Doomwatch^TM vs. Timesizing^®

• False news and hoaxes roiling financial markets - For some news agencies, accuracy lost out to speed..\..On hair-trigger Wall Street, a stock plunges on fake news, by Alex Berenson, NYT, B4..\..A1.
  ..."Investors" [our quotes - ed.] rushed to shed their Emulex shares \when\ Bloomberg News, a leading financial news service, reported..\..at 10:13 a.m. yesterday...that the company's chief executive had resigned and that Emulex planned to restate its earnings for the last two years.... The stock plunged from $103 to $45 in 15 minutes. The drop stripped more than $2B from the company's market valuation [as if that means anything these days - ed.] before the Nasdaq stock market halted trading in the stock at about 10:30.... The free fall dragged down several stocks of companies in similar businesses and even pulled down the broader Nasdaq. Dow Jones News Service, CBS.Marketwatch.com, the cable channel CNBC and other financial news outlets soon joined Bloomberg in reporting Emulex's woes, referring to a press release from the company.
  There was just one problem. The news was not true.... The statement was the latest - and most devastating - several fake press releases and other hoaxes that have upset the financial markets. The [other] two most prominent cases have been Lucent Technologies and PairGain Technologies.
  "Investors" quickly learned [the truth,] enabling Emulex to recover before the day was out.... [But] with trading volume soaring and longtime financial news providers...competing furiously with newer Internet services..., business reporters have never faced more pressure to put out information fast. And with traders [i.e., speculators?!] quick to punish stocks of companies with bad news, the odds have never been greater that a hoax will cause a stock to rise or fall, harming "investors" caught in the crosscurrents....
  [And why not. These "investors" are producing nothing whatever of value. They are shadow-boxing with the real world, dancing with symbols, and with only one thing on their little minds - MORE MONEY, no matter how much they already have and no matter how little time they have to actually spend it. So there is more and more incentive for people with a little more connection to the real world, and a little less respect for the rules of this gigantic charade, this mammoth folie en masse, to throw a monkey wrench into the works - or rather, since very little real work is being done - into the humungous mutual masturbation. And, of course, the people with the most inherent incentive to design and implement these hoaxes are the brokers themselves, because they're making money on every trading, whether "investors" win or lose.]

• [The Russians asked us for a fish, and we gave them a stone -]
  Sub tragedy reveals a new Russia..., letter to editor by Eric Brill of Bedford Hills NY, NYT, A24.
  ...The tragedy of the Kursk nuclear submarine is symbolic of, and possibly largely the result of, the terrible state to which [downsizing, not timesizing] capitalism has brought the former Soviet Union.
  "Privatization" and "reform," code words for the private sacking of state resources and the wholesale elmination of government provision to the public of even the most basic needs, have created a country that is so poor that it cannot properly equip or safeguard its armed forces. Meanwhile, a handful of billionaires grows steadily richer and more powerful.
  [Not to mention the more numerous gangsters.... - thank you, Jeff Sachs, you  #!$%#! so&so!  Great cri de coeur, Eric.]

1. United Airlines requires overtime for mechanics, pointer digest (to A14), NYT, C1.
   To help overcome delays and cancellations that have plagued it this summer, United Airlines has issued an order requiring mechanics at five airports to work overtime if asked....
   [Make that "ordered," not "asked." Americans' reinstatement of slavery proceeds apace. Employers move further and further toward getting a blank check on our lives = complete control over our lives. Overtime should always and only be optional, and heavily taxed - with an exemption for employers who institute overtime-targeted training and hiring. Tell you one thing - we personally sure do not want to fly on an airplane that has been serviced by mechanics forced to work overtime and we don't want to be cared for by doctors or nurses who are being forced to work overtime either. As labor gets marginalized by the splattering of ever more work-saving technology against a rigid and arbitrary pre-technological 1940-era workweek, management is getting worse and worse, more and more spoiled, and more and more crisis-oriented. That's what started the United Airlines problems in the first place. Running their pilots too close to the edge, too little margin of safety, too little time off. And now we're inflicting it upon our children -]

