6/15/2011  the promise or threat to jobs is the big club that the Great Parasites (Wal-Mart et al.) use to extort money from taxpayers -

• The End of EZ Money in California? by Al Norman, HuffingtonPost.com
  On May 16, 2011 California Governor Jerry Brown released a revised state budget to address what he called the state's "Wall of Debt."
  One of the Governor's more controversial proposals was to reform California's Enterprise Zones (EZs) program, which was created in 1986 to stimulate economic activity and create jobs for the economically disadvantaged.
  [This is another example of how "intelligent" beings in our lifetime are so block-headed and time-blind that they will do anything and everything but the simple and obvious: adjust the maximum share-per-person of natural market-demanded employment as required by rising levels of work-saving technology.]
  Budget wonks call such credits "tax expenditures," because the state has to forgo revenue to pay for them. The California Franchise Tax Board has estimated the EZ program cost California $333 million in lost tax revenues in 2005. $197 million of that total was from hiring and sales or use tax credits claimed on corporate tax returns.
  The Governor's latest budget criticizes the EZs for "significant failings." Brown says the EZ program encourages the hiring of employees -- but "it does not encourage the creation of new jobs." The Governor also slams the program for rewarding employers "even when it is demonstrable that the existence of the (hiring) credit had nothing to do with the fact that they hired a new employee."
  Governor Brown initially proposed last winter a wholesale repeal of the EZ program, but his kinder May proposal made tax credits available only to firms that actually increased their level of employment, and eliminated the practice of retroactive granting of hiring credits for workers who were hired years ago.
  The Governor's decision to cut a break for the EZs was credited to a political calculus designed to entice a handful of Republican lawmakers to support an extension of the state's vehicle license fees and sales taxes. But the Republicans would have nothing of it. "The governor certainly wants to find Republican votes, but he's going to have to do more than what's come out of the May revisions," said Assemblyman Cameron Smyth (R-Santa Clarita). "Enterprise zones should be left alone." Santa Clarita is home to one of the state's 42 Enterprise Zones. In Kings County, California, an economic development specialist gave this blunt response to Brown's reform plan: "If you eliminate the goose that lays the golden egg, you've killed the economy."
  But are Enterprise Zones killing the goose? The Enterprise Zone's performance has drawn its share of critics beyond Governor Brown. A 2009 report from the Public Policy Institute of California suggests that "after more than 20 years, the program's effects are still unclear... Our main finding is that, on average, enterprise zones have no effect on business creation or job growth." The PPIC report infuriated EZ supporters when it concluded, "For a cash-strapped state, it is too costly a program to simply continue with 'business as usual' without clearer evidence of the program's benefits or a well-defined plan to make the program more effective."
  One of the companies that has become a familiar face inside California Enterprise Zones is Wal-Mart. The world's largest retailer has 1.4 million U.S. employees -- including 70,115 in California. At least three huge distribution centers have been approved by local officials inside Enterprise Zones, but two of them -- Barstow and Merced -- have been held up for years by opposition from local citizens' groups.
  A Sprawl-Busters phone survey this week with 14 EZ managers in California turned up at least 19 Wal-Marts built inside the Enterprise Zones in places like Antelope Valley, Imperial Valley, Kings County, Long Beach, Oakland, Richmond, Salinas Valley, Santa Clarita, Shasta, West Sacramento and Yuba. The voucher manager in the city of Palmdale told me that there are 5 Wal-Mart's inside the Antelope Valley Enterprise Zone alone.
  The exact value of the "hiring tax credits" Wal-Mart has received from California is "highly confidential" one EZ manager told me. A spokesman for the California Department of Housing and Community Development, which oversees the EZ program, was unable to disclose the total number of Wal-Marts in Enterprise Zones, saying "We don't collect business specific information." Under the California Administrative Code vouchers granted in EZ zones are confidential, but the figures are accessible to the zone staff, the zone governing body, the California Franchise Tax Board, and the state Department of Housing. But here's an example: An eligible Wal-Mart worker making $12 an hour for 35 hours a week translates into a "hiring credit" worth roughly $11,000 -- half his salary -- in the first year. That's $1.1 million per 100 qualified workers. The credit continues for 5 years at stepped-down levels -- but the total tax break for Wal-Marts in California EZs could be in the millions.
  For two decades, Wal-Mart has been sucking down public revenues through such tax breaks, adding to the Golden State's Wall of Debt, and claiming lucrative hiring credits that are of dubious economic value. In 2011, Wal-Mart had net sales of $419 billion, and certainly did not need to rely on public welfare for any of its locations in California. According to one media source in 2009 Enterprise Zones received "nearly $500 million in tax breaks, benefiting companies like Wal-Mart, which locate their distribution centers in economically distressed areas."
  Jerry Brown's threat to take away these corporate subsidies provoked the bureaucracy that depends on this welfare to create a new lobbying entity called Californians for Jobs and Safe Communities (CJSC), which was founded by the California Association of Enterprise Zones. This group hired former staffers from Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's campaigns to serve as their PR consultants.
  California should learn from its own painful history. In February of 2005, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy released a report which showed that the corporate income tax in California, as a percentage of gross state product, had fallen by 34% between 1989 and 2003. The report warned that states should "stop providing foolish state corporate tax subsidies. When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing you need to do is stop digging. States need to stop giving away corporate taxes in the name of economic development. Chasing after businesses by fighting over who can give the largest tax concessions is a zero-sum game."
  In that same year, Cathedral City, California watched helplessly as its 'old' Wal-Mart closed, and a new super Wal-Mart held a ribbon-cutting in the neighboring community of Palm Springs. Cathedral City made a 10-year sales tax investment in Wal-Mart, giving the retailer an escalating sales tax rebate that reached as high as $800,000 a year. Just when Wal-Mart would have begun paying its full share of sales taxes back to the city, the corporation shuttered its store, pulled up stakes, and moved one town over, leaving Cathedral City with a big hole in its budget. "Wal-Mart loves to tell you they're a good corporate neighbor, they take care of the community; and that's just wrong, they're not," Cathedral City's former Mayor Pro-tem Greg Pettis told The Desert Sun newspaper. "They come into a community and (we) anticipate we're going to make some long-term money and in essence we reimburse them for the sales tax they generate. They haven't done anything for this community."
  California can't afford Enterprise Zone welfare, and companies like Wal-Mart don't need financial help from taxpayers. Very soon, the California Assembly will have to make a choice: between Wal-Mart or a Wall of Debt.
  Al Norman is the founder of Sprawl-Busters which has helped local coalitions fight big box sprawl since 1993. He is the author of The Case Against Wal-Mart.
  

