Collapse - 12/1-10/2000

Doomwatch^TM vs. Timesizing^®

Collapse trends - Dec. 1-10, 2000
[Commentary] ©2000 Philip Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080

12/09/2000 omens -

[Looking for examples of 'corporate welfare' or 'welfare for the rich'? Here's a doozy, possibly the 2nd-most radical example of socialism (corporate socialism, that is) in economic history -]
Law enables [New York] city to finance tower for stock exchange - A subsidy program for Wall Street gets a tepid reception, even on Wall Street, by Charles Bagli, NYT, B17.
Gov. George E. Pataki signed legislation yesterday enabling the city to finance a long-stalled plan to build a major 50-story trading complex and office tower for the New York Stock Exchange [NYSE] in the city's financial district.
[We forget - is Pataki a Republican or a Democrat? Does it matter?]
And two years after Mayor...Giuliani announced plans for the heavily subsidized project, city officials once again said they were close to signing a nonbinding agreement with the NYSE for the trading complex across the street from its home of Wall Street....
[Well we do remember that Giuliani is supposedly a Republican, and Republicans are supposedly against government intervention and spending, yet here he is, announcing plans for a "heavily subsidized project" - for one of the richest entities in the world - thus forcing ordinary taxpayers to (further) subsidize the rich , further concentrate income and wealth, and further restrict general consumer markets, the "consumer base" - once two thirds of the economy but falling, and when it falls, it takes down the whole thing. They don't call it the consumer base for nothing.]
But the continual delays have cast a cloud over the project. ..\..The estimated cost of buying the land and building the trading complex has jumped to about $960m, from $700m two years ago. The city would provide $905m in tax breaks, and the state $160m.... "The state is honoring its commitment to keep the exchange downtown," said Charles A. Gargano, the chairman of the Empire State Development Corp....
Alice Meaker, director of Good Jobs New York, an advocacy group supported by private foundations and unions, said, "This is the costliest deal in state history.... [Wall Street is] the most lucrative industry in New York. If corporate welfare were means-tested the same way family welfare is, Wall Street wouldn't qualify for subsidies."...
[So, further concentration of wealth and diminution of the active consumer base and active spending power. Further damage to the centrifugal forces of income and wealth in this economy and further acceleration for the already virtually unimpeded centripetal forces on income and wealth = depressive forces on active spending power. "The more concentration, the less circulation." Result? Further strengthening to the many, many current corporate strategies and federal policies inducing major, massive recession and depression, such as takeovers and downsizings, and badly designed federal overtime legislation that effectvely allows the USA national standard maximum workweek (dba the definition of "full-time employment") to get longer but not shorter. This is "free-market capitalism"?
[And that's not the least of it. Monday, we learn in "From Naughty to Bawdy to Stars Reborn," by Robin Pogrebin, 12/11/00 NYT B1 -]
...Restoring the [42nd Street] theaters - and fixing up the Times Square subway station - was originally the price developers agreed to pay in exchange for substantial tax breaks for new office buildings. Those abatements have been controversial, given estimates that the city and the state lose more than $1 billion in taxes [annually?] that such prime real estate would generate from a similar office complex built without subsidies....

