Doomwatch^TM vs. Timesizing^®

1. Savings rate hits 4-decade low as consumer spending increases, Reuters via NYT, B3.
   ...[by] 0.6%, keeping pace with the increase in July. Personal income, including wages, salaries, benefit payments and other sources of income, gained 0.4% in August after a 0.3% rise in July..\..the Commerce Dept. said [yester]day....
   [which must mean that consumer debt is going even higher, although strangely, the article fails to mention it in 7½ column inches.]

2. GOP seeks curbs on abortion drug [RU-486], by Mark Kaufman, Boston Globe, A4.
   [The self-proclaimed party of "less government interference" just can't keep its nose out of the inside of women's bodies and out of families' most private and long-impacting decisions. Once the more intelligent party, the GOP began toadying, starting especially in 1980, to the simple-minded of the religious right, who are ever seeking offbeat positions in which to feel 'holier than thou.' As colleague Kate asks, How many children are they adopting? Any at all? Until they are adopting every unwanted child brought into this world, they are in no position to enforce bringing more unwanted children into this world. Quality adults come from quality children, and quality children are wanted children, not unwanted children.]

• Philadelphia mayor sets work rules for teachers, AP via NYT, A21.
  The city imposed new terms of employment on Philadelphia teachers [last] night, raising the threat of a strike by the city's 21,000 union teachers. The new terms recommended by Mayor John Street would extend the school day by one hour and the school year by two days....
  [This is progress?! With all our technological advances, we can't do any better than this at the dawn of the Third Millennium? Are we pathetic or are we pathetic!]
  In exchange, the teachers would a $500 [annual] bonus and a total raise of 17% over five years.... The union said the mayor's terms would impose longer hours for teachers without enough of a pay increase....
  [But even with more of a pay increase, 'what is a teacher profited if she shall gain the whole world and lose another hour a day?' (Apologies to Joshua Nazarenus, Matt.16:26.)]

1. Unlikely debate topics, letter to editor by Gordon Douglas of Pawling NY, NYT, A30.
   In "Debate this!" (column, Sept, 19), Thomas L. Friedman discusses several important current foreign affairs issues and then bemoans the likelihood [that they will not come up in the upcoming two-party debates].... Population is another [such] issue.... Between John Glenn's first trip into space and his recent return visit, the world's population doubled. Yet this stunning and worrying growth continues to go unnoticed by our [two major parties. That] and the destruction of the...environment are probably the two great issues of the new century, but...I doubt that...these issues will be meaningfully addressed in the debates.
   [...unless Nader is included in them. Though his focus is the self-destructive and us-destructive behavior of the big corporations, since he is running as a Green, he can be reasonably expected to raise these issues, and possibly even the issue behind them - the Great Leak Upward. This is the fact that there is effectively no limit on the amount of wealth one person can accumulate and concentrate. In short, there's no such thing as enough - because no amount, however huge, is enough - because we have so far refused to define such a concept. However altruistic and utopian, we have routinely fallen into G.K. Chesterton's pan-utopian trap, the assumption "that no man will want more than his share" or even know what it should be. This means that it is entirely possible, in America and the world, for 1% of the population, or less, to gain 99% of the wealth, or more. And that's a miserable, dirt-poor, third-world situation for 99% of the population, or more. But we have no agreeable wealth-sharing mechanism. Indeed, if we try to share the wealth first, as we've done in this country for the last 67 years since the beginning of the New Deal and its successors, we just wind up generating dependency.
   [The solution demands sharing the work and the skills as a first step, not the income or the wealth, because work accesses wealth through the earning or deserving process as an intermediate step. Work preserves the concept of exchange, rather than outright giveaway, which allows the morale-dropping, vulnerability-injecting concept of dependency to enter. The only thing we must give up in the age of robotization is that earning requires hard work, in the sense of long hours. It doesn't any more. It requires smart work now in the age of high technology. Our motto must change from "work hard to get ahead" to "work smart, not hard."
   [Mr. John? Levitt, a highschool math teacher in Toronto in the '50s (Lawrence Park highschool), used to capture this dramatically by contrasting the mathematician with everyone else. He used to characterize most people's response to a problem as that of rushing in and madly running around to solve it - with minimum efficiency. The mathematician, however, would stand back and study the situation. He would hold back and ponder. Finally he would step in and with a few strategic moves, would solve the problem. (Mr. "Long John" Levitt was a tall thin man who walked slowly and majestically at a 45-degree tilt backward. He was a wonderful contrast to "Big Vern" Cunningham, the Latin teacher, who was almost as tall and thin but walked fast and menacingly at a 45-degree tilt forward. Big Vern, rumor had it, had flown jets in the Canadian Air Force, drove a T-bird, and according to the girls, wore sexy socks. After the fuzzy picture presented by Latin 'teach' Wild Bill "I don' give a care continental" Horwood, Big Vern made Latin crisp and clear. "O fons Bandusiae, splendidior vitro...." "Pallida mors aequo pede pulsat...." Are any of them still alive? Certainly Captain Mel Prideaux, that surpassing history teacher, cadet driller and stamp collector, who, no matter how stupid the answer a student might give to one of his questions, could always turn the answer around somehow and use it to forward the class, without humiliating the student, and rather encouraging the student to hang in there.)]
   [Mr. Levitt's characterization of The Mathematician is similar to the situation of high tech programmers today. The general public is patient with the problems but impatient with the solution process. Programmers are impatient with problems but patient with the solution process. This was the basis for the hope that the engineers or technocrats would save the world, in the 1920s and 30s. Thorstein Veblen's "Engineers and the Price System," Arthur Dalhberg's "Utopia through Capitalism" and "Jobs, Machines and Capitalism," Technocracy Inc., and almost everything that Buckminster Fuller ever wrote, all share this hope. Now we can express it thus - if we can apply hig-tech design principles to the development gap between our technology and our morality - we will greatly accelerate real human progress, in terms of solving the old chestnuts of poverty, unemployment and war. The key problem is Chesterton's pan-utopian flaw. The Timesizing program solves it in the employment dimension and lays down a pattern for solving it in an infinite series of subsequent dimensions.]