2. Students feel the strain of homework, work, work - Assignments mount even in the summer, by Maria Newman, NYT, A26.
   ...Like a growing number of students throughout the nation, Garrett [Mitchell of Montclair NJ], who is 12 and entering the seventh grade, has to worry not only about an increasing load of homework during the school year but about assignments that are due when he returns to school just after Labor Day....
   [This is really SICK. Title this "Training our children to be slaves - like us." Slaves have an unlimited workweek. And no vacation. A summer vacation with homework assignments??! (A) That's not a vacation and (B) "Cursed be they that must always be 'doing'." And the twist of the knife is - the kid is doing "summer vacation homework" on a computer - technology that was supposed to make life easier for people, not harder. The kid in the photo is looking up at the camera like "These adults must be crazy."]

3. [Extra]
   Clinton defends the outlay of $1.3B to Colombia - An anti-drug effort..., by Marc Lacey, NYT, A6.
   [Pathetic. A billion bucks of taxpayers' money wasted on The Return of Prohibition (only not against alcohol as in the 1920s). Funny how our "leaders" want to keep reviving stupid ideas (another one is Star Wars) to waste our money on - failed ideas that they have learned nothing from. In the case of drugs, the success of the Nicotine War and the failure of Prohibition should have taught them that you don't criminalize substances - you tax them for their costs. Same with guns.]

1. Local issues prolong phone strike in 6 states - The [mandatory] overtime issue remains open in the mid-Atlantic region, by Simon Romero, NYT, C7.
   ...in NJ, Pa., Del., Md., WV, Va., and Washington [presumably DC].... While union negotiators from New York and New England [former NYNEX] were pleased for the most part when Verizon agreed to limit mandatory overtime to 8 hours a week, negotiators in these other states have pushed for an even lower requirement....

2. Still inflation-wary, Fed lets rates stand - Some insist that 4% unemployment is perilously low and growth is too fast, by Richard Stevenson, NYT, C1, C7.
   [These are primitive and barbarous economic times in which we live. We have a central bank that has abdicated its responsibility from Congress to fight unemployment, tolerating over twice what was regarded as alarming (2%) in the solid-boom 1940s, only to obsess continuously about the tiniest inflation - which is actually nature's way of centrifuging wealth. And a stupid way to fight inflation it is, to foster fear in the workplace - fear of job loss - when we could be pitting deflationary incentive (job satisfaction etc.) against inflationary incentive (money motive) throughout the economy by taxing overtime and giving an exemption for overtime-targeted on-the-job training and hiring. And we have a lot of neanderthals who, duh, think it's jess dandy to travel along with 6% of their neighbors unemployed (never mind how many in prison) and to slow down economic growth.]

3. Book agent's buying fuels concern on influencing best-seller lists, by David Kirkpatrick, NYT, C1.
   [The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in publishing? = the "objective" observer affects and changes the observed.]
   ...Alan Nevins, a prominent literary agent with Michael Ovitz's Artists Management Group in Los Angeles, took promotion a step further last week by placing orders for at least 18,000 copies of his client's new book at a handful of small bookstores that report sales to The Times's [best-seller] list keepers.... Mr. Nevins said manipulating the best-seller list was not his intention.... He arranged the sales on behalf of companies that distribute Amway products so they could resell the books at a markup during their fall sales conferences....
   [Then why did he spread it among four small bookstores and write -]
   "This order of books should be reported the week ending August 18th to The New York Times in the business category, as an off-site author book signing," Mr. Nevins wrote in a fax to one bookstore, putting the date in bold for emphasis.... [Also,] he arranged special discounts from the publisher because of the size of the orders, but Mr. Nevins declined to explain why he opted against the even cheaper alternatives of buying through a book distributor or directly from the publisher..\.. Times editors...said Mr. Nevins's effort would not influence their compilation, because unusually large bulk orders are deemed suspect and are typically not counted....
   [But how omniscient and infallible are they. For that matter, how incorruptible are they? Look how far the corruption has gone in publishing -]
   Ron Land, a sales executive at the book's publisher, Thomas Nelson Publishers, said that getting the book on the best-seller list was indeed the motive for arranging the sales at bookstores. "The purpose of directing those sales through the stores was to get the book a presence in the marketplace and get it on the list, and five our marketing a jump-start," Mr. Land said. He said he believed that it was "very common" for business book authors to arrange bulk purchases either from seminars they lead or companies they run, directing the sales through stores to get on the lists. "Most people who are successful in the business book area have a large machine behind them, like Amway; that is just the way things are done nowadays," he said. Owners of the stores involved say Mr. Nevins made his intentions clear to them as well..\..
   [Does "Success" require cheating?]
   Mr. Nevins's activities seem likely to reinforce concerns among [other] publishers and bookstores about efforts to influence the various best-seller lists artificially....

