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[Commentary] © 2004  Philip Hyde, The Timesizing Wire™, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617)623-8080

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Glimmers of Random Hope
"The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. Take joy." Fra Giovanni, 1513
First, see our glimmers of strategic hope, our sporadic miracles, then our random glimmers here -

10/05/2007   glimmers of intelligence from the Wall St. Journal (j) &/or NY Times (t) - missing earlier and later dates are handled entirely on current homepage or archive pages -

• Angry voices: torture, Iraq, the [child health] veto, letters to editor, NYT, t.A26.
  [It seems to take a trio of outrages to send a ripple of awakening across America. That's what happened just before the last midterm elections, and that's what's happening now. This time the three are torture, Blackwater and a child health veto.]
  • By Monica Mori of Chicago.
    "Secret U.S. endorsement of severe interrogations" (10/04, A1) and "Bush vetoes health bill privately without fanfare" (10/04) make me feel sick and desperate about what this president has done, and continues to do, to our once-proud country in only seven years.
    Could he have done more to debase us if he had set out purposely to destroy us, our economy, our moral values and our dignity?

  • By Kenneth Aaron of Portland, OR.
    So we have a Justice Dept. that endorses torture, and an Army that hires private contractor-mercenaries who are outside of U.S. or military law, and a president who views the world as an episode of "24." All this is supported by a party that is homophobic and seeks to merge church and state. All in the name of democracy and freedom.
    Since when does trashing civil liberties...defend democracy?
    How did we come to have leaders who exhibit qualities of those from whom they claim to protect us?

  • By Pres. Leonard Rubenstein Physicians for Human Rights of D.C.
    ...No amount of legal jujitsu can change the fact that torture is defined as the infliction of physical and mental pain and suffering - precisely the conduct that administration lawyers approved for the C.I.A....
    It is time for the law to be enforced, for perpetrators to be held accountable, for Congress to explicitly prohibit the CIA's enhanced methods, and for American institutions and values to be reclaimed.

  • By Stephen Lehman of St. Paul, MN.
    James Comey said his colleagues at the Justice Dept. would be ashamed when the secret opinions authorizing torture came to light. So are they ashamed? I know I am.

  • By Carol Delaney of Providence, RI.
    Bush...vetoed a bill to expand health care provision for the poorest children in the U.S.... Yet he has no qualms about spending billions every month [$2B/wk! - ed.] on death and destruction in Iraq.
    That money could have enhanced the life of every person in the U.S. by financing free health care for everyone, not just children, and Social Security for years to come.
    [And if it was spent in the U.S. on lots of people, it would strengthen the U.S. consumer base and U.S. markets a lot more than spending it in Iraq and on a few wealthy weapons dealers in the U.S.]

  • By Paul Nadler of Metuchen, NJ.
    I walked through the World Trade Center 20 minutes before the attack, saw the buildings burning, breathed the poisonous dust, wept for my country.
    Now Blackwater. Torture. An unprovoked war.
    I am aghast. Revolted. And ashamed.

  • By Joel Sheffield of Haddonfield, NJ.
    After reading "From errand to fatal shot to hail of fire to 17 deaths" (10/03, A1) about Blackwater USA and the column by Maureen Dowd the same day ["Sinking in a swamp full of Blackwater"], I find myself overwhelmed by sadness, fury and impotence.
    First, there is the profound tragedy that a man can't drive his mother to the hospital without losing his life and precipitating chaos.
    Then, there is the [disgrace] that our State Dept. requests protection in a warzone and our own forces are unable to provide it. So we pay exorbitantly for mercenaries to do the job that we can't, and we also give them carte blanche to carry out their "mission" in any way they wish.
    There are apparently as many "contractors" in Iraq as members of our military. What if they decide that our own armed forces are in the way?
    [Too late. Apparently in several incidents they already have.]
    And then there is the impotence of the members of Congress, who are trying to triangulate among their constituents..., their president and their perception that to take any action is to be labeled.
    Surely this Iraq mess is not a partisan issue. We look to Congress for leadership and we get talk and evasion.

