• ...The top rate [was] 91%...uninterruptedly since the outbreak of World War II [WWII - 1941-42]....
  [Warsh does not mention the fact that the period covered (1941-1963) was one of solid boom and generally less than 2% unemployment.]

• ...In 1963, John F. Kennedy had cut the top rate to 75%....
  [And already starting four years later (1967), we were getting the first obscene flickerings of stagflation, a condition, as Jane Jacobs points out, completely at home in third-world countries where there's no middle class. It got a lot worse in the early '70s. And in the early 1970s, wages began their long stagnation.]

• Then Reagan cut taxes quickly and sharply in 1981. The top rate dropped to 50% immediately. Rates in all other brackets were cut by an average of 23% over the next three years and then indexed to inflation.
  [And immediately there was a recession, that Warsh blames completely on the Fed and not on the further dismantling of the centrifuge.]
  Given the deep recession contrived by Paul Volcker in his battle against inflation, and Congress's unwillingness to reduce spending, the tax cuts made for enormous deficits.

• Meanwhile, Social Security taxes were increased somewhat in 1983 to prepare for the retirement of the post-WWII generation [i.e., the "baby boomers"].
  [Social Security taxes, being a flat percentage for all incomes but capped at the time around $60k, had no centrifuging effect on income.]
  The combination [of deficits and higher SS taxes?] gave rise to a boom in asset values.
  [Presumably because the wealthy were by now consolidating sooo astronomically much money that they had nowhere else to put it.]

• Five years [after the 1981 taxcuts (1986)], Congress tried again - with Reagan's blessing. By eliminating a wide variety of loopholes of benefit mainly to the rich, it created a tax code with just two brackets - 28% and 15% - without changing the burden across classes...
  [Reducing the top bracket from 50% to 28% didn't change the burden across classes? What is Warsh smoking?]
  ...or reducing tax revenues. The deficits persisted at high levels.

• With the nation preparing to go to war in the Persian Gulf in 1991, George H.W. Bush agreed to raise the top bracket to 31% to narrow the deficit - and paid a terrible price with GOP conservatives for violating his campaign pledge to permit "no new taxes."
  [A 3% rise and the rich, now spoiled by what Warsh refers to above as Reagan's "individualistic sea change," are squealing like pigs.]

• The real jolt came with Bill Clinton. The deficit reduction act he sponsored in 1993 spurned the bipartisan tax simplification of 1986, raising the top rate to 39.6% and creating a 36% bracket.

• The revenue created is the source of the big givebacks in the current cut [to 33%? now in 2001].
  "A tax break for the rich approaching 7% of their taxable income" has a very different sound if you say, "Remove the Clinton surcharge." (That surcharge preceded a tremendous boom.)...
  [Here, at last, Warsh mentions a relationship between the centrifugation of a graduated tax and economic activity. Unfortunately, this last "tremendous boom" turned out to be a hollow bubble.]

5/27/2001  ominous qiki this weekend -

• Grads working harder to find their first job, by Cara Baruzzi, Boston Globe, City 1.
  ...Amid continued reports of a dipping economy and an uptick in unemployment rates in Massachusetts, thousands of Boston-area college seniors graduated this month with hopes of starting their first job - a job for which they have spent several years and thousands of dollars preparing....
  "One problem with the whole procedure is that everything is staggered," said..\..Boston College biology major..\..Victor Pereira [who landed a job with Mellon Financial - real relevant to biology!].... "You could interview with potential employers now and they can plan to call you months from now. Some people are having a hard time."
  [Surprise surprise, kids! "Education" has become a largely irrelevant initiation rite designed to keep you out of the job market as long as possible. If you don't land a job, please don't hesitate to go back to school like so many of the dot-com layoffees - a nice little MBA program perhaps? See #17 on our makework page for our opinion of what "education" has turned into.]

• Trafficking in humans spreads, by Naomi Koppel, Boston Globe, A9.
  GENEVA - Trafficking in humans is replacing slavery or bonded servitude as the most widespread form of forced labor, with the trafficking network touching almost every country in the world, the International Labor Organization said today. Most nations are either sending countries, transit countries, or receiving countries, and many are all three at once, said the 128-page study, "Stopping Forced Labor."
  The study, a followup to the UN agency's 1998 declaration on fundamental rights at work, said that forced labor is universally condemned, yet it still flourishes around the world.... The report pointed to Burma as the "prime instance of an extreme case of forced labor"..\..
  Ancient practices such as slavery and bonded labor still exist in some parts of the world, especially in Africa and southern Asia, but the fastest-growing form of forced labor is trafficking, it said.
  "The person may enter into an agreement with the recruiting agent on an apparently voluntary basis...but conditions at the destination point are likely to involve coercion, including physical restrictions on freedom of movement, abuse or violence, and fraud," it said. Victims frequently find themselves trapped in debt bondage and other slavery-like conditions." Much trafficking involves women and girls who are destined for the sex trade....

• Bush's free ride - From the attack dogs of the Clinton era to the lap dogs of today, the White House press corps sure isn't what it used to be, by Dan Kennedy, Boston Phoenix, front page.
  [The headline tells it all.]

• Bush is putting team in place for a full-bore assault on regulation, by Stephen Labaton, NYT, C1.
  [In other words, tear everything down before you have something simpler and better, like the forgotten Republican key to small and efficient government, to replace it. Brilliant. Maybe he should look into the one regulation that, in order to block, FDR invented the whole blizzard of programs and regulations in the costly "feel-good" but ineffectual New Deal - the Black Bill.]

• Hiring outlook seems weak, survey says, AP via NYT, C10.
  ...Only 27% of employers say they plan to add staff during the third quarter of this year, compared with 35% during the year-earlier period, according to the Employment Outlook Survey by the temporary staffing agency..\..Manpower Inc.... "Companies across all industries are continuing to show clear caution in hiring," said Jeff Joerres, Manpower's CEO.
  "The projected hiring strength in the present economy has declined for the second consecutive quarter and now seems to be approaching the 1990-91 levels in our survey history"..\..levels last seen during the 1990-91 recession.... The Manpower report said 9% of the 16,000 employers it surveyed expected to cut jobs, and 64% saw no change or were undecided.

1. Study, book note rise in work hours, stress, by Diane Lewis, Boston Globe, H2.
   Harvard University economist Juliet Schor was among the first researchers to shatter the myth that US employees are, by and large, lazy. In her [1991] book, "The Overworked American," Schor examined the increase in work hours since the 1960s and found the average American now [1991 - probably more in 2001] works an extra month per year. The reasons for this change ranged from a decline in unionization to the higher debt carried by US consumers.
   [Or the big background reason, colossal global labor glut as highly productive, 24/7 technology pours into the advanced economies with no corresponding reduction in the workweek (except in France). Net result? A huge decline in labor leverage, permanently flat wages and chronic recession - until we cut the workweek and share the vanishing work.]
   In the most recent study on overwork ["Feeling Overworked: When Work Becomes Too Much"], the NY-based Families and Work Institute looks at who is most likely to feel overworked, how the resulting stress affects job performance, and what working conditions are most likely to make employees feel overburdened.
   • 90% of employees agree they experience one of more of these pressures at work:]
     • My job requires that I work very fast
     • My job requires that I work very hard
     • I never have enough time to get everything done on my job
   • 60% of employees say they often or very often experience one or more of these problems when trying to focus on their jobs:
     • Have difficulty focusing on the work they do
     • Experience work interruptions [especially female employees]
     • Have to work on too many tasks at once [especially female employees]
   • 30% of employees feel chronically overworked. The more overworked they feel:
     • The more likely they are to report making mistakes at work
     • The more likely they feel angry toward their employers for expecting them to do so much
     • The more likely they are to look for work with a new employer
   [What a disgrace in an age of so much miraculous work-saving technology! = an insult to intelligence. And all from using technology to cut jobs instead of to cut hours.]

2. [And here's a case in point, demonstrating the kind of disaster that long hours can produce -]
   Right answer, wrong score: Test flaws take toll, NYT 5/20/2001 online via alert reader Alberto Tabiadon.
   ...The [test] scoring mistake that plagued Jake Plumley [whose graduation hopes were shot when he supposedly failed an NCS test] and his Minnesota classmates is a window into the way even glaring errors can escape detection. In fact, NCS [the testing company] did not catch the error. A parent did. Martin Swaden, a lawyer who lives in Mendota Heights, Minn., was concerned when his daughter, Sydney, failed the state's basic math test...by a single answer. Mr. Swaden...asked the state to see Sydney's test papers.... After threatening a lawsuit, Mr. Swaden was finally given an appointment. On July 21...he and a state employee sat down to review the 68 questions on Sydney's test.
   When they reached Question No. 41, Mr. Swaden immediately knew that his daughter's "wrong" answer was right. The question showed a split-rail fence, and asked which parts of it were parallel. Sydney had correctly chosen two horizontal rails; the answer key picked one horizontal rail and one upright post.
   "By the time we found the second scoring mistake, I knew she had passed," Mr. Swaden said. "By the third, I was concerned about just how bad this was."
   After including questions that were being field-tested for future use, someone at NCS had failed to adjust the answer key, resulting in 6 wrong answers out of 68 questions. Even worse, two quality control checks that would have caught the errors were never done....
   Eric Rud, an honor-roll student except in math, was one of those students mislabeled as having failed. Paralyzed in both legs at birth, Eric had achieved a fairly normal school life, playing wheelchair hockey and dreaming of becoming an architect. But when he was told he had failed, his spirits plummeted, his father, Rick Rud, said.... When the news of NCS's blunder reached Ms. Jax, the state schools commissioner, she wept. "I could not believe," she said, "how we could betray children that way." But when she learned that the error would have been caught if NCS had done the quality control checks it had promised in its bid, she was furious. She summoned the chief executive of NCS, David W. Smith, to a news conference and publicly blamed the company for the mistake.
   Mr. Smith made no excuses. "We messed up," he said. "We are extremely sorry this happened." NCS has offered a $1,000 tuition voucher to the seniors affected, and is covering the state's expenses for retesting. It also paid for a belated graduation ceremony at the State Capitol.... The mistake that derailed Jake Plumley's graduation plans occurred in a bland building in a field just outside Iowa City. From the driveway on North Dodge Street, the structure looks like an overgrown suite of medical offices with a small warehouse in the back.... This is ground zero for the testing industry, NCS's Measurement Services unit. More of the nation's standardized tests are scored here than anywhere else. Last year, nearly 300 million answer sheets coursed through this building, the vast majority without mishap.... What the company does in this building affects not only countless students, but the reputation of the entire industry. Inside, machines make the soft sound of shuffling cards as they scan in student answers to multiple-choice questions. Handwritten answers are also scanned in, to be scored later by workers.
   But behind the soft whirring and methodical procedures is an often frenzied rush to meet deadlines, a rush that left many people at the company feeling overwhelmed, current and former employees said. "There was a lack of personnel, a lack of time, too many projects, too few people," sighed Nina Metzner, an education assessment consultant who worked at NCS. "People were spread very, very thin." Those concerns were echoed by other current and former NCS employees, several of whom said those pressures had played a role in the Minnesota error and other problems at the company.
   Mr. Smith, the NCS chief executive, disputed those reports. The company has sustained a high level of accuracy, he said, by matching its staffing to the volume of its business. The Minnesota mistake, he said, was not caused by the pressures of a heavy workload but by "pure human error caused by individuals who had the necessary time to perform a quality function they did not perform."
   [Here's a CEO who is obviously out of touch and not listening.]
   Betsy Hickok, a former NCS scoring director, said she had worked hard to ensure the accurate scoring of essays. But that became more difficult, she said, as she and her scorers were pressed into working 12-hour days, six days a week.
   [That's a 72-hour workweek, CEO David W. Smith. We'd like to see your resignation before any more tests are scored by your company.]

5/14/2001  weekend omens -

• [How to Induce a Recession -]
  Wary spending by executives cools economy - Executives key to economy instead of the consumers - The nature of the business cycle may have changed again, by Louis Uchitelle, NYT, front page.
  People hang on Alan Greenspan's every word, but these days they should listen to business executives like Earnest W. Deavenport [chairman of Eastman Chemical Co.] and David E. Berges [president of Honeywell's Consumer Products Group] even more. The decisions they make are turning out to have more power to lift the economy, or keep it weak, than Mr. Greenspan's control over interest rates.
  [Getting close to a frontpage NYT admission that interest rate fiddling are merely cosmetic.]
  And for now, corporate executives are pulling back....
  [Pulling back despite lower interest rates that would let them borrow and expand more cheaply. America is creeping toward the same zero-interest-rate helplessness that Japan has been wallowing in for most of the last decade.]
  "We were spending $600-800m a year in the mid-1990's," Mr. Deavenport said, referring to all of Eastman's capital spending, "and now we are down to less than $300m, mostly for maintenance."
  Mr. Berges is closing plants, not building new ones: two closings in the last 12 months and a third planned for this year.... "The upturn in capital spending that everyone longs for will not come from us," Mr. Berges said. "We are not a growth business these days."
  This business cycle, which began in 1991 and is now the longest on record, is different. In all the others since World War II, the economy responded primarily to consumers, expanding and contracting in step with their spending.
  [Remember the spindoctoring of the dot-com "boom" and the "New Economy"? Here we go a-ga-ain...]
  Consumers still play a big role, of course. But in its rush to acquire the new information technologies, business made the economy boom in the 1990's. Its spending rose considerably faster than consumer outlays. And when business pulled back last year, the economy fell into the doldrums.
  A new boom-and-bust cycle had appeared, one more like those in the first half of the last century - in which capital spending wagged the dog.
  [There's no dichotomy here. Executives and consumers go together. Executives spend big money and hire more employees ("upsizing") and employees leave the office and start spending money as consumers. But watch this reporter try to "work" the dichotomy here -]
  But getting executives to spend again for machinery and equipment they do not need is far harder, economists say, than getting consumers to step up spending on extras....
  [Well that could just be because executives are replacing employees with machinery and equipment instead of facilitating them. And when you replace employees who leave and spend and double as consumers with machinery and equipment that doesn't leave or spend or consume, you cut your customers' customers, and when you cut your customers' customers, you cut your own customers and your own markets. We are putting a fine point on a fundamental contradiction in current management theory and strategy, the strategy of using technology to cut jobs instead of hours in order to keep everyone employed. It's the famed Ford-Reuther paraodox - Ford took labor leader Reuther on a tour of a newly mechanized and robotized factory in the late 1930s - Ford said to Reuther, "Let's see you unionize these robots" and Reuther retorted, "Let's see you sell them cars." The only intelligent way out of this paradox is Timesizing. There are plenty of unintelligent ways - downsizing, war, prison culture, plague, emigration, export dependency.... (The other two clinchers for cutting working hours are the need to reverse a concentration of income so intense that it vacuums the active spending power away from its own necessarily huge investments, and ultimately need to stabilize consumption to reduce environmental impact.)]

• ['bad, but'...]
  Report shows nurses may leave profession, by Philip Hilts, NYT, A20.
  ...In the United States 20% of the nurses surveyed, and a third of those younger than 30, plan to leave the field in the next year..\..
  [This is terrible for the US healthcare system, for whatever it's worth these days (funny, you don't hear people sneering at the Canadian system any more), but this kind of acute shortage will get nurses a much better shake in terms of working hours and pay.]
  The study by the University of Pennsylvania surveyed 43,000 nurses in five countries, and found that they believe their pay is satisfactory and that doctors are generally good, but that patient care is rapidly deteriorating and stress is increasing, largely because of bad management and cost-cutting....

1. ["April is the cruellest month..."]
   5/06  Stock investors manage to ignore 223,000 lost jobs, by Gretchen Morgenson, NYT, 3-1.
   ...The U.S. economy lost more jobs in April than it had at any time during the last 10 years.... Equally ominous was the rate of employment growth as measured by a survey of households; for the first time in a decade, it fell into negative territory. That rate typically goes negative only in a recession....

2. 5/07  After two centuries, Washington is losing its only public hospital - Fears that the poor and uninsured may be losing a health care safety net, by Sheryl Stolberg, NYT, front page.
   ..."We are tossing public health into the trash," said Dr. Michal Young, a neo-natologist and president of the hospital's medical and dental staff. "When you lose public health in the capital of the most powerful nation in the world, it is an indicator of what the rest of the country is going to do."...
   Indeed, it is an indicator of what the rest of the country is already doing.... Public hospitals offer free care for the indigent, typically at greater levels than private hospitals, and at taxpayers' expense..\.. Over the past two decades, as competition has forced hospital mergers and acquisitions, the number of public hospitals has dwindled. In 1999, the last year for which figures are available, that number was 1,197, down from 1,778 in 1980, according to the American Hospital Association. By comparison, the number of private hospitals dropped to 3,759 from 4,052....

3. 5/07  Now you need an area code just to call your neighbors, by Simon Romero, NYT, front page.
   Technology is supposed to make life easier, but the simple act of making a phone call is becoming more complicated....
   [Phil Hyde now has to dial 10 numbers just to call colleague Kate upstairs = incentive to stairclimb?]

1. What, us, worry? - Layoff: A spring break for some in the dot-com generation, by Matt Richtel, NYT, B1.
   SAN FRANCISCO... - Until he was laid off in February, Andrew H. Way oversaw customer service and some sales operations at an Internet company, an $85,000-a-year job that demanded 12-hour days....
   [No job at our technology levels "demands" 12-hour days without considerable bad management, confusion of "face time" with productive work, and confusion of overwork with importance. And what does this bad management and employee overload yield? Check our next headline -]

2. U.S. jobless rate hit 4.5% in April; 223,000 jobs lost - Biggest loss since 1991 - Reductions spread to service sector..., by Louis Uchitelle, NYT, front page.
   [And that's with a jobless rate carefully misdefined to miss half the problem. And here's some of the downstream dislocation -]

3. US office vacancy rates up - Mounting job losses, higher rents are cited, by Scott Nelson, Boston Globe, C1.
   ...Torto Wheaton Research, a Boston division of CB Richard Ellis Services Inc., the nation's biggest property broker, said vacancy rates in major metropolitan areas rose from 8.3% at the end of the year to 9.5% by March 31. That's [the rate's] biggest one-quarter jump since Torto Wheaton began tracking vacancies 15 years ago....
   [Time to share the vanishing employment before technology shoulders it all and we use no employees to produce mountains of stuff - and no markets to sell it all to.]

• Britain: Vote of confidence, by Alan Cowell, NYT, B2.
  ...Sir Christopher Bland [is] the newly appointed chairman of [debt-ridden] British Telecommunications PLC, [replacing] Sir Iain Vallance on May 1. A big part of Sir Christopher's $700,000-a-year job is to revive the company's share price [which is] at less than half of last year's peak....
  [This is like evaluating a cancer doctor by how happy his cancer patients are in church every Sunday. Considerations of stock price should never never Never enter executive job descriptions or executive discussions about corporate goals because stock holders by and large are no longer committed stake holders. They are will-o-the-wisp speculators. The fact that considerations of stock manipulation have taken over so many board rooms in the last century or two is another indication that the whole joint stock concept has outlived its usefulness and has become a factor in the deterioration of the business corporation, sending, as it so often does, the wrong messages to corporate leaders, messages that harm the corporation, its employees, its long-term stockholders, and, yes, its executives. Who should the corporation put first? Those with the biggest dependence on it = its employees who are also its customers. And second, its customers who are not also employees. It's come to the point where an executive's owning stock in his own company amounts to a conflict of interest. How then should employees, including top execs, be motivated? By a percentage of profits, similar to the yearly bonus system of one of main US timesizing companies, Lincoln Electric. (But the weakness of the yearly bonus should be avoided. The payout should be at least monthly if not more frequently, so that conscience-stricken CEOs do not trap themselves into a big payout at year's end because of employees' expectations of such in cases where none is warranted because of CEO errors.)]

1. Advantage, employers: Once able to write own ticket, job seekers are finding the tide has turned, by Michael Rosenwald, Boston Globe, front page.
   [Not so good considering employees could 'write their own ticket' in only a few highly publicized areas during the last few years anyway.]

2. Globalism: pain for many, gain for few, op ed by columnist Michael Kelly, Boston Globe, A15.
   ...Last week in Quebec, George W. Bush...inadvertently let out [that] the purpose of globalism is to allow capital to freely chase profits around the world.... What the unionsts know is that globalization ultimately depends on driving manufacturing jobs out of..\..high-wage, high-[standards] countries \to low\-wage, low-[standards] countries.... This is globalism's reason for being. [Any] spread of democracy and wealth is a byproduct....
   This may result in..."real jobs for real people" in Africa, but it also results in the loss of real jobs for real people in, say, Akron.... What does that cost America? Over time, many, many millions, a price that globalists ignore....
   [Funny he never gets to a more important price that globalists ignore - the weakening of their best markets - back in those high-wage high-standards countries. They think they can move jobs indefinitely from their strongest markets to their weakest markets and keep selling the same volume to their erstwhile strongest markets. That's called a "free lunch" and it's notoriously unsustainable. We used to smear the Communists for reducing the world to the lowest common denominator. Now we Capitalists are doing it.]

3. Japan: Economic estimate lowered, Reuters via NYT, W1.
   ...from 0.8 to 0.7 for 4Q00....
   [We didn't think it could go any lower, but then again, once it turns negative, the negative number series is also infinite. Note that Japan is the nation of workoholics that coined the term "karoshi" for "death by overwork."]

4. Indonesia faces policy dilemma as IMF loan stalls, Bloomberg Apr/25/2001 9:51 ET via AOLNews.
   ...An estimated 6m people out of more than 220m are unemployed, and of the estimated 90m employed, between a quarter and a third are "under-employed", working fewer than 35 hours weekly, according to economists....
   [Hm, where did we see this kind of rigid thinking before? Oh yes, Hong Kong on 3/20/2001. Seems like they're basing their definition on historical accident, instead of on how to activate maximum domestic markets by getting the maximum number of people trained and working and earning and spending. Let's see, 6m/220m= 2.7% of their total population is unemployed, or a hefty 6m/(90m+6m)= over 6.25% of their workforce. On the simplest assumptions, 90m people working 40-hr weeks means 90mX40hrs= 3600m hrs/wk are being worked. Putting everyone to work and activating that crippled 6.25% of their domestic markets would involve simply reducing the workweek gradually to 3600hrs/96m= 37.5 hrs/wk. But the multiplier effect of that shift would probably involve an increase in domestic demand closer to 10%, because "the less concentration (of wealth), the more circulation." This, in simplified form, is the principle Timesizing is based on, and the principle we ran the world on for the 150 years prior to 1940, when we reduced the workweek from over 80 hours to 40.]

• State's jobless rate rises to 3.1% - An agency that tracks layoffs says 28,000 Bay State workers have lost jobs since July, by Kimberly Blanton, Boston Globe, C1.
  Rising numbers of layoffs drove Massachusetts' unemployment rate up to 3.1% in March, from 2.7% in February.... The number of unemployed workers in the state surged by 14,300 \according to\ the state Division of Employment and Training.... That was the biggest single-month increase since a severe recession ravaged the state's economy in 1991. \The rate\ remains far lower than the 4.3% US unemployment rate.
  Jonathan Raymond, president of Commonwealth Corp., a public agency that tracks layoffs in Mass. said [the layoff] pace is "picking up." From July through September [3Q00], he said, about 60 Mass. companies announced layoffs of [7,000] workers. In the first three months this year [1Q01], layoffs accelerated to 110 announcements, affecting 12,000 workers. And in some cases, Raymond said, "We're seeing companies come back witth layoffs a second time."...

1. Japan: economic outlook weakens, by Miki Tanikawa, NYT, W1.
   ...The government...downgraded the economic assessment when it said last week that the economy was weakening. The bearish term was adopted for the first time since September 1995.
   [They don't have nearly as much of a rich-poor gap as we have, but they still have way too much. They need to increase everyone's security so people feel free to shop more - and pay ordinary employees more so they have more to shop with. The two are mutually reinforcing. And a third measure is to give them more time to shop by cutting the workweek. This is the one measure that would accomplish all three, because cutting the workweek mops up under-employment and raises wages by market forces. Where do the raises come from? From the unspendable super-extra-abundance of the rich - there is nowhere else. We call it timesizing, in contrast to downsizing, debt, makework, and wealth concentration.]

2. Training is investment in our future - As the economy changes, the employment prospects for our teens diminish, by Don Gillis, Boston Globe, C4.
   ...and workers and businesses throughout [Massachusetts] are faced with great uncertainty..\.. Just last week, Fed chairman Alan Greenspan suggested that rather than focus our economic interventions solely on lower interest rates or the elimination of trade barriers...
   [the first cosmetic and the second naive and destructive]
   we should be looking at retraining workers....
   [Then Don, who heads something called the Mass. Workforce Board Assoc., goes on to suggest four makework programs. We have a better suggestion. Quit focusing on any one group of jobseekers. Quit trying to coddle wealthy employers who downsize despite profits. Just make the workweek respond to under-employment (UE). If UE goes up, the workweek goes down. As long as UE exists, the workweek goes down. And use the incidence of overtime above the shortened workweek to target, trigger, pace and finance on-the-job training (OJT). We make altogether too much fuss about "education" and off-site training these days. Let's cut out the entire industries of middlemen and focus on OJT, as we did during the world wars. And let's get the workweek down to where it should be for our levels of worksaving technology. What level is that? Whatever level it takes induce the job market and the private sector to provide all our citizens with well-paying jobs and a good level of self-support, so that taxpayers and government can stop supporting them. This is the gist of Timesizing.]

1. 4/15 Layoffs blindside [Massachusetts] region, by Bruce Butterfield, Boston Globe, E1.
   ..."How could it all change so fast?" Thousands of newly laid-off workers across Massachusetts are asking the same question.... Nationally, companies since December have been laying off workers at a rate of more than 100,000 a month, according to the outplacement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas. Last April, the total number of layoffs around the country was just 37,000....

2. 4/16 Attack of the disruptive disk - Sales of DVD's are challenging the business of renting movies, by Geraldine Fabrikant, NYT, C1.
   [Ah, aren't we constantly assured by the media that though supposedly more efficient and worksaving, "technology creates more jobs than it destroys"? Gee whiz, what if it isn't true, or what if it's true but the jobs technology is creating are less urgently demanded? Then, our worst case plan - Timesizing.]

• [Further evidence that money is so concentrated there's nowhere else to put it -]
  Dow soars above 10,000 on tech rally - Investors buying merely in belief no bad news looming, by Walter Hamilton, LA Times via Boston Globe, D1.
  ...There was no major corporate or economic news to explain the surge in share prices. Rather, investors piled into the market in the belief that no further bad news will come out in the next few weeks. And after an almost uninterrupted drop in stock prices over the last two months, that was enough to drive stock prices higher....
  [The unimaginable concentration of wealth goes on, suctioning the spending power and markets away from the productivity itself is invested in. The top heavy economy, the 'Black Hole' of concentrated wealth, accelerates on. And the more concentration, the less circulation. And tomorrow, the old fatal "remedies" will be proffered yet again, as humanity displays its failure to learn from history - "Some experts say saving is a key factor in economic recovery" is the second subtitle of "Raising funds after the fall - Venture capital exists for realistic prospects," by Daniel Altman, 4/12/2001 NYT, C1. In it, there is no hint of realization that we've concentrated so much wealth and income so tightly that we have no choice but to save, and to save far far more than can support our investment targets with sustainable markets. The solution is reinvestment in our own markets on a COLOSSAL scale compared to today, or anything we've seen in history apart from war and plague years. And the intelligent way to engineer this level of reinvestment on a market-oriented basis is to mop up and normalize all our massive marginalized labor by cutting the workweek.]

• Grim times for jobs in high technology, LA Times via Boston Globe, C3.
  ...Employment at high-technology companies...is shrinking by tens of thousands of workers in what some experts fear could cause long-term damage to the entire US economy.... The scope of the layoffs appeared for the first [huh??] time in numbers released by the Labor Dept. on Friday. Since cresting in December, the tech industry shed more than 38,000 jobs in the first three months of this year.... That's just a sliver of the 10.7m people employed at US tech companies, but thousands more layoffs are expected. Of the more than 400,000 job cuts announced by US corporations this year, more than one-third were from tech companies, according to Challenger Gray & Christmas, a Chicago firm that tracks such data.... The tech industry has been slammed in recent months as US businesses have reined in their purchases of tech equipment amid the economic slowdown.
  [Time to read the handwriting on the wall in the over-dramatically titled "End of Work" by Jeremy Rifkin and quit doubletalking our way into believing that technology both efficiently saves work AND "creates more jobs than it destroys." We need a completely different approach that allows us to automatically share the vanishing work, and we need it fast. The most advanced design in the world for such a system is Timesizing. It is phased to ensure that wages and spending and markets don't shrink as the workweek shrinks, it has an inflation-blocking feature that doesn't require fostering unemployment like our current NAIRU (non-accelerating-inflation rate of unemployment) and best of all, it implements something we've needed for a long time, continuous training.]

1. U.S. report shows job loss in March [86,000] was most since '91 [Nov. 129,000] - New fears of recession - Rise in unemployment rate to 4.3% stokes hopes on Wall Street of Fed rate cut, by Louis Uchitelle, NYT, front page.
   ...The unemployment rate took another tick upward, to 4.3% from 4.2% in February and 3.9% in October, as the Labor Dept.'s job figures, announced yesterday, finally reflected the parade of layoffs and hiring freezes since last fall. Job losses in March, as they have been for months, were concentrated in manufacturing. But this time, job gains elsewhere were no longer sufficient to offset the cutbacks.
   [They haven't been for years anyway, because ever since the Labor Dept. started counted part-time jobs as full-time jobs in the early 1990's, they've been "offsetting" relatively high full-time job loss with relatively high part-time job gain, "apples and oranges."]
   Stock prices, in reaction, fell sharply....
   [Gee, don't tell us speculators are finally figuring out the productivity they're "invested" in might need some consumer markets and those consumers might actually need some jobs to get money to spend! Here's some clips from an item yesterday that came out in all caps because Bloomberg News apparently wants to warn us about the possible inaccuracies and misspellings of their machine? transcription, "Challenger Gray's John Challenger (transcript of interview)," Bloomberg Apr/05/2001 11:52 ET via AOLNews - ...[PAGE] HOPKINS: ...OVER HALF A MILLION JOBS HAVE BEEN AXED SINCE DECEMBER.... YET...WE'RE NOT SEEING LONG LINES AT THE UNEMPLOYMENT OFFICES. WHAT'S GOING ON? [JOHN] CHALLENGER: UNEMPLOYMENT TRADITIONALLY IS A LAGGING INDICATOR. ...AS THE ECONOMY STARTS TO SLOW DOWN...COMPANIES HORDE THEIR WORKERS. THEY HOLD ONTO THEM.... SO...EMPLOYMENT HAS STAYED STRONG, 4.2% THROUGH FEBRUARY. BUT LAYOFFS HAVE BEEN MOUNTING IN WAYS WE HAVE NEVER SEEN.... SINCE WE BEGAN TRACKING...DOWNSIZING NUMBERS...IN JANUARY OF 1993, WE HAVE NEVER SEEN THESE KIND OF CUTS. WE HAVE NOW SEEN FOUR CONSECUTIVE MONTHS OVER 100,000 JOB CUT ANNOUNCEMENTS. WE'RE AWASH IN THOSE ANNOUNCEMENTS IN WAYS THAT...INDUSTRIES ACROSS THE BOARD HAVE NEVER DONE IN THIS KIND OF LOCK STEP..\.. THE SLOWDOWN ACTUALLY STARTED IN JULY. WE WERE 5.6% GROWTH OVER THE SUMMER OF 2000. DROPPED ALL THE WAY TO 2.2. NOW LOOKS LIKE NEAR ZERO....]

2. Well off but still pressed, doctor could use tax cut, by Jim Yardley, NYT, front page.
   Robert Cline['s] income approached $300,000 last year, ranking him among the wealthiest 2% of all Americans. And yet Dr. Cline...a surgeon, says he does not feel rich. He worries about his retirement.
   [Phone 800-KEVORKIAN like the rest of us.]
   He worries about paying for college for his six young children,...
   [Let them wait tables and go to low-tuition state colleges.]
   ...not to mention weddings for his five daughters.
   [Let them elope like the rest of us.]
   And he worries that his earning power is fairly stagnant in a medical profession squeezed by insurance companies and tightening Medicare reimbursement rates....
   [Our heart bleeds. What about the squeeze his $300,000 a year puts on the rest of us? "He earns it"? Then let him vote that the AMA break open the bottleneck of access to medical skills and let him get more colleagues and assistants to share the workload, cut his hours and get some rest.
   [Then yesterday there was another sob story, another "poor little rich boy" - "Home exemptions snag bankruptcy bill," by Philip Shenon, NYT, front page - "The life of the onetime corporate raider Paul A. Bilzerian would seem to be a shambles right now. He declared bankruptcy in Florida in January, listing $140m in debts...but at least [he has] someplace to go home to. In Florida...state law allows debtors to shield their homes from creditors, even multimillion-dollar mansions. And for Mr. Bilzerian, home is a $5 million, 11-bedroom, 36,000-square-foot estate, the largest private residence in the Tampa Bay area, complete with indoor basketball court, movie theater, nine-car garage and its own elevator.... The...unlimited homestead exemption also exists in Texas, Iowa, Kansas, and South Dakota...."]

3. A computer would do better than the Fed - Limit the human variable, op ed by T. J. Rodgers, NYT, A25.
   [We prefer to jump the other way - increase the decision-participation to all the "humans" affected - by making interest rates a matter of regular binding public referendum. "The cure for the evils of democracy is MORE DEMOCRACY." Al Smith.]