• U.S. posts first July surplus since 50's, AP via NYT, C8.
  [Talk about "rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic," in the 50s our national debt was still well down in the billions - in the 80s we jumped it into the trillions. Check out also tomorrow's (8/23's) op ed -]
  Counting chickens [before they hatch] - Are those surpluses real?, by Paul Krugman, NYT, A25.

1. Ages-old icecap at North Pole is now liquid, scientists find - The North Pole is melting, by John Wilford, NYT, front page.

2. Companies likely to repeat mistakes in next wave of layoffs - Only one-third of companies learned a lot from past downsizings,
   PRNewswire via AOLNews via RadioTony, 18 Aug 2000 09:15:37 EDT.
   WOODCLIFF LAKE, N.J. - If a new wave of mass layoffs sweeps over corporate America - as many now predict - companies are likely to repeat the same mistakes made in previous downsizings, according to a research report [Please Go/Please Stay: The New Rules of Downsizing & Retention] by *Lee Hecht Harrison [LHH], a global career services firm....
   • ...[conducting] job eliminations...in a way that's [inconsistent] with the corporate culture
   • ...[not maintaining] strong communications during and after cutbacks were announced...to get remaining employees back to work quickly and productively
   • ...[not training] supervisors and employees in change management
   • ...[not recognizing] employees for innovation and initiative
   • ...[not using] company events to build morale
   • ...[not helping] survivors deal with the increased workload
   [In short, "Let us help you - further down the road (to slavery - NYAHAHA)."]
   Given the difficulty organizations have with post-downsizing retention..\..LHH COO Bernadette Kenny...explained, layoffs should be handled in a way that leads to smooth, successful transitions for the people affected and that enables companies to hold onto the employees they most want to keep....
   [The easiest way to handle downsizing with these goals in mind is to downsize the corporate workweek instead of the corporate workforce - as Lincoln Electric and Nucor Steel have been doing. This
   • keeps everyone together,
   • allows management to share the sacrifice with employees, thus maintaining trust and job security, and
   • shares control with employees who can then leave on their own schedule if they so desire, rather than being summarily tossed out on the street.
   • It also has the advantage of minimizing damage to the local, regional and national consumer base, which - directly or indirectly - every company relies on.
   Downsizing the workweek instead of the workforce is something we call Timesizing.]

3. Trade deficit set [yet another] record during June - Oil prices are cited in $30.6B gap, AP via NYT, B5.
   [Oh sure free trade is working.]

4. From Gore, the tonic of substance [- however...], letter to editor by John Dillon of West Caldwell NJ, A28.
   It is hardly reassuring to hear a candidate for the presidency proudly announce "I stand here tonight as my own man" (front page, Aug. 18). Whose man has Al Gore been up to now, and whose man will he be tomorrow?