1/10-11/2010  a massive case of makework -

• The college admissions scam, by Neal Gabler, 1/10 Boston Sunday Globe (BSG), p.C9.
  NOW IS the winter of high school seniors’ discontent. But then every winter is one of discontent as seniors file their college applications with a mix of dread and hope - mainly dread. Those applying to the most selective schools have the odds stacked against them no matter how sterling their high school records, though college admissions officers typically offer the cold comfort that rejection is not equivalent to failure and that, as one Yale admissions officer put it, “It matters far less which strong college admits you than it matters what you do with your opportunities once you are there.’’ To which most high school seniors would say, “Hogwash.’’
  They know that it does matter where you go to college, if not educationally then in terms of social recognition and opportunity. They know that America, for all its professions of meritocracy, is a virtual oligarchy where the graduates of the Ivies and the other best schools enjoy tremendous advantages in the job market. They know that Harvard or Stanford or MIT is a label in our “designer education’’ not unlike Chanel or Prada in clothes.
  So here is another, more realistic comfort to those anxious seniors who will soon be flagellating themselves as unworthy: The admissions system of the so-called “best’’ schools is rigged against you. If you are a middle-class youth or minority from poor circumstances, you have little chance of getting in to one of those schools. Indeed, the system exists not to provide social mobility but to prevent it and to perpetuate the prevailing social order.
  Of course, colleges loudly deny this since it undermines their exceptionality. Instead, universities will protest that the system is meritocratic; that they consider every applicant objectively; that the admissions process is “need blind,’’ which means that financial support plays no role in whether an applicant is admitted or not.
  Most of these assertions, however, are nonsense. Of course the odds are stacked against every applicant since the best schools admit only a fraction of them (less than 10 percent for most of the Ivies and just above 25 percent for selective schools like Northwestern and Emory), but as Daniel Golden demonstrated in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series for the Wall Street Journal and then in his book, “The Price of Admission,’’ the so-called “best’’ schools give heavy preferences to the wealthy; as many as one-third of admissions, he writes, are flagged for special treatment at the elite universities, one-half at the elite liberal arts colleges, and the number of open spaces for the non-privileged is reduced accordingly. As Golden puts it, the privileged take so many spots that the “admissions odds against middle-class and working-class students with outstanding records are even longer than the colleges acknowledge.’’
  Golden’s focus was on legacy admissions, which are essentially affirmative action for the rich and which provide huge advantages for applicants; on what are called special “development’’ applicants - thosewho do not qualify for admission under the ordinary criteria but whose parents have pledged large contributions to the school; and athletes who are, contrary to popular belief, not all poor ghetto kids adept at football and basketball, but are primarily wealthy white kids who are adept at lacrosse, rugby, crew and polo.
  But while these are overt ways to provide advantages for the wealthy, there are far more insidious and subtle methods of skewing the admissions process. Take early admissions. Early admissions account for 35 percent of the incoming class at Duke this year, 20 percent at Brown, 50 percent at Yale and 40 percent at Stanford. Under most programs, early admittees are obligated to attend that school should they be granted admission. But early admissions favor the wealthy - in part because they are able to forgo weighing options for financial aid.
  Then there is the “well-rounded student body’’ argument, which any parent accompanying his child on the college tour rounds has heard ad nauseam. According to this approach, colleges are not looking for the well-rounded individual student. They are aiming instead for a diverse student body: an exceptional athlete, an exceptional musician, an exceptional scientist, an exceptional poet. Except that exceptionality, as most parents can attest, doesn’t come cheap. Athletes require coaching and often traveling teams; musicians require lessons and instruments; scientists require labs and internships; poets require classes and opportunities for publication. None of these things is readily available to the average middle-class family, to say nothing of the high school student who must work at McDonald’s to earn spending money (even though colleges say they take this into account).
  Nor does diversity extend to racial composition. Of course every college boasts about its efforts to enroll a more racially diverse student body. But here are the facts: A New York Times article in 2004 revealed that Harvard’s incoming freshman class was 9 percent black, but between one-half and two-thirds of those black students were actually West Indian or African immigrants or the children of immigrants, and many others were biracial. In short, they weren’t African-American. Another 2004 study, conducted by Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania, also found that 41 percent of blacks at 28 selective colleges and universities identified themselves as immigrants, underscoring the West Indian and African component.
  The prognosis is equally poor for economically disadvantaged students, whether black or white. According to Golden, economic diversity counts the least in admission considerations, and only 3-to-11 percent of admittees come from the lowest economic quartile. In fairness, some universities, including Harvard, are offering full scholarships to financially strapped families, but this does not necessarily affect the admission of those students.
  A counselor told me when my daughters were applying for college admission that the first thing I had to do was withdraw my application for financial aid. When I said that colleges professed to be “need blind,’’ she laughed. Any admissions officer, she said, could tell from your zip code whether you were likely to need aid or not, and students needing aid were much less desirable than those who didn’t need it.
  But perhaps the most pernicious means of maintaining the status quo was devised, ironically, in the name of making the system more meritocratic. No one disputes that once upon a time elite schools were the preserve of wealth and influence. When the SAT was instituted in the 1920s it was done precisely in the name of changing the admissions process to a more egalitarian one. By providing an allegedly objective measure of a student’s intellect, the best schools could no longer be castigated as impregnable. Do well, get in. At least that’s what middle-class Americans dreaming of their children’s social advancement have been told.
  In truth, the SAT, which is thankfully being phased out at many schools, has had the opposite effect. Far from opening the doors of elite schoools to outstanding students from ordinary backgrounds, it has wound up giving an objective patina to an unjust process. In some ways it is the great subterfuge. That’s because SAT scores correlate highly to family income - an average of 12 point increments for every $20,000 of income, which this year amounted to a 130 difference on critical reasoning, 80 points on math and 70 on writing between the lowest income and highest income groups. While correlation isn’t always causality, economics professor Jesse Rothstein of Berkeley has called it a proxy for other demographic components and for high school resources. And, not surprisingly, Professor George Kuh of Indiana University, has found that the US News list of best colleges has an almost 100 percent correlation to SAT scores, which means that the so-called best schools could just as easily be ranked by family income.
  So here’s the bottom line for all those exceptional middle-class and lower-class high school seniors who will doubt their own worth when the near-inevitable rejection letters arrive: The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in you. The fault lies in the system, and the system isn’t going to change, because it benefits the people it is designed to benefit - people who understand how much a real meritocracy would threaten their power.
  Neal Gabler is the author, most recently, of “Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination.’’

