Collapse - 7/2001

Doomwatch^TM vs. Timesizing^®

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

7/31/2001 ominous qikis -

Net is down 56% at Parker Hannifin, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
CLEVELAND - ..."We haven't seen a downturn this deep and this long since the 1982-83 recession"...said \its\ treasurer, Timothy Pistell....
[In the immortal words of Curly, Larry and Mo, "Ooh ooh ooh." We were back 10 years. Now we're back 20 years. Let's see. At this rate, how long before we get back to 1932-33? But perhaps Parker Hannifin is already ready to take a serious look at the recession-proofing strategies of its Cleveland neighbor, Lincoln Electric.]
Japanese production fell in June, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
...for the 4th consecutive month...down 0.7% from May..\..a gloomy sign that the country has slipped back into recession.... For the 2nd quarter, output fell 4% from the period in 2000. "This is very, very serious, and points to a very big decline in GDP in the quarter," said Jeff Young, chief economist at Nikko Salomon Smith Barney.... A recent string of indicators have provided ominous hints that a long slump may be in the offing....
[...in our second-largest world economy. And so will it be everywhere until -
- economists raise the sophistication of their labor-input models from simply counting heads ("employment") to counting heads times worktime (employment x workweek) and
- management schools and CEOs stop teaching that technology creates more employment than it destroys and start sharing the vanishing work (in conjunction with continuous, overtime-targeted training and retraining)]
Noblesse oblige - Confronting a new rogue nation, op ed by Thomas Friedman, NYT, A23.
...America is referred to as a "rogue state" in Europe now as often as Iraq....
[Mounting fear of the "Land of the Free" is all too suddenly going to weld disparate Europeans and Asians together into rival economies and unite them into countervailing superpowers. And there's going to be such a rush for the exits from the Republican Party in 2004....]
Surprising result in welfare-to-work studies, by Tamar Lewin, NYT, A16.
Early studies of families in three welfare-to-work programs have found unexpected evidence that their adolescent children have lower academic achievement and more behavioral problems than the children of other welfare households....
[Well, what do you expect when parents, usually single parents, are run ragged working forty-plus hours a week - duh. With our high levels of work-saving technology, none of us should be forced to work more than 20-25 hours a week in this new millennium and have plenty of time for our children. The only thing stopping us is the obtuseness of our economists and business schools in ignoring worktime as an economic variable (in fact an economic control variable, in fact the economic control variable), their obsolete and commonsense-countering insistence that technology creates more work than it destroys, and our masochistic refusal to share the vanishing work and reverse the concentration of income.]
As audiences discover frugality [dba officially denied recession], pop culture starts feeling a chill, by Stephen Kinzer, NYT, front page.
[This is the opposite of what's happening in France on the shorter workweek (see our Timesizing story on 4/29/2001). More people employed. More people with money. More people with time.]
Britain: Victory for [$18.5B] subway privatization, by Warren Hoge, NYT, A10.
...[regardless of being] condemned as costly and unsafe by the London transport commissioner...an American[!] credited with rescuing systems in New York and Boston [and regardless of the Mayor's] obligation to run a "safe, integrated, efficient and economic" network.... [Privatization. Rich folks' idee fixe rips on, regardless. The London Underground works and "If it works, don't fix it!"? Forget it. Rich folks ain't no longer de conservatives. Dey now de radicals. Radically insulated. Radically short-sighted. Radically suicidal. And dragging the rest of us down with them. Class warfare? They're always the ones who bumble into it first, long before the rest of us wake up to the situation they have us all living in. Their answer? "Here's a little charity. Now kindly go away." Any system that relies on capricious charity for vital economic functions is, to the extent of its reliance, lethally flawed.]
[South Africa: Roman Catholic] Bishops condemn condoms, Reuters via NYT, A10.
[Vatican Inc. still can't quite make it into the 20th century let alone the 21st, let alone the world of AIDS, let alone the continent of AIDS. Their difficulties recruiting priests will continue to expand and their operation will continue to shrink. Feedback blockage. And btw, was it "How the Irish Saved Civilization" that pointed out why Vatican Inc. likes a celibate staff? A: no heirs to channel assets away from...Vatican Inc.]
Democrats to let Navy pay for Cheney's electricity, by Philip Shenon, NYT, A14.
[Still want to challenge Nader's dismissal of the Dems as no different from the GOP where it counts/costs?]

7/29/2001 weekend ominous qikis -

A plunge in profits is raising risk for stock market and economy, by Alex Berenson, NYT, front page.
...for the first time in a decade.... In profit reports released over the last two weeks, large publicly traded companies said that their earnings fell an average of 17% in the second quarter, compared with a year earlier....
The shadows of globalization - The coffee connection - ...First in a...series tracing consumer goods in the U.S. to their origin in developing countries - Thousands of miles from Boston's breakfast tables and fast-food restaurants, at the other end of a global trade network, Guatemala's farmers are barely scraping by, by Elizabeth Neuffer, Boston Globe, front page.

7/28/2001 omens -

U.S. economy grew at snail's pace in spring quarter - Slowest since early '93 - Still, the expansion continues despite a steep decline in spending by businesses, by David Leonhardt, NYT, front page.
[- "the expansion continues" but only if you don't remove the huge cheerleading inflators from our economic measures. The Boston Globe has a more emotionally appropriate headline -]
Growth in US hits 8-year low, by Scott Nelson, BG, front page.
[Back to the Times version -]
Economic growth nearly halted in the second quarter...
[And has actually been in reverse for three decades if you factor out the cheerleading.]
...as businesses made severe cuts in investment and consumer spending grew less quickly than it had at the start of the year, the government said today. The economy is now in its weakest condition since 1993....
[Make that "since 1932" and you'll have some idea of the realism of the economic measures of the future.]
The economy grew at an inflation-adjusted annual rate of 0.7% in the three months that ended on June 30, the Dept. of Commerce reported in its initial estimate of the quarter's economic activity. Overall spending by businesses actually fell slightly, but a surge in spending by state and local governments allowed the nation's longest recorded expansion to extend into its 11th year.
[We've got pretty rose-colored indexes if we're still calling this an "expansion." No true capitalist will allow a surge in spending by government to mask the harsh truth. The only thing expanding here is government B.S. -]
"The economy is puttering along - it's not nearly as strong as it should be"...Bush told...the Future Farmers of America [yester]day, adding that the taxcut he championed would provide "an incredibly important boost to economic vitality and economic growth."...
[Yeah sure, for most people their tax rebate and 25¢ will buy them a pack of chiclets.]
The vision thing - America keeps isolating itself on global issues, op ed by Anthony Lewis, NYT, A25.
[Or is it the Bush administration that keeps isolating itself? Yesterday we had "Senate supports strict standards on Mexico trucks - 70-30 vote defies Bush" and today we have "House demanding strict guidelines on arsenic levels - rejects Bush approach," both NYT front page.]
In 1969 Pres. Nixon renounced the development or use of biological weapons.... He then led the way to a 1972 treaty banning the development, production or possession of [those] weapons.
1. This week "Pres." Bush [our quotes - ed.] wiped out eight years of effort on a protocol to enforce the 1972 treaty. At a negotiating session in Geneva, the American delegate rejected a draft text that all others had accepted....
2. So it was, also, last week on an effort to negotiate limits on small-arms sales that feed civil wars and terrorism.
3. [And also] on the Kyoto treaty [on global warming], the NY Times headline nicely summed it up: "178 nations reach a climate accord; U.S. only looks on"..\..
The Bush administration made two arguments against [the bio-arms treaty]:
1. that the system would not be effective, and
2. that it would give foreigners too much access to U.S. bio-defense installations and pharmaceutical plants.
[Lord, if that isn't ominous!]
The second argument sent a dangerous signal to the rest of the world - that despite American ratification of the 1972 treaty there are still people in the U.S. Defense Dept. working on ideas for biological warfare. That can only encourage others to think about new biological weapons.
Administration officials told correspondents that they were looking for other ways to strenghten the 1972 treaty.... That he is working on a better way of accomplishing the objective after denouncing an international agreement has become a familiar claim from Mr. Bush. He took exactly that line after rejecting the Kyoto agreement on global warming..\.. There is no sign that the Bush administration is actually working on alternatives [to enforce the bio-arms treaty] in a serious way.... [And] in fact alternative ways of dealing with global warming are not under active study at the higher reaches of the Bush administration. Reports from Washington say there is no pressure from the top for urgent action....
Underlying Mr. Bush's response on these matters there is a failure of vision. He takes a parochial view, driven by ideology and a narrow [and short-term!] sense of where American interests lie....
[Never mind vision and American interests - the guy is clueless about his personal self-interest and that of his family!]

7/27/2001 omens -

Slow economy holding down cost of labor, Bloomberg via NYT, C7.
[No kidding. Isn't that great. We're holding down costs. Trouble is, when we hold down labor costs (i.e., wages), we're also holding down our own markets. Somehow this little detail has so far eluded our "idiot savant" business schools. In other words, the slow economy is now depressing wages and spending power = death spiral. Is it remotely possible that cutting costs in terms of wages SLOWED the economy in the first place? Nono, we cannot face such a thought. Either way, we didn't have to wait for the "slow economy" for this terrible cost of labor of labor (and wages and spending and foundational consumer markets) to be held down. Even when we had a "fast" economy, wages dba "cost of labor" was being held down by general but unpublicized labor surplus, thanks to ongoing but officially denied technological displacement cum mounting hidden under- and un-employment, and thanks to a workweek that for 61 years has not been adjusted downward to offset rising levels of technological efficiency. Dumb dadumb dumb. The colossal, in-your-face time blindness of American (and UK and Japanese) CEOs and B-schools and economists. Unbelievable. Humungous stuffed-shirt self-importance in the Land of the Blind.]

7/25/2001 omens -

Sins of commission - The men who stole the trust fund, op ed by Paul Krugman, NYT, A21.
[Paul really nails it with this one - what a beauty. Here's a taste -]
...Yesterday the ever more partisan Alan Greenspan - who, 18 years ago led the commission that increased payroll taxes and thus created the Social Security surplus [that he now wants to loot] - told a Senate hearing that the Bush tax cut was "quite modest"..\.. If we had 2040 A.D. demographics today (48 retirees per 100 workers instead of the current 30), Social Security benefit payments this year would exceed payroll tax receipts by about $180 billion. That sounds like a lot. But it so happens that if the Bush taxcut passed two months ago were fully phased in today, it would reduce revenue this year by about $170 billion....
Well, if it's a modest tax cut, then the sums Social Security will need to cover its cash shortfall are also modest \and not, as\ George W. Bush's hand-picked commission on the reform of Social Security claims..."a crushing burden".... [our quotes - ed.] You can't have it both ways....

7/21/2001 omens -

[more support for Nader & his "no difference between the major parties"]
Lieberman joins Bush bid to push aid-to-charity bill, by Elizabeth Becker, NYT, A10.
[What's to choose between these two gangs of morons if they both want to unseparate church and state, religion and politics. It's not as if we haven't been there, done that, bought the blood-stained T-shirt.]

7/20/2001 omens -

Nortel posts a huge loss for the quarter, by Bernard Simon, NYT, C2.
TORONTO...- The communications maker Nortel Networks reported a record loss of $19.4B, or $6.08 a share, for the second quarter [yester]day. The loss is one of the biggest in corporate history.... So far, Nortel has carried out 23,000 or 30,000 planned layoffs, about one-third of its work force....
[And you think we're going to have a rebound with this kind of stuff going on?]
Georgia [US state]: Unemployment rate up 50%, by Lino Rodriguez, NYT, A16.
...More than 15,000 workers have been laid off this year, 2,500 so far this month...and economists say there may be more to come in services and manufacturing.
["This is the way we make a crash,
Make a crash,
Make a crash;
This is the way we make a crash,
So early in the Millennn-yum."]
[No worries, because we, personally, always have Social Security, right? Wrong -]
Alarm cited on Social Security fund - Panel urges system overhaul - Social Security 'broken,' panel concludes, by Anne Kornblut, Boston Globe, front page & A18.
WASHINGTON - A preliminary White House commission report...said that within 15 years the government probably will have to slash benefits or raise taxes....
[But on the inside page under a photo we have the quote -]
'The system is broken.... The time to act is now.' Daniel Patrick Moynihan [photo] and Richard D. Parsons, Social Security commission cochairmen..\..
[And in the inside text -]
According to the draft, the system's obligations to retirees and the disabled will exceed its annual tax revenue by the year 2016, and its resources will dry up by 2038..\..
[Now what was it that Bush was saying about a "surplus" that used the Soc. Sec. funds? But no worries, they're smart people. They'll fix it, right? Uuuh, well someone's already starting -]
The finding sets the stage for "President" Bush [our quotes - ed.] to pursue his professed goal of radically overhauling the retirement program....
[And what, pray, does he want to do to it? Privatize it, that's what - even with the way the stock market has been yoyoing lately. Still feel secure?]
Swift unveils $7m skills training program, by Diane Lewis, Boston Globe, C4.
[But its government doing training that the private sector should be doing instead of soaking taxpayers.]
Saying that education is a top priority, Acting Governor Jane Swift yesterday unveiled a $7m plan to meet the growing demand for better trained workers....
[On the positive side, though Swift confuses the two, it's training she's talking about here, which is job-related, rather than education - which can go on indefinitely without enabling a person to support themselves. But here's the real bad news in this article -]
More than four months ago, a study by the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth (MassInc) revealed that 1.1 million Mass. workers - one third of the state's work force - lack the basic skills needed for today's jobs....
[And you can't tell us that any measly $7m government training plan is going to make a dint on that problem. This needs massive private-sector reinvestment in human capital, and the Timesizing program has just the ticket - an overtime-targeted on-the-job training program for the private sector at large, enforced by a heavy tax on overtime-vs.-hiring advantage with a complete exemption, and possibly a subsidy, for corporate reinvestment in overtime-targeted training, which can be retraining or cross-training of existing employees or training&hiring.]

7/19/2001 omens - 3 qikis, 1 biggy, and 2 "bad, but's" -

Tax enforcer says cheating is on the rise, by David Johnston, NYT, C1.
[But then, what did we expect when we defunded and cut the IRS?]
Times Co. operating profit fell 73% in second quarter, by Floyd Norris, NYT, C6.
...John M. O'Brien, the CFO [of the New York Times Co.], noted in a conference call with analysts that economists said the economy was not in a recession. But, he added, "it sure feels like one."...
[And another certain someone corroborates that -]
Greenspan warns of serious risk - but says rebound may be in sight, by Richard Stevenson, NYT, front page.
[But then, what's he gonna say?]
[And why is there serious risk, you ask? Here's one development that's happening all over the place -]
Prudential is challenged over plans to revamp, by Joseph Treaster, NYT, C6.
TRENTON [NJ] - ..."I love Prudential," the retired agent [Richard Ciocca] said at a hearing here on the company's plan to reorganize so it can issue stock for acquisitions. But like several others who testified [yester]day and [the] day [before], Mr. Ciocca said he found it impossible from reading Prudential's materials and talking to company representatives to figure out whether the reorganization was good for him, the company and others. The change would end decades of ownership by policyholders whose goal was low-cost insurance, not corporate profit....
"How can you trust these people?" asked Michael Weaver, a retired agent who has been a longtime critic of Prudential. Underscoring his comment, Mr. Weaver said 14 or 15 new cases of deceptive sales practices had just been reoprted [against Prudential] in Missouri. A spokesman for Prudential, which is based in Newark [NJ], confirmed the new sales problems and said a manager and an agent in Missouri were "no longer with the company."...
[We are witnessing how a great country and a great economy brings itself down. It might be called, "The capitalization of everything." Capitalize S&Ls, capitalize cooperatives, capitalize mutual insurance companies, capitalize social security, capitalize goodwill. And sell the stocks. Thus delivering the purpose of a diversity of corporations into the "ownership" of disengaged persons who naught but the most short-term interest in the company = stock price. And thus delivering most of the ownership into the hands of the richest people in the land and intensifying the concentration of income and wealth and decision-making power. So what's wrong with that? Two things.
1. Past a certain point in the concentration of income and the development of labor-saving technology (a point we have probably now passed in this economy judging from the downturn), it is impossible to get the velocity of money in its spending function to keep up with the huge investments of the wealthy in terms of their huge requirements for huge markets to purchase their huge productive output.
2. Past a certain point in the concentration of income, it is possible for the wealthy to simultaneously concentrate most of the decision-making power in the socioeconomy and completely insulate themselves from the negative consequences of any bad decisions they make. Ergo, no feedback system. In other words, the overall socioeconomy stops learning in the most critical sense - it stops learning from its mistakes.]
["bad, but" #1]
U.S. is ready to tell Russia it wants to end formal missile limits under ABM treaty, by Michael Gordon, NYT, A12.
[This internal headline is bad, very bad, but the internal subtitle -]
A radical break from 30 years of detailed, legally binding arms control treaties
[The subtitle is good, very good - because here we have the nation's newspaper, the New York Times, calling Bush policy what it is, not "conservative" but radical, with implications of illegal.]
["bad, but" #2]
Clueless on global warming, editorial, NYT, A26.
For the second time in six weeks, President Bush, having rejected the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, is headed to Europe without a strategy on global warming, an issue of deep concern to America's allies....
[This is bad, very bad. Especially the possible inference that not only Bushforbrains but Americans in general don't give a damn about global warming, just America's allies. But - here we have the nation's newspaper, the New York Times, calling Bush what he is, "clueless," in a headline. And that is good, very good. As it is, more and more people are asking, how can you be "conservative" when you don't want to conserve the environment?]

7/18/2001 omens -

Other people's money - What we say vs. what we do, op ed by Paul Krugman, NYT, A23.
...You would have to search far and wide to find anyone who thinks that the U.S. government should slash spending and raise taxes to offset the budget impact of this year's downturn, or who thinks the Fed is wrong to cut interest rates in the face of a slump....
But we - by which I mean both policy makers in Washington and bankers in New York - often seem to prescribe for other countries the kind of root-canal economics that we would never tolerate here in the USA....
[At Timesizing.com we don't believe either way works or gets at the root of the economic "tooth decay." However, we don't want to dismantle any programs or cut any government spending until we first deploy the real solution. We regard the downturn as a function of the over-concentration of income and a resulting drop in spending. To solve this, we believe we must withdraw the vast excess of labor hours from the job market by cutting the workweek and harnessing market forces to raise wages and benefits for the workforce at large, thereby centrifuging income out of its tight concentrations and out to the vast numbers of ordinary employees who will go out and actually spend it.]

7/17/2001 omens -

[First, executives hammer pilots, now oiltruck drivers, instead of doing their job and smoothing the damn workload -]
Rules change allows longer hours for drivers of heating oil trucks, by Robert Schlesinger, Boston Globe, A3.
WASHINGTON - Truckers delivering home heating oil in New England...for the next three winters..\..could find themselves working longer hours under a federal pilot program overhauling safety regulations...from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration [FMCSA] at the request of oil companies.... Oil delivery companies say the rules for their employees should be different because heating oil truck drivers operate under conditions different from truck drivers making long hauls.... Neither..\..Jack Sullivan of the New England Fuel Institute \nor\ David Longo of the FMCSA...could predict how many New England firms would volunteer, or be accepted, for the pilot program..\..
But highway safety groups, which fear that tired drivers will get into more accidents during their winter hauls, blasted the proposed rules. "Fatigue can kill," said Daphne Izer, founder and cochairwoman of the Maine-based Parents Against Tired Truckers..., "It doesn't matter if they're long-haul or driving within the city."...
The rule overhaul, printed in the Federal Register Frdiay, changes the amximum amount of time commercial truck drivers can operate over the course of a week. Currently, drivers who have been on duty for 60 hours within seven consecutive days, or 70 hours within eight days, may not drive for several days afterward, depending upon how much they have actually been driving.
Participants in the pilot program will be allowed to "restart" that clock if their truckers have been off duty for at least two consecutive nights, including the hours from midnight to 6 a.m. Only drivers who deliver in-state are eligible, and they can operate only within a 100-mile radius of the oil distribution point. The program will run from November to April 1....
Critics say the study is not scientific because it will be looking only at companies with good safety records, not at all of them....
[Pre-cooked data, just like the missile-defense "tests."]

7/14/2001 omens -

[here's how the NY Times reports Bush's insanity without seeming too critical -]
'Contradictory' U.S. words on ABM issue puzzle Russia - Moscow says it doesn't know where things stand with Washington, by Patrick Tyler, NYT, A3.
[See, it's really Russia's fault - they're just confused. Dateline Moscow, not Washington, which is putting out this blizzard of crap and provocation -]
MOSCOW...- Russia stated officially [yester]day that it is confused. Confused, strategically speaking, on whether the Bush administration is planning to withdraw from, negotiate changes to, or simply "bump up against" the Antiballistic Missile Treaty. Responding to a series of high-level statements made in Washington on Thursday that described an accelerated testing program for American missile defenses, Defense Minister Sergei B. Ivanov rhetorically threw up his hands today....
[So what "series of high-level statements made in Washington" is he talking about?]
On Thursday, [US] Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul D. Wolfowitz...made public comments on the administration's plans...on how the ABM Treaty might be modified to allow for accelerated tests of a [missile] defense system.... It now appears that the [Bush] administration seeks to build the infrastructure for missile defenses regardless of how its dialogue with NATO allies, Russia, and China proceeds..\..
[Never mind Russia. Never mind China. Bush doesn't even give a damn about our allies, e.g., in Europe. He thinks peace is entirely a matter of what the great USA does, regardless of anyone else in the world. Like peace and security are one-sided deals. This is the same kind of thinking the poor suffering Israelis use in their "kill a Palestinian a day" approach to Mideast peacemaking. This complete idiot is a megalomaniac committing suicide on behalf of all of us - he's evidently obsessed with a definition of "peace" that is shared by no one else on Earth, thereby forcing the whole planet to return to super high-risk Cold War with not only a handfull of nuclear powers but with dozens, maybe hundreds now the bomb instructions have been posted on the Web, and now with a dozen bioweapon powers. How fateful that Ursula LeGuin's "Lathe of Heaven" has been playing and replaying this weekend on PBC - whose message is "be careful what you wish for," and "the way to hell is paved with good intentions," and "arrogant do-gooders are extremely dangerous." Baby Bush wants to save the world over the world's dead body. The biggest and best treaty we ever negotiated during the Cold War - taking years to negotiate and finally concluded during a Republican administration - it's all trash to the moron in the White House. Yet it was exactly this kind of dead-certain, my-definition-or-nothing lunatic that the ABM Treaty was meant to restrain.]
Moscow regards the 1972 accord as the cornerstone of nuclear arms control, and Pres. Vladimir V. Putin has said that if the U.S. unilaterally abandons the treaty, Russia will consider three decades of arms control treaties nullified and will build a new generation of multiple-warhead nuclear missiles. China has taken a similar stand....
[Hey, that would solve our recession. Maybe it's not such a bad idea to give the Olympix to Beijing after all. China may be bashing human rights on an individual level but unlike U.S., they're not planning to unilaterally trash the treaty that guards human life on a planetary level -]
- Mr. Wolfowitz told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Pentagon was planning to build
  - a command center near Fairbanks, Alaska,
  - new radar stations and
  - 10 silos for antimissile interceptors at Fort Greely and on Kodiak Island....
  He added that this activity would "bump up against" the prohibitions of the [ABM] Treaty [our caps - ed. - the Times doesn't want to seem to respect the Treaty that much] in a matter of months. "So we are on a collision course," Mr. Wolfowitz said. "No one is pretending that what we are doing is consistent with that treaty. We have either got to withdraw from it or replace it"..\..
- [And here's the mealymouthed doubletalk from Rummy himself -]
  Mr. Rumsfeld said there was no question of the United States' violating the treaty as it moves "forward." [Our quotes - ed.] "I think the United States of America ought not to be running around being seen as breaking treaties and violating treaty provisions and being legitimately or illegitimately accused of doing that," Mr. Rumsfeld told a forum at The Frontiers of License [oops,] Freedom Institute.
  [In other words, in this jackass's "mind," it doesn't matter if we ARE "running around" breaking treaties and violating treaty provisions but please, God, don't let anybody see us doing it or accuse us of it, even if it's true!]
  "It's not what's good for our country, which is why the president has said, starting in his campaign and practically every month since, that we've got to move beyond the ABM treaty."
  [I.e., renegotiate it or "dialogue" with Moscow to negotiate a looser treaty. (Notice the language here - it's practically as incoherent as Bushleague himself.) So that sounds like Bumsfelt won't break the treaty, but...]
  But he added, "If you get to the point where we need to go beyond the treaty and we haven't been able to negotiate something, obviously there's a provision we can withdraw in six months, and that's what you'd have to do."
  [If there is such "provision" in the Treaty, American exercise of that "provision" would still be a unilateral nullification of the Treaty and would justify a full-scale return to the Cold War by all parties. Back to nuclear bomb drills in schools all over the USA and Canada. Remember "Tuck your head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye"?]
..\..Meanwhile, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman expressed "dismay" that the U.S., in a dispatch to its overseas embassies, had issued instructions to justify [aka rationalize] to foreign leaders American plans to test antimissile systems that would violate the ABM treaty "within month, rather than years." [And] Mr. Ivanov, who is Mr. Putin's closest adviser on strategic affairs, seemed at pains not to overreact, though Russian officials were clearly surprised by the American timetable.
[The whole missile defense aka Star Wars idea has flunked every test and is so badly conceived that they couldn't do anything functional with it in six years let alone six months - except restart the Cold War. Thank God the Russians have some albeit eye-rolling restraint in dealing with our blizzard of nonsense. This country has a lot of smart people. How come none of them are in government right now?]
Bush supports fossil fuel subsidies, pointer digest (to A1), NYT, B1.
The Bush administration plans to oppose an international drive to phase out fossil fuel subsidies and lift financing for nonpolluting energy sources worldwide, administration officials said. The proposals are contained in a report commissioned by the Group of Eight wealthy nations, which convene their annual summit in Genoa, Italy, next week.
[Every so often we need a really stupid and backward force like Dubya to clarify our priorities and unify us on them = renewable, non-polluting energy sources.]
No bailout is planned for Argentina - Bush and IMF see no need to move yet, by Fuerbringer & Stevenson, NYT, B1.
The Bush administration and the International Monetary Fund said yesterday that there was no special assistance in the works for Argentina, putting a damper on an early stock and bond rally in Argentina and other emerging markets. Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, told reporters that "Argentina is trying to take some steps to deal with its economic and financial situation and that is really the best course of action."...
[And it's so good for America not to be the individual savior of every single country in trouble, especially when the trouble today is so easy to fix locally - balance the overwhelming centripetal force on income and wealth by centrifuging work and skills. And the IMF has such a long record of harming those it "helps." They don't call it the "Typhoid Mary" of international economic epidemics for nothing.]

7/13/2001 ominous qikis -

Except for discount stores, retailers suffered in June - Stocks and layoffs blamed for weak sales, AP via NYT, C2.
..."I expected June to be bad, but not quite this bad," said Kurt Barnard, publisher of The Barnard Retail Trend Report...
Level of first-time unemployment benefits is highest since '92, Reuters via NYT, C2.
...The Labor Dept. said the number of initial jobless claims for the week ended July 7 rose 42,000, to 445,000. That far exceeded the slight decrease in claims Wall Street economists had expected....
[Yeah, because a lot of them are still recommending layoffs to boost stock prices and assuming that people can get easily rehired quickly - no problemo.]

7/12/2001 ominous qikis -

Argentine debt creates fallout that is wide, by Jonathan Fuerbringer, NYT, C1.
[Evidently they wanted to drag out a wordy headline for the front page of the biz section instead of using the R-word - which finally appears ("Argentina is battling a three-year recession") in the photo caption inside on page C6 - see story below.]
The fallout from the financial crisis in Argentina was felt outside Latin America yesterday as the dollar fell and the stocks of some American and Spanish banks with exposure there dropped....
[Compare Singapore yesterday.]
We're the reason world economy is foundering, by Syre & Stein, BG, C1.
In case you haven't noticed, the world economy is coming apart at the seams. Practically everywhere you look - Germany, Japan, Singapore, Brazil [Argentina - ed.] - the news is bad and getting worse.
[The caption on the photo on the inside page (C6) focuses on Argentina and, as with Singapore yesterday, actually uses the R-word -]
A Buenos Aires trader throwing up his hands at the stock market's performance yesterday. Argentina is battling a three-year recession.
[But by all means, let's admit to Japan's ten-year recession! Back to the beginning of the article -]
..\..The world economy is on track to report its weakest growth since 1991 and the islands of prosperity are few and far between.... The global slowdown will make it more difficult for the American economy to recover and it will depress corporate earnings for the next two or three quarters....
[But -]
Who is the villain in the world economic story? The United States. Because the US generates so much of the world's economic growth, a slump in this country is felt intensely around the globe.
[Problem #1 - our definition of "growth" in terms of GDP includes a lot of very bad stuff that is not at all positive. See list in California story on our goodnews pages, 6/15/2001. And here's problem #2 -]
"We have been pulling the rest of the world along," said Maureen Allyn, chief economist at Zurich Scudder, a mutual fund complex based in New York....
[Problem #2 is America's naive arrogance. Like everybody in the world needs us. Like the whole world depends on us. Like the whole world wants to be us. (With 2,000,000 of us behind bars?!?)]
[And here's today's concrete example of the "depressed corporate earnings" mentioned above -]
Drop in profit at Emerson [Electric] for first time in 43 years, Bloomberg via NYT, C5.
...dragged down by a plunge in spending by telecommunications companies....
Declining surplus renews debate over the budget outlook - A skirmish centers on the Medicare fund excess, by Richard Stevenson, NYT, A18.
[That's if you swallowed the line that there was a budget surplus in the first place. All in all, a little corroboration for our story below (7/06, "Red [ink] rising") about the bogus budget-surplus argument for the bogus taxcut.]

7/11/2001 ominous qikis -

Rise in wholesale inventories in May was biggest in months, Bloomberg via NYT, C12.
[Just like before the Great Depression! Gee, what a coincidence.]
Singapore says economy is in recession - A technology downturn takes a heavy toll, by Wayne Arnold [or Benedict Arnold for reporting this!], NYT, W1.
[How dare the Times use the R-word! If stocks go down, we'll sue 'em!]

7/7/2001 omens -

White House wants to bury pact banning tests of nuclear arms, by Shanker & Sanger, NYT, front page.
[Skyooz us while we barf.]
In its first 6 months, the Bush administration
1. has been examining ways to escape permanently from an unratified agreement banning nuclear tests,
2. just as it has moved to scrap the Antiballistic Missile Treaty and
3. has rebelled against at global warming pact that it believes would cripple [death-wish] American industry.
[All of which his more legitimately elected predecessors worked decades to craft. Perhaps the presidential moron is smart enuff to figger that, in the absence of a shorter workweek, we need WAR to solve our deepening downturn. "At least give us back thet good ol' Cold War!"]

7/06/2001 omens -

Red [ink] rising - Bye-bye, budget surplus, by Paul Krugman, NYT, A19.
...No sooner had Mr. Bush signed that tax cut into law than those same officials \who\ told wavering supporters...the Congressional Budget Office...was underestimating future surpluses...began admitting that the budget outlook wasn't that rosy after all. In fact, revenue is dropping like a stone. ...From now on the prospect is for chronic budget shortfalls.
...The federal government [will] take in more money than it puts out for a decade or so, until the baby boomers reach retirement age. But more than all of this surplus will come from Medicare and Social Security. And those programs are supposed to run surpluses to build up reserves for the demographic deluge [of the baby boomers]. The rest of the budget will be in deficit; in effect, the tax cut will come at the expense of the retirement trust funds...as those huge tax cuts for the rich phase in....
Mr. Bush's people
- deliberately underestimated the cut's impact on revenues;
- deliberately underestimated the cost of delivering on the administration's promises on defense, education and prescription drugs; and
- deliberately swept under the table other budget issues, like the need to fix the alternative minimum tax, that will inevitably subtract hundreds of billions from the surplus.
In short, the claim that the tax cut was easily affordable [was] a "lie."
The only real question was how long they would get away with it. Without the economic slump, they might have maintaineed plausible deniability until 2003 or 2004; because of the slump, the moment of truth is already here. Now comes the spinning [but] the truth is that moderates who voted for the tax cut were snookered. And the nation will spend years paying for the consequences of that gullibility.

7/05/2001 omens -

While economy boomed, spending on lobbyists soared - As companies grew, so did their interest in...politics, by Eric Lipton, NYT, A16.
[Sounds interesting - and a possible general rule applying to all levels of politics. This article, however, actually provides data only from municipal politics and only from New York City.]
Last year's surging economy and the related jump in major construction projects in New York fuled the largest increase in spending on lobbyists in at least a decade, as developers turned to lawyers and other well-connected professionals to urge city officials to give them permits needed before any shovels could hit the ground.
Overall, $14.3m was spent of lobbyists in 2000, an increase of nearly 15% compared with spending in 1999, according to an annual report to be released today by the city clerk's office. That means that so far during the Giuliani administration, which started in 1984, the amount spent trying to lobby City Hall has jumped by 72%....
The increase...appears to be tied in large part to...major construction projects \-\ shepherd[ing them] through the city's...byzantine land-use review process. The top lobbying bill, for example, was paid by the Museum of Modern Art, which spent $323,094 last year on Rosenman & Colin, a city law firm, as it sought approval for the reconstruction and expansion of its quarters on West 53rd Street.
[A non-profit spending "300 Grand" on lobbying? Yank its non-profit status!]
..\However -\
- Billboard advertisers...spent at least $75,000 trying unsuccessfully to dissuade the Council from passing a law restricting the size and location of large outdoor signs.
- ...Tobacco companies...opposed to a further tightening of indoor smoking bans...spent at least $27,000.
- ...Trash haulers [spent] at least $50,000...during a year in which the Council adopted a plan governing how the city's 24,000 tons of residential and commercial garbage are disposed of each day....
[The last word on this whole slimy area of corporate "leaning" on government - in both senses - was delivered by Paul Weaver's *The Suicidal Corporation: How Big Business Fails America (1988).]
[A dead-end grows legs -]
Living-wage movement catches on, pointer digest (to C2), NYT, C1.
[The minimum wage is a flop, eternally behind the times, ever needing another too-little too-late adjustment, and inflationary if you index it - a two-edged sword that cuts many of its intended beneficiaries by widening a gap at the bottom of the ladder back into the job market. A "living wage" is essentially just a higher minimum wage. We have been trying the higher minimum wage approach instead of the lower maximum workweek approach now for 61 years and the very fact we're still talking about it proves it has failed. But now that the minimum wage approach has failed for two generations, why would a higher minimum wage succeed? Progressives are wasting their time on this. This whole line of endeavor is lethally flawed. It's a tangent, a detour, a dead end. In computerese, it has a fatal bug. In addition, it's income (inflowing money per person) that needs to be balanced, not wages (outflowing money per job). Income (range of money share per person per time period) will eventually be appropriate territory for government regulation, while wages will never be. Wages are and always will be the province of the free market. And even income can't be balanced before employment (inflowing work per person) without generating dependency and breeding parasitism. That's why the Timesizing.com program focuses on time, not money; work, not income. At our current level of social evolution, we human beings are not ready to balance the money yet. So wage controls, whether "minimum" or "living," are bad. Worktime controls, especially workweek reduction, are good. Getit? "Gottit." Good. (Thank you, Danny Kaye.)]
The living wage movement is spreading, and advocates for living wages are fighting battles for state and city minimum wages....
[See, these should be battles for state and city shorter workweeks. Battling to heft up wages is forever swimming against the current of free-market forces. Battling to shove down anachronistic working hours, which haven't been touched since 1940 despite scads of worksaving technology, is forever reducing the gross ambient labor glut and harnessing market forces to drive up wages without direct regulation and without arbitrary inflexibility.]
It would be too bad if economists used their considerable persuasive power to undermine the movement.
[No, it wouldn't. What's "too bad" is that "economists have been using their considerable persuasive power to undermine" the shorter hours movement over the last two generations! That is the true locus of progress for our still-primitive level of social evolution. For two thirds of American history, labor had two demands - (1) shorter hours and (2) higher wages. And they didn't even have to bother with the second if they kept up progress on the first. The first carries with it the second - by engaging market forces on labor's side. The second not only excludes the first but makes it more difficult, by engaging market forces against the first. Once American labor was distracted from the first and its attention focused completely on the second, the axe was laid to the roots of its power and its role in American economic history. That change came between 1933 and 1938. The war gave American labor a one-generation stay of execution - until the labor shortage of the war was reversed by the threefold thrust of the babyboomers, women, and immigrants entering the job market and once again overwhelming it. Now American labor is toast - roadkill - a mere shadow of its former self. The pointer digest that we're commenting on points to an article by Jeff Madrick called -]
Economic scene - Living wages are practical and don't let theory get in the way.
[Jeff Madrick, a fellow at the liberal Shorenstein Center at Harvard, may just as well have said, "My mind's made up and don't confuse me with facts." Living wages are not practical. If they were, minimum wages, their lower and easier counterpart, would have proven successful over the last 61 years and we wouldn't even be considering trying to fix them. Living wages are a dead end for progressives - not only a complete waste of time but an actual "shooting themselves in the foot." Jeff Madrick gives his email, via his publisher, as challenge@mesharpe.com. We have emailed him before and received no response. So we now ask readers who are concerned about our slow rate of real human progress to email him and pull him out this dead end. He is paving the way to hell with good intentions. Making progress harder, not easier. He cannot have ranged very widely through the whole economic deep structure if he's still pushing "living wages." Somebody throw him a rope and pull him out of that quagmire.]