  • By Richard Dickinson of Glendale, CA.
    Re "Sinking in a swamp full of Blackwater," by Maureen Dowd (10/03): As a Vietnam-era veteran, I am extremely troubled by the privatization of our military. Even if Blackwater mercenaries had not killed a single innocent Iraqi, I don't want these surrogate soldiers in America's defense force. ...Donald Rumsfeld said he wanted to build a leaner military force, but then he hired contractors like Blackwater because he said he didn't have enough troops.
    If you want more troops, restore the draft....
    [They don't have the guts to restore the draft. They're scared that if they do, people will really wake up, storm Washington, and lynch every one of them.]

• Let's outsource professors who defend outsourcing, by Kathleen Slocum of Hope NJ, WSJ, A19.
  In regard to "The way we live now," editorial-page commentary by [Prof.] Jeremy Siegel, Jan.26: It's easy for Mr. Siegel personally to take his rosy view of the decline of Western economies while his business school is still importing students from China, India and other developing countries for him to teach here [instead of teaching there themselves] - in other words, while his job here is still safe. But why should that persist?
  When other American corporations can more cheaply turn out their product overseas, why shouldn't production of MBAs, PhDs, MDs and JDs also move offshore? All sorts of American professionals, many struggling with huge education debt as well as masive insurance premiums, are seeing their jobs outsourced. Professors will not be immune from this trend forever.
  Mr. Siegel decries "protectionism" when it is exactly a de facto protectionism that keeps him employed at home and allows him to be sanguine about everybody else's job moving overseas.
  [Hold on, Kathleen - we got another one doing it today in the Times -]
  Job migration is not all bad, pointer (to C2), NYT, C1.
  Some technology jobs may indeed be migrating overseas [like there's any doubt?!], but the trend is less frightening [to the author anyway] and more promising [to super-flush, short-sighted CEOs?] than one might think.
  [Target -]
  Economic scene - A researcher sees an upside in the outsourcing of programming jobs, by Virginia Postrel, NYT, C2.
  [Oh look, it's a twofer. Snug&sheltered Virginia is touting for snug&sheltered Catherine Mann, an economist at the Institute for International Economies in Washington. How much are they paying you two? Accepting articles from you two on this subject is like asking the tobacco industry if tobacco causes cancer. "Oh no-o-o!" And Catherine Mann is another 18th-century mind who thinks that -]
  ...Over the long run...the globalization of software and computer services will enhance American productivity growth and create new higher-value, higher-paid technical jobs.
  [What is it about these people's partitioned brains that keeps them from connecting the dots between worksaving "software and computer services," and CEOs' downsizing, not timesizing, response thereto? This manly Mann then cites a fatal example -]
  What's happening now to software and services has already happened to hardware, with great economic results.
  [OK, let's look at what has happened to hardware and look at these "great economic results." Hardware competition has driven PC prices below $500 for desktops and below $1000 for laptops, but, let's just take 3 hardware manufacturers that spring to mind and see what's happened to hardware employment - and derivative consumer demand. Hewlett-Packard has laid off 15,000+1,800 people - see 9/26/2002 #1 (where's the "new higher-value higher-paid tech jobs", Dr. Mann?). IBM has laid off 7,790 last year alone: 1060 on 1/08/2003 #3, 1000 on 2/28/2003 #1, 600 on 8/19/2003 #1, 400 (+ 3000 furloughs) on 9/26/2003 #3 and offshored 4,730 on 12/13/2003 #1. Gateway has laid off 11,500 noted on 1/07/2003 #2 plus 1100 on 9/04/2003 #1. So maybe both you two cheerleaders, Postrel and Mann, should just siddown & shaddap - you're just muddying the waters and discrediting yourselves. Or go peddle your valium in the Wall Street Journal. The only sustainable response to the domestic spending&growth-eroding effects of offshore outsourcing is the principle, "Firms are allowed to access a national consumer base only to the degree in which they maintain it with jobs and wages." Automatic mechanisms are designed to enforce this in any individual products, services or whole industries that are experiencing high offshore-outsourcing job displacement, as distinct from domestic-technological job displacement. The primary ingredient is the unremedied unemployment dba labor-surplus level that is tolerated or fostered around their offshore facilities. Based on that we impute to them an estimate of effective "unfair taxpayer subsidy" going on in that offshore location, even though such subsidy is probably forced by their CEOs and highly detrimental to the taxpayers there who are living with low wages, long hours and poor working conditions). If we estimate a high effective unfair subsidy there, two secondary ingredients come into the recipe for the automatically balancing trade mechanism that we are designing: the proportion of their headcount that is employed in the USA and the proportion of their payroll that is paid in the USA.]

