Collapse - 5/2002

Doomwatch^TM vs. Timesizing^®

Collapse trends - May, 2002
[Commentary] ©2002 Philip Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080

5/28/2002 headlines from hell -

Where's the boom? - Beware the ideas of March, op ed by Paul Krugman, NYT, A23.
[Krugman comments that it's not so much the presence of bad news, just the absence of good news, especially about signs of life in business investment. Maybe it's time businessmen looked back at neo-classical economics and the doctrine of the marginal efficiency of concentrated capital. When you concentrate that much spending power that tightly, sooner or later there's not enough circulation to sustain its value. How to centrifuge it most gradually and flexibly by market forces with only one planned adjustment? Reverse the surplus of labor and shortage of employment by flexible adjustment of the workweek.]
Japan: Retail sales fall, Reuters via NYT, C4.
[Oh no, not agaaain! Japan has a full-fledged deflationary depression under way and, until proud leaders admit it, there's no way they're going to implement the necessary structural reforms on the national level that they're now implementing only on the prefectural level in terms of work-sharing. But alas, reality often provides token "saves" that let the visionless continue business as usual. In this case, it's tomorrow's story about Japan's 5 largest automakers increasing production at their overseas plants last month to meet growing demand in US and Canada and elsewhere - "Japan: More autos built," by Ken Belson, 5/29/2002 NYT, W1.]
Site rates charities on finances - Lets donors compare, evaluate stability -...But some question results, by Bruce Mohl, Boston Globe, C1.
[Aside from the fact that some of these "non profit" CEOs are making $352K (Harvard U) and $475K (Dana Farber Cancer Institute) and the website doesn't seem to penalize them for that, there's the big background consideration that any economy that relies for vital functions on capricious charity is to that extent lethally flawed.]
Employees at plant on Hudson [River] defend nuclear reactors' safety, by Winnie Hu, NYT, A19.
[Well, as Grannie used to say, "We believe you but thousands wouldn't." Give it up, you morons. From insiders, we've heard about your drug usage, sexual escapades in the "hot" zone, and the architectural masterplan that led some of your pipes into one side of a wall never to appear on the other side. This technology suits the surface of a star like our Sun, not a planet like our Earth. By the way, who are you victimizing with your 30,000-year-radioactive refuse these days?]
Number of foster parents drops, report finds - False charges of abuse are cited among the reasons for the decline, NYT, A17.
[And in the background, the disgraceful fact that it's much easier for many Americans to adopt South American or Chinese unwanted babies than American unwanted babies.]
Thieves steal homeowners' identities and their equity - Arranging fraudulent sales or loans and pocketing proceeds, by Adam Clymer, NYT, A12.
[More on this scary battlefront while our law enforcement workforce wastes its time on victimless crimes like recreational drugs and the adult sex trade]
...The creativity of identity thieves is almost endless.... Identity theft carries only a three-year maximum sentence.
[And last but not least -]
Nearly 100 Kentucky men add to accusations against priests - 'Go home and pray and never speak of this again', by Francis Clines, NYT, A15.
...In tears, Mr. Pierce recounted being 12 when his father was dying and a priest who prayed at the hospital sickbed convinced his mother that he could comfort the boy. Two hours of sexual abuse followed at the priest's apartment, Mr. Pierce said, along with a warning that no one would believe him if he complained.
"That priest is the one that gave my dad his last rites," Mr. Pierce said, describing the aspect that he said haunted him most and impelled him finally to disclose his past..\..
"I should have done this 26 years ago," said James R. Pierce...a mechanic angry that he has been silent until now. "This is such a worthy cause. It's my time to speak out for that little boy within me that's been screaming and screaming, 'Defend me!'"...

