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

8/31/2001  omens -
  1. A victim of wide economic fears, Dow falls below 10,000, by Alex Berenson, NYT, C1.
    ...for the first time since April.... Since June, the Dow industrials have fallen 10% and the Nasdaq, 15%....
    [Ah, the same kind of weaving around, vaguely downwards, as we saw in early 1929.]

  2. Despite a rise in incomes, spending slows, by Terence Neilan, NYT, C2.
    [Just what you'd expect if most of the money was concentrating in the top brackets. But as usual, we'll get through the entire article before they mention that. The real problems are always unmentionable in polite society, because they indict polite society. Here's the kind of language they use, as if there weren't dozens of billionaires in the Boston area, some of them giving their 20- and 30-something kids an "allowance" of $500,000 a month.]
    After keeping the economy growing slowly by stepping up their spending in spring and early summer, consumers tightened their belts a bit in July despite a rise in personal incomes, a government report released yesterday showed.... Incomes jumped 0.5% after rising 0.4% in June, the government said....
    [Not exactly a real "jump," and It's entirely possible, indeed likely, that every income bracket actually fell in personal incomes during the period, but the top brackets rose so astronomically that they pulled up the overall figure. But we can't expect the Commerce Dept. to publish anything that revealing.]
    Lower tax rates and tax rebates were among the factors that accounted for the increase, the largest since December.
    [And figure this out -]
    Disposable incomes rose 1.7% in July.
    [How the hey can disposable incomes rise over three times as fast as incomes? Unless we're mainly talking about the super-rich who have no time and no interest in actually doing any spending aka "disposing." And at this point, one of their minions takes the Big Mike -]
    Bruce Steinberg, chief economist at Merrill Lynch, said the figures from July showed "the consumer is still out their alive and well...."
    [Ri-i-ight.]
    He said checks from the $38B income tax cut, up to $600 [WOW!] for each household, were still arrinving and that when they were received an increase in consumer spending would give the economy a push in the next few months..\..
    [Au contraire, we agree with Paul Krugman today (p. A23) - "The rebate checks are not much more than pocket change." For example, how much of July's wonderful 1.7% increase in disposable income translated into consumer spending?]
    The report, from the Commerce Dept., showed that consumer spending, which accounts for two-thirds of the economy, rose an expected 0.1%, the smallest gain since October and a drop from the 0.5% increase in June.... Spending on durable goods, like cars and washing machines, dropped 1.1% in July, in contrast to a 2.3% increase in June. Spending on nondurables, including clothes and food, fell 0.1%, the second consecutive monthly decline.
    In a separate report yesterday, the Labor Dept. said that first-time jobless claims fell 1,000 last week [0.25%], to 399,000. The decline came only because the previous week's level of claims was revised up by 7,000, to a one-month high of 400,000, the department said....
    [Well thank God they buried that little zinger in the fourth-last paragraph of this second-page article in the biz section where hardly anyone will get to it.]

8/30/2001  omens -
  1. Belgium: Economic growth declines, by Paul Meller, NYT, W1.
    Belgium's economic growth fell 0.6% in 2Q01 compared with the previous quarter, the first such decline in 2½ years, according to figures released by the Belgian National Bank.... Imports declined 2%, but exports fell 6.5%....
    [Another casualty.]

  2. [U.S.] Economy posts worst showing in 8 years - GDP growth put at 0.2% in 2d; markets swoon, by Isaac Baker, Boston Globe, C1.

  3. New economy loses more luster, pointer digest (to C2), NYT, C1.
    Recent revisions to productivity data reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show how thin new-economy thinking has been all along....
    [No kidding!]

  4. Ford Motor will not pay annual bonus to managers, by Micheline Maynard, NYT, C1.
    ...struggling with falling auto sales and the Firestone tire recall...[no bonuses] this year to 6,000 middle-level and senior managers, including its CEO, Jacques A. Nasser. This would be the first time since 1992 that Ford has not paid bonuses to executives....
    [At last, a modicum of justice.]