• New Mexico: Plan to end food and medical taxes, by Steve Barnes, NYT, A18.
  Gov. Bill Richardson [will] ask the Legislature to phase out sales taxes on groceries and medical services and reduce them on professional sporting and cultural events as part of a larger restructuring of the state's tax code.
  [As Milton Friedman says, "You get more of whatever you subsidize, less of whatever you tax." If we really want more business, more sales, we've got to stop taxing sales, ALL sales. In the short term, we need to switch taxes from sales onto sluggish concentrated money (the rich) via graduated income taxes, and in the longer term, we need to morph taxation into fees for services or shares of service (e.g., individual usage-share of roads, individual share of national defense - we now have the computational power to handle this level of accountability) and enable EVERYONE to more easily support themselves so that taxpayers don't have to do it. We estimate that some 75% of government today is makework, maybe more. Timesizing enables all that big government to be safely dismantled.]
  The food tax alone yields more than $90m annually to the state and local governments, and Mr. Richardson said he would work with lawmakers to soften the revenue loss when the Legislature convenes in a week.
  [We repeat, tax concentrated income and wealth - at current levels of compaction, it's just being wasted - creating a Black Hole economy.]

1. [1 UPsizing]
   WalGreen Co., NYT, C4.
   ...Deerfield, Ill., the drugstore chain, [plans] to build a 700,000-sq-ft distribution center in Anderson County SC to serve its growing number of stores in the southeastern U.S.
   [Unspecified new low-wage jobs.]

2. A vital immigration debate, editorial, NYT, A30.
   pResident Bush [our mixed case] has now waded into one of the most turbulent and emotional issues of our day: immigration reform....
   [With birth policy (delayed immigrants) close behind it, on a population-stressed continent that's hurting for water. And with imports policy (proxy immigrants) and offshoring policy (job-emigrants) close ahead of it. The Timesizing full-employment program handles all these issues, the "population variables," in Phase 5, and ties them right in to direct democracy and to living-standard deterioration.]
   ...The nation [has] 8-10 million illegal immigrants....
   [Or if those of us who entered this nation legally wish to question the use of the term "immigrant" in conjunction with "illegal" and to assume the connotation of "legal" inherent in the term, we had rather say -]
   The nation has 8-10 million illegal aliens.

3. One nation, under secularism - Why candidates should take religion out of politics, op ed by Susan Jacoby, NYT, A31.
   [Been there, done that, bought the bloodshed - century after century after century. We need to be building on the separation of religion and politics, and moving on to separate politics and economics.]

1. [1 UPsizing, unspecified new jobs]
   Panama Canal at crossroads - Waterway must add locks, at a cost of billions, or lose importance as trade route, WSJ, B1.
   [Compare general upsizing -]
   The weak dollar is prompting, pointer (to C14), WSJ, front page.
   ...some European car makers to expand manufacturing capacity in the U.S., Mexico and Brazil.