8/16/2000  omens -

• Democrats summon old ideals [& old president - ed.], by Zuckman & Kranish, Boston Globe, front page.
  [Boy, with Clinton's dominance of the first half of the Democratic convention, the Dems couldn't be committing suicide better if they were doing it on purpose. And now they "summon old ideals." That just ain't gonna make it. Check out today's Times editorial -]
  Warring populisms, editorial, NYT, A26.
  Depending on your point of view, it was either old-time religion night or dinosaur time at the Democratic National Convetion. Two of the party's great roarers, Sen. Ted Kennedy and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, were on hand to remind the faithful of the party's traditional New Deal values.
  [The "New Deal" being the blizzard of ineffectual government intervention that FDR slipped into once he rejected the key solution that a maverick Democrat had pushed through the Senate during the interregnum between Hoover and FDR. We say "ineffectual" because the New Deal never got the Depression's 25% unemployment down below 14% at best - and that's not even half a solution. What did work, "coincidentally" enough, was World War II, which got unemployment down below 2% once America plunged into it in 1942 after Pearl Harbor in Dec/41. Shortening the workweek withdraws surplus labor hours from the job market in an intelligent way. The world war withdrew them in a stupid and wasteful way - killing and maiming millions. The 30-hour bill would have solved America's Great Depression in two years or less, matching or beating Hitler's 2-year "solution" of Germany's depression by militarizing Germany in 1933ff. See Galbraith's "Age of Uncertainty" (1977, p. 214). Back the editorial -]
  Even before FDR's politically productive attacks on financial "royalists," economic populism was a staple of Democratic campaigns.... [Its] root system...dates back to William Jennings Bryan [in the 1890s]..\.. For years, when Democrats turned to their venerable themes of economic justice and fairer income distribution [they should have just focused on fairer work distribution - ed.], the Republicans accused them of promoting class warfare, but to little avail.
  [The Republicans didn't really start getting nasty like this until Reagan's reign.]
  Then under the tutelage of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, the GOP learned to trump the Democrats' appeal to middle-class financial solidarity with their own appeals to Main Street in the form of a cultural populism built around a powerful set of patriotic, religious and racial symbols.
  [What a disaster. The Dems failed to update and focus their vision in the first generation after the Depression and the War, falsely attributing the War's success at ending the Depression to the New Deal and its liberal grocery-list approach to progress, so Jimmy Carter floundered and Ronnie Reagan charged in with an even less intelligent approach consisting of coattailing on the flag, unseparating Church and State, and flirting with renewed racism. Now we have two warring populisms, both completely irrelevant - as Derrick Jackson points out today -]
  The souls of Republicrats - They call themselves Democrats but out-Republican the GOP, op ed by Derrick Jackson, Boston Globe, A23.
  ...The past 8 years have seen the White House occupied by the Republicratic Party, the party of genetically engineered Democrats who preach compassion on Monday, deliver the death penalty and the developed world's highest incarceration rates on Tuesday, promise education on Wednesday, proliferate weapons on Thursday, bask in a boom economy on Friday, eliminate welfare on Saturday, and rest on Sunday, smugly celebrating their diverse cobweb of optionless black and brown voters, fickle white voters, flourishing campaign donations, and unfettered free trade with a regard for human rights that is good only if you compare it to the Republicans, who have none at all.
  This is the world Bill Clinton gave us for two elections, and now Al Gore wants America to vote Republicratic a third consecutive time. As if being Clinton's VP was not enough, Gore made sure we all understood the deal by choosing as his running mate Joseph Lieberman [who] on Monday...supports Democratic core issues like abortion rights, on Tuesday...the vote by white Californians to kill affirmative action..., on Wednesday...labor groups, on Thursday...the Demcratic Leadership Council [which] has sought now for a decade to distance the Democratic Party from social issues...and toward an Alan Greenspan obsession with money markets....
  [Great writing, Derrick! (And not bad on the part of the Times editor too, above.) So Derrick, where's your endorsement of Nader? And are you 'cribbing up' on your worktime economics?]

1. Soros concedes goof in book - Global economy didn't collapse, by David Kirkpatrick, NYT, B1.
   George Soros, one of the world's most successful speculators and richest men...in 1998 wrote a book predicting the imminent "disintegration of the global capitalist system".... Two years later, the global economy is still kicking and, in a new book..."Open Society" From Global Capitalism to Global Democracy" (PublicAffairs Press)..\..Mr. Soros...is taking back his grave forecasts.... [Soros conceded too soon. We are still rebuilding all the conditions of 1928, one by one, even to the reconstruction of equivalents for the old bucket shops, penny stocks, extreme margin latitude, and intraday margin calls - see our "Let's take a flier" story on 6/30/2000. Soros only possible mistakes were visualizing the event in overdramatic terms - even in 1929 it was more of a fragmentation than a collapse - and setting a too-early timetable on it. The economy is so much huger now, its much greater momentum is going to make it take a lot longer to bring down. Plus despite the efforts of both major political parties over the last 55 years to dismantle our wealth centrifuging mechanisms, there's still a lot more socialism "in the basement" centrifuging wealth willynilly and supporting our consumer base to some extent. These two factors are huge wildcards that make the timing of the next economic fragmentation unpredictable. But our short-sighted 'captains of industry' keep making all the 'right' stupid moves - such as downsizing - to induce a future fragmentation, and sooner or later their cumulative and hyper-astronomical concentration of wealth will bring us all down.]