5/26-27/2002 headlines from hell -

(5/27) Atlanta's growing thirst creates water war, by Douglas Jehl, NYT, front page.
...Atlanta and its swelling suburbs, still ballooning with [development], rely for nearly all their water on the Chattahoochee River, a relative trickle of a waterway that is the smallest to supply so large an American city. ...In the last 10 years, as greater Atlanta's population soared nearly 40%, the withdrawals from the Chattahoochee have kept pace, with more than 400m gallons now sucked from the river and a reservoir every day, helping to keep countless suburban lawns green. But for the first time, Atlanta is being forced to admit that the current pattern cannot be sustained.
[There's that hallmark ecological concern again - sustainability.]
That theme is at the heart of a dispute [between] Georgia, Alabama and Florida about dividing water rights for the next half-century, and it has left Atlanta to ponder what to do when its share of the Chattahoochee runs out..\..
[So the Chesterton Flaw (assuming no one will take more than his share) appears in yet another guise.]
It has all the elements of a classic regional water war, pitting developers against environmentalists and state against state. Yet this battle is gripping not the parched Southwest, but the normally verdant Southeast, in a sign of future clashes around the country over an increasingly limited supply of fresh water....
[The much maligned prophecies of MIT's Limits to Growth team don't look so dumb....]
(5/26) Losing to technology - We do what the technology lets us, and punt on the rest, by Mary Helen Gillespie, Boston Globe, G2.
...There's an urgent lesson to be learned from the latest corporate meltdowns: Adelphia Communications, Ernst & Young, and Metromedia Fiber Network.... These are not small entities that made widgets in a converted garage. These are, or at least were, industry leaders with global reach. Now they are battling huge disruptions ranging from bankruptcy to SEC violations. How does this happen, week after week...day after day?
My theory: Because management lets it. It is the result of the 24-7 multitasking at which we have all become experts. Think of it as the Default Scool of Management. We all harbor unrealistic expectations that by deploying technology, managers are in fact executing strategy. But we're not hitting goals, just the "send" button on the top of the PC screen.
We send e-mail to people who sit next to us during working hours rather than stand up and ask a question in person. Face it: we have become a natoin of techno-losers. The technology that makes it possible to work all the time from any place is corrupting the ability to lead....
[Or at least prioritize, schedule and time things right, all key management skills.]
Despite the buoyant insistence of software developers, this miasma of binary code and business rules \encased in\ customer relation mgmt software, knowledge mgmt S/W and Web-based marketing campaigns...is only a tool to enhance processes, not to replace them.
[Compare the subatomic clocks that idiot savants claim defines time, not just refines a long-standing definition forged by the spinning Earth.]
Network systems, and the data warehouse that supports them, have become the ruling entities over business processes. "Can't do X" because the system doesn't support it. So we do what the technology lets us, and punt on the rest....
[Compare the happytalk overleaf -]
Virtual rival for training by the book - More companies seeing benefits of e-learning, by Diane Lewis, BG, G1.
[We still say you can't beat one-to-one human-to-human on-the-job training targeted by overtime. Would you turn over your child to be reared by computer? (&ifso, why'd you have him/her?)]
(5/26) Job changers move along but not up, BG, G2.
...Nearly one in five Americans changed employment status during the first quarter of 2002 and most changed jobs because of necessity rather than choice, according to Lee Hecht Harrison, an international outplacement firm. The company, which surveyed 1,002 adults last month, said fewer workers actually advanced within their organization between the first and second quarter.
"The bottom line is that there simply aren't as many opportunities for people to advance internally because of economic pressures," said Colin Moor, senior VP and general manager. "In boom times, people denied a promotion might leave in anger and frustration. Today most people are pleased to simply be in the same job."
[Compare -]
Career reboot - When the dot-com boom went bust, many workers lost their jobs but gained the opportunity to reassess work and life - ...Layoffs often lead to career changes, but this downturn seems to be producing even more soul-searching, by Marcella Bombardieri, BG, B1.
...In Massachusetts last month, 168,700 people were working in the non-manufacturing high-technology sector, 16,300 fewer than one year before, according to state figures. Where have those workers gone?..\..
- Carmin Karasic - THEN - Information architect at iXL
  NOW - Freelance Web designer...at $100/hr but in the languishing economy, she doesn't get nearly enough work, \so also, asst director of Boston Cyberarts Festival,\ art instructor, laundromat attendant.... The same woman used to be a corporate manager overseeing a staff of 20..\..
- Craig Komins - THEN - Internet strategist at iXL
  NOW - Project manager, designer and contractor renovating condos
- Dan Robertson - THEN - Art director at iXL
  NOW - Freelance designer, artist, occasional antique dealer....
[More jobs, less pay. Sounds like the "10,000 new jobs" that Clinton claimed to have created and one woman stood up and said, "Tell me about it, I've got three of them myself!" Re Karasic's job as a laundromat attendant -]
"I'm not proud of it," Karasic...who lives in Quincy MA, said of her job there. She thinks of it this way: In three nights, at roughly $7 an hour, she makes half of her 15-year-old son's monthly tuition at BC High School. "I do it because it helps make ends meet. These are tough times."...
(5/27) Group says 27 million are enslaved, Reuters via BG, A9.
LONDON - ...In a report released to coincide with the opening of a special UN session on slavery, Anti-Slavery International said slavery was fueled by "poverty, vulnerability, and lack of political will." The British-based group urged governments to stamp out the practice and highlighted in particular sexual exploitation of children, forced labor in Sudan, and trafficking of child camel jockeys to the United Arab Emirates.... Citing research by the ILO, the group estimated that...girls younger than 16...employed in domestic labor...probably "run into the millions worldwide."...
[Compare -]
(5/26) Child porn purveyors get younger - The new generation taps Internet's power, by Michael Rosenwald, BG, B1.
...Law enforcement officials, psychiatrists, and child abuse experts are increasingly finding teens and twenty-somethings implicated in child porn cases....
[The desperation for income spreads and deepens and darkens. And all we need to do with all this wonderful technology is just spread the vanishing honest human employment around by cutting the workweek.]