2. Why cost of power hasn't dropped - Under deregulation, power efficiency is unattractive, by Kirk Johnson, NYT, A23.
   [Let's take New York state for example -]
   ...Before New York's energy markets were deregulated, beginning in 1998, the state required companies like ConEd to reduce demand in the system - through energy efficient measures, for example - if that choice was cheaper than building a new plant.
   Under deregulation, that requirement has been lost. In an open market, every participant wants to sell more energy, and the government agencies in New York and other deregulated states that once compelled companies to think of alternatives have become silent or powerless....
   [Another "market failure" - and one that brings us into conflict with the dawning ecological age, requiring, in Bucky Fuller's phrase, "doing more with less." The true believers in absolutely free markets would have us "do more with more," a clear ticket to human extinction. Humans have (so far) always adapted to the requirements of survival - "necessity" has been "the mother of invention." But there are no guarantees because "there's always a first time."]

1. 9/25  Many holes weaken safety net for victims of failed brokerages, by Gretchen Morgenson, NYT, front page.
   Kevin Heebner, owner of a building supply store,...four years ago...invested $100,000..\..in short-term bonds, assured the bonds were safe \by\ his longtime stockbroker. Three months later...the broker told him the money...was gone. The president of the broker's firm, Old Naples Securities, had stolen it.
   ...Then he remembered with relief that his account was insured by the Securities Investor Protection Corp., created by Congress in 1970 to protect investors' brokerage accounts from just the sort of theft he had been a victim of.... Mr. Heebner recalled, the broker's "business card and letterhead all had SIPC logos on them; I figured SIPC would cover it." Mr. Heebner figured wrong. For more than four years, the corporation maintained he was entitled to nothing - even though three federal courts ruled that SIPC should pay him $87,000. Only last week...did the investor receive a check [for] $87,000.
   ...Said William P. Thornton Jr., a lawyer at Stevens & Lee in Reading, Pa., representing Mr. Heebner against the corporation, "They are very aggressive in attempting to prove that investors' claims do not come within certain legal definitions within the SIPC statute. And the loser is the investor." ...A close look at this littlet-understood organization shows that the safety net that investors believe the corporation offers is in fact full of holes. Industry-financed but not government-backed, the corporation is a far cry from the agency on which it was loosely modeled, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which protects bank customers against losses. Created three decades ago after a number of brokerage firm failures and securities thefts, the corporation is chartered to protect each investor with securities held at a member brokerage firm for up to $500,000; claims for cash are limited to $100,000 a customer.
   But convincing [SIPC] to pay can be extremely difficult. The organization requires investors to run a gauntlet of legal technicalities that would challenge even those knowledgeable about securities law..., "Although these legal arguments may follow the letter of the investor protection act, SIPC's reliance on them is reminiscent of a private insurance company trying to use every conceivable esoteric legal stratagem to avoid customer claims," said Lewis D. Lowenfels, a lawyer at Tolins & Lowenfels in New York and a leading authority in securities law. The list of what the corporation does not cover is long.... Assets in a failed brokerage firm are not covered if the loss is a result of most kinds of securities fraud, including a failure to execute a purchase or sale of securities or misrepresentation in the sale of a stock or bond....
   [In short, this is largely a sham insurance scheme set up by the brokerage industry to give investors false confidence and unwarranted willingness to hand-over money. And THIS is the industry that the GOP wants to give our Social Security money to?!]