5/31/2009  1 compound-complex chronicle of makework -

• The downward spiral of progress - Why companies keep ruining your favorite products, by Tom Scocca, Boston Sunday Globe, K1.
  FOR MORE THAN a decade, starting nearly 20 years ago, I believed that I would never need to think about buying sneakers again. When I needed new sneakers, I simply went to a suitable shoe store and found a pair of Jack Purcell sneakers, size 12, a clean white replica of the dirty and fraying shoes I'd worn into the store.
  The badminton champion Jack Purcell had designed them in the 1930s: plain canvas, long rows of metal eyelets, a white rubber cap toe, a flat blue sole, and a correspondingly flat canvas insole. The shoe had survived through whole epochs of modern shoe design, secure in its atavistic simplicity, like a horseshoe crab. It was handsome and comfortable.
  Then, a few years ago, the shoes were gone. In their place was something that almost looked like them - cap toe, eyelets, canvas - but, in the words of the manufacturer Converse, had been "reinvented with a ½-inch thick comfort insole, lightly padded tongue and upper sockliner....along with a redesigned outsole for added comfort." Whose comfort? There were already plenty of sneakers out there with padded soles and tongues; if I'd wanted them, I would have bought them. In the name of making the shoes better, they had made them into something else. The Jack Purcell sneaker had been improved out of existence.
  There are plenty of criticisms of American consumer capitalism and its guiding ideology, the notion that the Invisible Hand of the Market is as all-capable as the hand of God used to be (back when God was what people worshipped), only more helpful and efficient. It's not hard to spot cases where the market is inadequate to answer moral or ethical questions, such as how to pay to fix an 83-year-old retiree's broken hip.
  But consumer capitalism is also a disappointment at the thing it's supposed to be good at: the ordinary buying and using of stuff. It's especially frustrating when the market decides to improve something that customers didn't want improved. If the consumer marketplace allows useful, effective products to disappear, then what is it good for? Or who is it good for? Not the person who's buying.
  On June 12, after one last round of delays, the last analog television signals in America are due to be cut off. People who were happy watching old-fashioned television with rabbit ears - the most frugal, least demanding television customers in America - will have either bought a digital converter kit or they will see their pictures go dark.
  The government's TV-transition website assures the analog-TV holdouts that "digital broadcasting allows stations to offer improved picture and sound quality." This is debatable: where you might watch a weak analog signal on a snowy screen, a digital signal would go blank or curdle into unwatchable, unmoving pixel-chunks. And because digital signals take longer to digest, it will become impossible to flip instantly from channel to channel - a maddening lag I first encountered on digital cable, after my provider insisted on upgrading me. But digital is officially better, so everyone gets digital.
  [Oh. cases abound!
  Flip-up sunglasses - try to find them for less than $50 these days.
  Old-fashioned Palmolive soap - have to buy the 'classic' scent from Mexico.
  The really peelable stamp hinges from Dennison for stamp collectors.
  Woonsocket Bakery iced brownies (Rhode Island).
  Spence's Bakery buttertarts (Aurora, Ontario).
  The Avro Arrow - Canada's supersonic jet.
  The steam locomotive - hyperefficient when GM shut it down.
  American railroads in general.
  Hi fi that only dogs can hear....
  Tom Scocca mourns the disappearance of Jack Purcell sneakers, analog TV...]
  This sort of ruination through 'improvement' has a rich history. The most notorious example was the introduction of New Coke, when Coca-Cola announced it was replacing its ubiquitous, wildly popular flagship beverage...with a new version that people would like better. No one wanted New Coke, and it was quickly withdrawn, to be remembered as a humiliating failure.
  What's mostly forgotten, though, is that old-fashoned Coca-Cola never came back. What replaced New Coke was a drink called Coca-Cola Classic - made, like New Coke, with cheaper and more cloying high-fructose corn syrup in place of cane sugar. Now, people who care enough to want the actual, white-sugar taste of Coke end up hunting for foreign bottlings or hoarding the corn-free Passover version.
  Things like New Coke, digital TV, and the smaller, easier-to-handle daily newspaper are all changes meant to make things easier or more profitable for the producer, which are presented to the consumer as improvements.
  As Facebook grows from a social-networking site to a data-mining site for marketers, the homepage becomes a gabble of personality quizzes taken by people you haven't seen since highschool. The bait-and-switch is crude and obvious.
  More insidious are the disimprovements through which the producer genuinely believes it's making its product more attractive. Why, one day in the '90s, did a capering anthropomorphic paperclip start jumping out at you when you tried to write a letter in Microsoft Word?
  [Phil Hyde agrees with Tom Scocca but colleague Kate Jurow is lonely for that 'office assistant' and wishes it would come back as an option on the Word Upgrades. "Kate is perfectly entitled to her own WRONG opinion!"]
  Why did a particular brand of toilet paper - and in short order, nearly every brand of toilet paper - turn crumbly and linty in the name of "extra softness"?
  [Hm, we just use Charmin Ultra, which we like, but that may be the one he means...]
  Why does the first Star Wars movie now teem with swarms of excess spaceships, computer-pasted onto the original scenes?
  It's not that everything old is inherently better. A piezoelectric starter on your stove beats a pilot light. I don't miss rotary phones, carbon paper, cloth diapers, or dial-up modems. I would rather send you a text message than talk to you on the phone (although that's partly because the lack of an old-fashioned analog feedback loop makes cellphones annoying to talk on) [and frequently time-wasting as you both repeatedly start to talk at the same time].
  When a product gets disimproved, the company behind it is trying to give you more - but not you, personally, exactly. Someone else, some other person, who still must be wooed.
  The satisfied customer, his or her needs having already been accounted for, can be [taken for granted and forgotten]; it's the dissatisfied customer, who still wants to buy things, who makes the system run.)
  The moment you're comfortable enough to stop thinking about your choice is the moment your choice is most likely to be yanked away from you.
  This is the source of the auto-industry truism that any small, lean car will inevitably evolve, model year after model year, into a bloatmobile. The people who didn't buy it in the first place would prefer something a little bigger, a little more like a regular car. The Ford Thunderbird, a little two-seater in 1955, acquired over the next 20 years a full set of seats, four feet of length, and nearly a ton of extra weight. The Scion xB, an American-market version of Japan's popular box-shaped economy wagons, just bulked up and dropped below 30 mpg - the better to attract people who prefer SUVs to Japanese economy cars.
  So it was that when I went to replace my old MacBook, the smallest and most portable model, I learned that the new smallest model was an inch bigger. Apple wanted to give people a wider screen, the sales clerk said. That there were already wider models didn't matter.
  Sometimes the market really will correct itself, as the economists promise, reversing a disimprovement, or even coming up with an improvement. No-boil lasagna noodles, with their weird parchment-y texture, seemed to have driven all the real lasagna noodles off the shelves a few years ago; now the normal product has made a comeback. If you pay a little extra when buying a Windows computer, they'll strip out the Vista operating system and let you have a plain, older version. Soft-drink makers are formulating specialty products with sugar instead of corn syrup.
  But mostly, unwanted progress is here to stay. The market can't be trusted to keep supplying you with what you like, because the goal of the market is not to have sold things but to be selling more things, tomorrow. It's not about the loyal customer, but the one whose loyalty still needs to be negotiated - on new terms, if need be. The loyalty of the old customers is strictly one-way. The ideal customer is someone who doesn't want the product.
  [Compare Jimmy Tingle's observation that the ideal person for health insurance is the person who never gets sick and needs health insurance, and people who do need it, private insurance companies won't insure.]

3/01/2006  1 outrageous case of makework, totaling 14,700 artificial jobs, costing $1.4-2 billion a year, reported in the Wall Street Journal (j) -