  5. Study: Despite [recent] boom, wage gap gr[e]w..., by Scott Nelson, BG, C1.
    ...According to MassINC's analysis, the richest 10% of the households in [Massachusetts] - those with annual incomes of $120,128 or more - earned 11.46 times as much as the poorest 10% in 1999. That's up from a ration of 11.2 to 1 at the end of the 1980s, and 9.2 to 1 as the 1970s ended.
    Even more telling..\..said Dana Ansel, MassINC's research director...is that inflation-adjusted incomes fell in Massachusetts during the 1990s for almost all of the earnings spectrum...with the exception of the best-earning tenth of the population.... Across the country, inflation-adjusted income increased at every point on the scale....
    [But then, this is household income, not individual income, and makes no correction for number of members in each household working, or how many jobs they're working, and how many hours per week they're working. The last variable is definitely higher.]

  6. Report blames NAFTA for Mass. job losses, by Diane Lewis, BG, C5.
    The North American Free Trade Agreement led to the loss of 16, 998 Massachusetts jobs between 1994 and 2000, according to a report..."Corporate Globalization and its Impact on Massachusetts Workers"...by the Northeast Labor Committee for Global Justice, in conjunction with researchers at UMass and two other groups. It claims that passage of NAFTA has undermined the wages, living standards, and bargaining power of thousands of workers in Mass....

8/29/2001  omens - 8/28/2001  omens -
  1. Japan unemployment rate rose to a record in July, Bloomberg via NYT, C8.
    Japan's jobless rate climbed to a record 5% in July, prompting the government to subsidize companies that hire the unemployed. A record 3.38m people were unemployed last month, pushing the jobless rate up from 4.9% in June, government figures showed.... Manufacturers and service industries shed 290,000 jobs in July.... The record jobless rate "could trigger aggressive calls for more pump-priming measures, making it difficult for Koizumi to maintain the spirit of his fiscal reforms," said Michael Wilkins, market strategist at Societe Generale.

  2. Study in Congress sees need to tap Social Security - $9B for this year - Lawmakers' nonpartisan arm more pessimistic on budget than is White House, by Philip Shenon, NYT, front page.
    [Here we go-o-o.]

8/26/2001  weekend omens - 8/25/2001  omens -
  1. Doggie-bag index shows economic slump, by Dave Carpenter, AP via Boston Globe, A5.
    In an economic indicator that Alan Greenspan might want to consider, restaurants are reporting an increase in doggie-bag requests over the past year or two. They say it shows that their customers are feeling the pinch.
    [And -]
    Some diners are just staying home. The average number of US restaurant meals per person per year has fallen for the first time since 1990, according to NPD Group, based in Port Washington, NY, which conducts industry research. The number was 137 meals purchased per capita over the 12-month period ended February, down 2.8% from the previous year.
    Still, the data show that the average American still eats out 15 times more each year that a decade ago..\..
    [But that could also be a negative indicator - of a different kind = the decline of the family. Back to doggybags -]
    "People who wouldn't have thought about it a year ago...now will take home the smallest of portions"..\..said Izzy Kharasch, a restaurant industry consultant in Chicago.... The doggie bag upswing was cited in a report this month by the National Restaurant Assoc., which said that one in five dinner customers is asking to take home uneaten food. 20% of the 450 restaurants the trade group surveyed said their customers were requesting more doggie bags that two years ago.... Restauranteurs say the increased requests for leftovers are generally a result of the economy....

  2. Bush says pension not untouchable - Would draw on Social Security in recession, war, by Anne Kornblut, Boston Globe, front page.
    [Nothing like adding to the insecurity of "recession, war." Remember the days when we wanted government programs to be counter-cyclical?]

8/24/2001  omenettes -
  1. Initial jobless claims rise as unemployment benefits surge, Bloomberg via NYT, C7.
    ...suggest[ing] that the laid-off employees are having trouble finding work.
    "So few new jobs are being created that nearly all of the newly laid-off are finding themselves unemployed," said Steven A. Wood, chief economist at Financial Oxygen Inc. in Walnut Creek, Calif....