12/08/2000 omens -

Study: State must link employers, schools - A lack of skilled workers is a perennial problem in Massachusetts, by Kimberly Blanton, Boston Globe, D4.
...the Mass Insight report "Call to Action"....
[We think the problem here is that there are so many colleges in the area, Mass. tends to attract whiny CEOs who think that perfect job candidates are going to be served up to them on a silver platter. In the rest of the country, there is, not much more, but some more training - offered by the private sector itself. In Massachusetts, the private sector expects the colleges to do it all for them and the taxpayers to pay for it. The danger, often realized, is that the colleges offer too little too late and too irrelevant to the fast-changing needs of the private sector.
[The answer, of course, is to design a statewide or nationwide system to incentivate and guide the private sector to set up its own flexible training programs, targeted and triggered by overtime. Fortunately the outlines of such a design are already available.]
[And you thought CEOs were overpaid -]
Make a wish, it's bonus time on Wall Street - Bonus time...to be good news for many - Good times abound, but there is an undertone of dread, by Patrick McGeehan, NYT, C1.
...As the 1990's boomed on, two-by-fours (two years at $4 million a year) became three-by-fives....
[But now -]
"We are hearing from people for the first time in years that they are happy just to have a job," said Cynthia Remec, president of her own recruiting firm. She added, "They know that things are going to get rocky, and they want to position themselves in the safest place possible to ride out the storm.
[This is the end of the article. What are these people worrying about?]
...The softening market and the acquisition of two midsize investment banks...removed much of [the competitive] pressure [employers felt to coddle employees]. Chase Manhattan, which is buying [J.P.] Morgan, [will] lay off 5,000 workers; Credit Suisse First Boston said its acquisition of Donaldson [Lufkin & Jenrette] would lead to 2,600 layoffs. One reason for that sorting out is that firms have guaranteed so much pay to employees in the last few years. With the stock market bulling ahead and multibillion-dollar mergers occurring at a breakneck pace, firms waged a war for talent that sent wages spiraling. To compete, they locked in deal makers with multiyear, multimillion-dollar packages that defied the Wall Street tradition of minimizing fixed costs.... In the last two weeks...recruiters and some people inside Salomon said Deutsche [Bank] offered [Tony] Whittemore...a three-year contract that would pay him at least $18m....
[...making it a "three-by-six"?! The problem, of course, is that Wall Street is the problem. It is the major locus of the humungus current consolidation of wealth that in the long term will be directly reinvested in the consumer base via much much higher general wage levels and much much shorter workweeks. What do these grossly overpaid guesstimators really contribute? Good question.
[As colleague Kate says, Wall Sreet is like a Gilbert&Sullivan chorus. One of the leads sings, "Things are good, good, good" and all the analysts & 'experts' on Wall St. chime in, "Yes, things are good, good, good." Or v.v. It's nothing but herd mentality. And then there's their extremism. Every tiny event of normal ups&downs gets grotesquely exaggerated and melodramatized. That's nothing but backfence gossip stuff. For this they get "three-by-fives" - and we call this a healthy economy. "Jesu, Jesu, what mad days we've spent."]

12/07/2000 omens -

Ease up, top universities tell stressed applicants, by Kate Zernike, NYT, front page.
...Increasingly...admissions officers at the most selective colleges say they worry that the process has become such a high-stress exercise in resume padding \as in\ grades...volunteer work...athletic prowess...summer experiences...that students are arriving at their campuses on the brink of burnout.... At Harvard, the admissions office has written a paper lamenting that students "seem like dazed survivors of some bewildering lifelong boot camp."
["Lifelong" already? - what are they, aging before their time?]
And at a recent meeting of the College Board in New York, admissions officers packed shoulder to shoulder into a discussion group about how to make sure high school students get more sleep....
[More evidence of job desperation in the face of universally denied but widely sensed global labor redundancy. And all we have to do is share our fate - spread the vanishing work - work less per person so it gives everyone a slice, however small (which after all is the whole purpose of technology - to make life easier) - and we will all be in heaven instead of this split-apart overworked vs. underemployed hell. The most flexible, gradual and market-oriented way of transitioning? Timesizing.]