• Idle hands - Detroit's symbol of dysfunction: Paying employees not to work - Cost tops $1.4 billion a year as layoffs fill 'jobs bank'; A dismal facility in Flint - Mr. Mellon takes a long nap, by Jeffrey McCracken, 3/01/2006 Wall St Journal front page.
  FLINT, Mich. [Michael Moore's hometown] - In his 34 years working for General Motors Corp. [GM], one of Jerry Mellon's toughest assignments came this January. He spent a week in what workers call the "rubber room."
  The room is a windowless old storage shed for engine parts. It is filled with long tables...and has space for about 400 employees. They must arrive at 6 am each day and stay until 2:30 pm, with 45 minutes off for lunch. A supervisor roams the aisles, signing people out when they want to use the bathroom.
  Their job: to do nothing.
  This is the "Jobs Bank," a two-decade-old program under which nearly 15,000 auto workers continue to get paid after their companies stop needing them.
  [Hey, Japan has something like this too! Gotta find a reference.]
  To earn wages and benefits that often top $100,000 a year, the workers must perform some company-approved activity. Many do volunteer jobs or go back to school. The rest must clock time in the rubber room or something like it.
  [Hmm, wonder what else they have? This is could be like our string of secret prisons in eastern Europe. Gee, how many ways can America sign its own death warrant?]
  It's called the rubber room, Mellon says, because "a few days in there makes you go crazy."
  [But maybe that's the point. When you're certifiably crazy, the private sector can palm you off onto the public sector, who then closes down its mental health facilities and dumps you out onto the street.]
  The Jobs Bank at GM and other US auto companies including Ford Motor Co. is likely to cost around $1.4-2 billion this year [2006]. The programs, which are up for renewal next year [2007] when union contracts expire, have become a symbol of why Detroit struggles even as Japanese auto makers with big US operations prosper....
  [But at home in Japan they have some kind of rubber room for unwanted but unlayoffable employees too. This is a global problem. It bedevils all frozen-workweek economies; in fact, any economic design that allows unlimited concentration of value with no automatic design-mechanism to spread it around. The lack of such a mechanism spreads unpredictability.]
  Mellon joined GM in 1972, following his grandfather and his father.... Throughout the 1980s and 90s, Mellon held jobs designing electronic systems for vehicle prototypes.
  [Too bad Mellon never thought of applying some of his electronic design principles to the economy. (If you see this, Jerry, and you want to start, contact us at timesizing(at)aol.com, x.Phil.)]
  In 2000, GM merged two engineering divisions, and [Jerry Mellon] wasn't needed any more.
  Since then, except for a period in 2001 when he worked on a military truck project, GM has paid him his full salary for not working. That is currently $31 an hour, or about $64,500 a year, plus healthcare and other benefits.
  [Is this crazy or what? And recently, some Swedish agency gave a $700K prize to an already wealthy children's book author in Barre, Vermont. Add that to the capriciousness of their Nobel Prize awards and all the other bizaarely capricious bestowals of our moneyvacuum&charitysprinkle system. Our species has become suicidal in terms of unlimited concentration of value, and failure to define and enforce any concept, however generous, of fair share. It's the Chesterton Pan-Utopian Flaw.]
  About 7,500 GM workers are now in the Jobs Bank, more than double the figure a year ago. [Michael Moore, check this out!] The bank added 2,100 workers last month [Feb/2006] when the company closed a truck-assembly plant in Oklahoma City. Each person costs GM around $100,000-130,000 in wages and benefits, according to internal union and company figures, meaning GM's total cost this year is likely to be around $750-900 million....
  [This is like a high-cost prison. And recall that GM president's statement in the 1950s = "As goes GM, so goes the nation." The once-great USA how has the largest prison population in the world but each prisoner only costs $30,000-35,000 = much more efficient storage. Clearly our current economic design is robbing itself of customers and stability by storing this many people, instead of including them all in the job market on a productive but short-workweek basis.]
  GM employees constitute slightly more than half of the 14,700 auto workers in the Jobs Bank. In second place with 3,600 Jobs Bank workers [or "workers"] is auto-parts maker Delphi, which filed for bankruptcy-court protection last October [2005]. The Chrysler unit of DaimlerChrysler AG has 2,500 and Ford 1,100. Executives expect the total to rise to more than 17,000 next year, as the Detroit companies prepare to shed more than 60,000 jobs..\..
  One way employees in the Jobs Bank can fulfill their requirements is to attend 8- or 12-week classes offered by GM. In these classes, Mellon has studied crossword puzzles, watched Civil War movies and learned about "manmade marvels like the Brooklyn Bridge," he says.
  [Sounds like the PBS video series - the episode about John? Roebling & his bridge.]
  One class taught him how to play Trivial Pursuit.
  [This is pure Keynesianism in the heart of self-styled Friedmanism, and it's the second-stupidest kind of makework (the stupidest is military). Keynes said that better than unemployment would be to pay half the population to bury bottles of money and let the other half dig it up and spend it (see chapter on Keynes in Heilbroner's "Worldly Philosophers," any edition.]
  More recently, he attended an institute in Flint called the Royal Flush Academy. It is designed for those seeking work in casinos - the Detroit area has several - and teaches students to deal blackjack and poker.
  [Great. More subsidies for gambling, which is basically a no-solution tax on the poor.]
  Mellon says he isn't interested in casino work and he left the academy after they docked his pay because he was 10 minutes late coming back from lunch. With that he arrived at the rubber room.... The rubber room and neighboring buildings...are offlimits to outsiders.
  Every day for a week Mellon got up at about 4:30 am to make the 45-minute commute to the rubber room from his home in Otisville, Mich. At first he read the newspaper or magazines lying around, such as Reader's Digest. He talked some with acquaintances. After conversation dried up, he says he spent hours staring at the wall, hoping time would move faster.
  One day he asked a supervisor if he could bring in a cot. The supervisor said no, so he pushed together four padded chairs and slept across them for several hours. He had stayed up late the night before, anticipating this nap.
  The waiting "makes you want to bang your head against the wall," Mellon says. "I couldn't take it. I need to be doing something. And there is a supervisor who walks around staring at everyone. It's worse than high-school detention."
  Mellon thinks a "line-worker mentality" keeps people going back to the rubber room.
  [But a line-worker, follower, don't-rock-the-boat mentality is exactly what unlimited-concentration economics wants and encourages so the top brackets don't feel threatened! The whole American public-school system is designed to pop out these passive "donut people" - and then some of them tell you they're trying to "teach you how to think" - HA = Another contradiction!]
  "A lot of guys sit in that room and just collect their paycheck because they don't know what else to do," he says. "They've spent 20 years tightening a nut as it came down the line. They are faced with this harsh reality, and they are just happy the paycheck still comes so they can put their kid through college."
  [But what's their kid going to do for a job after college?? The more skills and worktime and income get concentrated, the fewer and fewer job openings, regardless of education. Healthcare? - because it can't be outsourced? This takes us back to item 6 above, the unbelievably inefficient American healthcare and health insurance industry. With more and more people crowding into low-level healthcare jobs (and hairstyling and massage and tatooing) cuz they can't be outsourced, and more and more people relying on free emergency rooms, and fewer and fewer people who can afford to pay for healthcare or even health insurance, including the healthcare employees themselves whose pay and benefits keep getting cut due to the surplus of them, we're going to see more and more hospital bankruptcies.]
  A Way to Escape [Not]
  Mellon found a way to escape the room, through volunteering. That is what many of his fellow workers do....
  [There you have it - volunteering is a kind of charity and a major contradiction in unlimited-concentration economics - they tell you to work hard to get ahead, that you gotta get paid for it to be called work, but then they have no jobs, so all there is is volunteer "work." We call it the skimming and charity economy - though the skimming has now mounted to vacuuming and clearcutting. And any system that relies for vital functions, like centrifugation of spending power, on charity (ie: caprice), is inherently unsustainable and temporary, i.e., doomed. But what about the Invisible Hand? Doesn't that automatically make selfishness and greed redound to aggrerate societal benefit? They (the top brackets) wish! If it did, there'd be no business cycle, no recessions, no depressions. But even back in the 1830s during Andy Jackson's bank war, people had already noticed that capitalism periodically needs protection from itself. The invisible hand was a tiny one-off mention in Adam Smith that the top brackets seized upon and blew out of all proportion, to justify their continued skimming and vacuuming of spending power from their financial foundations, the workforce and the consumer base (since every employee not only constitutes one consumer but usually supports one or more other consumers). But the invisible hand in the economic sphere at the time was simply the very visible hand in the political sphere, leaking its balance, its centrifugation of power, over into the economic sphere. We are talking about the repeated extensions of the vote that were taking place in Britain and America in the centuries around Adam Smith's publication in 1776. And the whole evolutionary function of the vote is to provide a centrifuge of non-economic power to offset the unlimited concentration of economic power and its two byways to self-destruction: (A) its self-insulation and -isolation that cumulatively slows and distorts the vital system feedback function, and (B) its cumulative diversion of the national income to the topmost brackets where, as it redistributes up the income continuum, it changes from spending power to investing power and crosses the threshold of concentration at which it changes from self-sustaining to self-undermining, producing, as it does, an astronomical degree of consolidated investment money that (certainly cannot be spent and) cannot possibly find market-sustained productivity to sustainably invest in - because the money flows throughout the economy have been cumulatively modified and directed upward to the topmost brackets, thus vacuuming the spending power and activity OUT of the markets for the productivity in which they previously sustainably invested.]
  Detroit's Big Three automakers are likely to seek reductions in the program when they renegotiate their contracts with the United Auto Workers next year....

1/24-26/2004  8 cases of makework, totaling unspecified 'jobs,' reported in the Wall Street Journal (j) or New York Times (t) or Boston Globe (g) - missing earlier and later dates are handled entirely on current homepage or archive pages -

1. Omnibus spending bill has $10.7B in 7,931 earmarked 'sweetheart projects', 15 per Congressman (1/26 j.A14)
2. Scale of US military spending faces GAO questions - $4B/mon for Iraqis & $1B/mon for Afghans (1/26 j.B2)
3. Congress hears more calls to probe Halliburton re overbilling & kickbacks in Iraq (1/26 j.B3)
4. David Kay, Iraq arms inspector, says WMDs gone before war, so war pure autism & makework (1/24 t.A1)
5. Halliburton cites $6.3m in kickbacks employees got from Kuwaiti firm in Iraq reconstruction (1/24 t.A1,A9)
6. Moving from high tech into a new career as a personal trainer (1/25 g.G17) - or yoga instructor, or masseur, or hair stylist, or nail polisher, or Starbucks or Wal-Mart or McDonald's 'associate'...
7. New Mexico courts film industry with taxpayers' budget surplus (1/26 t.C1)
8. Hmong immigrants give up on textiles in Fresno, try chicken raising in South (1/26 j.A1)

1. 12/29 Halliburton contracts in Iraq: The struggle to manage costs, NYT, front page.
   [Yeah, it's rough, especially when all your incentives and your power push in the opposite direction.]