5/23/2002 headlines from hell -

Severe water and land loss predicted over a generation - Recent steps have helped, a study says, but won't be able to halt severe shortages, by Andrew Revkin, NYT, A6.
Expansion of cities, destruction of forests, erosion of fields and rising demand for water are likely to threaten human and ecological health in many countries for at least a generation, according to a new UN report on environmental trends...which was released yesterday by the UN Environment Program. ...Most regions of the world will see their biological diversity and coastal ecosystems badly damaged by 2032....
[This is the type of thing the NY Times should have on its front page, not the ongoing ephemera about Bush's mismanagenet and Arab-Israeli moronity. The Boston Globe version buries it further in on page A12 and focuses on the problems for other species besides us -]
UN report sees extinction threat - Says humans are taking habitats, AP via BG, A12.
[There's a mention of water shortage in halfway through paragraph one, but basically we have to dig down to the fourth paragraph to find a warning for us -]
...At a London news conference, UN Ennvironment Program exec. dir. Klaus Toepfer said [housing and industrial] development "across more and more areas of the planet is not sustainable...."
[Which makes it all the more urgent to get a handle on human population. And as far as we know, the only complete economic core design currently available that integrates population variables into quality-of-life concerns is the Timesizing full-employment program, especially its Phase 5.]
US pushes to keep its troops exempt from world court, by Elizabeth Neuffer, BG, front page.
United Nations - The Bush administration, facing a July 1 deadline when war crimes could be prosecuted by a new world criminal court, is stepping up efforts to exempt American troops and other US officials from the tribunal's jurisdiction....
[The usual "we're above the law" US BS that started when Democrat president Woodrow Wilson dreamed up the UN's predecessor (the League of Nations) and then got so perfectionistic, uncompromising and unsharing about it that he soured the Republicans and kept the US from joining. See Thomas Bailey's "Woodrow Wilson and the Great Betrayal."]
[and back to bashing the Republicans, justifiably -]
The working mom con - GOP wants mothers to be at home - unless they're poor and single, by Ellen Goodman, BG, A19.
[The headline and subhead speak for themselves.]

5/21/2002 headlines from hell -

[the inefficient stock-piling of unspendable 'black holes' of spending power goes on and on -]
Enemies of reform, op ed by Paul Krugman, NYT, A27.
- ...In 1980, chief executives at large companies, according to Business Week's estimates, "earned" [our quotes - ed.] 45 times as much as non-supervisory workers.
- By 1995, however, the ratio had risen to 160;
- by 1997, it had reached 305....
- by 2000, though profits hadn't really increased \because\ after 1997 companies made increasingly aggressive use of accounting gimmicks to create the illusion of profit growth [because] corporate leaders were desperate to keep their stock prices rising [because of] options..., they were paid 458 times as much as ordinary workers.
The point here isn't that top executives are overpaid, though they surely are; it's that the way they are paid rewards them for creating the illusion of success, never mind the reality.
[Not to mention the consideration that "the more concentration, the less circulation," and this much concentration of spending power suctions the markets away from its own necessarily huge investment targets, especially when the only metric they seem to bother about today, productivity, is being multiplied by evermore efficient technology and - surprise, surprise - with the workforce downsized instead of timesized (jobcuts + unemployment, welfare, prisons, etc. instead of hourscuts + full employment), consumer markets too are downsized and the amplified productivity is just not selling strongly. What good is productivity without markets?]
...Today the Senate Banking Committee is scheduled to take up a bill...that would take some modest steps toward accounting and auditing reform...endorsed some of the most respected names in finance - people like Paul Volcker, the great former Fed chairman and John Bogle, the famed investor. But Sen. Phil Gramm...will try to kill the bill.... The NY Times reports that Mr. Gramm is "working closely with the Bush administration" in his efforts to block the...bill.... By blocking reform of a broken system, the Bush administration is favoring the interests of a tiny corporate oligarchy over those of everyone else.... Like the Asian nations before their crisis, the U.S. relies heavily on inflows of foreign capital, inflows that depend on international faith in the integrity of U.S. markets. The Bush administration may believe that investors have nowhere else to go, that the money will keep coming even if we don't reform. That's what Suharto thought too.
[And Krugman might also quantify for us the sacrifice in economic growth we're making by allowing this much spending power to be wasted by this much inefficient consolidation in the pockets of the "tiny corporate oligarchy." We have always wondered why economists aren't applying their own marginal efficiency doctrine to this core issue. The idea that "concentrated capital works just as hard as spread around capital" is laughable in view of the hit it takes in velocity of circulation. Note also the neighboring op ed -]
The welfare Washington doesn't know - Few who shape poverty policy have been poor, by Douglas MacKinnon, NYT, A27.
...Douglas MacKinnon, press secretary to former Sen. Bob Dole, is a former White House and Pentagon official..\..
[So how is he any different from the rest of "Washington"? -]
...By the time I was 17, my family and I had been evicted 34 times....