2. 9/24  High price of a busy life, by Eileen McNamara, Boston Globe, B1.
   ...For too many of us, there was a shudder of fear and recognition beneath the shock and sadness at the loss of [5-month-old] Aliyah Bos of Jamaica Plain, who died after spending [nine hours] strapped in her car seat in the family's locked Saab..\..while [her dad] put in a full day's work.... Peter Bos discovered Aliyah's body that night after he drove from work to the baby sitter to pick up his baby and was told that he had never dropped her off. Rescue workers who responded to the emergency call found Bos hysterical, rocking inconsolably on the ground beside the car, overwhelmed by the magnitude of his oversight and his loss.
   Could I have done that, we ask ourselves...? How close have I come?..\.. I forgot to pick up my [youngest] son after school last week. It happened the same day I forgot to pick up my daughter from soccer practice, even though she was playing only 100 yards from...where I picked up my oldest son without incident.... The relief that most of us have never come that close should be cold comfort. The death of Aliyah Bos is a caution about ignoring the pressures on..."hard-working American families." The cultural changes that have transformed [or should we say "mutilated", "disfigured"? - ed.] families in the last 30 years are still not reflected in workplaces that value long hours more than productivity.... At the same time as the workplace is demanding more of us, our children and our communities rightly are expecting no less. When we aren't preoccupied with work, we are supervising homework, coaching soccer games, leading Scout troops, and teaching Sunday School. It is is truism that most American families are overscheduled and that the baby boom generation would rather whine than [change things]. But the issue is less that we are doing too much than that we are not fully present in what we are doing when we're doing it.
   [And cell phones make it even worse.]
   ...We buy desk calendars, pocket datebooks, Filofaxes, and Palm Pilots but each new organizational tool is just one more way to get our signals crossed.... On two days last week -...before the police had to be summoned, before any harm could befall them - I remembered the son I had forgotten to pick up after school and the daughter I had left stranded at the soccer field. They were waiting when I arrived, Patrick's arms folded across his chest in front of school, Katie's mouth twisted into a scowl at the side of the field. I was fully present on the ride home while my children expressed their dismay at my parental deficiencies. I thought of Peter Bos and said a silent prayer: There but for the grace of God go I.
   [It's time to get the promise of the technology, a unified population with more pay from less work and more free time for their families, friends and communities, instead of continuing with the curse of technology - splitting our society ever further into overworked and under-employed - people with money and no time, and people with time and no money. The most flexible, gradual, market-oriented way to balance the overworked and under-employed and to centrifuge the wealth out of our huge stock bubble and into solid wages and consumer markets, is Timesizing.]

3. 9/24  Firms are recruiting recruiters - Staffing experts in greater demand, by Michael Rosenwald, Boston Globe, K1.
   ["Employers, cut the obfuscation and just offer MORE PAY & TRAINING and FEWER HOURS OF WORK." Of course, they'll never do that until they're forced to, by a labor shortage acute enough to engage market forces in accomplishing it. That's where Timesizing comes in.]

9/19/2000  omens -

• Wage bill good for Americans - Senator Edward M. Kennedy's leadership is the reason the minimum wage issue is still alive this year, by Robert Jordan, Boston Globe, E4.
  [Nonono, minimum wage BAD for Americans and other intelligent beings - Kennedy should be reviving the maximum workweek issue. Here are the arguments against the whole minimum wage concept -
  1. It's always too little, too late no matter what you do. If you're not smart enough to index it to inflation (and we haven't been so far), you have to rev up lawmakers every couple of years to pass a slightly higher but still completely inadequate floor on wages - a major Congressional investment of time and effort. But if you do index it, it becomes a major inflationary stimulant, and inflation just ratchets the whole wage disparity upwards anyway, and everyone has to waste a lot more time and effort changing pricetags throughout the economy. And our Fed chairman gets pulled in to control inflation the only way he knows how - a way similar to old barbershop leach-bleeding for all ailments - raise interest rates to slow business borrowing and expansion and hiring, foster unemployment and slow overall economic growth. Talk about conflicting cures for AIDS and hepatitis! - this medieval 'cure' heals by givng the patient another sickness. Let's deal with the real problem, the wage disparity, including obscenely high CEO pay and the unimaginable concentration of income and wealth that it produces. And since you can't centrifuge the money concentration directly without creating dependency, you have to first centrifuge the concentration of skills and employment. That means you have to quit worrying about floors (minimums) and work on ceilings (maximums), not on money but on employment. That's what a maximum workweek does, and a maximum workweek is what Timesizing is.
  2. It's inflationary, even if you don't index it to inflation.
  3. It's in the wrong dimension, money, where it distorts the skills market, and promotes camouflaged charity (i.e., dependency) - the only way to avoid which is to address a prior dimension, time, and balance employment. Oops, that's a separate one.
  4. Minimum wage is camouflaged charity, and worse, it's forced charity.
  5. It damages the job ladder for people entering the job market - young people, women, the poor, anybody who's never been in the job market or who's been out of it for awhile. If we visualize the value of activities to employers as a ladder from 0 cents and up in 25 cent increments to infinity, a minimum wage makes artificially and arbitrarily unavailable for healing the economy and making everyone self-supporting, all the rungs of the ladder from 0 to - what is it today - $6.25/hour. That's 6x(100/25) = 24 missing rungs on the ladder to self-support. That's a big hurdle for people who have never been in the job market, or who have been out of it for a time. And every time we raise the minimum wage, we enlarge that gap at the bottom of the ladder into the job market and into self-support. This is an unsustainable approach and as such, unecological, because anything ecological has to be sustainable in the loooong term. Minimum wage is non-green. Oops, that's a separate one.
  6. Minimum wage is unsustainable and non-green. See above paragraph.
  7. It damages the wage ladder for business. "So what, business is rich." Well, it damages the wage ladder particularly for small and starting businesses. As such, it functions as a subsidy for big business (but that's the Kennedy's for you). And since "small business is the engine of job growth," and it puts small business at a disadvantage, the minimum wage concept has always been used in the context of government makework and plenty of it (but never enough to solve poverty-joblessness-crime except during wartime).
  8. It's per job, not per person. Even if there were no other objections to the minimum wage concept, it would still be regulating the free-market's domain of per-job factors, instead of the government's proper domain of per-person factors. Jobs really do come in wildly differing sizes, persons do not. Jobs are properly divergent - a blizzard of diversification. Persons are properly convergent - "equal before the law." A maximum workweek is a per-person phenomenon. It defines the upper limit on workshare per person, which is half of a proper equalization on a range, not a point. By defining the upper limit on "share per person" - even if only in the employment (and skills) dimension - the maximum workweek concept avoids the Chesterton pan-utopian trap. Oops, save this for next one -
  9. It's falls right into the Chesterton pan-utopian trap - the blithe and naive assumption that no one will want more than his/her share - or even know what it is. What about all the people pulling HUGE effective wages - like Bill Gates and his buds - and not only hogging much more than they can spend in 1000 lifetimes, but undermining the whole function of currency via the "marginal efficiency of (concentrated) capital" - a highly under-researched doctrine of neoclassical economists? "The more concentration, the less circulation." The problem is not setting lower limits. There is always a very close and effective lower limit - zero. The real problem is setting upper limits - the upper limit on the range that defines fair 'share per person'. Any economy, however rich, can still be miserable if 1% of the population has 99% of the wealth, and there's absolutely nothing stopping that avenue to misery in our economy today. And incidentally, Steve "Bubbleface" Forbes' idea of replacing graduated taxes with flat taxes would get us there even faster. Let him first show his good faith by making our current flat tax - the Social Security tax - consistent by removing its cap (currently around the $63,000 annual income level?) and running it all the way up the income scale to the highest observed personal income level in our economy. Back to the point, Timesizing avoids the Chesterton trap by facing the need for a politically distasteful maximum and designing one as non-stiflingly as possible - in the right initial dimension (employment, not money - so we don't just get shades of dependency).
  So, to summarize, the whole minimum wage concept is "leading the way to hell with good intentions" because it's in the wrong dimension (money, not time), in the wrong ptovince (free-market, not government) or we might instead say wrong sector (private, not public), it's arbitrary unless we index it to inflation, either way it's inflationary (indexed, moreso), it makes it tougher to jump into the job market from a $0.00 wage, it creates difficulties for small businesses (so it functions as a covert government subsidy for big business).... On the other hand, centrifuging income and wealth by engineering an economy-wide shortage of labor (not just spot skill shortages as today) via an enforced and downward adjusted workweek ceiling has difficulties, but they are the right difficulties because they do solve the "income gap" (dba income&wealth concentration) and lead beyond (to other dimensions that solve it further when we get that high a level of sensitivity and expectations). We have been experimenting with a dead-end (minimum wage) for nearly a lifetime (roughly 65 years) and we still have poverty and joblessness - and the crime that goes along with that. Bottom line, it's time we faced the verdict - minimum wage does not work. It is a maximum investment of time and effort at a point of minimum return. So take your choice - we can continue to repeatedly do the little easy thing that doesn't work, or we can change direction and tackle the tough thing - that does work. How bored are you with today's "same old, same old" megaproblems - poverty, joblessness, crime? It is the year 2000, the start of a new millennium. Isn't it time we moved on, just to keep the mind alive?! Let's timesize!]

• Working families, going without, 3 letters to the editor, NYT, A30.
  1. By Will Duchon of West Harrison NY -
     One hopes that your disturbing Sept. 13 news article "Family Needs Far Exceed the Official Poverty Line" will shatter the many illusions and distortions about the "economic boom" this country is supposedly enjoying.
     Not only is the divide between the rich and poor widening, but our social programs have also become bureaucratic nightmares for the people they are intended to assist. The woman in Queens you mention is a perfect example.... She began receiving child support [and] her benefits were cut drastically, leaving her worse off than [before]. Poverty is the worst form of violence. It feeds on families, encourages drug abuse and increases crime.
     Economic boom? For whom?

  2. By Roslyn Powell of New York City (NYC) who is staff attorney of the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund -
     NYC families receiving child care subsidies face a double whammy. Not only are child care copayment fees based on a [lower] nationwide federal poverty level, [but also] that level is more than 10 years old.... As a result, these families have...been wrongly deemed ineligible for child care subsidies.... Child care \is of\ critical importance...to the ability of any family to work and become self-sufficient....

  3. By John Bucki of NYC who is director of the St. Francis Xavier Welcome Table and chairman of the NYC Coalition Against Hunger.
     The...news article...raises a question: How have working New Yorkers been surviving?
     The answer is no secret to those of us who run the soup kitchens and food pantries. Despite a "robust" economy [our quotes - ed.], more and more working families are coming to emergency food programs. Unfortunately, most programs can't feed everyone seeking help. The solution is not more programs. We need...to develop living-wage jobs for low-skilled workers, effective jobs training and education, and affordable housing.
     [Unfortunately, Rev. Bucki still recommends yet another (too-little too-late) increase in the minimum wage coupled with (artificial) job-creation programs (alias makework). We Timesizers substitute enforcement and reduction of the maximum workweek, which constitutes a natural work-division program (no need for work creation - ecology weighs against it), plus a ceiling on the workweek that replaces simplistic "Everybody Stop Work Here" with "Keep going as long as you want AND as long as you're willing to reinvest all overtime profits (corporate) and earnings (individual-employee) in training and hiring." Naturally the training and hiring must be targeted by the overtime. The adjustment of the workweek ceiling, mostly downward as required by constant waves of technological efficiency, is Phase 4 of Timesizing, and the reinvestment of overtime profits and earnings in training and hiring is Phase 2 and Phase 3.]

• 2 economists give far higher cost of gun violence, by Fox Butterfield, NYT, A20.
  [Now this is what economists should really be doing - applying their distinctive quantifying viewpoint to current controversies, like gun control, reproductive rights, income&wealth concentration, and skills&work concentration via our 60-year-frozen workweek. But to do it right they need to extend their characteristically short-term horizon and become longer-term ecological economists.]
  Gun violence costs Americans $100 billion a year, according to...the first effort to make a comprehensive estimate of the price the nation pays for criminal shootings, gun accidents and suicides committed with guns.... In their book, "Gun Violence: The Real Costs," to be published next month by Oxford Univ. Press, Professors..\..Philip J. Cook of Duke University and Jens Ludwig of Georgetown Univ. departer from earlier approaches that looked only at costs like the medical expense of treating gunshot wounds and the lost productivity of gunshot victims. Those are only a small part of the total, the authors say. [They] applied a method widely accepted by economists as a way of determining hard-to-measure costs. This method, known as contingent valuation, asks people how much they would pay to avoid a problem..\..
  The much larger [costs] involve "the devastating emotional costs experienced by relatives and friends of gunshot victims, and the fear and general reduction in quality of life that the threat of gun violence imposes on everyone in America, including people who are not victimized." These include all [kinds] of costs, from the time lost waiting in line at airports to pass through metal detectors, to the difference between actual property values in violent neighborhoods and what those values would be if there was no gun violence....
  [Bravo to these two economists, two of the very few economists who are really making a valuable contribution to improving life on Earth instead of just supporting the miserable-for-most status quo. Look at the imagination that went into seeing the costly consequences of the NRA's precious freedoms - metal-detector lines at airports, differential property values. These are all in line with our hunch that as humans progress, they will get more sensitive to the costs of less desirable behavior and the whole area of accountability will expand. We will increasingly do better accounting of policy positions and increasingly find ways of charging those who advocate these policies for the true and complete costs - as they occur to us - because, face it, they are sooo obvious and taken-for-granted that we habitually overlook them. The NRA has a lot of money at the moment, but let's start charging it, through fines or taxes, for all the gargantuan costs of its precious freedoms. Its freedoms, our costs. Enough! You want unlicensed access to any kind of weapons, however powerful? You-a gonna pay and pay the FULL costs. Nothing would solve these BORING ON&ONGOING controversies faster!
  [In the US Senate race against Ted Kennedy in this millennial year, Carla Howell, the Libertarian, has been gleaning much support and media by roving round the state catering to free-access-to-gun-groups. We won't call them just "gun owners' groups" because as recent letters to the editor (e.g., 3/21/2000) have shown, not all gun owners are this simplistic and stupid. How contradictory that a Libertarian - who advocates smaller government and lower taxes, should support a cause that stiflingly oppresses all of us with much higher informal government and taxes in terms of the time-consuming regulations at airports - and "time is money" - not to mention the depressed property values of inner cities and other high-gun-violence areas.]

1. Most gas stations in Britain close as protests grow - Deliveries are blocked - Drivers in Western Europe join in demonstrations calling for lower fuel taxes, by Sarah Lyall, NYT, front page.
   ...As panicked motorists set out on frantic, often fruitless, hunts for gasoline, ambulance companies and fire departments began cutting back services. Many hospitals canceled all but essential procedures, and some diesel train lines were canceled altogether. The Royal Mail said many of its delivery trucks had just a day's worth of fuel left. ...Similar anger continued to spread through Western Europe, where truck drivers, farmers and small-business people formed impromptu coalitions to protest cripplingly high fuel prices, and the taxes that make up much of the cost. ...Britain held the dubious honor of being the country most flattened by the protests. Although its refineries and storage depots are full of fuel, the country has been prevented by blockades from delivering the fuel to service stations..\.. Prime Minister Tony Blair...firmly ruled out capitulating to the protesters' demands that he lower the 76.2% fuel tax, the highest in Europe and the main reason that gasoline in Britain costs $4.37 a gallon....
   [What planet do these politicians live on? Blair's blockheaded refusal to implement the obvious relief is on par with Hoover's stupid refusal to give the Bonus Army of Great War veterans their bonuses in 1932. And as colleague Kate points out, he's a Labor PM?!! Britain must be suffering from the same kind of "representative democracy" only for the richest 1% as we are. And where are the results of sustainable energy development that is the only excuse for taxes on unsustainable fossil-fuel sales?]

2. Convention center's plans for renewable energy lag - Ambitious proposal in peril; legal row hampering funds - 'And quite frankly, it's been difficult to get return phone calls. I'm skeptical.' Walter Upton, manager, convention center project, by Richard Kindleberger, Boston Globe, D20.
   Plans for making the planned South Boston convention center a showcase for renewable energy are moving so slowly they are in jeopardy of being left out of the project, members of the center's development team said yesterday. A state renewable energy fund, awash in cash, could easily cover the projected $14m cost of siting photovoltaic cells on the center's roof and installing fuel cells in a separate area of the building.... But with the fund in limbo until April because of a legal challenge...its plans are in their infancy....