  2. [And our next feature, "The Incredibly Shrinking Surplus" -]
    A political straitjacket - Promise to protect social security money is sorely tested as budget surplus shrinks, by Richard Stevenson, NYT, front page.
    ...Now, with the surplus outside of Social Security gobbled up by the combination of...Bush's tax cut and the ailing economy - and with Democrats and Republicans continuing to pursue expensive and clashing agendas - their resolve [not to] touch the Social Security surplus \and\ keep the other side from getting its hands on the money...is about to be tested....

  3. Germany: Economy stalls, Reuters via NYT, W1.

  4. Chile: Economic growth slows, Reuters via NYT, W1.

  5. Brazil: Rate rises end, by Jennifer Rich, NYT, W1.
    After raising interest rates for five straight months to keep a lid on inflation, the Brazilian central bank left rates unchanged this month at 19% to avoid aggravating an economic slowdown that may lead to recession....

  6. [our everso well-meaning "president" continues to commit slow suicide and drag us all with him -]
    Bush declares U.S. will quit ABM pact, pointer blowout (to A6), NYT, front page.
    [Definition of missile defense aka Star Wars = "Saving the world over humanity's dead body."]

8/23/2001  omens - 8/22/2001  omens - 8/21/2001  ominous qikis -
  1. Nikkei near 17-year low, AP via BG, D2.
    [(The Nikkei is Japan's major stock index as London's is the Footsie.) Right next to this article, AP strains for some good news, "Key indicators rise in June - Index's uptick hints economy may be on mend," AP via BG, D2. But we don't have much faith in the key indicators when one of them, mfg workweek, is interpreted backwards. A mfg workweek rise in an automating economy is not a good thing because it just further depresses wages and spending. Lord, we need an iconoclast like Keynes to come and contradict our toxic conventional wisdom.]

  2. Slump in U.S., slump in Mexico, pointer summary (to A3), NYT, A2.
    Mexico has been dragged into recession by the faltering American economy, taking a toll on millions of Mexicans and the political asperations of President Vicente Fox.
    [Pretty unreal definition of "recession" when a third-world country is not regarded as being in chronic recession. The main article has the a photo of Fox sitting, watching, waiting at a recent Rio Group summit meeting. The whole attitude of present-day economists, executives and analysts is a helpless waiting for an act of God to solve downturns. Of course, first they see how much they can punish the economy before it breaks. They merge and downsize right and left, grab as much money as they can, and prepare their "Oh I'm so surprised" act for when the slump comes. A pathetic bunch of morons who can't see the nose in front of their faces.]
    Promises that he made when he took office on Dec. 1, including the creation of 1.4m jobs, have gone unfulfilled.
    [Hey baby, all ya hafta do is copy France and CUT THE WORKWEEK! Skip the strain of phony government job creation and let the private sector clean up its own production-consumption skew. All Fox has to do is arrange to share the fate of his people, and arrange for Mexico's executives to share the fate of their employees - only in the worktime dimension! - and who cares about recession? The people are all together for good or ill, like a marriage for better or for worse. No longer is "growth" a compulsive need.]

  3. Come to me, all you big spenders - Tourism is on the rise in Turkey, brightening a bleak economic scene, by Douglas Frantz, NYT, A4.
    ...Expectations are especially high because as Turkey endures the worst economic crisis in its modern history, tourism is the only sector that is thriving....
    [But not for long. As the slump deepens, would-be tourists will stay home.]