5/18/2002 headlines from hell -

Tokyo sees end of recession, but others are not so sure - Moody's weighs downgrading Japan to the level of Botswana, Ken Belson, NYT, B2.
...Moody's Investors Service has said it is considering another downgrade of the country's credit rating this month, potentially ranking it on a par with Botswana.
[Dunno how low that is, but shore sounds baaad!]
..\..Exhibit A is the recent growth in Japanese exports to the U.S. and Asia...but many analysts are skeptical that the upturn in exports will spread to other parts of the economy. Capital spending is still weakening, they say, and consumer spending remains pinned down by falling wages and employment.
...Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has staked his job on reining in the country's runaway debt, which now exceeds GDP by 40%..\.. Because of the country's huge debt, Japanese lawmakers are being pressed not to stimulate the economy with more government spending, as they have done repeatedly since 1992....
[Japan has exhausted two of the big superficial fixes for economic downturn - lowering interest rates and creating government makework. They're also not afflicted with waves of uncontrolled immigration bolstered by political correctness that labels any criticism "racist." They're cornered, and because of World War II treaties, they can't play the "war card" that is the usual escape hatch from such a situation. They are being forced to restructure their society along timesizing lines, but most of them still haven't realized it yet = the usual obtuseness of human beings, who repeatedly get dragged kicking and screaming into a much better, freer and more diverse and tolerant future. (Note to those who can't figure out how workweek controls jive with "freer" - your workaholic mind still hasn't realized that the most fundamental and all-embracing kind of freedom is not free speech, free religion, freedom from want or freedom from fear but...free time - and we distinguish sharply between free time {"time off") and unemployment.)]

5/15/2002 headlines from hell -

Treasury juggling accounts - To move money around to avoid default by US, by Jeannine Aversa, BG, D11.
WASHINGTON - For the second time this year, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill is moving money around to prevent the federal government from defaulting on the national debt as the agency faces a standoff in Congress. To dodge a default for now, O'Neill planned to temporarily shift billions of dollars in civil service retirement funds to non-interest bearing accounts starting today or tomorrow....
[This should be illegal and impossible.]
That would free room for more government borrowing.
[Congressmen should be personally liable - then tantrum "standoffs" would never get in the way of taking care of business.]
The move is "necessary" [our quotes] because Treasury's request to extend the government's authority to borrow has been mired in a political fight on Capitol Hill. Lower-than-expected tax payments are squeezing the government's cash flow.
[Wasn't it that clown Gingrich that started this kind of brinksmanship with US Government solvency?]
O'Neill has asked Congress to boost the debt limit by $750 billion. The limit now stands at $5.95 trillion....
[This is the color of Republican "conservatism" - a national debt of $6 trillion and bloating - not to mention the associated mega interest burden on the American taxpayer.]
Government payments to Social Security recipients in July also could be disrupted....
"Many Republicans still in Congress today considered these same actions an 'impeachable offense' when Secretary Rubin used them. Now that it's a Republican Treasury secretary, the silence from these same lawmakers is deafening," said the House Ways and Means Committee's top Democrat, Rep. Charles Rangel of New York..\.. Democrats...say pResident Bush's tax cut last year caused the problem and they don't feel compelled to help him fix it....

