Collapse - 2/2001

Doomwatch^TM vs. Timesizing^®

Collapse trends - February, 2001
[Commentary] ©2001 Philip Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080

2/21/2001 omens -

Welfare reform's success at issue - Brandeis study: Data misleading, by Ralph Ranalli, BG, B1.
A Brandeis University think tank [Center on Hunger and Poverty] has accused [Massachusetts] state officials of seriously understating the hunger and other problems former welfare recipients face after leaving public assistance.... The question of what happens to women on welfare who are either forced off the rolls, or leave voluntarily, is a contentious one. Advocates for the poor say the welfare reform law, which generally limits recipients to two years of cash assistance, has left some families in more precarious circumstances.... The most glaring statistic downplayed in the [state's] report, according to..\..Dorie Seavey, director of the Center's Food Security Institute...was that while about 14% of those surveyed reported hunger in their families before leaving welfare, that number jumped to almost 22% after they left the rolls, a 56% increase. There was also a 31% increase among families reported "food insecurity without hunger" after they left welfare or their benefits ran out. The food insecurity category includes families who may be at imminent risk of going hungry or who are stretching their food budgets to the point where nutrition is suffering.... "Severe food insecurity" among people forced off welfare by time limits...rose from 13.3% to 23.5% over the course of the study...77%,
[The short-term fix for this to prevent people from getting dependent on welfare and welfare from getting institutionalized and "set in concrete" is not time limits. It is a stepped, higher-frequency, smaller-payment schedule of benefits, coupled with stepped-up supervision and training, including a temporary shift from resume-writing and job-related training to home economics, positive familiy dynamics and budgeting. The long-term fix is to let our rising technology levels make it easier and easier for everyone to earn a good living, by implementing continuous training (overtime targeted, of course) and statutory workweek reduction. This one-two punch is the essence of the Timesizing program.]

2/20/2001 omens -

[America, the nation of witch-hunts and overkill - First, the 'war on poverty' (poverty survives & homelessness is up), then the 'war on drugs' (drugs survive & we're paying to support 2,000,000 prison inmates), then the 'war on child abuse' (now there's no child care), now a war on fraudulent medical billing -]
Investigator, heal thyself - Increasingly, invesetigators and prosecutors are measuring their apparent success in dollar terms, not just convictions, by David Vicinanzo, BG, C4.
...A page one article in the Jan. 23 NYT \said\ "Fraudulent billing is a silently common practice among many doctors around the country, some of whom contend that managed health care does not reimburse them for procedures they believe are necessary."... Translation: lots of doctors everywhere are criminals. Not just petty violators, but serious criminals because almost all federal "fraud" crimes are felonies.
The use of the word "fraudulent" to describe the "common practice" of "many" doctors speaks volumes about how the press has come to assume that there is widespread fraud in health care billing. A few more unchallenged statements like that in the major media and it will become "true" no matter how bogus.
Not that there aren't some frauds out there. [In my] 13 years as a federal prosecutor, I went after plenty of them. [However,] the current escalation in health care investigations began with the failure of the [Clinton] administration and Congress to enact a national healthcare...plan in the mid-1990s. The political face-saver for that failure was the announcement that "health care fraud" was a massive national problem, the enactment of new or upgraded...fraud laws, and the apportionment of huge sums of public monies to pursue the allegedly vast numbers of health care criminals. Since 1996, federal agencies have received...increasing resources earmarked for "health care" investigation.
- In the first year of the buildup (1996), the FBI received $47m to investigate health care cases and the Dept. of Justice got $22.2m to prosecute them. By 2000, these numbers had just about doubled, to $88m and $43m respectively.
- In the last five years, the number of FBi agents assigned to target health care violations rose 340%.
Of course, when resources are dedicated, results are expected. Hence, it is no surprise that health care fraud prosecutions have increased by nearly 600%. And while some cases are no doubt merited, the question arises whether some are driven by the need to justify the large expenditures of time, money, and personnel.
There is another reason to question the motivation and merit of a significant number of the government's healthcare investigations: money. The government is making more profit from healthcare settlements and prosecutions each year. A portion of these dollars - presently in the billions and growing - undoubtedly reflects the desire of some healthcare businesses to pay up just to avoid the expense and bad publicity of an investigation.
[So, sort of like a protection racket.]
...Last year, federal prosecutors in Massachusetts announced a plea settlement with Fresenius Medical Care North America. The amount: nearly half a billion dollars, which the US attorney described as the largest plea deal ever in the healthcare area. (Columbia HCA has since settled for more.)
[Hey that should pay for quite a few FBI agents! Now that we've prosecuted childcare providers, nursing homes, mammogram facilities, and anesthesiologists to the verge of extinction, now we're working on healthcare in general. Hey, we regulated most of our railroads into bankruptcy. Why not our hospitals and clinics?! If we're going to freeze our workweek at a 1940 level in an age of automation, our government is going to have to whip up a lot of jobs, like in the FBI and the Justice Dept. Let's review the other areas of pervasive makework in our efficiency-obsessed economy.]
Whether the problem of healthcare fraud is anywhere near as broad as some in government suggest is highly debatable. What is certain is that the healthcare industry needs to use all means available to induce the government to accurately assess wrongdoing in a profession dedicated to healing and health. Additionally, the industry must convince the media and the public that it is just plain wrowng to lump together the vast majority of dedicated, honest healthcare providers with the frauds and scammers.