• [surprise, surprise - after decades of mergers, banks act more like market-gouging monopolies -]
  Late fees on credit cards punish users, Masspirg says, by Bruce Mohl, Boston Globe, D1.
  Credit card companies have developed an enormously profitable "late payment" business by [shifting from annual fees to monthly late fees. They are making it harder for cardholders to pay on time and gouging them with fees and penalty interest rates when they don't, according to a report released today by the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group [MassPIRG].
  A survey of 100 credit card offers found the average grace period for making a payment had dropped to 22.6 days, from a historic average of 30 days. The average late-payment fee had more than doubled in the past nine years, to $27.61.
  [Note in general the blanket dis-integration effect that occurs in a society as decades of technological "work-saving" are taken in mergers and layoffs for a mounting, marginalized minority of employees, instead of in more free time for the entire workforce of the nation. The same thing happened in the 1920s, particularly in banking, because of the disempowerment of consumers, most of whom were disempowered employees. What about the wealthy? If you have a big account, you get special treatment and special low interest rates by going to special banks, like Chase or Cambridge Trust, who won't look at you unless you're talking about $100,000 or $1,000,000. And of course, these special banks still respect their customers the way all banks respected all customers in the 40s and 50s. So let's see. We have the widening income gap, the widening digital divide, 30% of American black men behind bars, this gap in banking and other services, and tomorrow, "Gap between best and worst widens on U.S. reading test," by Kate Zernike, 4/07/2001 NYT, front page. And Soros wants an "open society" without any caps on income concentration? What's the problem with at least getting a cap on employment and skill concentration, à la Timesizing?!]
  A late payment - in some cases, even to another credit card company - can trigger a new penalty interest rate. Sixty of the 100 cards surveyed carried penalty interest rates. The average penalty rate was 22.84% a year, or 8% over the average rate for purchases. FleetBoston Financial Corp. just notified its gold MasterCard customers that it is increasing its penalty rate to 27.59%, from 24.9%. The rate kicks in if a customer makes a late payment, exceeds a credit limit, or has the account closed. "The credit card industry is out of control," said Tara Hudson, author of the report titled, "The Credit Card Trap."...
  [Especially now they're going to make it harder to declare bankruptcy - unless uncapped home exemptions for the wealthy snag the bill (see "Home exemptions snag bankruptcy bill," by Philip Shenon, NYT, today's front page). So what's that song about
        ...Another day older and deeper in debt -
        Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I cain't go-o-o -
        I owe my soul to the company sto-o-ore.
  This is backfiring on the banks in many cases. For example, we don't know about you folks, but we here at Timesizing.com have basically stopped using credit cards in favor of debit cards. And if you look for them online, there are still a few credit card banks - in places like Kentucky and Tennessee - that still have annual fees and no monthly late fees.]

• Nightmare on Wall Street - A tight-fisted consumer, by Gretchen Morgenson, NYT, C1.
  [Wall St. just doesn't get it. They think everybody's like them, LOADED. The possibility that consumers may just not have the money any more is the farthest thing from their little minds. The four taboo connections they cannot, must not, make (lest the finger point to them & their love of layoffs) are:
  1. investments in productivity depend on markets for the productivity,
  2. those markets depend on consumer spending,
  3. consumer spending depends on wages, and
  4. wages depend on jobs.
  "Stocks depend on jobs" is a much truer generalization than "jobs depend on stocks." Wall Street keeps trying to tell us that the majoritiy of Americans own stocks so the "wealth effect" from rising stocks to rising spending&markets is significant. The fact is that at best, 51% of American households own stocks. That means that if one person in a household of five has a 401k with $500 in stocks, they get counted. But even if you have $500,000 in stocks, what good are higher stock values in accounts that most Americans can't touch because they haven't retired? Rising stocks have about as much effect on spending and markets as Dubya's taxcut for the rich. The stock market is the locus of less spending and markets, not more. The only reason stock prices inflated so high the last few years is because, with downsizing instead of timesizing, the top brackets were getting sooo much income that they couldn't spend it. And they had no quick alternative but to throw it into stocks. So stocks rose instead of wages and markets. Hence today's Great Divide between super-astronomically bloated investment capital and strangled consumer markets (which any investments depend on to hold their value). We are recreating the Great Depression with an overlong workweek, a consequently marginalized and low-wage workforce and a starving consumer base, next to astronomically concentrated income and a super-bloated stock market that we've been stuffing with that too-funnelled-to-spend income.]

4/03/2001 qik omens -

1. Manufacturing down for 8th consecutive month, AP via NYT, C4.

2. U.S. population has biggest 10-year rise ever, by Eric Schmitt, NYT, A10.
   ...surpassing the growth between 1950 and 1960 at the peak of the baby boom, the Census Bureau reported today. Even as many other industrial countries are suffering [we would say "enjoying" - ed.] declining populations because of shrinking birth rates, the United States swelled by 32.7m people to 281,400,000, the result of waves of immigrants with families and a steady birth rate that outpaced deaths. The increase, which was greater than the country's population total during the Civil War [beginning or end?!], easily surpassed the previous record growth of 28m in the 1950's....
   The population center of the country...moved to Edgar Springs, Mo., nearly 40 miles southwest of DeSoto, Mo., the pop midpoint 10 yrs ago....
   [So more population in the Southwest deserts and in California, where they're too dumb to provide for sustainable power generation. And guess who's subsidizing the water bill's of Las Vegas's, Phoenix's and Tucson's fountains and swimming pools in the desert. Watch for big "opportunities" for those of us in the Northwest to "help out" with their electric bills too (notice today's BG front business-page headline, "Mass. Electric to hike rates up to 69%.")]