5/09/2002 headlines from hell -

Washington [State]: Widening income gap, by Timothy Egan, NYT, A22.
The income gap between the Seattle metropolitan area and rural Washington is the widest it has been in 30 years, new Census Bureau figures show. King County, which includes Seattle, accounted for 38% of the state's wealth. Officials say that while Seattle's technology and dot-com economy rose and then fell in the 1990s, the state's rural economy remained stagnant or declined.
[Still believe "a rising tide floats all ships"? The uncapped concentration of employment, income and wealth à la Chesterton's pan-utopian flaw can nullify any amount of growth. Only a definition of "enough" (or "cap") can change that. So Timesizing.com spends its energy designing the least stifling, most market-oriented cap. The results of our efforts are Phase Two and Phase Three of the Timesizing full-employment and full-markets program. We map the cap initially onto the employment dimension, since that's more initially 'cappable' than either income or wealth, and we map it only onto the employment dimension, since humans take sooo long to make any real social progress and this stage could take 100-200 years. But the minimally stifling, market-friendly cap design that we map onto employment can just as easily be mapped onto the income and wealth dimensions, or indeed any value dimension that emerges centuries from now after all those are balanced.]

5/08/2002 headlines from hell -

[what else can we do to slow down recovery? -]
A tax on Internet products, Reuters via NYT, W1.
The European Union [EU] approved rules that will require companies in the United States and elsewhere outside the 15-nation union to levy a value-added tax [VAT] on products like computer games and software sold over the Internet to consumers. The new rules take effect in July 2003.
[Talk about exceeding your authority! Talk about unfunded (and unfundable) mandates! Talk about taxing what you want (sales) instead of what you don't want (spending power in unspendable concentrations)! And notice that these officious clowns aren't even mandating a global Internet sales tax, which would be simple compared to this. They're trying to mandate a tax on every stage in production and distribution of a Web-sold product where "value" gets "added." Where do they GET these genius notions?]
Argentina shakes, Uruguay rattles, by Jennifer Rich, NYT, W1.
Thousands protested against economic conditions in Montevideo, Uruguay, in April. The country, already mired in recession for several years, has been significantly hurt by Argentina's deep economic troubles. [caption of photo showing long street filled with people with umbrellas - mustabin pouring!]...
The war on what? - Is democracy a wallflower?, op ed by Thomas Friedman, NYT, A31.
[louzy title for op ed that hits a coupla homers -]
JAKARTA, Indonesia - Spend a few days in Indonesia and you'll find people asking you a question you weren't prepared for: Is America's war on terrorism going to become a war against democracy?
As Indonesians see it, for decades after World War II, America sided with dictators, like their own Pres. Suharto, because of its war on Communism. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, America began to press more vigorously for democracy and human rights in countries like Indonesia, as the U.S. shifted from containing Communism to enlarging the sphere of democratic states. Indonesians were listening, and in 1998 they toppled Mr. Suharto and erected their first electoral democracy.
Today Indonesians are still listening, and they're worried they're hearing America shift again - from a war for democracy to a war on terrorism, in which the U.S. will judge which nations are with it or against it not by the integrity of their elections or the justice of their courts, but by the vigor with which their army and police combat Al Qaeda [and] for Indonesia, [that] is not good news.
"Indonesian democrats have always depended on America as a point of reference that we could count on to support us," said the prominent Indonesian coommentator Wimar Witoelar. "If we see you waffling...it is like the sun disappearing from the sky and everything starts to freeze here again..\.. Whom do we turn to?"...
[With leadership so limited and backward as the five contemptible Supreme Court judges and their creature, Bush, we suggest Indonesia turn to Europe - Britain, France, Germany and Japan. America is roadkill until Bush is just a bad memory. And next, the Bushybrain's latest step backward -]
In shift, Justice Dept. tells court individuals have a right to guns - Briefs reflect new policy on second amendment, by Linda Greenhouse, NYT, front page.
WASHINGTON...- Reversing decades of official government policy on the meaning of the Second Amendment, the Justice Dept. told the Supreme Court for the first time late Monday that the Constitution "broadly protects the rights of individuals" to own firearms.
The position, expressed in a footnote in each of two briefs filed by Solicitor General Theodore Olson, incorporated the view that Attorney General John Ashcroft expressed a year ago in a letter to the National Rifle Assoc....
[Guess no matter how many mass murders we have, nothing will happen until they directly affect the NRA and the Bush administration.]

