For a change, death is in the news this week. According to Reuters, state troopers in Miami stopped a man one recent evening "for driving without headlights on a main highway. One trooper noticed a suspicious-looking item wrapped in a blanket in the car. The item in the blanket was identified as [the driver's] wife." To this point, the story sounds like a routine Miami traffic stop, but a few days later, People magazine broke the news that the driver was international rock and roll star Paul McCartney, who was in Miami (which the McCartneys called "Santa Barbara") to lobby for a new trial for James Earl Ray, who was in prison for the 1968 murder of civil rights leader and presidential candidate Sirhan Sirhan.

Now I'm no statistician, but the evidence here seems clear: If you eat vegetables, you'll get breast cancer and die.

Paul McCartney Inc. isn't the only big company in the public eye, though. The media are giving huge amounts of space and time to the news of mergers between extremely large companies, despite the very real possibility that they will be forced to mention, several times, the name of the extremely large, merged company that owns them. Recently, the largest merger in history was announced, between banking concern Citibank and insurance/investment giant Travelers Group. The new company, Citigroup, would have had $72 billion in revenues and been 7th on the Fortune 500 list last year, which means that the merger is an extremely fortunate occurrence for you, assuming you, personally, are an investment banker.

Sanford Weill, CEO of Travelers, joked that their stock price jumped so much that his chauffeur is a millionaire and Weill is going to have to start driving him around. Ha ha! Good one, Sanford! Apropos of nothing much, I'd like to mention that Weill made $230 million last year as CEO. Assuming he worked 24 hours a day for 365 days, that's barely $26,000 per hour. Now I'm not saying that Weill's comments should prompt you to fly to New York City, track down his diamond-studded limousine, drag him into the street, and beat him until he's facedown in a pool of his own spittle. I'm saying you could drive to New York instead.

The rationale for the merger was to begin the consolidation of all the industries we hate into a single large industry, namely, the Banking- Insurance-Tobacco-Credit-HMO industry. Not that the MWC staff has an acronym in mind. Why do we hate these industries? Well, some of us have been told it's partly due to something called "inappropriate anger management," but that's another issue (Issue 8). For most of us, it's because they treat us like [bad word]. Well, strictly speaking, that's not true. They go out of their way not to step on [bad word]. That means that [bad word] is above us. We have to look up to [bad word]. [Bad word] laughs at us.

Seriously, they say they're merging so that they can offer customers one-stop shopping for all their financial needs. The theory goes that customers will be able to come into the branch office and do their banking, buy insurance, and get a mortgage. What's the problem with this? It's a little thing that we like to call "the law." The Glass-Steagall Act prohibits banks from being in the insurance business. How will they deal with this? In their words, "Citibank and Travelers Group expect that current laws restricting bank holding companies from participating in insurance underwriting activities will change in the forseeable future." That means they're going to use something called "democracy," which comes from the Greek words demo, meaning "white men," and cracy, meaning "accepting large cash contributions in return for legislation." I'm kidding, of course. Members of Congress prefer checks.

This isn't the real problem, though. The real problem is the idea that these "banks" have branch offices that are open for business. Sure, you can drive around the building on your way to the ATM and notice the sign on the door that says "Open 10-3" weekdays, but let's face it -- no one you know has set foot in a bank for a dozen years. The banks were among the first to realize that if you're open for business, members of the public will come right in and start bothering you. You can hardly blame them, though. The public is mostly made up of people, and have you looked around at people lately? Who wants to be around people? Good grief.

You have to respect the banking industry's strategy, which is to take customers' money and never let them come back and get it. It makes for a nice fit with the insurance industry. As business plans go, this is probably only surpassed by the tobacco industry's plan, which is to take customers' money and then kill them. Or maybe that's the plan of the HMO industry. I forget.

There is some heartening news, though. In the story for which the word Schadenfreude was invented, Nike has fallen on hard times. Profits and the stock price have both fallen sharply in recent months. Nike has taken some drastic measures, with plans to lay off 20% of the workforce. This includes about 500 jobs in Asia, which is expected to slash payroll expenses by about $10 per day.

At least a couple of alert readers will recall that a few years ago, Nike CEO Phil Knight rooted for the Brazilian soccer team, which was sponsored by Nike, over the U.S. team, which was then sponsored by adidas. And defended doing so. Knight, proving that he hasn't lost his magic public relations touch, is featured in Michael Moore's new documentary, The Big One. In it, he says this actual near-sentence about Nike's Indonesian workers: "There are not 12-year-olds working in factories, the minimum age is 14." Moore, of course, gained fame as the maker of the 1989 documentary Roger and Me, which, if you've seen Moore, you know is about his quest to become an exact physical replica of film critic Roger Ebert.

Nike acted swiftly, hiring the public relations people of the tobacco industry, who said, "Nike doesn't try to entice nonworking teenagers to start working. It's just trying to get the ones who do work to switch from the factories of other brands of sneaker companies. Also, Mr. Knight said eighteen, not fourteen."

Be sure to eat your vegetables, Mr. Knight.