12/06/2000 omens -

Delta sues pilots over overtime, AP via NYT, C10.
[Some employers just don't get it, regardless of the elevated accident rates during overtime hours. Do a few of these pilots have to fly kamekazi missions to penetrate Delta CEO's brain?]
Delta Air Lines sued its pilots' union and 49 individual pilots today and said it would trim 100 to 125 flights from its schedule in an effort to minimize cancellations that it says have been caused by pilots refusing to work overtime.
[Well, the flip side of that is - these cancellations have been caused by Delta's failure to hire enough pilots.]
The company's chairman and chief executive, Leo F. Mullin, said the airline was forced to seek a temporary restraining order against the pilots in federal court after having to cancel 386 flights last weekend.
[Whenever CEOs start talking about being "forced" to do something, they are usually unintelligent, unimaginative and severely out of touch. Pilots - and employees in general - don't react quickly to abuse, but just look at the extent this has reached. "Nullin" Mullin had loaded 386 flights onto pilots' overtime??! What a dangerous retard! Just where is he going to draw the line for passenger safety? Clearly Delta is a good airline to avoid until Mullin sobers up - or becomes a casualty on one of his own flights that crashes due to pilot fatigue. This is all part of Americans' inability to set sensible limits for themselves. "Oh we're invulnerable, we're superhuman - we don't need sleep - we're 24/7." Yeah, right. Robots really are 24/7, and foolish humans can't even begin to compete with them in that race. Unfortunately, American physicians started this foolishness. American physician training, known euphemistically as 'med school' and 'internship,' gradually evolved into a kind of 8-10 year frat hazing fixated on sleep deprivation. Then it spread to the law schools and law offices of the land. Then it spread much further so that there are only a few islands of sanity left in this *qoyannosqatsi (Hopi: unbalanced) economy. Basically, it's people saying, "I have no time. Therefore I'm important," or "I'm busier than you. Therefore my bloated fees/wages are justified."]
[And speaking of bloated - remember the other day when we spoke of how, "coincidentally," the Boston Globe only seems to find big-money political candidates newsworthy - and unfunded ones unnewsworthy - but then the Globe has the nerve to periodically complain that there are no uncontested political races in Massachusetts? Well, speak of the devil, here comes one of their complaints now - 'course they tuck it on the back of B section -]
Report details fund-raising - Special interests' role highlighted,
by Regina Montague, Boston Globe, B8.
...In the Nov. 7 election, more than two-thirds of the state's legislative seats went uncontested, ranking Massachusetts the second to last state in the nation for contested general elections..\..the Mass. Money and Politics Project reported yesterday.... "This raises serious concerns about the state of democracy if voters are only given one candidate to vote for in most races," said Ken White, the executive director of Common Cause Massachusetts.
[Yeah, we might as well live behind the old Iron Curtain for all the choice we get in Massachusetts, or for all the media we get if we do 'raise periscope' and contest an election - and Phil Hyde speaks from experience, being the only rival to Joe Kennedy in 1996, when it was so breathtakingly incredible that any unknown would be fool enough to contest an election with Joe Kennedy that the Globe and Herald immediately started publishing rumors that Phil was a Kennedy "plant." And no media, or that kind of media, means no credibility and "no contest." And let's not forget how the two-party lockout kept Ralph Nader out of the presidential debates in this nation that we naively call a 'democracy.' And then, despite Florida's automatically triggered recount because of the closeness of the top two presidential candidates' results, the recount there seems to be getting cut off somehow, doesn't it. Here's a sobering squib from a Times op ed today -]
Recounts are part of the game,
op ed by Miklos Haraszti of Hungary, NYT, A31.
...Thanks to the cursed Communist past, Hungarian voters had decades of practice making a uniform motion of the pencil over an always uniform (that is, option-free) ballot list....
[Can anybody tell us the difference between that situation in Hungary under Communism and most Massachusetts' ballots under the stifling sway of the Democratic machine and the Boston Globe's "only money is newsworthy" policy? Let's go back to the other article and pick up the sad tidings at the beginning -]
One out of every three dollars raised by state legislature incumbents between 1997 and 1999 came from four donor groups - lobbyists, government employees, lawyers and PACs, a new study finds. Those special interest donors represented a small fraction - less than 1% - of the 4.7m eligible voters in the state, the Mass. Money and Politics Project reported yesterday.... The report...suggested that lawmakers' coziness with special interests and access to the money discourages potential challengers....
[No kidding. The game in Mass. has changed. The only races worth running are the races with a big-name incumbent, like a Kennedy or a Barney Frank. And even then you're jumping for scraps, but at least there are scraps. All the rest of the 'races' are exercises in futility and wasted time, and the cynicism of the political desks of the Boston Globe, "public" television, and most of the other media are major contributors. Even the once-celebrated League of Women Voters makes it difficult for many independents to gain access to their "impartial" website facilities until 3-4 months after the major-party candidates. By then, why bother?]