5/07/2002 headlines from hell -

Enron forced up California prices, documents show - Electric traders' action - Moves 'may have contributed' to severe power shortages throughout the state, by Richard Oppel & Jeff Gerth, NYT, front page.
...to increase Enron's profits from trading power in the state....
[The costs of utility (= natural monopoly) deregulation and/or preregulation roll on.]

5/06/2002 headlines from hell -

[USA talks the talk of globalization but -]
US to pull out of world tribunal treaty - Powell says body might hamper American troops, Reuters via Boston Globe, A6.
[But then, that's the whole point of treaties, isn't it - to hamper troops - especially the troops of big “of course I’m right” nations.]
..."Within the next day or so, the United States will notify the Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan...that we have no intention of ratifying the international criminal court treaty [that would set up an international criminal court]," Powell said on ABC's "This Week."...
Senator Russ Feingold, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he was troubled by the US decision, saying it could hamper efforts to maintain international cooperation in the war on terrorism.... "Beyond the extremely problematic matter of casting doubt on the US commitment to international justice and accountability, these steps actually call into question our country's credibility in all multilateral endeavors," Feingold said in a statement.
[Power corrupts and role-switches roll on - the USA acts more and more like the old USSR. Justice schmustiss. Our law-unto-ourselves myopia undermines our own security ever more deeply. 'Leadership' like this provides a constant supply of enemies to our nation and guarantees that the only thing that can teach us respect for international law is the death of many more of us. We didn't "get it" in 1919 when we never joined the League of Nations that we ourselves had started (see Thomas Bailey's "Woodrow Wilson and the Great Betrayal"), and we still don't get it. We are suicidal fools and hypocrites, a danger to ourselves and others. Here's a letter to the editor 2 days from now that hammers this home -]
As America spurns another treaty, letter to editor by Program Dir. Zachary Allen of Global Security Institute in San Francisco, 5/08/2002 NYT, A30.
...As pResident Bush knocks down treaty after treaty, he erodes the principles of rule of law and multilateral cooperation that are critical in the post-Sept. 11 global security environment..\..
[In fact, it was exactly this kind of American behavior that sparked Sept. 11.]
The decision continues a dangerous pattern of unilateralism and exceptionalism....
The world is growing impatient with America's go-it-alone p-resident.
[our modifications - to this contemptibly highcourt-stolen title]
Not only is he damaging American credibility and national honor..., but his unilateral approach to foreign policy will in the long run be damaging to our national security.
[Or maybe Sept. 11 indicates it's already started, since the Bushbaby had already spurned a number of treaties before that.]

5/04/2002 headlines from hell -

U.S. jobless rate increases to 6%; Highest in 8 years - Skepticism on economy, by David Leonhardt, NYT, front page.
...a sign that many companies are too worried about the economy to begin hiring again.
[Must be pretty bad if even our official rosy-as-we-can-get-it unemployment rate is that high! 6%, 8-yr hi - this is about as mnemonic as the 6 wives of Henry the 8th. Or that Vancouver is not the capital of BC or on Vancouver Is.]
The Labor Dept.'s report [yesterday] raised the possibility that the current economic 'recovery' [our quotes - ed.] could resemble the so-called jobless recovery of the early 1990's, when unemployment continued to rise for many months after a recession had ended.
[Real recoveries don't begin, or recessions end, while there is rising unemployment.]
In April, companies added a total [gross or net?] of 41,000 jobs to their payrolls, but the hiring of temporary workers was responsible for the entire increase.
With the help of technological advances, businesses have been able to increase their production in recent months without adding permanent employees.
[Again we ask, where are those who would claim that "technology creates more jobs than it destroys" - in the non-timesizing 'dark ages' of economics and corporate strategy?]
"We're wondering where the boom is," said Denise R. Sutton, president of A. J. O'Neal & Assocs., an employment firm in Tampa, Fla....
[and your daily dash of environmental disaster -]
Bush to allow mining industry to fill streams, NYT, A10.
...administration approved regulations late today that will allow coal companies to dump leftover dirt and rock from mountaintop mining into streams and valleys....
[With "regulation" like this, who needs "deregulation"?]
[and latest demonstration of Americans' love of freedom -]
Hawaii: Defeat on assisted suicide, by Michele Kayal, NYT, A10.
...25-member state Senate voted 14 to 11 against the bill on Thursday..\..would have made the state the second in the nation after Oregon to legalize doctor-assisted suicide....