8/19-20/2001  weekend omens -
  1. 8/20 World's economy slows to a walk in rare lock step - No one factor to blame - Big surprise is Europe, which had thought it could avoid a downturn as in U.S., by Joseph Kahn & Edmund Andrews, NYT, front page.
    The world economy, whch grew at a raging pace just last year, has slowed to a crawl as the United States, Europe, Japan and some major developing countries undergo a rare simultaneous slump. The latest economic statistics from around the globe show that many regional economic powers - Italy and Germany, Mexico and Brazil, Japan and Singapore - have become economically stagnant, defying expectations that growth in other countries would help compensate for the slowdown in the United States.
    [No mention of France on the downside.]
    The $33 trillion world economy [has] expand[ed] every year since the Great Depression.... Still, many experts say the world is experiencing economic whiplash, with growth rates retreating more quickly and in more of the leading economies than at any time since the oil shock of 1973.
    [Then we see one of the first statements of expert obfuscation -]
    And this time there is no single factor to account for the widespread weakness, persuading some economists that recovery may be slow in coming.
    [What would they say about 1929?]
    "We have gone from boom to bust faster than anytime since the oil shock," said Stephen S. Roach, the chief economist of Morgan Stanley, a New York investment bank. "When you screech to a halt like that, it feels like getting thrown through windshield."... [Even] Germany's economy, Europe's largest, came to a standstill in the second quarter of this year. Italy and the Netherlands are showing practically no growth.
    [Still no mention of work-sharing France. But now -]
    And France's relatively frothy economy has slowed sharply as both consumers and businesses have cut back spending....
    [At last. "Frothy," a slightly pejorative version of "buoyant." No specific comparisons showing France's leadership in recession resistance. No mention of France's 35-hour workweek. No hint that if France kept its workweek flexible and adjusted it slowly further downward, it would be completely recession-proof.]
    R. Glenn Hubbard, chairman of the White House council of academic advisers...said that the reasons for [global] weakness were idiosyncratic, varying from place to place....
    [The usual failure of economists to see the forest for the trees, to see beyond the next quarterly report or the current presidential term, to consider the ecological, the geological long-term. All activities in this planet's biosphere, whether small (appointments) or large (Hiroshima) are quantifiable and comparable measured by the momentum of the planet's rotation (day, hour, minute, second) and revolution (year, season, month), in short, measured in time. Every accountable, remunerable activity is measurable as worktime. This is the easiest thing for us to share, nationwide or worldwide. But we have introduced worksaving technology without sharing the vanishing worktime. We have tried to fight technology by creating just as much worktime, or more, than before. But our job creation is always too little too late. The result is sinking real wage levels and pockets of concentrated work and income and wealth. But the more concentration, the less circulation. It's the same crisis of inadequate spending and inadequate demand that was so obvious in 1929 -]
    Domestic demand for consumer goods and industrial machinery around [Europe] is so tepid that it offers no source of growth at all....
    [Except in France, where the reduced workweek has given the majority of people more time, more money and more security.
    More time - see "Analysis - French say 35-hour week makes for better lifestyle" 5/16/2001 which begins "Most French people say their lifestyle has improved thanks to shorter working hours, with many using their extra leisure time to dine out more often, take last-minute trips and spruce up their homes."
    More money - "French 4th-qtr wages rose..." 3/23/2001.
    And more security - see "France to escape worst of global slowdown - OECD" 5/04/2001.
    "French economy added 124,400 jobs in first quarter" 5/19/2001,
    Jospin trumpets million fall in French [unemployment[" 3/01/2001,
    "Analysis - French steal economic march on German neighbours" 2/07/2001,
    "Analysis - Layoff outcry masks better French business climate" 4/07/2001 which includes subtitle "France lures investors."
    In fact, a clueless German economist couldn't have got it more backwards -]
    ...Thomas Mayer, a senior economist at Goldman Sachs in Frankfort...faults the unwillingness of political leaders to liberalize the labor markets and give employers more freedom in...firing. France and Germany have taken steps to bolster the power of unions and make it more difficult for companies to lay off workers. "That is the sort of thing we should especially try to avoid right now," Mr. Mayer said....
    [Maybe a chat with Steve Roach would help. But no mainstream economists really "get" the implications fo technology. None have really thought about Reuther's retort to Ford, "Let's see you sell cars to these robots." It's like every 70 years or so, economists forget that productivity without markets is meaningless, that employers aren't the only vital ingredient in an economy. And as for the careless blind eye they turn to worktime as an economic variable, and a control variable at that, and perhaps the control variable - they're going to be very embarrassed in the economic history books, sort of the way the Ptolemaic astronomers were in the history of astronomy - the "experts" who said the Sun revolved around the Earth.]