2. 12/29 The thinning of the army, editorial, NYT, A20.
   Over a third of the Army's active-duty combat troops are now in Iraq, and by spring the Pentagon plans to let most of them come home for urgently needed rest.... When [that third,] the 130,000 Americans [now in Iraq] rotate out for home leave, nearly the same number [another third] will rotate in. At that point, should the country need to send additional fighters anywhere else in the world, it will have dangerously few [the third third?] of them to spare....
   [So hey, let's put a big neon sign - "Attack us when we're troop-rotating and you'll have us outnumbered with only 130,001 troops." But if we can keep this babywar going, think of all the JOBS, never mind just sharing the vanishing work like intelligent lifeforms.]

3. 12/29 Effort to promote U.S. falls short, critics say, by Christopher Marquis, NYT, A6.
   ...The government's PR drive to build a favorable impression abroad - particularly among Muslim nations - is a shambles, according to Republican and Democratic lawmakers, State Dept. officials and independent experts. They say the effort, know as public diplomacy, lacks direction and is starved of cash and personnel....
   [That's the solution = throw more of our children's tax money at it! Mine it for all the bogus jobs it can create! Never mind public diplomacy up front by signing the Kyoto Protocol, honoring the ABM Treaty and NEVER making a huge military mountain out of a 9/11-irrelevant mole hill or yearly sending fortunes in our money to support Sharon's squatters and wall-builders in Palestine.]
   Washington [ie: Bush] has failed to capitalize on the ouster of Saddam Hussein [who cares - it was irrelevant to our national interests and disastrous to our national security and financial future], those critics say, and did not maintain the sympathy generated by 9/11.
   [How could we when we don't even respect Muslims enough to tally the collateral casualties we cause them in Iraq.]
   In Iraq, occupation officials routinely place blame for their miscalculations on pessimistic American news media, a reflex that even some hawks denounce as deceptive.
   {Deceptive? It's ridiculous!]
   Public diplomacy is "a complete and utter disaster in Iraq," said Mark Helmke, a senior staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who holds that the occupation authority has done little to counter criticism that it is an imperial, occupying force....
   A senior State Dept. official, who is active in public diplomacy, says he starts his day pondering the antipathy to the U.S. "Why, in Jordan, do people think Osama bin Laden is a better leader than George Bush?" he asked.
   [How about because bin Laden only gets 20 of his people to commit quick suicide and stays alive himself, while Bush and his team of oil executives are committing slow suicide and taking all 290,000,000 Americans with them?!]
   "It's not just Arabs who are angry with the U.S. [ie: the Bush regime]. It's worldwide."
   [And it's not just outside the U.S. It's also at least 20% of Americans, according to a Bush gull in the latest Economist mag out of London.]

4. 12/27 OSHA's complicity, letter to editor by Paul Hosman of Kalamazoo MI, NYT, A34.
   ...OSHA is a prime example of a bureaucracy that "doesn't want to rock the boat" and protects the corporations and companies it is supposed to regulate. It needs many fewer paperpushers and managers and many more people on job sites....

5. 12/27 Senate ethics and 'Stevens money', editorial, NYT, A34.
   ...in Alaska, the outsize chunks of federal spending that Sen. Ted Stevens [R] has secured for his constuents....as chairman of the Appropriations Committee....

6. 12/29 Lifespan of a mall, letter to editor by Mark Kmetzko of Cleveland Hts OH, NYT, A20.
   [Built-in obsolescence reaches further fields -]
   ...In the summer of 1976, we made retail history with the opening of the huge Randall Park Mall. That cavernous suburban shopping space is all but empty now.
   Meanwhile, a new mall - sorry, a "lifestyle center" - has just opened about 5 miles up the road. And you can't find a parking space....
   In 20 years, I'll have it all to myself.
   [A new application for the comicstrip undertaker's motto, "You plug 'em, we plant 'em."]

7. 12/27 Stadium madness, letter to editor by Avram Sand of Teaneck NJ, NYT, A34.
   ...Many sportsfans [as well as other taxpayers] question why New Yorkers [sh]ould build a West Side stadium [when ticket prices are so high, why do they need tax money?]....

1. Pentagon gives airlines a lifeline with payments [over $1.2B this year] for moving troops, NYT, front page.
   [Followup -]
   Private carriers get $2.4B [in fiscal 2003] to carry U.S. troops to mideast, 12/29/2003 WSJ, B2.

2. [and here's a way of amplifying the makework "value" of war -]
   U.S. can't account for [$1.2B worth of] Iraq supplies, WSJ, B2.
   [So, more unaccountability in the Halliburton-Cheney area.]

3. [UNmakework? -]
   China announced steps, poniter (to A9), WSJ, front page.
   ...to curb spending on construction, factories and equipment in order to avoid overexpansion and inflation.

• [now China's getting into the act - we've really got a poverty of ideas out there -]
  China: Bailout for a bank, Bloomberg via NYT, W1.
  The Bank of China will receive a $20B government bailout as soon as next week to help write off bad loans before a first-time share sale in 2005, an executive at the bank said.
  [Gotta keep that welfare-for-the-rich aflowin!]
  The bank will use the money to reduce bad loans and speed plans to sell shares, the executive said.

1. 12/20   Ease a little guilt, provide some jobs: It's pork on the hill - Lawmakers wrangle for swimming pools and traffic lights back home, by Sheryl Stolberg, NYT, front page.
   DC...- Like most other members of Congress, Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., tries to do what he can for the folks bank home.
   So when the House passed a catch-all spending bill this month, Mr. Gibbons wasted no time in announcing that he had secured millions of dollars for Nevada, including $6m for a bus terminal, $2m for a truck climbing lane and $1.6m for drinking water improvements.
   But it was a lesser appropriation - $225,000 to repair a swimming pool in Sparks, Nev., his hometown - that got Mr. Gibbons in hot water....
   The spending bill, called an omnibus, is stuffed with an estimated 7,000 special interest provisions, from $50m for an indoor rain forest in Iowa to $150,000 for a stop light and traffic improvements in Briarcliff Manor NY. If the Senate approves it, total spending on pet projects - which has more than doubled in the last five years - will reach roughly $23B this year, the most ever, according to watchdog groups that track federal spending....
   The spending bill, which the Senate will take up in January, treats the home states of powerful appropriators especially well.
   • Alaska, home to Sen. Ted Stevens, the Republican chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, would reap millions under the measure, including $1m for the Anchorage Museum and $1m for the Tongass Coast Aquarium.
   • Florida, the home state of Rep. Bill Young, a Republican who is Mr. Stevens's counterpart in the House, also stands to gain millions.
   Every state - indeed nearly every Congressional district, no matter Democratic or Republican - is the recipient of one pork project or another.
   • The measure includes $200,000 for the University of Hawaii to produce a documentary on the Kalahari Bushmen, $220,000 to renovate a blueberry research center at the University of Maine
   • and, in a provision Sen. Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader, called "most ironic," $500,000 for the "Exercise in Hard Choices" program at the University of Akron, which examines how Congress makes budget decisions.
   "It's worse than ever, and it's even more egregious because the Republicans are in charge, and everyone thought that they would be fiscally responsible," said Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, an advocacy group that named Mr. Gibbons "Porker of the Month" for the swimming pool provision....
   Rep. Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, has defended the $820B measure, which includes $328.1B in discretionary spending, as fiscally responsible, saying it represents an increase of just 3% over last year.... As to pork, Mr. DeLay and other lawmakers prefer a different term: earmarks. Such projects are typically neither subject to Congressional hearings nor competitively awarded through the federal bureaucracy's grant-making process. Usually, they are requested by a single member of Congress and serve only a single local or special interest. Whatever the name, lawmakers defend the practice vigorously.... The amount of money set aside for earmarks has been increasing for a number of reasons [and] pork projects are getting more parochial. To read through the 1,182-page omnibus is to discover that no detail is too small to escape Congress' attention.
   • The bill, for example, allocates $10,000 for the Endless Mountain Transportation Authority in Bradford County PA;
   • $12,000 for a group called 100 Black Men of Louisville KY;
   • and $15,000 for the Fisher's Peak YMCA in Trinidad CO.
   Of course, one man's pork is another man's economic development....