2/14/2001 omens -

Chief executive compensation rose 16% last year over '99, by Reed Abelson, NYT, C2.
[And this would be "compensating" for a 16% additional pain of exactly what, pray tell?]
The annual pay packages of chief executives continue to soar and now exceed $10 million among the nation's very largest public[ly traded, private-sector] companies, according to a new survey.
Benefiting from a continued abundance of stock options that make up the bulk of their pay, the average compensation for chief executives reached a record $10.9 million in 2000, according to the survey by Pearl Meyer & Partners, an executive compensation consultant in New York....
[The more concentration, the less circulation.]

2/13/2001 omens -

Planting of genetic crops increases, pointer digest (to C2), NYT, C1.
Despite growing concerns over the use of biotechnology in agriculture, American farmers are increasing their orders to plant genetically altered crops, according to surveys by the nation's biggest seed companies.
[Of course, these shortsighted seed companies may be "cooking the data" of their own surveys, but if farmers are really doing this, clearly they don't have the horse sense God gave them.]
Bush's tax cut's benefits uneven, by Robert Jordan, Boston Globe, C4.
Based on a national tax research firm's report, Pres. Bush's $1.6T+ tax cut proposal, which he submitted to Congress last week, is bad news for most American taxpayers. ...His tax cut claim [is] that the average family of four would receive a tax cut of $1,600 [but] the Citizens for Tax Justice [CTJ], a national public research and advocacy firm...argues that almost 90% of taxpayers would receive less than $1,600...based on 1999 dollars.
Using the respected Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy's Tax Model, the CTJ's analysis determined that the typical single taxpayer would get only $249 from the Bush plan. And 27% of taxpayers would receive no tax cut at all. Moreover, according to the report, as the Democrats have argued, the best-off 1% of all taxpayers would get an average annual tax cut of $46,000 (in 1999 dollars) almost 43% of the total cut....
[Oh that should really help our economic dynamism - "the more concentration, the less circulation."]
Etc., Globe wire services, Boston Globe, C6.
Ted Philip, acting president of Terra Lycos...told investors at a conference, "The US seems to have slowed down more than we've seen throughout the world. I don't think we've seen bottom yet."
[Certainly not until our "captains of industry" stop digging us in deeper with evermore takeovers and downsizings. What a mob psychology of self-destruction! What a pack of self-important lemmings! The trouble is, "the bottom" is not limited to them. In fact, it affects them last if at all, and that means one louzy feedback system. For all our vaunted power and pride, our economic cybernetics stinks, and throughout the five millennia since the dawn of history, that has always meant one thing - deterioration and decline.]

