Word: levins
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...musical environment at Harvard in the ’60s was much more academic and imbued with the gentlemanly tradition according to Robert Levin ’68, Head Tutor of the Music Department. Although HRO and BachSoc were already performing, there were few other performance opportunities. Musical performance was rarely encouraged by the department or anyone else. The Harvard Music department course offerings were traditionally academic, composed almost entirely of theory and the study of music. Levin describes the situation of the past as being influenced by the Ivy League attitude wherein music could be intelligently discussed over cocktails...
...Carl Levin is determined to get angry about Big Oil and high gasoline prices - no matter what the evidence says. The Democratic senator from Michigan - under the aegis of the well-named Permanent Investigations subcommittee - spent 396 pages and who-knows-how-many taxpayer dollars drilling for political black gold in the field of possible price collusion by Big Oil. The report found no sign that oil companies had gotten together, OPEC-style, to keep prices high - but that "In a number of instances, refiners have sought to increase prices by reducing supplies...
...Gasoline prices, while still historically low when inflation is accounted for, have risen in the past month, thanks mostly to Middle East tensions and some unseasonable Texas heat. But for Levin to get the summer-season spikes he can make an issue out of, he'll need the now-hesitant economic recovery - and the attendant increase in both business and consumer demand - to reach full swing in short order...
...Levin still has problems with the current state of said free enterprise system. The investigation "did not discover any evidence of collusion," he admitted, but that was only because none was necessary. Gasoline markets, he argued, are so "highly concentrated you don't need collusion to have a big artificial impact on supply" and therefore on prices...
...Aside from the questionable use of the word "artificial" when it comes to companies selling their own products, Levin has a point - corporate names like BP-Amoco, ChevronTexaco and ExxonMobil demonstrate well enough the industry's recent wave of consolidation. But as Levin targets the brief but headline-making pump-price spikes of spring 2000 and summer 2001 and calls for antitrust action against the industry, he forgets how the got on this merger kick in the first place: the rock-bottom oil prices of 1999. Disappearing profits induced Exxon and Mobil to join forces in search of a vertically...