2. 12/20   Pentagon inquiry - Halliburton says it saved U.S. oil money - A company says the Pentagon requires it to buy some high-priced oil from Kuwait, NYT, A6.
   [WSJ version -]
   A Halliburton official, pointer (to A3), WSJ, front page.
   ...said he and his staff were pressured by U.S. and Kuwaiti officials to buy gasoline from Kuwait for Iraq.

3. 12/20   The former general - Clark has stake in technology he champions, by Edward Wyatt, NYT, A12.
   CLAREMONT, N.H...- Gen. Wesley Clark loves to talk on the campaign trail about a new electric motor and rechargeable battery that he says could be used in electric cars and windmills to reduce the nation's dependence on foreign oil. If he is elected president, Gen. Clark promises, he will put "big bucks" into subsidies for the development of those and other types of renewable energy.
   One thing Gen. Clark does not mention is that he has a financial interest in the small private company that developed and is marketing the new motor and battery...WaveCrest Laboratories, based in Dulles, Va....

4. 12/20   Massachusetts: Another piece of Big Dig in place, by Katie Zezima, NYT, A14.
   The last major roadway change created by the Big Dig, Boston's $14.6B highway project, has opened to traffic....

5. 12/22   Growth of the Internet may take nothing short of a revolution, by Lee Gomes, WSJ, B1.
   ...Starting Tuesday, researchers from 4 big universities and other research outfits gathered on the Carnegie-Mellon campus in Pittsburgh for the initial planning session of the "100 by 100" consortium. With a $7.5m grant from the National Science Foundation, the group is spending the coming few years thinking about how to improve the Internet so that 100m US homes can have everyday speeds of 100 megabytes a second....

1. Iraqi scientists - U.S. to steer ex-arms experts to peaceful jobs, by Judith Miller, NYT, A12.
   DC...- The State Dept. said Thursday [12/18] that it was starting a 2-year program that could spend some $22 million to help provide several hundred [estimate 300] former Iraqi weapons scientists and technicians with nonmilitary jobs in a post-Saddam...Iraq to prevent them from working for countries of concern or for terrorist groups.
   [So, 22m/300= $73,333/job, pretty plush in the 3rd-world at US taxpayer expense, never mind our needs here, such as skyrocketing homelessness, see 12/19/2003.]
   Richard Boucher, the State Dept. spokesman, said American officials would begin by opening the Iraqi International Center for Science & Industry in Baghdad, at a cost of $2m. He said the [2-year] program could ultimately provide some $20m in projects for such scientists....

2. Auditors accuse Halliburton of delays, by Neil King Jr., WSJ, A3.
   DC - Pentagon auditors have accused [Dick Cheney's former] Halliburton Co. of refusing to turn over internal documents that show the company was aware of accounting problems related to an Iraq fuel contract that has allegedly overcharged taxpayers so far nearly $100 million....
   [As Reagan used to say about the Dems, we now say about the slime-dripping neo-con Republicans, "There they go again" - withholding public information, just like Cheney's energy taskforce. When the Pentagon can't even extract the information from the White House's pet criminals, we're really in trouble!]

3. [So is it any wonder that Halliburton has taken out a huge ad today -]
   Halliburton: The truth about our work in Iraq, 2/3-page ad by chairman, president & CEO Dave Lesar of Halliburton Corp., WSJ, B7.
   [Talk about over-concentration of power - this guy is a regular Pooh-bah of titles and roles. A big expensive ad all paid for with our tax money, another prime example of quasi-private-sector makework, and in the Wall Street Journal too, so it's preaching to the choir. How much does a 2/3 page ad cost, including coat-tailing on the flag a la "Halliburton is proud to serve our troops"? Gag us with a gas hose. With apologies to the bard, "Methinks the Pooh-bah doth protest too much."]

• The real story is about Halliburton, letter to editor by Eric Pilsmaker of Milton MA, Boston Globe, A22, flagged by colleague Kate.
  The story broke this month about Halliburton overcharging the US Army for importing fuel into Iraq. Halliburton and its subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root have contracts with the Army amounting to $15.6 billion ("Halliburton faces questions on overbilling," Dec.12, BG, A2 [see NYT version 12/12/2003 #1 below]).
  Besides the fact that they were the only company to bid on the contracts, they overcharged by an alleged $61 million. [And today they sloughed off their asbestos liabilities by having their subsidiaries declare bankruptcy - see 12/17/2003.]
  VP Cheney is the former CEO of Halliburton.
  Does this not stink of corruption?
  What other political favors are being handed out that the public is not yet aware of?
  Just a few days after this story broke, Saddam Hussein is caught in his 'spider hole.'... The capture of Hussein will not end the violence in Iraq or help set up a new government. It is just another propaganda tool used by the Bush administration to cover up the disaster in Iraq.
  The real story here is
  • the Halliburton scandal,
  • the nine months of fighting,
  • hundreds of dead American soldiers,
  • and no weapons of mass destruction.
  It is not some ex-dictator whom we [yanked out of a hole] in the desert.
  [Compare next page -]
  Still no mass weapons [WMDs], no ties to 9/11, no truth - Saddam's capture could not possibly have been worth the lives of 455 US and 80 European soldiers, op ed by Derrick Jackson, Boston Globe, A23.
  ...With no WMDs, no nuclear weapons, and no tie to 9/11 [Saddam's capture] could not possibly have been worth [also] the lives of 7,600-45,000 Iraqi soldiers.
  With no rationale for the invasion, you could consider this a massacre....
  With no WMDs, no ties, and no truth, the capture of Saddam was merely the most massive and irresponsible [and unnecessary] police raid in modern times. We broke in without a search warrant..\..
  The killing of unknown thousands of Iraqi civilians [supposedly] constituted justifiable homicide.
  America was again above the law.
  We have taught the next generation that many wrongs equal a right.
  In arrogance, we boasted, "We got him!" [like it was a sports event]....
  The capture of this dictator, driven by the poison of lies, turned America itself into a [mass-murdering] dictator.
  [Compare -]
  Can a tough Dean rally Democrats? op ed by Robert Kuttner, Boston Globe, A23.
  [A burro nominated to run against the cesspool that the neo-cons have turned the White House into could rally any true Americans, liberal or conservative.]

• U.S. troops are expected to remain in Iraq at least a 'couple more years,' commander [Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez] says, NYT, A18.
  [There are occasionally examples of what we could call UNmakework -]
  Developer declines $15m city loan - [Robin] Brown turns down the use of HUD funds for posh [Mandarin Oriental] hotel, condos, Boston Globe, C1.

• [today, a little damage control from the Wall Street Journal -]
  U.S. and Kuwaiti aides, pointer (to A11), WSJ, front page.
  ...apparently tried to steer Halliburton to work with a subcontractor that may have overcharged in Iraq.
  [When in doubt, fingerpoint...elsewhere.]