2/12/2001 weekend omens -

2 clothing factories accused of forced, unpaid overtime, by Steven Greenhouse, NYT, A24.
Two [women's] apparel factories in [Sunset Park,] Brooklyn [NY] are being accused of forcing three employees to work 100 to 140 hours a week - and illegally failing to pay them overtime. [They] are expected to file a lawsuit today that claims the employers demanded that two of the plaintiffs do a full day's work without pay and fired them when they refused.
The dispute is the latest in a series of battles involving Street Beat Sportswear [which] the workers say...controls the two factories being sued.... A draft of the lawsuit identifies the plaintiffs as three Chinese immigrant workers, Fen Chen, Quiu Chen and Yu Zheng, whose jobs were to plane finished garments on hangers along with the proper tag and protective bagging.
...In one week last May the two Chens, who are not related, each worked 140 hours, [reporting] to work very early in the morning and [leaving] the factory well after midnight....
In June 1999..\..the Asian American Legal Defense Fund...reached a settlement of a suit against Street Beat and one of its contractors in which they agreed to pay $285,000 in back wages. In that lawsuit, four pressers accused a factory controlled by Street Beat of forcing them to work 137 hours in one week without paying them time-and-half for overtime. Fifteen plaintiffs in that case said they were often required to work 100-hour weeks, without overtime. The four pressers said that they were fired when they complained about mistreatment....