12/05/2000 omens -

Baseball's unfair economics, editorial, NYT, A30.
The signing of Mike Mussina...by the Yankees to a six-year $88.5m contract...is great news for Yankee fans. But it reinforces a trend that plagues baseball. Teams in big cities generate lots of revenue, pay big salaries and attract the best players. Teams in small cities general little revenue, pay low salaries and watch their players exit for New York and Atlanta. The Yankees spend about six times what Minneapolis spends on players. One pitcher for the L.A.Dodgers made about as much money last season as the entire Minneapolis team.
[Ahso, a microcosm of the American economy, where 1% of the population owns as much as the "bottom" 95%. And this is with a huge balancing/centrifuging mechanism in place that the economy does not have = every year every team in the sports league starts evenly in scores with zero games won. In the economy, NO WAY does every job market participant start evenly with zero savings and investments. So this current sports squawk is just about the disparity of skills and, regardless of seasons opening with 'zero games won,' gigantic disparities of wages.]
The disparity matters. Between 1995 and 2000, 189 playoff and World Series games were played. Only three of those games were won by teams ranked in the bottom half of the league by payroll.
[There it is - the ultimate result = what biologists call 'subspeciation' and then complete 'speciation.' In social-science terms, you don't just get different social 'classes,' you gradually get different 'races' and then different 'species,' like the Eloi and the Morlocks of scifi fame. The problem for the game? No more suspense. The result of each and every game is a foregone conclusion. Sound familiar? Yep, that's what has happened to American politics, especially here in Massachusetts, where the Boston Globe and Herald regularly complain about the lack of real contests - a lack they powerfully contribute-to by giving huge overbalanced column inches to incumbents etc., and huge underbalanced column inches to challengers and non-Democrats and the less funded.]
Yet without balance, baseball cannot thrive. The satisfaction of watching the Yankees play ball has everything to do with the quality of teams they face.
Two proposals have been issued to tackle the competitiveness problem,...one...from [an] independent panel..\..appointed by the commissioner of baseball [and] the other from Paul Weiler, a law professor at Harvard.... Both proposals include mechanisms to keep rich teams from spending too much. They also recognize the equally important need to keep weak teams from spending too little....
[Funny how we always start at the most superficial, symptomatic level.]
Both proposals would also redistribute locally generated revenue from rich teams to poor ones....
[And as soon as we get below the surface, we in the peanut gallery can swing into the usual (in economics anyway) game of Stifle The Discussion. Here goes. "Redistribute"?! Altogether now, "Hey that's Communism!"]
Some of these ideas are not new. For several years baseball imposed what amounted to a luxury tax on teams with the highest payrolls.
["Luxury tax" on the "highest payrolls"?! Altogether now, class - "Hey, that's Socialism!"]
But the tax was suspended in 2000...
[Altogether - "Phew!"]
...and besides, it only added a couple of million dollars to payroll costs that already exceeded $90m.
[Bad writing. ¿Are they saying "and besides, it was ineffectual anyway" which they should have told us before telling us it was suspended, or are they saying it was suspended "even though it was so small" which would be appropriate in this position.]
By contrast, the independent panel would impose a 50% tax on payrolls that exceed $84m.
[How delightful to see a whole other field struggling with this highly educational problem. The kneejerk objections that we raise here are of course - "too arbitrary, too abrupt, too rigid" - implying that the 'fixes' would be logarithmizing both the tax rate and the taxable threshold, making them both fluctuate slowly, and tying both to fluctuate with two logical opposites in the problem structure - as Timesizing does in the overall socioeconomic area. Now the Times finally gets around to answering their unspoken fears that these two solutions will be criticized as communist or socialist -]
...Baseball has long had a system for distributing locally generated revenues.
[There you are. "Distribution" isn't as bad as "redistribution" in terms of triggering kneejerk resistance from the right, but our Timesizing translation is even better - "reinvestment."]
At present, it transfers about $160m from high- to low-earning teams.
[The right presumably fumes in outrage at this disclosure of communist infiltration. Any transfers that they make are "doing whatever they want with their own money." Any transfers anybody else makes is dangerous Socialism.]
The panel proposes to raise that by about 50%.
[Quite a leap but probably still inadequate. Basically, at our primitive level of economic evolution, we have NO IDEA of the colossal levels of reinvestment in our own markets that are required for long-term stability. As the old joke goes - redistribute money everywhere equally and within two weeks it would all be back in the pockets of the rich anyway. Recall that today the top ONE percent of Americans have as much as the "bottom" NINETY-FIVE percent - and rising.]
The proposed payroll guidelines...
[Oh yeah, that's another thing you have to do. Don't call them "controls" or godforbid "regulations" or you're dead in the water. Ya gotta call them "guidelines" or "ground rules." This sounds funny but we're dead serious. (Ah, skip the 'dead' part.)]
...and increased revenue sharing...
[We avoided the word "sharing" for years because it's so soft alias low prestige/underpowered/sneered-at/sissy etc. We've rehabbed it a little.]
...will trigger some opposition from owners and players.
[No kidding. Here we have the classic struggle between those with short-term unextended self-interest and those with long-term, extended self-interest.]
But neither proposal mirrors...
[They probably mean "is as extreme as."]
...the one-sided assault on players' salaries backed by owners in the past, in that neither would do away with free agency or otherwise limit the ability of individual players to sell their talents to the highest bidder.
[In other words, owners (presumably the rightist of the right) tried to 'solve' this 'problem' in the past at an even more superficial, more symptomatic level that only 'hurt' players, not them.]
But both [proposals] seek to dampen...
[Say it, say it - "seek to RESTRICT."]
the ability of [owners] to bid as freely as they presently do.
[And then the Times tries to distract angry objectors and dilute the issue with an appeal to charitable instincts -]
And both focus on raising the payrolls of weak teams.
[Ah, isn't that heart-warming. Then they slip in a couple of appeals to short-term unextended self-interest (alias greed) again -]
The net result would be a better balanced, more profitable league. If the idea works, the league will attract more fans, and everyone - players, fans and, yes, [owners] - will win.
[But not short-term (unsustainable). "Only" long-term (sustainable).]
Parent group lists 'dirty dozen' toys - Accuses industry of using violence to entice children - 'The toy industry is sending the message to children that violence is fun and violence is child's play' - Daphne White, Lion & Lamb Project, by Mark Wilkinson, Reuters via Boston Globe, A5.
[Then the article gives the Project's list of 12 worst toys. We'll hafta find that similar article on a clergyman who'd also put together a list of toys, one of which involved a male character with a knife that fit into a female character. Some "toy." These toy designers must be getting as sick as prison guards. "OK, boys, let's train em not only for violence, but for VAW, violence against women!"]