2. Waltham firm shares $12m to study rats, by Ronald Rosenberg, Boston Globe, C2.
   ...The nearly $12m in federal funding \for\ Genome Therapeutics Corp. of Waltham [Mass.] is coming from the National Human Genome Research Institute, under its initiative to better understand the comparative function of genes.... [Another chunk of corporate welfare going to the incredibly wealthy and arrogant pharmaceutical industry, which naturally suffers from the Great Leak Upward = no cap on executive pay. More charity for the rich at taxpayer expense. More dynamism-damping concentration of wealth. Virtually all of government and the private-sector - despite constant yammering about "efficiency" - gradually becomes a gigantic makework campaign under the pressures of creating enough work for people to spin their wheels for 40 hours a week, decade after decade, despite wave after wave of work-saving technology. We have frozen the workweek at a pre-high tech level now for SIXTY YEARS, and therefore not received any substantial time-freeing benefits from our stratospheric and still-rising time-saving technology. Every new efficient technology that gets introduced has to be immediately offset by government programs and business featherbedding, including trumped up "quality" improvements like audio high fidelity that only dogs can hear and TV/monitor digitalized resolution that, if we need it, we're staring far far too much at TV & computer screens instead of getting outside into the real world and relating to real people in real-time. The alternative is unfreezing the workweek and implementing a system that automatically decrements the workweek as our levels of technology rise. The first complete core design for such a system is Timesizing. Ralph Nader will at least stop the corporate welfare, but he will need Timesizing to really rebalance our economy and society. Ecological pressures will eventually force the transition, however, because we can't keep consuming all this extra stuff just to continue to set in concrete our nicely nostalgic but totally outdated and inflated (for our technologies) level of the the workweek.]

1. U.S. child poverty rate fell as economy grew, but is above 1979 level - Rooting child poverty in low wages and high living costs, by Don Terry, NYT, A10.
   ...More than 13 million American children, 3 million more than in 1979, live in poverty..\.. Child poverty rates fell significantly in many states in the current economic boom, but nationwide, and in all but a handful of states, child poverty is still higher than it was 20 years ago, according to a study released [yester]day by the National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia University.... The recent decline [of 14.9% in California] was encouraging but still lagged behind the rest of the nation, which saw a 17.1% decline after a 38.8% increase from 1979 to 1993. Nationally, according to census data, the child poverty rate rose to 18.7% in 1998, the most current information available, from 16.2% in 1979. In New York [the land of gold-paved Wall Street] the rate is 24.2%, or nearly 1 in 4 children living in poverty, up from 18.9% in 1979....
   [To cure the low wages and high living costs, the Timesizing approach raises wages to match living costs. It does this by creating a general shortage of labor that eradicates under-employment (including unemployment) by lowering the workweek and spreading the vanishing human work as technology keeps pouring into the economy. It controls inflation by mobilizing deflationary incentive (job satisfaction) to balance inflationary incentive (money motive). How? The only corporations that get to practice overtime are those that reinvest their overtime profits in overtime-targeted hiring, and training if needed. The only individuals who get to practice overwork (overtime from all sources) are those who reinvest their overwork earnings in overwork-targeted hiring, and training if needed. This automatically spreads the most popular human work, the work where there's the least inducement to ask for a raise. Why is it automatically the most popular? Because individuals wouldn't be willing to work overtime on it without getting unaccountable spending power out of it if there wasn't something non-monetary in it that they liked. Instead, they'd just quit at the top of the standard workweek (whatever it came down to) and leave the extra work to others. If we can't share the work, there's no healthy way to share the income and the wealth, because sharing money without sharing work just generates dependency.]