1. U.S. sees evidence of overcharging in Iraq - Halliburton subsidiary - Preliminary findings on fuel deal - Company defends its actions, NYT, front page.
   [Compare -]
   Halliburton's contracts in Iraq face investigation by Pentagon, WSJ, front page.
   [Why? Aren't they all in it together? Was Halliburton stupid enough not to pay off EVERYONE? Compare -]
   A deliberate debacle, op ed by Paul Krugman, NYT, A35.
   ...Yes, Halliburton is profiteering in Iraq - will apologists finally concede the point, now that a Pentagon audit finds overcharging? And reports suggest a scandal in Bechtel's vaunted school-repair program....

2. Making the medical care system fair for all, letter to editor by Michael Gindes of NYC, NYT, A34.
   ...This new prescription drug bill is...a huge enlargement of Medicare that will add trillions of dollars to the already tens of trillions of dollars of unfinanced liabilities in the future. [This is] another act of the people's money being hijacked and handed over to special interests. Except that the special interest in this case is the AARP, the mother of all special interests.

3. "America's Trillion-Dollar Housing Mistake," by Howard Husock, reviewed by Thomas Mallon, WSJ, W9.
   We sometimes forget, so routine has it become, that the federal government injects billions of dollars of subsidies, vouchers and loans itno the housing market each year, mostly through the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development [HUD]. In [this book] Howard Husock shows again and again how the interventionist impulse has made things worse instead of better....

1. Bringing home the jobs, pointer (to C2), NYT, C1.
   Cities that attract businesses with tax breaks and other incentives generally make out well, a new study [by MIT's Michael Greenstone and UCLA's Enrico Moretti] suggests, though the bidding wars may not be in the national interest.
   [And such a study would have to ignore downstream taxes on everyone else, especially burdensome on small businesses, to favor the few, plus increasing clamor from all businesses for exemptions, subsidies and special treatment.]

2. Airbus is contending, pointer (to A3), WSJ, front page.
   ...that Boeing's plans to finance its newest jet could violate trade rules by relying on government subsidies.

1. High payments to Halliburton for fuel in Iraq - Company defends cost under U.S. contract, NYT, front page.
   [Journal version, buried inside -]
   Halliburton pacts for Iraq work rise to nearly $5B, Dow Jones via WSJ, C15.

2. [Star Wars is ba-a-ack -]
   Lockheed Martin Corp. - Pentagon awards $4.6B contract to develop missile targets, WSJ, C15.
   ...for the military's fledgling missile-defense system to shoot down....
   [Better make them big and easy to shoot down.]

1. Why peace won't come, op ed by James Carroll, BG, A23, flagged by colleague Kate.
   Why is it so difficult to make peace?...
   [You don't hear this question posed very often, and you sure don't hear the correct answer flirted with very often -]
   Alas, the answer is money. War remains the turbine that drives America's economy....
   [Though the mechanism whereby war drives the economy remains unexplained - no mention of the crucial withdrawal of all the wage-depressing surplus labor hours from the job market so that market forces are harnessed to raise pay in response to a perceived labor "shortage" (actually, balance at last!) and centrifuge the huge, necessarily sluggish concentration of income and wealth in the top brackets out to where people actually spend it and get it back into circulation. Trimming the workweek is so much more intelligent and less wasteful and dangerous than war.]

2. House [242-176] passes massive [$829B] spending bill - Pressure on Senate leaders is raised to call members back to vote on measure, WSJ, A2.

1. [private-sector makework - compare American litigiousness -]
   12/08 L.A. confidential - In land of big-budget egos, private investigators are a part of life - Even at $5,000 a day, clients sign up for the 3-day service, by Schwartz & Glater, NYT, C1.
   ...Second only to the business of hiring a private detective may be hiring specialists to determine if you are being investigated. James Atkinson, president of the Granite Island Group, a counter-surveillance firm, says he typically receives 25 calls a day requesting a sweep for listening devices or bugs. ...One or two a day will sign up for the full 2- or 3-day service....
   [Compare computer anti-virus services.]

2. [back to public-sector makework -]
   12/06 Air Force pursued Boeing deal despite concerns of Rumsfeld, by Douglas Jehl, NYT, front page.
   DC...- Even after Defense Secy. Donald Rumsfeld expressed concern late last month about improprieties in a proposed $20B contract with the Boeing Co., the Air Force's top acquisitions official, Marvin Sambur, distributed messages urging Pentagon officials to sign the deal "ASAP"....
   [Sambur getting a little kickback mayhap?]

3. [And, not to be confused with Boeing -]
   12/08 Beijing to inject $15.7B into two banks, Dow Jones via WSJ, A13.
   BEIJING - China's Ministry of Finance plans to inject 130B yuan in capital into two of the country's four major state-run commercial banks as part of a new rescue package for the ailing sector, a banking official said....
   1. Industrial & Commercial Bank of China...
   2. China Construction Bank...

1. Ridiculous and wasteful, letter to editor by Tim Mulligan of DC, WSJ, A13.
   I am a former trial attorney with the Tax Division of the Justice Dept. I applaud your Nov.28 page-one story on the shameful political pressures involved in that boondoggle called the synfuel tax credit. I only hope you keep following this story, as I fear it will take extensive media coverage before the politicians in DC are shamed into backing off this ridiculous and wasteful tax credit. Keep up the good work.
   [Colleague Kate says this tax credit was designed for corn producers (ethanol) and is heavily subsidized.]

2. Pentagon and bogus news: All is denied, by Eric Schmitt, NYT, A6.
   DC...- Early last year Defense Secy Donald Duck oops Rumsfeld disbanded the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence after it became known that the office was considering plans to provide false news items to unwitting foreign journalists to influence policymakers and public sentiment abroad.
   But a couple of months ago, the Pentagon quietly awarded a $300,000 contract to SAIC, a major defense consultant, to study how the Defense Dept. could design an "effective strategic influence" campaign to combat global terror, according to an internal Pentagon document.
   Sound familiar?...
   [How about just cutting the distraction with Saddam Hussein and going after Osama bin Laden?]