  2. 8/20 Newsweek: Media lead sheet/August 27, 2001 issue (on newsstands Monday, August 20), PRNewswire 08/19/2001 15:36 EDT via AOLNews via RadioTony.
    "The worst non-recession ever" (p. 43). No one wants to utter the "R" word because it signfies a symbolic threshold that, if crossed, might worsen consumer, business and investor psychology. But many business indic[a]tors, including industrial production, employment, newspaper help-wanted ads and business investment in equipment, show that the economy is already in a recession, writes Contributing Editor Robert J. Samuelson.

  3. 8/19 The bookshelf - Workplace, corporate world score low marks with authors, by Martha Mangelsdorf, BG, H17.
    The American workplace...this year [is] like the sinking Titanic.... In her book "Free to Succeed: Designing the Life You Want in the New Free Agent Economy," Barbara B. Reinhold at one point compares being a loyal, trusting employee to being a naive worker on the doomed ship Titanic.... Reinhold [defines] "free agents" not only as the self-employed but also as those employees who have a part-time business on the side - including employees who work part time, have flextime, telecommute, or go to school while working..\..
    Reinhold tells the story of employees in the Titanic mailroom, who drowned while trying to protect the mail from water damage. "They perished with the mail they were faithfully dragging to nowhere," she writes. "Today, all over the world, workers who believe that, somehow, their employers will still maintain their Cadillac benefit plans and take care of them as promised are also going down with the mail."...
    On the other hand..\..Reinhold's approach to "free agency" at times borders on boosterism [which] could give readers an unrealistically rosy view of self-employment. ...It could be that "free agency" looks good primarily because the state of the contemporary work world looks so bad.
    [i.e., the lesser of two evils. See also our non-overlapping excerpts from this article ("The bookshelf - Workplace, corporate world score low marks with authors") in our timesizing pages today, 8/19/2001.]

  4. [Here's another article exploring the bad state of the contemporary work world, but this time from the low-level manager's point of view -]
    8/19 Book notes changing roles, rules for bosses - Authors suggest some survival tips, by John Mello, BG, H1.
    Pity the poor bosses. ...With layoffs being the order of the day, they're being asked to do even more with even less. Moreover, as pink-slipped employees clean out their desks, bosses find themselves charged with boosting the morale of the remaining staff....
    "The Boss's Survival Guide"...is penned by an unlikely trio.
    1. Bob Rosner [of] *workingwounded.com ...
    2. Allan Halcrow...former editor of "Workforce" magazine...
    3. Alan Levins...senior partner with Littler Mendelson, one of the nation's leading labor law firms, where he's extensively involved in wrongful termination...cases....

8/18/2001  ominous qikis -
  1. Taiwan: Economy shrinks, Bloomberg via NYT, B3.
    Taiwan's economy shrank for the first time in 26 years as a slide in electronics exports hurt investment and consumer spending, prompting the Central Bank to cut interest rates for the eighth time since December.
    [Rate cuts won't help anyone this time. This is the big one. Only activating the spending power locked up in the uncapped concentration of income and wealth all over the world is going to cut it this time. And short of war, the only way to activate it is by centrifuging it by market forces responding to labor shortage engineered by workweek reductions.]
    GDP fell 2.4% in the second quarter from a year earlier....

  2. Shares fall broadly on poor profit news from big names, by Sherri Day, NYT, B1.
    ...as varied as Dell Computer, Ford Motor and Gap....