2. [Check this behavior out from the 'leaders of the free world.']
   Legislatures of the world call [US] Congress 'the rudest' - An invitation to a meeting at the United Nations goes unanswered, by Barbara Crossette, NYT, A8.
   UNITED NATIONS...- More than 170 speakers of legislatures around the world plan to meet here for the first time later this month to celebrate a little-noticed byproduct of the spread of democracy: the growth and strengthening of national parliaments.... An invitation to preside over part of the meeting was sent to J. Dennis Hastert, the Illinois Republican who is speaker of the House of Representatives. It has not been answered....
   [His excuse? Some important national or GOP function, no doubt? - No way...]
   Mr. Hastert could not attend...because he would be traveling in Colombia with Pres. Clinton at the end of August...\..
   [Has-tert, will travel.]
   Najma Heptullah, the speaker of India's upper house, who is now president of the parliamentary union...waited in vain in New York for two weeks for an appointment with Mr. Hastert in Washington..\..
   [And the GOP was calling everyone "isolationist" who didn't support flushing American living standards down the toilet by supporting "free" trade?!]
   Anders B. Johnson, a Swede...is secretary general of the group.... An official on Mr. Johnson's staff, frustrated by repeated snubs from Washington, called C ongress "the rudest parliament in the world, without a doubt." He described the atmosphere on Capitol Hill as fortress-like and "run by aides who are the age of my children."
   [Well, who is this silly international group anyway?]
   ..\..The meeting [is being organized by ] the Inter-Parliamentary Union, which Americans helped to found in 1889..\..
   [Oh well, who cares. We started the League of Nations and then doomed it by refusing to join. We started the United Nations and have been cripling it by withholding our dues. Speaking of which -]
   Since 1996, the Republican-led Congress has failed to pay its dues to the group that organized the meeting.... If Congress does not resume paying its dues, about $900,000 a year, it will be suspended from the Inter-Parliamentary Union in October and expelled next year....
   [Sounds expensive, but you can't call us "isolationist" because we want free trade, by which we mean, you take your clothes off while our top executives keep theirs on and steal yours - and those of their own middle class. Now each of our CEOs has way more shoes, for example, than Imelda Marcos, and they still want more.]

3. DuPont says it is expanding into money management, Bloomberg via NYT, C3.
   E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., the world's largest chemical company, is diversifying into managing other people's money. The company is following the lead of other industrial companies, including General Electric and AMR [parent of American Airlines], lured by the potential steady income of money management. DuPont [will] initially offer 2 portfolios to institutions, like pension funds, and [has] no immediate plans for mutual funds.... Its in-house investment operation, DuPont Capital Mgmt, already manages DuPont's $18B employee pension....
   [Everybody's doin' it, doin' it, doin' it.... First we had to repeal Glass-Steagall (7/02/1999 #2) so bankers and insurers could meddle in brokerage. Now our chemical companies, appliance firms, and airlines want in on the gravy. Guess as you wipe out your middle class and consumer base with downsizing, brokerage is the only game left in town. Stocks are the only thing the hypersuperrich spend on at anything like their rate of accumulation.]

4. Polo Ralph Lauren sues Jordache over [polo] sport emblem, by Allison Fass, NYT, C19.
   ...A year ago, a federal court ruled that..\..the U.S. Polo Association...had to change the name of its official magazine, Polo. And in 1984, a federal judge ruled that the Lauren company could have trademarks and logos that the association had argued were generic to the sport....
   [Next our out-of-it judges will be fighting common sense by trying to make generic air and water the private property of some corporation. They're already closing in on DNA.]

1. Rampage gunman receives life term, AP via Boston Globe, A14.
   HONOLULU - Bryan Uyesugi, a Xerox employee who shot seven co-workers to death in June, was sentenced yesterday to life in prison without parole. Uyesugi was also sentenced to life with parole for the attempted murder of the eighth man, and was ordered to pay $70,000 restitution to the victims' families....
   [We have more pressure-relieving technology (and this example in vacationland Hawaii), yet more stress than ever before in our history, and all because we've frozen our workweek at its 1940 level and chosen to take the worksaving benefits of technology in terms of unemployment instead of leisure, and cutting jobs for a few instead of trimming hours for everyone. The intelligent alternative is Timesizing.]

