr did provide management’s explanation for the bonus plan, though most of the column gives much more prominent treatment to the union criticism. “It is sort of along the same lines as the Bank of America and A.I.G. bonuses, except it is not taxpayer money,” Carr quotes Cet Parks, executive director of the Baltimore-Washington Newspaper Guild.

There is one notable detail that Carr left out of his column. The Newspaper Guild represents employees at most major American dailies, with the prominent exception of The Wall Street Journal. The New York Times has a Guild newsroom. Carr himself may well be a Guild member, though management personnel and freelancers typically would not be. I do not know Carr’s employment status. Also, it is possible to work in some Guild newsrooms without formally being a Guild member, though the employee still pays dues to the union.

Disclosure gets a lot of attention in financial journalism these days. Analysts and money managers who are interviewed for print and broadcast routinely say whether they have an investment position in companies they comment about. If Bloomberg L.P. discusses a company that owns an interest in Bloomberg, this fact is noted. Likewise, when The Wall Street Journal covers Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp., it points out that News Corp. owns the Journal.

But The Times never seems to mention its own employees’ labor affiliation when covering any labor matter – not even one, as in Carr’s case, that involves the journalists’ own union. The only exceptions I have seen have been stories about The Times’ negotiations with its employees. In other words, if employees are not writing about themselves and their company, their labor affiliations are nobody’s business.

I think this is wrong. Credibility is hard to come by and easy to lose. Too many people already assume journalists are prone to bias or worse. Lack of disclosure ultimately feeds those suspicions.

It also makes it easier for journalists to fool themselves into dismissing their own biases. I know this from personal experience. I myself once was a member of the Wire Service Guild, which is the Newspaper Guild unit that represents Associated Press employees. I covered all sorts of labor stories, including a Montana state AFL-CIO convention. My stories never noted my Guild membership, nor the fact that The AP was a Guild shop.

I told myself that I could put my own union membership aside in covering labor matters. I convinced myself that I had no choice but to join the Guild, since I had to pay dues anyway, even though I could have opted out of formal membership.

As a crusading young reporter, my sense of ethics was so finely tuned that I would not join a political party or even sign a petition. I left a dream assignment in Washington when I got married because my wife, a professional marketer, probably could not have found work there without creating potential conflicts with my work. (I did not suffer professionally; The AP moved me to New York and let me cover federal courts.)

But, in retrospect, all this was wrong. I was a union member covering union matters. My audience had a right to know this fact. It might not have changed what I wrote, nor how I was perceived. But disclosure would have been honest and fair. It also would have made me feel better about what I was doing. I remember listening to the rah-rah speeches at that AFL-CIO convention and thinking that it felt strange to actually belong to something I was covering.

I emailed Carr last week to ask whether The Times has a policy on disclosing Guild representation of its employees. I also asked whether he is a Guild member, and whether he believes he should have noted this fact in his column. I have not received a reply.

These are tough times in the newspaper business. Bad management and a bad economy deserve some of the blame, but not all. Bad journalism plays a part. Arrogance and bias make for some pretty bad journalism, and I get a healthy measure of both in my daily New York Times.Jo

Larry Elkin is President and Founder of Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC.

Despite all sorts of government help, dairy farmers say they can’t make a living milking their cows. Meanwhile, marijuana growers are doing just fine with a product nobody is allowed to cultivate, possess, transport or sell.

This is the opposite of what we want. Milk is good for us (especially babies), and cows are cute (especially babies). Meanwhile, the folks who supply us (especially our babies) with pot are the ones we want to put out of business.

So let’s flip the policies. We should outlaw milk and provide price supports and marketing boards to sustain the marijuana industry. Close your eyes and picture the billboards along America’s highways inquiring, “Anyone seen Mary Jane?”

Dairy farmers will benefit from a new, artificially high price on a product most people buy but nobody can openly sell. Meanwhile, America’s pastoral landscape will feature weed growing like weeds. We’ll have so much of the stuff that the government probably will force refineries to turn it into ethanol so we can pump it into our cars. Prices will collapse anyway and growers will scream bloody murder. But nobody will actually be getting killed, which is not currently the case, as anyone in Mexico can attest.

The Burlington Free Press reports that the price farmers get for their milk has crashed in the past year. In June 2008, dairy farmers in Middlebury, Vermont, could expect $18.91 per hundredweight, or 11.6 gallons, of milk. This year, that price was down to $11.28. Vermont state legislators Sen. Sara Kittell, D-Franklin, and Rep. Carolyn Partridge, D-Windham, wrote in a letter to Vermont’s State Agriculture Secretary Roger Allbee that the average cost of production is $17.88 per hundredweight.