  3. Dollar's slow slide indicates foreign investors may be wary of U.S., by Jonathan Fuerbringer, NYT, B1.

8/13/2001  weekend omens - 8/11/2001  omens -
  1. Japan: Economic assessment, AP via NYT, B3.
    Japan's economy has deteriorated further on sharp declines in exports, industrial further on sharp declines in exports, industrial output and business investment, the...cabinet office..\..said in its monthly report...the sixth downgrade this year in the government's economic outlook. "We judged that the deterioration was continuing and that the degree of deterioration had intensified," said Haruhito Arai, a policy official at the cabinet office.

  2. Singapore: Economy shrinks, Bloomberg via NYT, B3.
    ...an annual 10.7% in the second quarter from the first...as falling electronics exports forced companies to cut production. The decline...confirms that Singapore is in recession for the second time since 1998 after the economy shrank an annual 10.8% in the first three months....
    [And if our economists were doctors instead of quacks, they'd have realistic definitions that portrayed such situations as indefinite depressions so people could make appropriate deep-structure adjustments instead of jerking them around with news of on and off slumps or, if they're willing to use the word, recessions. Note the string of page W1 omens we passed over yesterday -
8/09/2001  dark qikis -
  1. Economy remained slow...across the nation..\..in June and July, Fed reports - Manufacturing slide moved to more areas, Reuters via NYT, C4.
    ...Weakness in the factory sector was seen in almost all regions, the central bank said. "Sustained weakness in the manufacturing sector spilled over to other businesses, with many districts indicating declines in demand for office space and trucking and shipping services," the Fed said....

  2. Human toll of layoffs, letter to editor by Maria Hrabowski, NYT, A22.
    Re "Dallas bleeds as jobcuts rake tech sector" (news article, Aug.5):
    ...[The NYT] write[s] about job layoffs as if they were always cushioned, at least for full-time employees, by severance pay, transfers to new jobs and other strategies of caring employers. Satisfying Wall Street's appetite for more layoffs means that many people will lose their houses, move to different states or neighborhoods, and will be affected by the lack of financial and social security.
8/8/2001  qik takes along the parade route of our March of Folly -
  1. Sluggish Germany begins to drag down rest of Europe, by Edmund Andrews, NYT, W1.
    Germany, Europe's biggest economy, provided more evidence today that its growth has come to a stop and that it is dragging down the rest of the Continent....
    [Unbelievable. They've got 5-6 week annual vacations. They've got 35-hour workweek France booming next door. And the dummkopf Deutschers still can't figure out the secret to recession-proofing!]
    German political leaders and many economists have blamed the slowdown emanating from the United States for most of Gemany's problems.
    [Same old B.S. Fingerpointing rather than realizing that one of the most technologized societies in the world still has TOO LONG A WORKWEEK to share the vanishing work among all its population and spread the funnelling profits to the many who will spend them. buy the technology-multiplied products and services, and keep the game going.]
    Germany depends more on exports than most countries [except Japan!], particularly sales of the kinds of heavy equipment that companies stop buying in slowdowns....
    [Hey, wait a minute! Make up your mind, Andrews! Is Germany dragging other countries down or are other countries dragging Germany down!]

  2. Brazil pledges to cut spending, pointer digest (to A6), NYT, C1.
    The Brazilian government [plans] to cut spending by about $2.5B over the next 18 months.
    [Why is it that when the problem is weaker spending, the first instinct of so many supposedly smart people is to worsen the problem? Here's a hint from the subtitle of the main story on the inside pages -]
    - To qualify for a $15B IMF line of credit, budget cuts, by Larry Rohter, A6.
    [Oh, so Typhoid Mary, the International Monetary Fund, is out to ruin another economy with its toxic credit candy?! That gives the main title on the inside pages a special irony -]
    Brazil inoculating its economy with an injection of austerity
    [Great, it's injecting itself with live typhoid viruses from Typhoid "Your IMF at work" Mary. Brilliant. How many times does our supposedly intelligent species have to make the same stupid and obvious mistakes? How many times do we have to listen to the broken record before we get bored?]