12/04/2000 omens -

Women lawyers' exodus - Attorneys cite long hours, inflexibility at state's top practices, by Diane Lewis, Boston Globe, front page.
Donnalyn Kahn was an attorney at a big Boston law firm three years ago when she took a 50% cut in pay to work for the city of Newton. Kahn quit after watching what she described as the subtle harassment of women lawyers at the firm who had chosen to work less than 60 hours per week. "People were expected to put the firm first. If you put anything else first..., you were not committed," said Kahn.... "I considered working part time after the birth of my first child five years ago, but I never asked because I saw what was happening to other women."
Women lawyers, burned out and fed up with what they perceive as grueling hours and lack of flexibility at the state's major law firms, are eschewing 6-figuire salaries and the prestige of a partnership for jobs in government, business, or at smaller firms where hours are shorter and personal satisfaction is higher. Of those who leave these firms, 40% reported that their firm's reaction to reduced-hour working arrangements led to their resignations.
That's the key finding of a report released today by the Women's Bar Association, [called] "More thatn Part-Time: The Effect of Reduced Hours on Retention, Recruitment and the Success of Women Attorneys." ..\..The survey of the 45 largest law firms in Massachusetts found that the growth rate of female representation at the biggest firms is down from 12% in 1995 to just 0.8% in 1997, the last year data were available.... The study also found that women attorneys with reduced hours left big firms at a higher rate than full-time women and at a rate that was 70% higher than their full-time male peers....
And how about this companion item for "pathetic!" -]
Foosball power, pointer squib (to C1), Boston Globe, front page.
The table-soccer game is relieving stress and building team spirit at thousands of technology companies.
["Team spirit" in a corporate culture of jobcuts? Stress relief by playing a stupid-table soccer game in a corporate culture of unlimited workweeks? This society is moving backward toward the sweatshops of the "dark Satanic mills" of the 1820s and 30s, and farther back, into slavery. This economy won't see any real team spirit or stress relief - or social progress - until we accept the work-saving life-easing benefits of technology and SHARE THE VANISHING WORK by cutting the workweek instead of getting ourselves all pumped with the self-importance of never having "enough time."]

12/02/2000 omens -

Now we know that not all votes count, op ed by John Lewis of US House of Reps (D, Ga), NYT, A31.
The United States exists today because our forefathers fought and died for the right to vote.... Immediately after the elections, analysts told us that this [Florida] experience would teach us that every vote counts. I fear that the current vote counting teaches us the opposite.
- If you were confused by a butterfly ballot, your vote does not count.
- If the military neglected to postmark your absentee ballot, your vote does not count.
- If your ballot has a dimpled, hanging or pregnant chad, your vote does not count.
Unless there are drastic changes in the way votes are being tallied, these are the lessons we will learn in Florida.
The makers of the ballot machines have told us that the most accurate way to count the ballots is by hand. So, count them by hand we must, even if it means recounting all six million ballots cast in Florida.
...There can be no legitimacy in an election [without] the principle of one person, one vote. In an election this close, every vote must count, and every vote must be counted.

12/01/2000 omens -

Mad cow disease panicking Europe as incidents rise - Beef sales are plunging - Governments promise action - Meat bans fail to allay the fear of consumers, by Suzanne Daley, NYT, front page.
[Yet another example of the stupidity of the entire farm and food industries in not reacting immediately and drastically to any problems. And still, America wants to fool with Frankenfoods (let alone unlabelled Frankenfoods), even the dairy industry (as in "milk, nature's most perfect food")??! Dumbdumbdumbdumbdumb.]

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