2/10/2001 omens -

[a buildup of short-term fixes means long-term disaster for both US & Mexico -]
Bush, Fox back temporary immigration, by Ken Guggenheim, AP-NY-02-09-01 0343EST via AOLNews.
Both President Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox support boosting legal, temporary immigration to the United States. So do lawmakers from both parties. Even farm workers and the agricultural industry have found common ground.
["Even" unnecessary with "the agricultural industry" alias agribusiness, but let's see the evidence that legal American farm workers are dumbing down. Agribusiness loves hiring low-wage labor that doesn't speak English or have any concept of overtime pay or other employee rights. And agribusiness contributes to and lobbies "lawmakers from both parties" who thereupon love low-wage labor etc. The trouble is that while we're constantly invoking the short-term fix of pulling in the "deus ex machina" of low-wage migrant workers, we never groom these jobs for unskilled legal Americans, who then find it easier to make a dishonest living and wind up costing taxpayers $25,000 a year per prison inmate. Short term it's lovely for agribiz and maybe for consumers (though with no cap on executive pay, don't count on it). Long term it distorts our economy and society more and more and more. And Mexico never gets the message that it's got to develop a long-term solution to take care of its own unskilled unemployed - not just close their eyes and while essentially running a breeding program of unskilled workers for export to US.]
Yet prospects for a new "guest worker" program, a likely topic when Bush and Fox meet Feb. 16, may not be much better now than they were last year, when powerful Republican senators killed a compromise plan.
[Aha, "glimmers of intelligence" among Republican senators. Why on earth would we want to institute guest worker programs, when they've been so much trouble in Germany (where guest workers are called Gastarbeiter)? Are we incapable of learning from other people's mistakes?]
At issue is whether guest workers could eventually become permanent U.S. residents. Farm worker advocates and Democratic congressional allies say that's essential;...
[Oh so it wasn't legal American farm workers. It was "farm worker advocates" which means illegal migrant farm workers - no "even" necessary with them either - they're probably on agribusiness' payroll same as "lawmakers from both parties."]
...Republican immigration critics won't accept it.
[Too bad they accepted simplistic free trade in terms of NAFTA and beyond to "globalization."]
""It's entirely possible that the differences between the Democrats and the Republicans could kill the deal," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which opposes guest worker programs.
[What "differences between the Democrats and the Republicans," Mark? All we've heard from our AP reporter, Ken Guggenheim, so far is that "lawmakers from both parties..\..support boosting legal, temporary immigration to the United States." Do you know something Ken doesn't know or is Ken (uncharacteristically for AP reporters) slanting the news?]
The treatment of illegal alians has been a sensitive issue in U.S.-Mexican relations, and both Bush and Fox, who took office Dec. 1, have stressed the need for change. Mexico doesn't have enough jobs for its unskilled workers...
[like we in the USA have???]
...and wants its citizens to be allowed to work in the United States under protection of U.S. labor laws and without having to resort to illegal and periolous cross-border treks....
[Yeah, well everyone wants a free lunch, Vicente. Everyone wants a sugar daddy to pay all the bills. You don't want to have to design and implement a long-term solution to take care of your own. You just want them to be picked up by your next-door neighbor - when that next-door neighbor hasn't even grown up enough to take care of its own at the root level of worksharing rather than the symptom level of prisons. American taxpayers are supposed to be the patsies of the world, sending $5B a year to subsidize racist warfare and weapons buildup in Israel, and spending $25-30,00K per prison inmate per annum to let our millionaire agribusiness executives continue to bring in sweatshop labor from Mexico. Let's see, 2m prison population, conservatively $25K per year apiece, - that means we're paying $50 billion a year to subsidize prison construction millionaires and millionaires executives in the agricultural and other industries who have gotten addicted to low-wage sweatshop migrant labor in America. (This weekend (2/12/2001 above) we'll have a story on the apparel industry in New York.)]
The agricultural industry has argued that a guest worker program could help cut illegal migration.
[So could adequately funding our Immigration and Naturalization Service.]
Shortage of farm labor in the United States...
[at long hours and low wages]
...and cumbersome visa procedures for short-term foreign help...
[How about NO visa procedures for short-term unskilled help?! How about raising pay and recruiting unskilled Americans? How about subsidies for recruiting unskilled Americans? This is starting to sound like the adopt-American-child vs. adopt-foreign-child or give subsidies for expensive fertility procedures debate. Why do we always have to do things the stupid, short-sighted hard way? Why can't we facilitate and even subsidize adoption of our millions of American unwanted children instead of doing backbends to bring in kids from China and Latin America (not to mention heroic fertility procedures)? And why can't we facilitate and even subsidize the hiring (and training if necessary) of legal American unskilled employees, whether on welfare or disability, or in homelessness or prison????????????? What's the matter with some LONG TERM thinking for a change, and solving OUR OWN problems instead of prioritizing the problems of everywhere ELSE in the world?! Or why do we always have to adopt contradictory policies like our brilliant new prez -]
In his presidential campaign, Bush made an expanded guest worker program one of his immigration priorities, along with strengthened border security....