  3. Productivity still gaining despite slump, by David Leonhardt, NYT, C1.
    [Ah, wait a minute. That's WHY we're slumping! Productivity is still gaining and we've got much more than we can sell! We're not running on an economic theory. We're running on an economic crap shoot, with special emphasis on the "crap." And look at the "odds" that they're trying to tell us is "good news" -]

  4. In New England, slow growth ahead - But the good news is that economists say odds of recession are remote, by Scott Nelson, BG, D1.
    [Those "yes men" will never admit there's a problem until our regional and global economic Titanics are vertical in the water. But with "normal" times like these, what difference would it make using the word "recession"? Oh yeah, they might have to change their stupid ideas. They might have to admit that the economic solar system doesn't revolve around the "Earth" of productivity. Rather, Earth/productivity revolves around the Sun of more evenly shared working hours (and necessarily fewer of them if we want to keep introducing work-saving technology) and more widely spread income - to activate spending. Ptolemaic economics doesn't make it any more. We need Copernican economics that puts worktime per person where it belongs - in the center of the theory, as does Timesizing.]

8/07/2001  omens - 8/05/2001  ominous weekend qikis -
  1. Things were not as they seemed - Profits of the great bull market weren't as hot as we all thought, by Syre & Stein, Boston Globe, E1.
    [No Kiddin!]
    [Compare this article two pages later, "Few convinced by Wall Street optimists," AP via BG, E3 - but how long can the suckers be dammed?]

  2. Economic puzzle - Amid layoffs, employees with certain skills still demand, by Diane Lewis, BG, E1.
    [This is the case even during a depression - because No Continuous Training such as the overtime-targeted training and hiring of the Timesizing program.]

  3. Nuclear waste creates storm in France, by Clare Kittedge, BG, A29.
    [= the clot in France's shorter-workweek-crafted creamcrock, the darkening stain in their otherwise rosy present and long-term future.]

  4. HUD eyes cuts in rental funding - Poor seen being hurt by homeownership push, by Wayne Washington, BG, front page.
    [Housing healthcare childcare welfare jailfare corporationcare... - government micromanagement goes on and on. Alternative? just automating workweek adjustment against unemployment (UE) and underemployment (including welfare disability prisons...) a la UE up, workweek down, thus sharing the vanishing work and spreading the funneling income and spending power, by avoiding the surplus of working hours currently flooding the job market and stagnating wages. Make it as easy for the millions of ordinary people to support themselves well as it should be with these levels of advanced technology, so that government and taxpayers don't have to support them. Note also the petty government micromanagement on drugs, captured by Ellen Goodman's pointer quote on A2, "We don't allow morphine on the street, but we permit it in the doctor's arsenal for the treatment of pain. Imagine the uproar if we made morphine illegal. There is no logic in treating marijuana differently." This excerpts her excellent op ed, "Importing sense on pot - US needs a dose of Canada's thinking," Boston Globe, D7. Also on same page -]

  5. Bush is bombing on Social Security, op ed by Robert Kuttner, BG, D7.
    [And you thought the stock collapse would bury the whole loony attempt to privatize Soc Sec? Like Star Wars, like the Cold War, like Freddy Kruger from Nightmare on Elm St., thanks to Bush, it's ba-a-ack!]

8/04/2001  omens - 8/03/2001  omens - 8/01/2001  ominous words - For earlier collapse stories, click on the desired date -
  • July/2001.
  • June/2001.
  • Apr-May/2001.
  • Mar/2001.
  • Feb/2001.
  • Jan/2001.
  • Dec.21-31/2000.
  • Dec.11-20/2000.
  • Dec.1-10/2000.
        Earlier Y2000 months accessible via links at bottom of Dec.1-10/2000 page.
  • Dec.16-31/99.
  • Dec.1-15/99.
        Earlier 1999 months accessible via links at bottom of Dec.1-15/99 page.
  • Dec/98.
        Earlier months accessible via links at bottom of Dec/98 page.

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