That means that, at current prices, dairy farmers are losing money. It also means they cannot make money unless they always receive just about the highest price they have ever seen, which was the case last year. Most businesses are allowed to go bankrupt if this is the case. But hey, these are dairy farmers. They are nice people who buy alarm clocks with no snooze buttons.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has accused Dean Foods, a milk distributor which Sanders says controls approximately 70 percent of the dairy market in New England, of contributing to the “disastrously low prices” paid to dairy farmers. The decrease in prices has not been passed on to consumers who continue to pay an average of $3.01 per gallon while farmers receive just $1 per gallon, Sanders said.

Dairy farmers and their elected representatives are turning to Washington for the answers. While the prices of other products depend on the fluctuations of the free market, milk has not been subject to this laissez-faire approach. The U.S. Department of Agriculture boasts in its 24-page primer on milk pricing that “Over the past 125 years, a complex pricing system has evolved to deal with the problems of milk production, assembly, and distribution.” The U.S.D.A does admit that “The very complexity of the system, however, has baffled many and led to numerous misconceptions.”

The marijuana trade, on the other hand, operates quite outside government regulation and seems to be getting along very well without any “complex pricing system.” The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency reports that marijuana production appears to be increasing in Mexico, the U.S. and Canada. We do not hear marijuana growers demanding federal price supports or complaining about their distributors. Of course, the distributors often carry Uzis, which may have something to do with it.

Admittedly, my approach means we will have to lock up a few kids who are indiscreet about their milk and cookies at snack time. Those shiny tanker trucks will have to leave the Interstate and take back roads through the woods. But there will be milk for all and everyone in the business will prosper, just as the marijuana sellers do now.

Meanwhile, pot growers, under the auspices of the U.S.D.A., will have to deal with quality standards, commodity prices, futures markets and state-run marketing boards. There will be fights about what qualifies as organic smoke and appeals for price supports from farmers under pressure from evil, monopolistic corporate mega-buyers.

In a year or two those hardworking New England farmers will be anxiously monitoring their cannabis, hoping for plants at least knee-high by the Fourth of July. The heifers will be locked up in the barn, or shall we say, the grow house. But don’t feel sorry for them. All that pot has to go someplace. I expect the Holsteins in those barns will be laughing their heads off, suffering from no more than a permanent case of the munchies.

Larry Elkin is President and Founder of Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC.

A man sits down to read a politically provocative novel on his electronic reader only to find that the book has vanished. Without warning, his purchase price has been refunded and the book he’d hoped to peruse has been deleted.

You might think this is from George Orwell’s famous anti-utopian adventure 1984, but it is in fact a scene that played out earlier this month in real living rooms and commuter trains across the country. Ironically, the disappearing book was 1984.

The deletion occurred after Amazon discovered that it was distributing 1984 and other books, including Animal Farm, without the proper permissions. Amazon’s Kindle devices come equipped with digital rights management software that enables the company to do something with ebooks that it cannot do with traditional print copies, which is to step into the customer’s home and take back what has been sold.

Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, apologized for the incident, saying Amazon’s “‘solution’ to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles.”

In spite of Bezos’s promise to “make better decisions going forward,” the incident provides plenty of reasons to be uneasy about technology that could potentially be used to monitor and to censor what we read. In this case, Amazon’s electronic recall had nothing to do with the content of the erased books, but, in the future, governments or other powerful entities could conceivably ask (or force) Amazon to use its powers for less benign purposes.

Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School and author of the book, The Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It commented to The New York Times that, eventually, digital rights management software might be used “like a line item veto for content.” He went on to suggest that “It could happen first in jurisdictions like the United Kingdom, where there isn’t as rich a First Amendment tradition and where libel suits happen much more frequently.”

In spite of Amazon’s efforts to make reading a book on the Kindle as much like reading a paper and ink book as possible, events like this remind us that electronic content distribution keeps us discreetly tethered to our suppliers. This is true not only of Amazon, but also of Apple’s iTunes store and cable companies that supply us with set-top boxes. What if the National Football League’s license agreement allowed it to demand that blown calls, wardrobe malfunctions and other embarrassments be electronically deleted from our DVRs?

The First Amendment gives Americans some of the strongest protections for free expression the world has ever seen. Freedom of speech and freedom of thought are not universally respected or even admired. Amazon goofed when it deleted the electronic books it had sold, but it also did us a favor by reminding us that today’s powerful information technologies work in both directions.

Come to think of it, this blog is available to Kindle users for the modest fee of $1.99 a month. If you downloaded this post on your Kindle, I hope you get the chance to read it.

We can bring the bookseller into our homes. The question now is: Can we also keep it out?

Larry Elkin is President and Founder of Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC.