Collapse - 10/2000

Doomwatch^TM vs. Timesizing^®

Collapse trends - October, 2000
[Commentary] ©2000 Philip Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080

10/31/2000 omens -

Family doctors in Netherlands stage a protest, by Marlise Simons, NYT, A8.
...More than 1,000 family doctors...traveled to The Hague to tell parliament that they were overwhelmed with work but gravely underpaid. They said the Health Ministry had ignored their urgent pleas for the need to reduce their 70-hour weeks and for more subsidies to hire extra staff members because demands on primary care physicians were expanding year after year.... By the standards of neighbors like Germany and Belgium...family doctors in the Netherlands have more patients - on average 2,350 per physician - and earn less, about $50,000 a year after taxes and overhead. They usually work 10 hours or more a day and must do one shift of evening and all-night duty every week. While work has increased...their fees, which are largely determined by the government, have stood still....
[And then there's medicos' habit of strangling access to their skills and pretending that they're Superman.]

10/29/2000 weekend omens -

Town, police union argue overtime, by David Scharfenberg, Boston Globe, City Wkly 6.
...The Brookline [Mass. (wealthy Boston suburb)] Police Union...filed suit against the town in September, 1998, alleging several violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act [which] sets standards for overtime pay....
[But does so as part of an original intention to discourage overtime, which completely failed. However, the Brookline Police Union won their case.]
Both sides..\..agree on several issues, including keeping...exemptions...for sergeants, lieutenants and captains [and] that the town had miscalculated overtime benefits [and] would provide $1,000 per officer as compensation.
One issue remained unresolved. Under the Act, the town is allowed [or required???] to provide [police] officers with time off, or compensatory time, in lieu of overtime pay. However, in recent years, the town has periodically deferred requests for comp time when it would be forced to pay other...officers at overtime rates to cover.... The court sided with the union....
"On the face of it, the concept of paying one employee overtime to cover for another employee's comp day is ludicrous," said Town Administrator Richard Kelliher....
[So hire more officers, or hire temp or part-time officers. This is not rocket science and it has been faced and solved by management for centuries. "Let your overtime determine your hiring." Overtime is the most important economic design challenge of our lifetimes, because to avoid creating dependency, we have to share the work before we share the money, and overtime is the biggest place where we don't share the work.]
The education paradox, by Jerry Morris, Boston Globe, C5.
...In our value system, education is held in the highest regard, but those who provide it are held in the lowest....
[The solution is this - education has become a universally revered idol like motherhood and apple pie - and then emptied of most of its meaning and function. The whole educational establishment in this country is the locus of much of the makework and featherbedding necessitated by our even greater paradox - our insistence on a pre-technological level of "full time" work regardless of incessant waves of ever more work-eating technology. Education is no longer worthy of idolization because it can no longer guarantee self-support at its completion (if any) and much of today's education has lost complete sight of this goal. Training is worthy of our esteem because it has a beginning, a middle and an end, and it can guarantee a job at its end, especially on-the-job training. That's why Timesizing prioritizes massive (re)investment in on-the-job training and leaves the sacrosanct Education to the tens of millions of people who constantly jawbone about it while it gets worse and worse.]

10/28/2000 omens -

Moms and dads, at work and at home, letter to editor by Ruth Wooden, Pres. of National Parenting Assoc. NYC, NYT, A26.
Re "Now a majority: Families with 2 parents who work" (news article, Oct. 24):
...Our recent nationwide survey found that working parents say balancing job and family is their biggest daily challenge. It's not surprising that mothers say this, but fathers say so too, and to the same extent, 32%. This could be a powerful sleeper issue in this and future elections. Among undecided parent voters in our sample, 39% pointed to work-family balance as their top challenge.
While both presidential candidates have focused much attention on family concerns like education, they have largely missed this huge issue.
[High time for Timesizing!]
Middle class starts to feel HMO's pain, by Liz Kowalczyk, Boston Globe, front page.
...From retirees to young mothers to dot-com executives, from the rural Berkshires [western Mass.] to the tip of Cape Cod [eastern Ma.], Massachusetts consumers [and consumers across the country] are feeling the fallout of the most unsettling year in health care since the runaway medical inflation of the late 1980s and early 1990s.... [In] September...the 75,000 Massachusetts residents with nongroup health insurance received...stunning notification; higher rates. Much higher. \For example, Falmouth, Ma. resident\ Jonathan Shaw...'s HMO, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, had raised his insurance premium 44% to $1,069.17 a month - one-quarter of his income. \And\ Jon Scarbrough...65, has to find a new insurance company if he wants to keep his longtime physician....
["Where now, O proud Americans, is your vaunted private-sector healthcare 'system'," taunt Canadians, your best friends and hecklers, getting their own back for your scorn of their public-sector system. For while both are imperfect, every Canadian is covered so Canada will survive a fast-acting plague, and costs are contained. Yet another reason to bust up the choice-strangling two-party logjam in Washington and vote Nader & Hyde.]

10/27/2000 omens -

Global warming draft is dire - In UN report, group reportedly sees greater risks, by Maggie Fox, Boston Globe, A22.
...The average global temperature could be as much as 11 degrees higher at the end of the century than it was in 1990 [which] could lead to chaotic weather, with storms, flooding, and severe droughts....
Candidates spend thousands on ads [in Sept.] with little competition, by Alex Canizares, Boston Globe, A4.
- ...Kennedy $160,000+$52,366= $212,366 [the disavowed Republican spent only $8,671, the 3 independents spent virtually nothing - but how much did the big-spending Libertarian spend??]..\..
- ...Olver $168,390 [Republican spent $933]
- ...McGovern $13,761 [no opposition?]
- ...Tierney $44,924 [Republican spent $8,787]

10/26/2000 omens -

Bond market signals worry over economy - Treasury market soars despite rising inflation, by Gretchen Morgenson, NYT, C1.
[This story is right above another nail-biter -]
Stocks tumble on sales news from Nortel, by Jonathan Fuerbringer, NYT, C1.
[...which indicates that the market is still in "easily spooked" mode as we come up to Halloween and even before that, Black Monday, the last Monday in October when stocks really took a dive in 1929. True, today's Company News column in the NYT (C4 & A1) is carrying 5 "up" stories (Oxford Health, Unocal, Clorox, Hilton, Ivax) and only 2 "down" stories (Halliburton and Bethlehem Steel) but
- yesterday it was only 3 up (Hershey, Estee Lauder, Lincoln National) to 2 down (Dial, Tenneco) and
- Tuesday it was 0 up to 1 down (DaimlerChrysler) and
- Saturday it was 0 up to 7 down (Tribune, Circuit City, Big Boy, News Corp., LaCrosse Footwear, Owens-Illinois, Lund)
for an overall score of 8 up, 12 down. But then, there's the 'millennium year' effect - the unwillingness of many of the wealthy to go bearish in a millennium year - it would just be too bad an omen valid for too long a period.]

10/25/2000 omens -

[This is what American 'democracy' has come to -]
Kennedy turns down requests to debate - Robinson, Howell object as he cites Senate session, by Tina Cassidy, Boston Globe, B1.
...This year, a media consortium including the Globe, WBZ-TV (Channel 4), WCVB-TV (Channel 5), WHDH-TV (Channel 7), WGBH-TV (Channel 2), and New England Cable News wrote to Kennedy to request that he appear at a debate..\.. After stalling for months, US Senator Edward M. Kennedy yesterday said he will not debate during his re-election bid, a first in the 38 years he has held the seat....
[Shame on him. So much for his vision in the Millennium Year 2000.]
Kennedy's opponents immediately denounced the decision as undemocratic and urged the senator to relent. "I will personally donate $2,500 to any charity that he designates if he changes his mind and agrees to the debate," [Republican candidate Jack E. Robinson] said. "And if he rejects that offer, then the citizens of Massachusetts should reject him."
[Fat chance. These are the wages of our failure to pass any sort of term limits over the past decades.]
..\..The move would also sidestep any potentially embarrassing televised moments on a stage with...Robinson and Libertarian Carla Howell [hey, what about Phil Hyde, Dale Friedgen and Philip Lawler?!], longshot candidates who have been aggressively attacking Kennedy. Robinson has also raised the issue of Kennedy's 1969 accident at Chappaquiddick, in which a young woman was killed....
[Gee, maybe the independents haven't been "aggressively attacking Kennedy" enough, but as Jack and Carla are discovering, that don't give him much incentive to debate. Of course, he could yell "Jack the Tongue" back at Robinson, but what's he gonna say to Carla? She may be on the conservative side but as a woman, she's got the liberals' own political correctness on her side. But it gets worse -]
Although the consortium had not decided whether it would include Howell....
[These "democratic" media don't even want to include the third ballot-status party in Massachusetts. What chance, then, to get to the real ideas in the race, those of the independent third-party candidates?! We did have a letter to editor calling for a debate - "A great debate," letter by Kyle Price of Carlisle MA, 9/15/00 Boston Globe, A18 - ]
"It is a terrible shame that the people of Massachusetts do not have a Senate campaign battle like the Hillary Clinton-Rick Lazio contest in New York. Their debate Wednesday night was an outstanding display of impassioned political argument, the likes of which have been missing from our state for years. Sadly, we are poorer for it."
[But then this was contradicted two weeks later - "Why should he debate amateurs," letter to editor by P. Morrison of Winchester MA, Boston Globe, A22, totally ignoring the fact that America's political structure was designed for amateurs. The founding fathers feared professionals so much they didn't even want political parties! The Boston Globe weighed in with its usual crocodile tears, Brian Mooney's Sept. 23 story, "Kennedy should at least play along" (City & Region section) and their eye-rolling 9/21 editorial, "Election sham" (A22) bemoaning the record-low voter turnout for the record-low contested primaries in September, blaming everybody but themselves, who routinely trivialize candidates like Robinson and totally refuse to deal with independents on anything remotely approaching equal coverage. For example, here's the sum total of our coverage in the current article about Kennedy's refusal to debate -]
Also on the Nov. 7 ballot are Philip F. Lawler of the Constitution Party, Philip Hyde III of the Timesizing Not Downsizing Party [that's our motto, not our party], and unenrolled candidate Dale E. Friedgen.
[The Globe is too lazy to give Dale his more positive position as the Natural Law-Reform Party coalition candidate. And then they gave our local pet 'Napoleon,' John Silber, a full op ed piece to actually decry the fact that the august Sen. Kennedy even had to condescend to stand for election every six years! Lordy, does the Globe have any appreciation of the fact that a Millennium Year like this only comes round once-in-a-thousand and offers a one-in-a-thousand opportunity to discuss ISSUES and IDEAS bearing on America's looong-term future? America won't have any long-term future if it's so sloppily and lazily served by its major media.]
..\..Kennedy blamed the decision on his tight schedule in Washington, where the Senate is still meeting, later than usual....
[Poor guy, he's sooo busy. Maybe needs a pinch of Timesizing and "work smart, not hard"?]

10/24/2000 omens -

Shorter workweek criticized, Bloomberg via NYT, W1.
The Bank of France made its strongest criticism to date of legislation that would cut the workweek to 35 hours,...
[Hello-o, the legislation did cut it to 35 on Feb. 1. Are some French still in denial? Or did they delay it again? Hard to get news on this all-important, albeit primitive, experiment in this provincial land. Have to subscribe to Le Monde??]
...saying it could accentuate a "very dangerous" inflationary spiral unless wage moderation prevailed. The Bank of France said in its monthly bulletin that it would have to be "even more attentive" to general inflationary risks if wages increased more than consumer prices did "because of the impact on unit labor costs and corporate competitiveness of the reduction in work times."
[This is starting to remind us of the Chicken Little fears that greeted the idea of women gaining the vote in the early part of this century. "Oh, the sky will fall, the sky will fall!" The French could guarantee control of runaway inflation by designing the top of the workweek a little more intelligently. You don't want to stop everybody absolutely at the 35-hour level. For instance, you don't want to stop the little toymaker who 'never worked a day in his life.' He loves it. He'd do it for nothing. He's got deflationary, qualitative, inherent incentive; not inflationary, quantitative, exogenous incentive. So how do you separate the sheep from the goats? Simple. Require reinvestment of overtime earnings. That way you'll only stop those that are just doing it for the money, and if you require reinvestment in training or hiring, you'll provide the merely money motivated with a way to make the extra money they seem to require by upgrading their skills and making what they think they need within straight time rather than oozing into overtime. How do you cushion all this for individuals? Get corporations doing it first. Set a high tax on overtime with a complete exemption for reinvestment of overtime advantage (overtime profits) in overtime-targeted on-the-job training and hiring. That way every incidence of overtime is self-resolving, every overtime skill is self-spreading, and the whole thing is market-determined, not decided arbitrarily by ivory-tower 'experts' with a splash of covert socialism.
[Of course, this chain of ideas is so simple and obvious that it's hard to come up with, so the French haven't. Are they in fact getting any inflation, or they just exercising the current fashion in central banks - inflation paranoia? Hey, at least it got the only big shorter-workweek experiment going on in the world at the dawn of the Third Millennium a mention in the NY Times (which is ordinarily so clued-out on the all-important worktime/worksharing front that it avoids mentioning the concept at all costs.]

10/21/2000 omens -

IMF's hand often heavy, a study says - Some recent aid terms found to be excessive - The aid package for Indonesia came with 140 strings, by Joseph Kahn, NYT, B1.
[Never mind 'excessive' - it's the destructive ones that bother us. Why didn't they just say, "Stop corruption!" - or would that have been 'casting the first stone'?]
...[The] Indonesian bailout, and several others like it around the world during the emerging-market financial crisis of the late 1990's, was often criticized as the IMF's equivalent of imperial overstretch. Now, a new study using the fund's own unpublished data suggests that the critique may have actually underestimated the fund's commandeering approach. Under heavy pressure from wealthy nations that control its policies, the fund...told [Indonesia] to
- raise taxes on state-owned companies [which could wipe out those companies]
- cancel 12 road, bridge, and port projects [which would cut wages and reduce their consumer base]
- remove protections on dairy farmers [which could wipe out their domestic dairy industry]
- eliminate price controls on cement [which could wipe out their domestic cement industry]
- part of a long list that at one point included 140 items, the study shows.
[Talk about "He who pays the piper calls the tune"!]
The idea was to convert Mr. Suharto's Indonesia, which had a partly capitalist economy plagued by corruption...
[You mean, sort of like ours! (But we've got it more seemingly and seamlessly plastered o'er.)]
into an open, competitive and stable free market economy. Even though few economists argue with the goal, the methods are coming under new scrutiny.... Said Morris Goldstein, a 25-year IMF veteran who did the study, ...is now...at the Institute for International Economics [and] has often defended the IMF as an important force for global financial stability..."If a nation is so plagued with problems that it needs to make 140 changes before it can borrow, then maybe the fund should not lend."...
In the last decade, the fund, not always willingly, became the primary vehicle for rich nations to export capitalism to developing countries, including heavyweights like Russia and Brazil, as well as the former Communist states of Eastern Europe and poverty-stricken nations in Africa.... Some nations that received IMF aid during the financial crisis have recovered quickly [examples???]. But Russia and Indonesia are examples of high-profile lending efforts sodden with detailed instructions that have not, to date, led to sustained economic growth....
[And that's putting it charitably! Russia is a basketcase, and the only stuff they tell us about Indonesia are the trials and tribs of Wahid, its blind but far-seeing and deeply humored new prez.]

10/20/2000 omens -

Study finds that many large companies pay no taxes - As corporate profits rose 23.5%, payments to the U.S. rose 7.7%, by David Johnston, NYT, C2.
1. Goodyear,
2. Texaco,
3. Colgate-Palmolive,
4. MCI WorldCom
and eight other large corporations earned more than $12.2B in profits in 1996 through 1998, but none of them ended up owing corporate income taxes over that period, according to a study released yesterday. Indeed, as a group, the companies received $535m in credits refunds, the report found.
[Talk about 'corporate welfare' and 'welfare for the rich.']
The study of 250 large publicly traded companies showed that
- 24 owed no tax or received credits against past or future tax obligations in 1998, up from 13 in 1997 and 16 in 1996....
- 71 of the 250 companies paid taxes at less than half the official 35% corporate rate during the 3-year period.
The study was conducted by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a Washington research organization associated with Citizens for Tax Justice, a nonprofit group supported in part by labor unions. The group argues that the tax system favors the rich and politically connected....
[No kidding.]
In recent years, Congress has watered down the 1986 overhaul of the tax laws, which lowered rates and eliminated most tax shelters, and was supposed to simplify reporting.... "Corporate taxes are not rising along with profits because companies have found all sorts of ways to get around the reforms in the 1986 tax act," said Robert S. McIntyre, the director of Citizens for Tax Justice. "Companies have gotten a lot of help from Congress, especially in gutting the minimum tax rules." Mr. McIntyre said that he and T.D. Coo Nguyen, the co-author, spent more than two years examining financial statements the companies sent to shareholders.
[232] of the companies studied are on the Fortune 500 list, and the others are in the Fortune 1000. He said companies were excluded if they lost money or their tax disclosures "were crafted so that you could not figure them out."...
Recent annual reports filed by Microsoft and Cisco Systems indicate that they paid no federal income taxes in 1999 because stock options exercised by employees wiped out profits for tax purposes.
The study found that GE, IBM, Pfizer, Intel and Bristol-Myers Squibb also sharply reduced their tax rates because of stock options without having to show reduced earnings to shareholders.
[Heads they win, tails taxpayers lose.]
The most significant factor in the easing corporate tax burden, Mr. McIntyre said, can be traced to actions in Congress, which relaxed the corporate minimum tax in 1993 when the Democrats were in control of both the House and Senate, and again in 1997, after the Republicans had taken over.
[So who was that out there who was saying Ralph Nader was wrong for observing no significant difference between the two major parties??? And it gets worse -]
Congress made it easier for corporations to spread tax breaks and profits over many years, including reaching back to past years to get tax breaks that could not be used at the time.
In at least one of the three years studied, 41 of the 250 large companies studied paid no federal income tax. Those 41 companies reported $25.8B in profits to shareholders in the years they paid no taxes. If they had been obligated to pay the full 35% corporate rate, the tax bill would have been $9B, but [on the contrary,] the companies received $3.2B in refunds.
In total dollars, GE was the biggest beneficiary of tax breaks, the study said, saving $6.9B in three years. The company paid $2.1B in income taxes on $25.8B in profits, for a tax rate of 8.1%.
[Quick, where's the vomitorium? It's time we opened up another front in this battle. We should be moving away from arbitrary tax rates toward accountable fees-for-service. We HAVE the technology to do this. Let's get going. (A similar second-front strategy can be used to uncorrupt Washington - we've had little success gaining campaign finance reform so let's extend binding issue-oriented referendums and do an 'end run' around the whole corrupt mess on Capitol Hill.)]

10/16/2000 weekend omens -

Red ink crippling more US hospitals, by Barry Tye, Boston Globe, front page.
America's hospitals have been complaining for years that they are facing financial ruin, but now they have the numbers to prove it. One in three US hospitals is losing money. Another third is on the brink. And facilities from California to Connecticut are closing critical departments and selling off assets much the way Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess said it was doing last month.
[Now, speaking for the moment as a Canadian (the old Jeckyll-Hyde routine), "Where now, O proud America, is your vaunted, choose-your-own-doctor, private-sector health strategy?" (As if Canadians, all of whom are covered by health insurance, can't choose their own doctors!) It's pathetic that in the biggest economy in the world, the 'tough is cool' attitude of the Me-Decade 1980s has dragged on so long as to not only exclude millions of Americans from health insurance, but to pull back on Medicare/Medicaid funding and ruin the nation's healthcare system. (Not that the Great Leak Upward of unlimited doctors'-in-general and hospitalCEOs'-in-particular pay and perks wasn't ruining it anyway, but that's a much broader problem that will take a much broader solution. Hint: Centrifuge the wealth by creating a wartime labor-employment ratio via cutting the workweek = Timesizing, rather than drafting people for killing and maiming.) And hospital finances aren't the worst of it -]
Yet when hospital CEOs get together behind closed doors the way they recently did in West Virginia, they fret over something much more organic than sinking budgets and soaring costs. They wonder whether the 20 million Americans who will check into a hospital this year can assume they will check out healthier. Or at least no sicker. [For example,] the open-heart recovery room at W.Va.'s biggest hospital, Charleston Area Medical Center...had always had
- one nurse for each of its 18 patients,
- two technicians to take blood pressures and pulses, and
- a pharmacist who specialized in cardiac cases.
Today, in the midst of the money crunch,
- there are half as many nurses.
- The technicians are gone, with the already overworked nurses assuming their duties, and
- there is no pharmacist in the unit to advise whether a drug is safe.
Missing too, is the old assurance that severely ill heart patients will get the attention they need during the critical 24 hours after surgery. Such concerns have special resonance in Massachusetts, where even a venerated Harvard teaching center like Beth Israel is swimming in red ink. The nationwide emergency makes it clear that the Bay State is not alone....
[At the risk of rubbing it in, neither the American nor Canadian healthcare systems are perfect; however, while America's is flawed and millions of Americans have no health insurance, Canada's is flawed but every Canadian has health insurance. In the midst of a so-called "economic boom," America slips further into the Third World. "So why don't you go back there?!" Hey, with global warming, we're thinking about buying a clam shack in Newfoundland, before prices go ballistic.]

10/14/2000 omens -

New concerns rise on keeping track of modified corn - Breakdown of a system - After recalls, industry and U.S. are trying to trace bioengineered crop - Recalls raise concern about spread of unapproved genetically engineered corn - Not all farmers followed the rules to keep the grain out of the food supply, by Kurt Eichenwald, NYT, front page.
[This kind of ignorant-cowboy greed and stupidity has the potential to kill us all, because there are sooo many unknowns - so we might as well have fun with it - "eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow...."]
...Millions of bushels of the unapproved corn, known as StarLink...
[Yeah, "StarLink" - it's long-term effects could avalanche us all to eternity and "link us to the stars."]
...have been delivered to more than 350 grain elevators around the country \raising\ concern...that the corn - which has already been discovered in two brands of grocery products - [has] made its way more widely into production channels for the nation's food supply.... Government and industry officials...are now pushing the operatorsto test their supplies for evidence of contamination.... Food companies, many of which are now testing every shipment of corn..., have reacted with dismay to growing evidence of contamination, saying that it demonstrates a breakdown in the procedures intended to keep products grown from genetically modified seeds separate from conventional grains.
[What the hell do you expect from an arrogant bioengineering industry that REFUSES TO LABEL??? "Oh, there's nothing substantially different about these seeds" - as if they've done even a mere 100 years of testing on them and their complex biosystem interactions. Here's hoping the food companies sue these SOBs into extinction, before their naive and arrogant meddling with incredible basis-of-life complexity makes us all extinct.]
..\..There is no evidence that the corn causes health problems...
[yet - and actually there is (read on)]
in humans...
[but if they affect insect pollinators with 'unintended consequences', and the pollinators affect unanticipated other species with 'unintended consequences' - etc. etc.... - and these morons are fighting basic LABELLING??? - Truly, as John Fagan, chairman of Genetic ID, said the other day (see 4th item on 10/11/2000 on our glimmers pages), genetic engineering has been 'prematurely commercialized.']
...but the discoveries have led to nationwide recalls of two brands of store-bought taco shells, a move that was extended yesterday to a larger group of brands and products....
[Our italics. That's it - the whole biogenetics industry is TACKY. And the New York Times isn't much better, because the impression given from the 5 paragraphs on the front page is that, gee, why would Big Government bother to recall all these jess-fine free-market products? Except that, buried in the inside section of the article, we find -]
It was cleared for animal feed or industrial products in 1998, but the EPA withheld approval for use in food meant for human consumption because tests showed properties indicating that it might cause allergies.
[God only knows what potential horrors that carefully worded diplomacy might be covering up.]
..\.."This whole system has been self-policing by the seed industry," one food company executive said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "And obviously it hasn't worked."
[Yeah that's a funny thing about self-policing.... So is this article ever going to, like, NAME NAMES??? Oho, carefully buried inside on page A11 -]
...the developer of the corn, Aventis CropScience, a subsidiary or Aventis S.A. of France....
[So we're bending over backwards, essentially trying to run tests on any number of random human guinea pigs from among the American public, AND THIS IS NOT EVEN FOR AN AMERICAN COMPANY??? Boy are we dumb. And it gets worse, much worse -]
...The National Grain and Feed Association has demanded that the company reveal the names of the more than 2,000 farmers growing StarLink crops - information that would allow the industry to track potentially contaminated shipments more quickly. But those requests have been refused. [Our italics]
[Wha-a-at?! Not only are they holier-than-thou Europeans who won't admit this stuff into their own food supply on a bet, not only do they resist labelling for the American public, but when there's a problem they refuse to provide the information that would enable it to be SOLVED??! We say, shut them down and boot their arrogant butts back to France!]
The grain association has since filed a request with the EPA under the Freedom of Information Act, seeking the names of those farmers.
[Yeah and how long is THAT going to take?]
...Aventis CropScience...reached an agreement with three federal agencies to work together to buy up all of this year's StarLink crop and to ensure that it had not entered the food supply.
[So OK, like, this is going to cost taxpayers MONEY now? Big time? Right, where's our checkbook.]
...Not all farmers had signed required contracts obligating them to follow certain procedures intended to keep StarLink out of the food supply....
["Oh, what a surprise." And here comes the after-the-fact "due diligence" on the part of the company -]
"This is a very sensitive matter, and everyone's role in preventing StarLink corn from entering unapproved channels is critical," John Wichtrich, VP and general manager of Aventis CropVoodoo [oops] CropScience, wrote to elevator operators....
[Like, "Hey, o-pe-ra-tor...." Wichtrich reminds us unnervingly of Macht and Recht, as in "Macht macht Recht" meaning "Might makes right" or "Might is right." Wicht actually means weight, and if 'rich' comes from Reich, it means rule = Weightrule. How ironic for a guy who didn't give enough weight to the rules.]
Mr. Wichtrich did not respond to a telephone message seeking comment.
...At a meeting on Tuesday with officials from the Dept. of Agriculture, the EPA and the FDA, the company spelled out details of its contacts with 2,070 farmers who have grown the StarLink crops.
[Screw the contract. NAME the farmers!]
...Aventis CropScience...determined that 10.7 million bushels of StarLink had been fed to livestock....
[And is this that game that the Brits play with scapey-infected sheep? "Aaow, let's just feed this lot to the cows and it'll be all roight." Ergo, mad cow disease. What's with these morons that they think there's some kind of hermetic seal that stops bad stuff they feed to the animals we eat from endangering us when we eat them? This whole fiasco is going to convert a LOT more people to vegetarianism - cuz then ya only hafta watch out for those fertilizers and sprays. But speaking of sprays, guess what "organic farmers" have been using for decades? From the companion article, also nicely buried on the inside page, "Case illustrates risks of altered food," by Andrew Pollack, NYT, A11, the whole tone of which is "No need to panic, no need to panic..." -]
...StarLink...is one of several genetically modified corn strains known as BT corn, so named because they contain a gene from the Bacillus thuringiensis bacteria that causes the corn to produce a toxin that kills insects [e.g. from previous article, "StarLink is engineered to produce a protein toxic to a common pest, the corn borer"]. BT toxins derived directly from microbes have been used for decades as pesticidal sprays and are a favorite of organic farmers because they are natural.
[Hooboy. 'New Speak' is everywhere. It's "1984" compounded. And here's a prime example of "Don't panic, don't panic,..." -]
While there is at least one report of farm workers' developing antibodies to the toxin, these sprays have generally been given a clean bill of health for farm workers and consumers. And that is one reason the [EPA] has been willing to approve several types of crops - corn, potatoes and cotton - with BT genes.
[All of this UNlabelled, we presume - so the guinea-pig status of all Americans is well advanced, without our knowledge or consent. Some 'democracy.']
But the StarLink BT toxin, known as Cry9C ['cry' indeed! - "Nine, nine, the end of the line"], is from a different strain of bacteria than the others and has not been used in sprays....
[Folks, that's about all we can take of this self-perpetrated disaster on and by humanity for now.... We repeat the words of John Fagan, chairman of Genetic ID (4th item on 10/11/2000 in our glimmers), genetic engineering has been 'prematurely commercialized' - way WAY prematurely commercialized. Parthian/parting shot (hey, Halloween's coming) -]
Environmental groups and the FDA say they have received some reports of people claiming to have gotten sick or suffered allergic reactions after eating the taco shells. But none of these reports have been confirmed.

10/13/2000 omens -

Heads up: Bust may be as wild as boom - New-economy guru is nervous, by Steven Syre and Charles Stein in Boston Capital column, Boston Globe, E1.
When the book landed on our desk, we weren't impressed. The title, "The Coming Internet Depression," [see item on book ad below on 10/11] made it sound like the work of a kook, one of those guys who predicts the Earth is going to be struck by a comet in 2008.
But Michael Mandel, the economics editor of Business Week, is anything but a kook. Along with his colleagues at the magazine, he has been a champion of the new economy. He has been right on the mark the past few years in predicting that the economy could grow faster than anyone imagined without triggering inflation. He also has a doctorate in economics from Harvard.
So if Mandel is nervous, attention must be paid.
Mandel...believes that because we have had a different kind of boom...
[Yeah, narrowly focused but widely promoted.]
...we are headed for a different kind of bust.
[Yep, a depression, not just a recession, and as Syre&Stein say below, "A depression [is] essentially a long recession." What they don't mention is that depressions are self-perpetuating and self-aggravating, essentially permanent. Then how did we get out of the last one? Same way we always get out. War. How does war work? By creating a shortage of labor so acute that competition for employees raises wages and counteracts the astronomical concentration of income and wealth - essentially centrifuges the money in the economy and back into circulation. So war pries the spending power away from the few people who don't have time or need to actually spend it, and gets it back to the many people who do. But a shortage of labor can be created without all the killing. How? By withdrawing labor hours from the job market, same as war does. How? By reducing the workshare per person per time unit - in short, by cutting the workweek, alias Timesizing.]
The boom...was the result of two forces coming together: technology and money....
So what could go wrong? ...The whole process could shift into reverse...
[I.e., technology and money could come apart, i.e., the money could pull out - as it indeed started doing in the spring with the 'big dot-com shakeout'.]
...triggered by a slowdown in the economy or a slide in the stock market....
[This raises the question of what is the trigger, cue, or 'spark'? We repeat the Kindleberger quote from Warsh's book that we mentioned on our suicides page (10/11/2000) - "The spark can be almost anything: a bankruptcy, a suicide, a flight, a refusal of credit, some change in views that causes a serious [player] to unload a big position; anything that 'snaps the confidence of the system, makes people think of the dangers of failure, and leads them to move from commodities, stocks, real estate, bills of exchange, promissory notes, foreign exchange - whatever it may be - back into cash.'"]
Venture capitalists...would react by turning off the spigot....
['We rest our case.']
But the unraveling of the boom only gets you to a recession. A depression - essentially a long recession - would require a screwup by the Federal Reserve. ...If prices rise in the early stages of the slowdown, the Fed could be tempted to raise interest rates. Such a move would be a disaster, Mandel says, because the new economy is like an airplane: It needs to maintain a decent rate of speed or it will fall out of the sky....
[He refers to the velocity of the circulation of money, which decreases as the concentration of wealth increases - "the more concentration, the less circulation." Mergers and downsizings boost concentration and cut circulation. Timesizing cuts concentration and boosts circulation. Can you ever get too much circulation and too little concentration, as capitalist and "free market" theorists claim, calling it an 'overheated' economy? The only problem with it, as they see it, is runaway inflation (though their definition of 'runaway' has almost come down to zero). We, however, believe there is a healthy range of inflation and that moderate inflation is nature's ultimate centrifuge of wealth and income. If you have an automatic way of converting a tighter concentration of value in one dimension into a concentration of value in another dimension where it has not yet become so tight, we believe that you cannot 'ever get too much circulation.' Timesizing accomplishes this by converting overtime into training and hiring. The other dimension of value into which it converts the concentration of employment is prestige - the prestige of training and hiring your unemployed brother-in-law during your overtime hours (if you choose to work them) and with your overtime earnings (which Timesizing requires that you reinvest in this way if you do choose to work overtime). People who are interested in getting "supervisor" or "trainer" on their resumes, or who love their jobs for any reason enough to work overtime, do work the overtime, reinvest the overtime earnings, and their reinvestment in additional production - by a trainee or hiree - balances the additional consumption by that trainee/hiree, and checks the inflation ("too much money chasing too few goods") that would happen if there weren't additional productivity to match the additional consumption. Today's unemployment insurance and welfare approaches are classic inflationary 'remedies' - you're handing over money without getting back products or services. Under Timesizing, you're handing over overtime profits or earnings, but getting back products or services - ergo, no runaway inflation.]
[An argument for Luddism (=destroying machines) -]
Grocers promoting do-it-yourself checkouts - Say shoppers see savings in time, by Bruce Mohl, Boston Globe, E4.
[More technology, less service -
- now we're our own phone receptionists due to all these telephone answering robots,
- we're our own typesetters,
- our own ticket sellers &
- travel agents,
- our own gas-station attendants, and
- now, ...our own grocery checkouts?!! - 'thanks' to scanners and new 'customer checkout' stations - check out the Super Stop&Shop in Wellington Circle in Medford, Mass. for a taste of this nightmare
[If this is progress, let's try some regress.
[Our proposal to grocers to save shoppers time? Put your best people on your express cash registers, not your worst. The express cashiers have the opportunity to make a good impression on the most of your customers - or a bad impression. The fastest express cashier we know of is Carolyn at the Porter Square Star Supermarket in Cambridge, Mass. She's often the only late-night cashier, but if the mgmt had any brains, they'd give her the shift premium or more for working rush hours (4:30-6:30 pm) on an express register. She's incredible. Clone her. Put her in charge of training.]

10/12/2000 omens -

Study finds poverty deepening in former Communist countries, AP via NYT, A3.
LONDON...- At least 50m children in Eastern Europe [10m] and the former Soviet Union [40m] live in poverty and are exposed to tuberculosis levels usually associated with the third world, says a report..."The Silent Crisis"..\..released [yester]day...by the European Children's Trust, a group active in 10 Eastern European countries....
The report...found that poverty in the region had increased more than tenfold over the decade since the fall of Communism because of the reduced spending on health, education and other social programs.... The study says..."For all its many faults, the old [Communist] system provided most people with a reasonable standard of living and a certain security."
[That's because it centrifuged money almost as much as it concentrated it. The new non-system of savage capitalism concentrates it far more than it centrifuges it. We're talking "astrophysical economics" here, where the ideal system is a balance of the centripetal and centrifugal forces on income and wealth.]
...Over all, more than 160m people, 40% of the population are thought to live in poverty.... In Kyrgyzstan, 88% of people live below the poverty line, the report found....
[All they have to do is start sharing what little work there is, and like the 'miracle' of the loaves and fishes (Matt.14:17ff.), there will soon be more and more money. Timesizing is the way for them to go. It's a system of balanced, win-win capitalism with essentially only one effective regulation right in its center that does away with the hordes of ineffectual regulations we still have today in our savage, win-lose capitalism. Communism failed the people of eastern Europe, and now capitalism is failing it. They asked for bread but we gave them a stone (Matt.7:10). Let them try something else, a Third Way.]

10/11/2000 omens -

Who will fall first? - book advertisement by Basic Books, NYT, C7.
The Coming Internet Depression - Why the high-tech boom will go bust, why the crash will be worse than you think, and how to prosper afterwards, by Michael J. Mandel (As seen in Business Week).
The economist most renowned for predicting the New Economy of the 1990s shows us why the Internet Depression is increasingly likely, and what we can do to lessen its impact and prosper afterwards.

10/10/2000 omens -

[Here we go a-ga-ain -]
Higher fuel prices do little to alter motorists' habits - At most, the gas guzzlers are choosing to buy regular instead of premium, by Leonhardt & Whitaker, NYT, front page.
When the price of oil tripled in the mid-1970's, Americans' consumption of gasoline fell sharply. Congress approved sweeping new rules calling for a doubling of the fuel efficiency of cars. Gasoline-sipping Honda Civics and Toyota Corollas became the most popular cars on the road, shaking the confidence of the American Automobile industry.
Over the last two years, energy prices have tripled again, but...few people have sharply cut back on their driving or have begun shopping for cars based primarily on fuel efficiency, according to interviews around the country and data from the government and auto industry. The nation is on pace to use almost the same amount of gasoline as it did last year, which was the most ever. SUVs and other trucks continue to gain market share slowly.... [But then, they're what the car companies are advertising most - they're the ones with the short memories. And for New England, this is all particularly disastrous. Did you catch this doozie from yesterday's paper? -]
Bracing for oil price jump, N.E. rethinks its reliance, by Beth Daley, 10/09/00 Boston Globe, frontpage & B4.
New Englanders have been warned before. Ever since the energy crisis of the 1970s, energy specialists said it was risky for them to rely so much on heating oil to stay warm. It's almost all imported, they said, and vulnerable to sudden price increases. Yet, as residents brace for a second straight winter of high oil prices, New England remains more dependent on heating oil than almost anywhere else in the United States. The six states [of New England - Massacusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut and Rhode Island] have less than 5% of the nation's population, but consume a whopping 25% of the heating oil that is used in the United States.... "Everyone was driving around in their SUVs this summer, and now they are wondering why we don't have heating oil," said Elizabeth Drake, assoc. director at the MIT Energy Laboratory. "It's all linked. At some point we are going to have to get in a different mode of thinking about energy"..\..
[No hurry, tho, right, Liz? New England must be so dumb because we've got more colleges and universities per square mile than anyplace else in the land - with all their resident idiot savants. Hey, right next door to Somerville here is Cambridge, the "Athens of America"! Well, there's one glimmer of hope, and if this guy even has an associate's degree, he ain't flauntin' it -]
"We have problems," said Larry Chretien, exec. director of Massachusetts Energy Consumers Alliance, a cooperative oil-buying group. The group was formerly called Boston Oil Consumers Alliance, but Chretien changed the name a month ago and started to buy other energy sources....
[So nice to hear that at least one New Englander, nearly 30 years after the oil crisis, has figured out how to generalize from "oil" to "energy." After our visions of empty New England supermarket shelves in '73-74 (most of our food comes in on trucks, and guess what they run on), "ay matey, we can sleep sounder in our bunks t'day, thaynks to the intellyjenss of ahr New England enerjy stalwarts."]

10/09/2000 weekend omens -

[Another depression cue moves into place...]
Loans tightening to young and deeply indebted businesses, by Riva Atlas, NYT, C1.
As the stock market gyrates and rumors are heard about Wall Street firms' incurring losses on high-yield bonds, investment worries are spreading to new markets. A quiet credit squeeze is under way for the most heavily indebted corporate borrowers. Banks and other companies are increasingly wary of lending to
- start-up businesses...
  [bad, very bad - "Small business is the engine of growth."]
- ...companies undertaking leveraged buyouts and other leveraged enterprises. The volume of new loans to such companies, which typically carry bond ratings below investment grade, was 25% lower in the first nine months of this year than it was in the corresponding period a year earlier, according to S&P/Portfolio Mgmt Data....
  [Good, but coming in the historic market-doom month of October, it could set up a cascade.]

10/06/2000 omens -

Reality check - Consumers expected to rein in holiday spending, by Chris Reidy, Boston Globe, C1.
1. Maybe it's high gasoline prices.... "Money you spend on gas you don't spend on Christmas presents"..\..said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor's Co. in New York..\..
2. Or maybe it's because tapped-out consumers already have too much stuff.... "just how many sweaters can you buy for your wife?" said Wyss..\..
  [Wow, how many times do you see a concept in today's American major media that implies the existence of "enough" rather than "never enough"?]
3. Last year, there were horror stories about consumers who got burned when they shopped online.
  [This year too.]
4. Then there's the matter of a possible toy shortage [due to today's reliance] on computer chips to make them talk, shimmy and shake [and the] "terrible chip shortage" \that] toymakers face [according to] Toy Wishes copublisher Jim Silver..\.. Sony Computer Entertainment has already said it will badly miss its supply targets for [its new] Playstation 2 game console.
  [Oh nooo, Mr. Bill.]
5. [And then there's the greater concentration of wealth this year over last year - this is the long-term key]
  With so much new wealth around, luxury retailers are poised for a strong holiday [while] most department stores yesterday reported so-so sales [and] for much of the year, apparel retailers have blamed bad weather and boring fashions for lackluster results.
  [Morale - luxury retailers alone do not a "good season" make.]
6. ...Two-income households [are] pressed for time.
7. [And Chris never gets around to mentioning record consumer debt....]

10/05/2000 omens -

U.N. sees $1 trillion in global investment, by Elizabeth Olson, NYT, W1.
Foreign direct investment worldwide, fueled by cross-border mergers and acquisitions, is expected to increase to $1T this year, up from $865B in 1999.... Industrialized economies led by the U.S. received the largest share of investment inflow, with $276B, more than all developing countries combined, at $208B.
[Lacking an automatic market-oriented centrifuge mechanism like Timesizing, wealth is now concentrating globally, not just nation by nation, and starving the consumer base and markets away from its own mega investment targets. It's long overdue for economists of integrity to stop neglecting and start researching the marginal efficiency of capital.]

10/04/2000 omens -

Economic indicators drop for 4th month - Fall seen pointing to slowing growth; home sales drop by 3%, AP via Boston Globe, D2.
...The index of leading economic indicators declined by 0.1% in August to 105.7, according to the New York-based Conference Board.... The index...stood at 100 in 1996, its base year. Except for a 0.1% increase in March, the index has been flat or declining throughout the year....
The index is made up of 10 components, of which six fell in August:
1. average workweek production,
2. weekly jobless claims,
3. the Treasury yield curve,
4. building permits,
5. vendor performance, and
6. consumer expectations.
The remaining four components rose:
1. money supply,
2. capital goods orders,
3. orders for consumer goods, and
4. stock prices.
Foreign workers bill approved - High-tech firms, colleges see gains, by Cindy Rodriguez, Boston Globe, D2.
Congress yesterday passed a bill that would increase the number of foreign workers in the U.S. to a total of 585,000 over the next three years, securing a major victory for high-tech companies and feeding an unceasing "need" [our quotes -ed.] that industry specialists say can't be met with US workers.
[What B.S.]
On a 96-1 vote in the Senate and a voice vote in the House [so we can't identify them? -ed] lawmakers agreed to increase the number of H-1B temporary visas available for high-tech workers. The two bodies approved the same measure, sending it on to Pres. Clinton.
The bill also removes limits on [hiring] foreign nationals for universities and research organizations, giving them carte blanche ability to hire as many skilled [foreign] researchers as they "need"....
[Our quotes again, of course. And ain't it interestin' how carefully the Times avoids juxtaposing the words "hiring" and "foreign"?]
Judge upholds FDA policy on genetically altered foods - A victory for an agency under fire for not regulating strictly enough, by Andrew Pollack, NYT, C18.
...throwing out a lawsuit by biotechnology opponents [the Alliance for Bio-Integrity and some scientists and clergy members] that sought to require that such foods be labeled and tested for safety.... The suit also asserted that the FDA had not allowed for proper public comment or filed an environmental impact statement on the new policy. And it said that the lack of labeling violated the religious rights of people who did not want to eat such foods on moral grounds.
But Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the U.S. District Court in Washington granted summary judgement to the FDA, ruling that the agency "was not arbitrary and capricious in its finding that genetically modified foods need not be labeled because they do not differ 'materially' from nonmodified foods"....
[What an ignorant finding, placing herself and her 'court' in a contemptible position. Truly these fools in biotech, and their gulls in courts and legislatures, rush in where angels fear to tread, and meddle greedily with complex balances in nature of which they know nothing, thus putting themselves, their children and everyone else at unknown risk for unknown duration. Remember when they advertised milk as Nature's Most Perfect Food? Now all they can say is, Got Milk? Duh. The arrogance of the biotech industry and now this 'court' in refusing something so basic as disclosure is a black omen of the loss of the freedom of informed choice in America, and another cut in American commonsense and authority that will be noted all over the world.]

10/03/2000 omens -

Congress approves $23.6B spending bill - GOP challenges Clinton to veto pork-barrel bill, by Alan Fram, AP via Boston Globe, A3.
WASHINGTON - The Senate gave final approval yesterday to a $23.6B energy and water package, inviting a pre-election veto fight with Pres. Clinton.... The bill, loaded with scores of home-district projects for lawmakers, passed the House over-whelmingly last week....

For earlier collapse stories, click on the desired date -