3. Profiteering from democracy - Broadcasters fight campaign [funding] reform, op-ed page ad by *TomPaine.com, NYT, A31.
   ..."From 1996 through 1998, the National Assoc. of Broadcasters and five media outlets - ABC, CBS, A.H. Belo Corp., Meredith Corp., and Cox Enterprises - cumulatively spent nearly $11m to defeat a dozen campaign finance bills mandating free air time," writes Charles Lewis, director of the Ctr for Public Integrity, in a recent commentary (*Public-i.org).
   "At the same time," Lewis notes, "news coverage of political candidates is becoming minuscule.... The 19 top-rated TV stations in the top 11 markets broadcast, on average, only 39 seconds a night about political campaigns. Top stations in Philadelphia and Tampa averaged 6 seconds a night."
   "Broadcasters have little incentive to cover candidates, because it is in their [short-term!] interest to force them to purchase time to publicize their campaigns," writes media scholar Robert McChesney in his book, Rich Media, Poor Democracy.
   "Broadcasters are profiteering from democracy," says Paul Taylor of the Alliance for Better Campaigns (*BetterCampaigns.org) which is calling on TV stations to give at least 5 minutes of political news coverage a day in the month before Election Day - just five measly minutes.
   But the broadcasters, intoxicated by profit, ignore their public-interest obligations - only 2% of them have agreed to Taylor's proposal....

4. Research sees ploy to hide smoke, by Anne Barnard, Boston Globe, D19.
   Using code names such as "Project Stealth" and "Project Ambrosia," cigarette manufacturers have tested ingredients that hide secondhand smoke, in a bid to make smoking more socially acceptable but not necessarily safer, the [Massachusetts] Dept. of Public Health contended in a study released yesterday.
   The study was issued just four days after a federal court struck down a 1996 Massachusetts law requiring tobacco companies to disclose each brand's ingredients...from largest to smallest amount, as manufacturers are required to do on food packages....

5. Families' basic costs far exceed poverty line, by Nina Bernstein, NYT, A27.
   [From "Surviving in the City" pointer summary on p. A2 -]
   An economic study found that, depending on where in New York City a family lives, bare-bones needs for a family with children cost two to five times more than the $14,150 national poverty level set for a family of three by the federal government.
   [In area after area, governments and the insulated rich who control them are moving far too slowly and with far too much short-term blinderedness for the new century, let alone the new millennium.] We need to move quickly toward Buckminster Fuller's vision of continuous issue-oriented referendums.]

6. The stink lingers, by Steve Bailey, Boston Globe, D1.
   The geniuses who helped make Stone & Webster what it is today - bankrupt, that is - will convene again tomorrow in Boston. And if I could ask this sorry board of directors just one question at their meeting at Ropes & Gray it would be this: Why has Kerner Smith been allowed to walk away from the disaster he presided over with $3.5m in goodbye money and Edward Sweeney, who got the shaft after 35 years of the job, not seen a dime of the $3m a jury awarded him?...
   [Wasn't capitalism supposed to be all about incentives? But with the kind of perverse rewards seen in this case study, seems like the only thing our current win-lose, downsizing type of capitalism is incentivating today is a faster slide into the Great Depression II.]

1. [Either we smarten up, share the still-uncomputerized employment & control our population, or we lose the world. Here's another installment -]
   Monarch butterflies lose much of their wintering grounds, by Carol Yoon, NYT, D1.
   Over the past 20 years, biologists have voiced increasing concern about the monarch butterfly's most threatened and critical habitat, a single stretch of...forest...in the mountains of central Mexico..\..to which hundreds of millions of these butterflies migrate from the United States each year to spend the winter.... Now an international team of researchers has reported that what was a broad swath of thousands of acres of intact forest just 30 years ago has since been reduced to...only a little more than half \in the form of\ peppered remnants in a sea of farms, homes, cattle-grazing areas and logged and degraded woods. This has occurred even in areas designated as protected monarch sanctuaries for more than a decade....

2. South Africa's new poor: White and bewildered , by Rachel Swarns, NYT, A4.
   JOHANNESBURG -...The slaugherhouse where [Martin van Niekerk] weighed and priced animal skins for 17 years was shut down in 1998. The clothing store where he later worked as a security guard closed abruptly three weeks ago. For days, he and his wife and three children slept in the street until they landed in this shelter, the Kempton Christian Action Settlement.
   And today, he and the scores of men and women living here [in tiny one-room wood&cardboard huts] are members of a tiny but growing slice of South Africa's evolving society: They are unemployed, homeless and white.
   "My cell phone, I sell that," said Mr. van Niekerk, 38, as he guided a visitor through Shack No. G7, his temporary one-room home. "And the iron. Even my wife, she sells our wedding rings. But it is not enough to pay the rent."... Being a white man in South Africa [whites account for 10% of the population] used to mean having a steady job, a house, a car, a certain respectability.... But for an increasing number of whites, there are startling new realities. Between 1995 and 1999, the ratio of unemployed whites increased from 3.4% to 6.8% [still small compared to the 35% among the black majority but still enough to] send shivers through many whites [who] are facing increasing competition [from blacks], particularly at the lower rungs of the work force, as the economy sheds thousands of jobs....
   [Another nation in the grips of our Dark Ages economic theories
   • that spew doubletalk about technological "efficiency" while quickly adding that "technology creates more jobs than it destroys"
   • that think downsizing is as appropriately applied to the business workforce as it is to the government workforce - and see absolutely no relation between workforce and consumer base
   • that occasionally mutter about the marginal efficiency of wealth but focus all their reform efforts on palliative gestures at the bottom of the skills, work, income and wealth scales while ignoring the top, the Great Leak Upward, which has absolutely no effective limit (in America today, 1% of the population owns as much as the "bottom" 95%)
   It's time to cut the contradictory rhetoric and cut the workweek. Tax overtime heavily and give a complete exemption to companies and individuals who reinvest overtime profits and earnings in training and hiring. It's called Timesizing and it obsoletes unemployment, poverty, most crime, most inflation and gets us on with some new, more interesting problems. Aren't the old problems getting just a little BORING?!! There's a solution now. It's gradual, market-oriented and liberating. Let's GO!]
   [And here's another nation that needs it, another nation where the unemployed live in cardboard boxes -]
   After Japan's election - Sunset for the men in suits - Japan is changing rapidly, for better and worse. Its politics remains eternally the same. How long can that last?, 7/01/00 The Economist, 26.
   ...On the surface, Japan looks as prosperous, content and law-abiding as ever, and must more relaxed as well.... Below the surface, however, and away from the bright city lights, cracks have begun to snake their way through the corporate masonry.
   [...Just as in the United States of the 1920s.]
   ...Almost half of Japan's 100m eligible voters do not support any particular party these days. Their frustration is with the whole system.... There is a widespread feeling that the country is in dire need of a whole range of social as well as economic reforms, but that the government - bound by its powerful ties to special interests - is incapable of doing the job.
   [Sound familiar to Americans at the "dawn of the third millennium"?]
   Anyone younger than 50 in Japan grew up in an era when incomes were doubling every decade. But the 1990s were a different story. In 1990-91 the bubble economy collapsed, ushering in stagnation that lasted a decade: Japan's longest and deepest slump in more than 50 years. The recession [notice the capitalist taboo on calling it what it is, a depression - ed.] hit family incomes especially hard. Bonuses, if paid at all, have been slashed; wage rises are out of the question; overtime is a thing of the past. [= one good thing anyway!]
   Worst of all, loyalty to the company - the bedrock upon which Japan Inc was built - is no longer being rewarded. Older workers, who are costlier because of Japan's seniority pay system, are being told unceremoniously to leave.
   [Note that Timesizing replaces downsizing with sharing the work on a shorter-hours basis, and replaces seniority pay with versatility and creativity pay.]
   Unemployment, barely heard of a decade ago, has hit an official 5% (measured properly, it is at least 7%), and is set to climb still further, even as the Japanese economy begins its slow recovery. The unemployed can be seen in the parks; some live in neat cardboard boxes, beside small gardens which they carefully tend to fill up the hours.
   According to opinion polls, one family in eight has a member who has recently been made redundant (risutoni, or "restructured", in the bitter workers' jargon), or expects to be made so shortly. One in five youngsters looking for a first job have been unable to find one. Meanwhile, the Bank of Japan's policy of zero interest rates has mercilessly squeezed the savings of a rapidly aging population [thus demonstating the essential superficiality of the U.S. Federal Reserve's one and only mechanism for adjusting the course of the economy - ed.]. Little wonder that suicides have risen by 53% since 1991.
   Crime, too, has risen sharply, especially among the young. Not since the 1950s have Japanese city centres been places to avoid after dark; but now gangs of young thugs go in search of easy targets, particularly drunken sararimen. If only for the vicarious thrill, one in three girls of high-school age admits to having dialled one of the three "telephone clubs" that match callers with men willing to pay for sex.
   In Japanese classrooms (once famous for the cheerful obedience of the children), incidents of teachers being threatened with knives or beaten with baseball bats have become so common that they are no longer front-page news.
   [Also familiar to Americans, who, instead of benefiting by Japan's Theory Z and its lifetime guarantee of employment have succeeded in infecting Japan with their win-lose capitalism of high downsizing, high underemployment and high crime/incarceration.]
   Instead, reporters find bloodier incidents to cover. There are now more hours of bloody mayhem every week on Japan's TV screens than on America's....
   [Every economy in the world will go through just as much pain as it takes to starting sharing the skills and the work a la Timesizing.]