2. Issuing apology, United cancels nearly 2,000 September flights, AP via Boston Globe, D6.
   ...The airline already had canceled 4,800 flights from May through the end of August after pilots announced they no longer would work overtime. ...The pilots say there is no organized work slowdown and problems are more the result of United's failure to hire enough pilots....
   [United, with a big portion of its shares employee-owned, used to be a real employee-friendly company, but it seems that a lot of American CEOs just don't "get" the fact that more and more employees want a life, and especially those in the transport industries who are all too aware of the dangers of driving during overtime hours. "But we can't find the pilots to hire." Ever heard of  t-r-a-i-n-i-n-g, you babies? Get off your fat butts and TRAIN the people you need. DO something for your ludicrously bloated pay for a change! Timesizing will goad you with taxes on overtime unless you train and hire.]

3. Fuel bills empty poor pockets, unfilled by boom, by Neela Banerjee, NYT, front page.
   ...Millions of low-income Americans...are untouched by the flourishing economy and, as a result, unprotected from the effects of rising fuel and utility prices....
   [Then the economy is not "flourishing," is it, when millions are untouched by it.]

4. Oil closes beaches near Ft. Lauderdale, Reuters via Boston Globe, A14.
   Sticky gobs of oil washed ashore along a 25-mile stretch of Florida's southeastern coast yesterday, chasing swimmers from the water and forcing the closure of some beaches.... The oil, from an unknown source, appeared in the water and on the beaches from...north of Ft. Lauderdale to...north of Miami.

5. Choice of Jewish candidate is noted in slurs on Internet - Online services try to keep up with the flow of hate speech, by Lisa Guernsey, NYT, A18.
   [Advanced technology, primitive minds. Only when there is plenty of training and good jobs for everyone will we staunch our racism, creedism, sexism, and agism. And if we're going to keep introducing work-saving technology, we'll never have plenty of good training and jobs for everyone until we keep lowering the workweek. When we get too close to zero, we can alternate workweeks and keep reducing the frequency. The important thing is to share the vanishing work and make it easier and easier for everyone to support themselves at a higher and higher quality of life.]

1. As Japan deregulates, quality-of-life [suffers] - Mom and pop [stores] do battle with discounters, by Stephanie Strom, NYT, C1.
   [Now Japan is bankrupting its little guys and concentrating income and wealth same as we're doing here - and burying themselves even deeper.]

2. Nuclear sites to stay toxic, pointer summary (to A12), NYT, A2.
   The National Academy of Sciences said that most sites where the government built nuclear bombs would never be clean enough to allow public access to the land, and that the plan for guarding permanently contaminated sites was inadequate.
   [And what about all the sites where we're dumping nuclear waste from our still-going nuclear power plants?]

3. Fear of unions has companies keeping quiet, by Seth Schiesel, NYT, C1.
   [Or is it rather that 'modern' CEOs want to believe unions are a thing of the past?]

4. It's not 'the economy, stupid' anymore, and neither presidential candidate stands to gain from discussing the issue, writes Lester Thurow, pointer blowout (to D4), Boston Globe, D1.
   [Oh yes it is, and yes they do, as Nader is in the process of proving, but the average American is still so confused by the stock bubble and cowed by the crowing of the wealth-owned media that s/he is just sitting tight.]

5. ABC to correct organic food story, pointer digest (to C11), NYT, C1.
   ABC News said a report it showed twice, challenging the assumed benefits of organic food, was based in part on research that did not exist. ABC said it would issue a correction during "20/20" on Friday night. In the report, the correspondent John Stossel said that research commissioned by ABC showed that conventional produce does not necessarily have more pesticide residue than organic produce.
   [Remind us never to knowingly watch ABC again. What a herd of hustling hogwashers.]