[Make up your mind, pal. And before we leave it, let's examine the rest of that bizarre sentence we failed to complete above -]
..\..Shortage of farm labor in the United States and cumbersome visa procedures for short-term foreign help prompt some farmers to operate with illegal alien workers....
[Is this strange AP reporter implying that we should feel sorry for "some farmers"? If they can't make it without breaking the law of the land, they should get out of farming. If only "some" farmers "operate with illegal alien workers," that means some other farmers do not break the law, and are placed at a competitive disadvantage by those who do break the law. WHY AREN'T WE ENFORCING THE LAW - instead of weeping for these sad law-breaking cheaters? Let's quit playing mind games here. Every country in the future that wants any kind of living standards is going to have to get a lot more serious about clear immigration policies and enforcement. And countries like the United States that have laid upon themselves the responsibility for taking in the unwanted human beings produced anywhere else on the planet is going to become third-world and worse. You can kiss your living standards goodbye. "Give me your poor, your huddled masses longing to be free, | The wretched refuse of your teeming shores...." For those of us who look further ahead than next Christmas, it is plain that continually giving those "teeming shores" a safety valve against change - us - is cruel love, short-term feelgood behavior, like a bandaid that never gets changed and winds up infecting, exhausting, and finally killing both sides. It is an excuse-for-a-policy that has no place in the Ecological Age adawning. Both sides should be approaching economic democracy by taking care of their own via worksharing - and its successors.]
Tokyo makes a mostly symbolic rate cut - Discount rate falls for first time in 5 years, but only by 0.15%, by Miki Tanikawa, NYT, B2.
Faced with mounting evidence that Japan's economy is stalling...
[It's only been in out&out depression for 10 years - how much evidence do you need?]
...and with growing pressure to do something about it,... [Oh why bother now? The wealthy aren't feeling any pain.]
the Bank of Japan announced an interest rate reduction [yester]day that was almost purely symbolic, while leaving most other aspects of its monetary policy unchanged.
[Great solution! Do something that won't do anything but you can say you've done something.]
The move today reduces the country's official discount rate by 15 basis points, or hundredths of a percentage point, to 0.35% from 0.50%.
'Monetarily, this means virtually nothing," said Robert Feldmlan, an economist at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. Of the $926B of total assets in the banking system, only $6B is lent to banks by the Bank of Japan under the discount rate, Mr. Feldman said. \Japan's\ more significant overnight call rate was left at 0.25%.
...The move...along with other measures announced [yester]day...was clearly intended as a gesture to ease fears of a liquidity crisis....
["Fears" of a liquidity crisis? They've HAD a liquidity crisis for 10 years!]
Since 1995, the bank has tried a series of measures to loosen money, including reducing the benchmark interbank rate to almost zero in February 1999.
[Do we need any further evidence that interest rate fiddling is superficial and irrelevant to economic performance? It will be swept off center stage in all future economies by being assigned to regular public referendum. Alan Greenspan and the world's other rate diddlers aren't geniuses. They're morons who have an idiotically long attention span for trivia. Unemployment will eventually after trying absolutely everything else and enduring decades of unnecessary pain and suffering, be completely solved by an automatic workweek-adjusting and employment&skill-sharing system like Timesizing, and inflation will be controlled by an incentive system that demotivates the concentration of skills and employment and fosters the continuous spread of market-determined scarce skills, first by corporations and then by individual employees. Meanwhile, just look at the irrelevant B.S. that Japanese "leaders" are putting their country through -]