1. Federal spending per household is most since WWII - Spending increases 'are more than twice as fast in the first three years under Bush [as] under the last three years of Clinton - Richard Kogan, economist, by Susan Milligan, BG, front page & A35.
   Non-defense and non-9/11 spending, chart, A35.
   Since 2001, 55% of the items fueling the spending increase are unrelated to defense and 9/11 spending. Critics are calling for the 'Republican' Congress to control the budget [our quotes]..\..
   DC - Congress is set to end its session next week with a vote on an $820B appropriations bill, capping two years of record-level spending economists say has raised the per-household outlay to its highest since World War II.
   Such programs as the No Child Left Behind education law have combined with wartime costs and a generous farm bill to increase government spending by [an average of 8% a year] in the last two years [sounds low], compared with an average of 3.5% a year during the 1990s.
   The recent passage of a $396B Medicare expansion[?] and overhaul bill is expected to drive spending even higher in future years.
   The Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups expressed concerns yesterday about the spending habits of a Republican Congress that had promised fiscal constraint. The Foundation said this Congress's spending increases went well beyond the outlays for defense and homeland security. Subtracting those, spending still went up 11% over the past two years.
   "It's always easy to be generous with ["OPM"] other people's money," said Brian Riedl, a Heritage Foundation economist who released a report yesterday on special interest, or "pork barrel" items in the upcoming omnibus spending package, which would fund seven appropriations bills for 2004.
   Riedl found that per-household spending this year reached $20,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars for the first time since World War II [WW2] - a trend he said makes a tax increase nearly[?] inevitable.
   [So Bush, like Reagan, is more Keynesian than the Democrats, and folks, that means more socialist. But if Bush is to succeed in reconstructing WW2-level prosperity, Keynesianism is not even half the story, because FDR practiced it for four years ('33-37) and only got unemployment, 'UE', down 43% (from 24.9% UE in '33 to 14.3% in '37) before it slipped back up to only 24% down (to 19% UE in '38). The problem was that Keynesianism only bandaided the symptoms, and never really touched the disease, which was the "marginal utility of wealth," i.e., the huge overbalance of lazy low-circulation-velocity money in the top income brackets and the vast underbalance of dynamic high-circulation-velocity money in the middle and lower income brackets - in a word (at the risk of giving our 'conservative' readers dyspepsia), maldistribution. That's why when conservatives say that FDR was "a traitor to his class" (ie: his own top income bracket), more informed people say "No, he preserved his class, because he enabled the status quo (ie: the existing maldistribution) to survive without revolution." But FDR also briefly implemented something that was not part of the New Deal at all, something that was much more effective even though he dropped it after 3 years, and something whose technique was copied by WW2 in a much cruder way. That technique was to withdraw the massive wage-depressing surplus of labor hours from the job market so that the stagnating hyperconcentration of money in the top brackets would be centrifuged flexibly and gradually by natural market forces responding to a surplus reduction and the perception of shortages appearing in increasing numbers of skills. FDR accomplished this by a 3-year period of timesizing. He first set the nationwide workweek at 44 hours on Oct.24, 1938 and then reduced it by two hours the next year and a further two hours the following year, which brought us to the 40-hour level on Oct.24, 1940. Even though the levels involved were still too high to cure the Depression, they made a serious dent. The unemployment rate came down to 17.2% in 1939 just from establishing a specific workweek maximum and inherent in it, a definition at long last of what a fair share of market-demanded work per person was, and the rate came down to 14.6% in 1940 after the first two-hour cut and to 9.9% in 1941 after the second two-hour cut. Thus timesizing was well on its way to doing what the makework and socialism of the New Deal had never done, namely getting the 24.9% unemployment down more than halfway (9.9% means a {24.9-9.9}/24.9= 60% decrease in the unemployment of the worst of the Depression), when WW2 intervened and carried unemployment down the rest of the way (to 1.9% in 1943 & '45 and 1.2% in 1944) by withdrawing even more surplus working hours from the job market (by mass militarized 'emigration' of millions of employees, and subsequent killing and disabling of many of them).]
   "People haven't felt the pain [of fast-increased federal spending] yet because...spending has been financed by budget deficits," he said.
   The Center for Budget & Policy Priorities [CBPP], a group that has defended spending on social programs in thepast, arrived at similar conclusions. Looking at "discretionary spending" - appropriations that exclude entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, whose payments are largely out of the control of the president - spending in inflation-adjusted dollars has increased 8.7% a year under the current administration. That's up from an average of 4.2% a year in the last three years of the Clinton administration, CBPP economist Richard Kogan said..."even though Bush has deficits and Clinton had surpluses."...
   These spending patterns have angered conservatives, who expected a dominant GOP to tighten budgets and shrink government. "It's not good enough to say 'the [Democrats] would be worse,' " said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and one of a group of economists who voiced their budget worries to officials at a private White House meeting yesterday....
   Many Democrats have been complicit in the spending spree, backing much of this Congress's expensive legislation and making thousands of requests for pork-barrel projects for their districts [makework alert!].
   These [pork-barrel] projects consume a 'small' portion - tens of billions of dollars - in the massive $820 billion spending bill Congress will take up next week, according to analyses by Heritage Foundation and Taxpayers for Common Sense. "The bill is currently a hodgepodge of parochial pork for almost every congressional district in the nation. But this bill provides no direction or fiscal leadership for the country," said Steve Ellis, VP of programs at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a fiscal watchdog group.
   Budget watchers note that Bush has the power to make recessions in programs to cut their spending [yet even so,] conservatives say Bush has supported bills that increased [not decreased] entitlement spending. For example,
   • the farm bill, allocates a record $180B in assistance to agribusiness over the next 10 years,
   • and the Medicare package Bush is scheduled to sign Monday would cost $396B over the next decade....
   • Approval of the stalled energy bill would cost the government at least another $23B in corporate subsidies and taxbreaks....
   Bush's spending "is really threatening at this point to exceed that of Jimmy Carter"..\..said Bill Beach, a budget analyst with the Heritage Foundation....

2. [case in point -]
   The energy bill, pointer summary (to A4), WSJ, front page.
   ...would help a firm [Louisiana Energy Services] that wants to build a [$1.2B uranium-enrichment] plant in New Mexico, home of the Senate energy panel's chairman.
   [See below, buried in the middle of article on 11/27/2003.]

3. [Star Wars is ba-a-ack!]
   Northrop and Raytheon won, pointer summary (to A12), WSJ, front page.
   ...a Pentagon contract valued at up to $4.5B to develop a rocket capable of destroying ballistic missiles.

• Raytheon Co., WSJ, D9.
  ...will buy back as much as $1.24B in debt...in order to beef up the company's debt ratings [which] would translate into lower borrowing costs..\.. Like its competitors, Raytheon has racked up a store of cash as the Iraq war and a focus on security have prompted the U.S. government to buy more weapons and intelligence-gathering equipment....

• Japan moves to expand cleanup of banks, by Ken Belson, NYT, W1.
  ...Trillions of yen in tax money [have] been spent propping up lenders that would have otherwise collapsed or been taken over, and rules have frequently been bent or rewritten to spare the banks from having to report crippling losses or inadequate capital....
  In past years, the government threw money at banks...without demanding much in return. In 1998 and 1999, Ashikaga Bank received 1.35B yen ($1.2B) in public funds, most of which will be lost \now that\ Japanese regulators formally took control of [it] on Monday, the first regional bank Tokyo has nationalized.... Last year, Ashikaga persuaded local governments to buy more of its shares even though the bank had lost 129B yen..\.. Regulators were at pains to say publicly Monday [11/01] that the bank was a special case because of its heavy lending to struggling leisure businesses like golf courses, hot-spring resorts and pachinko parlors....
  Investors who were impatient with this soft approach drove Japanese stock prices to 20-year lows in April, helping to push Resona Holdings, the country's 5th-largest lender, to the brink of collapse the following month. Fearing chaos, the government propped up the barely solvent Resona with another 1.96 trillion yen without demanding new common stock in return. Judging that the government did not have the stomach to penalize shareholders for the bank's bad management, investors sent bank stocks soaring. Regulators cannot do the same for Ashikaga's shareholders [damn, no more charity for the rich?]. Legally, the government must take over all the bank's equity, rendering stockholders' shares worthless....
  The government [however] said all depositors' funds would be guaranteed, and...Ashikaga's holdings of bad loans would be transferred to the government-sponsored Resolution & Collection Corp., while its healthier assets would be sold. The Nihon [=Nippon =Japan] Keizai Shimbun [=newspaper] reported that the government also intended to repay fully the bank's 80B yen in subordinated loans and subordinated bonds. The bailout is expected to cost about 1 trillion yen in all.
  The takeover is a far cry from the free-market solution many economists' advocate, where weak banks are allowed to fail and private investors buy the remnants without public subsidies. Only tiny credit unions and small banks have been allowed to fail outright.
  Though Ashikaga's health is not...a national concern, the bank is the largest in Tochigi Prefecture, north of Tokyo, handling the local government's transactions, holding about 40% or deposits in the region and making nearly half the loans. For the national government, that makes it too important to be allowed to die unrescued.
  [The "too big to fail" syndrome with fear of job losses at bottom - brushed aside under Timesizing, where a responsive aggregate-level safety net takes care of jobs.]
  Still, the takeover is evidence that Tokyo has come to recognize the futility of endlessly propping up banks that have so few prospects of ever returning to health, analysts say....

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