1. New economy - The response to Deutsche Telekom's bid for VoiceStream brings into focus an unwritten tenet of U.S. trade policy, by Anthony DePalma, NYT, C4.
   It used to be...the way America threw araound its military might was what perturbed out allies. Now, it seems, it's the way we do business.... A perfect example surfaced late last month when Washington got into tiffs with two of the United States' most important trading partners, and very nearly a third, over what could be called the corn syrup corollary.... The corollary [began in] the 1993 negotiations that led to NAFTA. Worried that sugar produced in Mexico...would flood the United States, an inventive [US] Congress decided to count corn syrup as sugar in determining the level of Mexican sugar imports that would trigger tariffs. This verbal alchemy came at a time when Pres. Clinton was badgering Mexico to drop its own trade barriers. ...Mexicans resented [this] but they felt they had no choice by to enter NAFTA.... The corn syrup-for-sugar [equation] set a pattern that has dismayed allies and trading partners alike. [In] late July...the U.S. Senate threatened to block Deutsche Telekom's $50.7B acquisition of a rookie American cellular telephone company, the VoiceStream Wireless Corp. \The whole thing adds up to\ an unwritten tenet of U.S. economic policy..."Do as I say, not as I do."
   [In other words, it's OK for US companies to acquire any foreign company, but when some big foreign company tries to acquire an important U.S. company, America the great proponent of "free" trade starts yelling about unfair competitive advantage and even about jeopardized national security. Maybe we should have thought of that before we adopted the simplistic "free" trade policy, which by our corollary only means, "Free when it's in my interest, not when it's in yours."]

2. Verizon workers form picket lines as talks continue - 86,000 employees strike - Negotiators closer on issue of union organizing, but still split on overtime, by Simon Romero, NYT, front page, A15.
   ...According to a spokeswoman from the Communications Workers of America, the unions and the company remained most divided over forced overtime and job stress....
   [Unions will be toast until they restore a balance of labor and employment by cutting the workweek per person. Of course, employers will see the situation as an acute labor shortage. But it's the kind of shortage that centrifuges income out of Wall St. and into wages, and dynamizes the economy. And actually gets employers t-r-a-i-n-i-n-g Americans and not just lobbying for more work visas for cheap pretrained foreign youngsters.]

• 1st decline in payrolls reported in over 4 years - July job loss viewed as sign growth easing, by Kimberly Blanton, Boston Globe, C1.
  About 108,000 fewer Americans were working in July, the US Dept. of Labor reported yesterday.... Much of the payroll shrinkage can be explained by last month's layoffs of temporary workers who were hired to collect US Census data, a [once-per-decade] event that bloated the jobs data in preceding months....
  ["Bloated" or normalized?]

• [India returns to 17th century -]
  5 accused of sorcery are burned to death, AP via Boston Globe, A15.
  HYDERABAD - A mob of nearly 200 villagers in southern India yesterday burned to death four women and a man they accused of practicing black magic, police said. The victims were dragged from their homes and tied to a tree in the main square in the village of Timmapur in Andhra Pradesh state.... The mob then doused them with kerosene and set them on fire.... Police are investigating the deaths but no arrests have been made..\.. Police superintendent Vinayak Apte...said the villagers believed the victims were practicing sorcery and had caused deaths in the area.
  [The return of "spectral evidence."]

• Expansion worries, pointer blowout (to C2), Boston Globe, C1.
  Business confidence in the Bay State [Massachusetts] slipped for a second month, with companies reporting they were concerned they could not hire enough workers to expand.
  [Can they spell t-r-a-i-n-i-n-g? Probably not. Their whole problem is, they've been so deluged with resumes from downsizees the last 15 years, they've raised job qualifications & cut training right outa sight.]

1. Like bungee jumping? Buy tech stocks, by Syre & Stein, Boston Globe, F1.

2. Some still singing the bank-merger blues, by Anthony Flint, Boston Globe, F1.
   ["Some"? Try "Many."]

3. The avengers, op ed by Joan Vennochi, Boston Globe, A15.
   Republicans are putting on the smiley face to avoid the mistakes of Houston in 1992, when a conservative message more chilling than compassionate turned voters away from the GOP....

4. [Argentine invasion - "resistance is futile" (sorry, this is probably serious) -]
   California ant war, pointer summary (to D1), NYT, A2.
   Argentine ants are overwhelming native California ants while forming what may be the world's biggest ant colony, stretching from San Diego to north of San Francisco.