Against a storm of opposition from leading politicians, the bank, led by Masaru Hayami, reversed the zero-interest policy last August on the grounds that the economy was recovering and that interest-free money was economically distorting.
[Japan is ahead of us in economic deterioration and learning the hard way - though they don't seem to have learned much yet (although we would like to hear more about their "law mandating shorter work hours" mentioned in a story we featured on our 'glimmers of timesizing' pages back on 2/03/2001). If your interest rate gets too close to zero, there's no incentive at all for people with money to take the risk of lending it. That's why only $6B of the Bank of Japan's $926B is lent out under the discount rate. The other $920B is presumably lent out over the discount rate or not lent out at all. The whole development is a textbook example of the ultimate impotence of our current financial shellgame that paints money different colors and calls it different names, but basically leaves it all concentrated in the hands of very very very few people, who could never spend it in a thousand lifetimes because they have neither the time nor the need. What passes as our whole current economic "edifice" will be regarded with amusement in the future and with considerable amazement that the system gave any semblance of working at all. We waste most of our consumers by nickle&diming them instead of paying them enough to purchase their own output, we waste most of our currency by paying most of it to a tiny percentage of our population who can hardly be bothered adding it to their already astronomical bank and stock accounts, and we carry on like everything's lovely, we're God's gift, and "it doesn't get any better than this." Ha. The only thing that's going to get the money centrifuged out into the hands of people who will actually use it to buy stuff that they need or like (and actually provide some demand, so we quit the supplyside BS, the demandside BS and get some BALANCE "side" for a change), is generating an artificial shortage of labor, of job applicants, of all kinds - an artificial labor shortage similar to the artificial labor shortage of wartime - though during wars we convince ourselves that it's not artificial, it's "real" - even though it's completely human generated and the result of no natural disasters. World War II (WW2) was the result of the stupid vindictiveness of the "Peace" of Versailles that supposedly ended The Great War (WW1) To End All Wars, and WW1 was the result of the stupid posturing of crippled Kaiser Willy and the even stupider rigidities of the stupid aristocracies who felt inflexibly bound to rush to one another's aid, however stupid the situation. After all, "who cares if we sacrifice a few hundred thousand common people. They breed like rabbits anyway and frankly we don't have the jobs for them" (at 48-54 hours a week). And the only way to generate an artificial shortage of labor without killing people is cutting the workshare per person per time unit - best candidate, CUT THE WORKWEEK. And if we do it right, we will cut it only as much as we need to at each step, and we will implement continuous training in the most highly pressured skills. This is essentially what the Timesizing program does - the first complete homeostatic core system ever designed. The rest of this article is too depressing and boring to recount. It's circular, impotent, and the only glimmer of hope on the Japanese "setting sun" horizon is that "law mandating shorter work hours" mentioned back on 2/03/2001. Japan has to start copying France's workweek reduction and employment spreading, and fast, or it will continue as economic roadkill and start to demo, for all the world to see, a serious return to third-world living standards. It's already bucking for the highest suicide rates - check out our general story on 8/18/2000 - plus the suicide per month of some Japanese banker or executive. And lest we 'Merkins get too cocky, remember we're vying with Russia for the World Cup in prisons - see story 8/10/2000 and nobody beats us for regular monthly workplace and school murder-suicides and massive private-sector makework - all unnecessary if we quit marginalizing ourselves by retaining a "work hard, not smart" 1940-era workweek regardless of 61 years of worksaving technology. And we think we're an intelligent species? Maybe "idiot savants," but that's about it.]

2/04-05/2001 weekend omens -

2/05/2001 US business's shortsighted schemes, letter to editor by Robert DiCurcio of Nantucket, Boston Globe, A14.
Regarding the Feb. 1 Business story, "The end of a sure thing": The decision on the part of directors of more and more companies to slash, and even suspend, dividends bodes ill for economic stability. What lies in the future for a company whose shareholders participate only as temporary owners, applauding everything that jacks up the short-term market price of their company, so as to divest themselves continually of ownership by selling their stock?
[Short-term "Capitulation Capitalism" -]
Is this pride in and loyalty to the mission of their company's endeavors? No, this is capitulation to trendy and risky "momentum investing": a sellout mentality, which most likely will lead to volatility followed by long-term devaluation. The US business community has weathered many economic storms because the owners historically stayed the course, not selling out but methodically taking moderate dividends if and when the company's earnings justified it.
But for those who now repudiate this sensible, dependable, and proven modus operandi because of tax considerations that favor capital gains over dividend income, it is worse than shortsighted. It is destabilizing of the future for their employees, and tantamount to recasting for themselves an upside down business plan: a sort of Ponzi scheme, if you will, in reverse.
[Here's an interesting argument in favor of capital gains taxes that we hadn't thought of. And the whole letter is an obituary for old-fashioned fundamentalism in investing and a heralding, some would say a rather belated heralding, of the sweeping victory for technical investing, alias short-term speculation. Well, as an entire society and economy focus more and more exclusively on the short-term, it becomes easier and easier for it to get hit from directions and dimensions that it's not watching. This is the mechanism by which, as some ancient philosopher to whom many wealthy Americans pay lipservice once said, "the first become last."]
2/04/2001 Executives borrow millions from firms and don't repay, Bloomberg via Boston Globe, H13.
...Top officers borrow money from their companies for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes, the debts are never repaid....
- Mattel loaned former Kraft Foods Inc. executive Robert Eckert $5.5m in May when he was named the toymaker's CEO. Eckert won't have to payp it back if he's still employed by Mattel on May 19, 2003, or is fired by the company before that date. If Eckert sticks around another year, Mattel will reimburse [him] for any taxes he incures from the forgiven loan. These types of policies may encourage employees to leave a company at the first sign of trouble rather than stick it out, \said\ Patrick McGurn, director of corporate programs for the Institutional Shareholder Service, which advises investors....
- Mattel will never see the $7.2m it loaned Eckert's predecessor, Jill Barad. When she stepped down in February, after the company's shares had slid 60% in the past year, Mattel forgave the debt and agree to pay an additional $3.31m for federal and state taxes Barad would have incurred. Barad had borrowed $3m from the El Segundo, Calif.-based company for a home loan and another $4.2m to pay taxes on a stock bonus. Mattel spokeswoman Lisa Marie Bongiovanni declined further comment on the loans.
  [Mattel sounds like a company of patsies that it's very good to be CEO of, briefly.]
- Priceline.com Inc. loaned form CFO Heidi Miller $3m when she joined the online retailer last February. The Norwalk-Conn.-based company forgave Miller's obligation when she quit in November and said it would take a Q4 charge of $3.3m for not collecting the debt. Priceline.com spokesman Brian Ek declined further comment. "It's the old job: If you owe the bank $1,000 and don't repay, it's your problem; if you owe a million, it's the bank's problem," McGurn said.
- Kodak loaned former chairman and CEO George Fisher $8.28m when he joined the world's biggest photography company in 1993.... Fisher had to use all but $1.5m of the proceeds to buy Kodak's shares.... The company agreed to forgive 20% of the principal annually and all of the accrued interest for five years so long as Fisher didn't leave Rochester, NY-based Kodak and join a competitor. In total, Kodak excused about $9.5m in principal and interest. Fisher stepped down as CEO last year and retired as the company's chairman on Jan. 1..\..
[Actually, with all the "no comments," these are sounding more like golden parachutes disguised as loans to get them past directors or shareholders.]
While few investors object to management's personal wealth being tied to a company's stock performance...
[though there are now so many company-damaging tricks CEOs can pull to briefly raise their stock (witness Chainsaw Dunlap), maybe they should find a better measure of executive performance and reward]
...some question how much incentive is created when the shares are bought with the employer's money. These loans, shareholders and their advocates say, suggest that corporate directors have trouble saying no to executives' demands. "If a board's not willing to stand up to the CEO about this issue, will they be able to stand up when the guy wants to make a bad acquisition or do something stupid?" asked Brian McGurn.... Corporate boards are turning increasingly to outsiders to run their companies. Mounting pressure on these new executives to perform has given business leaders more than enough leverage to demand loans and other perks when they negotiate their contracts with an employer.
[That can't be the reason for the leverage because lots of jobs are under pressure and they don't get golden parachutes. But there's a clue further on -]
"It may be difficult to identify candidates with confidence not only because of a potential dearth of [qualified applicants] but because it's a big job," said Ken Bertsch, director of corporate governance at the Teachers' Insurance and Annuity Assoc.-College Retirement Equities Fund, or TIAA-CREF, the biggest US pension fund....
[There are lots of "big jobs" so it can't be that. But this "potential dearth of qualified applicants" sounds like the real factor. In many ways, CEOs have projected an acute shortage of - themselves, and co-opted market forces to reward them insanely. Now they have no feedback or accountability, because they win even if they destroy the company. The Timesizing system puts everyone in that kind of shortage - wartime levels of shortage without the waste and war - and thereby centrifuges income out to people who actually spend it and thereby maintains markets, and at the same time makes skills a lot more transferable by implementing direct overtime-to-training conversion.]

2/03/2001 omens -

US jobless rate rises in tepid economy, Bloomberg and Kimberly Blanton, Boston Globe, F1.
The unemployment rate rose...0.2 percentage points...to 4.2% in January..\..as a markedly weaker US economy and a wave of corporate layoffs began to affect the federal government's monthly jobs report. While job creation continued at a robust pace of 268,000 jobs last month and appeared to accelerate, that figure masked growing weakness in the nation's job market. The bulk of the new jobs - 182,000 - were concentrated in the construction industry and the government sector.... Growth in construction sector employment was a record last month..\..
[Global warming spurring outdoor winter jobs?]
Said Denis McSweeney, regional commissioner in the Northeast for the Labaor Dept's Bureau of Labor Statistics [BLS], "...Most of the others [job categories] are flat."... Retailers' payrolls grew a modest 27,000. [And] the services sector, which has been powering the [bubble] in recent years, added 81,000 jobs last month, a more modest pace than was evident during much of last year.... Manufacturers continue to suffer most, as business customers cut back their orders and reduce inventories. Goods makers lost another 65,000 jobs in January, the government said. Since June, manufacturing has lost a total of 254,000 jobs..\..
Reports of a cooling employment situation follow weeks of deteriorating economic data on other fronts, from sliding consumer and business confidence and decreased business investment to slower sales of automobiles and personal computers.... Layoff announcements by major corporations...have begun snowballing.... The BLS said that layoffs involving 50 or more employees leaped in December to 2,667 - up sharply from 1,509 in December 1999.... [The NYT counterpart "U.S. jobless rate for January rose to 4.2% from 4% - Rise less than expected - Figures suggest the economy has not entered recession - Fed cuts may slow," by Louis Uchitelle, NYT, front page, is looking through rosier glasses, as you can tell from the subheads, and delivering a more positive spin, for those of you who don't want the doctor to tell you when you have cancer.]

1/29/2001 weekend omens -

Valley view, by Scott Kirsner @Large, Boston Globe, C1.
SAN JOSE, Calif. - The Internet bubble popped a lot more loudly out here. And the bubble is still in the process of deflating, collapsing in on itself....
[This pans out as a cheerleading story, so we should group it with 1/26's stories below, but the opening admission is certainly interesting.]
[Gotta train them youngsters to be docile and tolerate sleep deprivation for those "new"-economy 70-hour workweeks that we haven't seen so widespread since the 19th century! -]
Problems seen for teenagers who hold jobs, by Steven Greenhouse, NYT, front page, C22.
Some weekdays, Alicia Gunther, 17, works past midnight as a waitress at a New Jersey mall, and she readily admits that her work often hurts her grades and causes her to sleep through first period....
In a nation where more than five million teenagers under 18 work, a growing body of research is challenging the conventional wisdom and concluding that working long hours often undermines teenagers' education and overall development.... The National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine...found that when teenagers work more than 20 hours a week, it often leads to lower grades, higher alcohol use, and too little time with the parents and families..\..
[Now waytaminnit - wasn't this supposed to teach them teenage hellions....]
...responsibility, provide...pocket money and keep...them out of trouble[?!]
[In other words, the old "devil finds work for idle hands to do" theory? Seems it's backfiring.]
...In Massachusetts, several lawmakers are seeking to limit the maximum amount of time 16 and 17-year-olds can work during school weeks to 30 hours, down from the current maximum of 48 hours....
[Whoa, sounds like a law in contravention of the Fair Labor Standards Act, but hey, let the little zombies get overtime, right?]
In 1998, Connecticut lawmakers reduced the maximum number of hours 16 and 17 year olds can work during school weeks to 32 hours, down from 48, and last year they debated imposing fines on employers who violate those limits.
[Sort of like our "overtime tax" - but we propose a complete exemption for reinvestment in overtime-targeted training and hiring so the overtime doesn't get chronic.]
In New York, students that age are allowed to work up to 28 hours during school weeks, while in New Jersey the maximum is 40 hours....
[No wonder American McJobs pay so bad. We got effectively unlimited immigrants competing with schoolkids. And here's the -]
Quotation of the day, pointer blowout (to A22), NYT, A2.
"We have 16- and 17-year-olds working 40 hours a week on top of 30 hours in the classroom. Something has to give, and [education] seems to be taking a back seat." Peter J. Larkin, Massachusetts legislator.
[Well, now that we've so completely screwed up the purpose of technology, to make life easier (shorter hours, higher pay for all), might as well start grooming the nation's youth to put up with the deteriorating living standards we're bequeathing to them, since the Sainted FDR backed the wrong horse in 1933.]