1/30 Clinton to urge $48m plan to aid fishermen in [New England], by Aaron Zitner, Bos Globe, E1.
...hurt by restrictions on fishing [not to mention the reason for those restrictions -] collapsing...stocks [of commercial fish species]....
[Here's a nice little example of how ecological constraints are conspiring with our own economic cluelessness to spur on collapse.]
1/29 Doubts cancel Brazil's [bond] auction, Bloomberg News via Bos Globe, E2.
SAO PAULO - The Brazilian currency fell for a seventh day, as two failed bond auctions stoked concern the government might not be able to repay its ballooning debt.
[Cursed be they that call evil "good" and shortfall "surplus" - ]
1/29 $2.6t US surplus seen over decade - Projection of billions more than thought likely to spark battle over how to spend it, AP via Bos Globe, E2.
[Is Social Security going bankrupt or isn't it?
[Do we have a $5.5 trillion national debt and huge interest payments or don't we?
[Can we afford to stop cutting social programs and restore what we cut or can't we?
[Do we have a robust economy or don't we?
[Washington has become such a chaos of conflicting messages, no wonder our "representatives" can do nothing but fingerpoint!
[If things are really so great, these congressional clowns and their minions in the meaninglessly "bipartisan" Budget Office should stop salivating over Monica and
1 - save Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid
2 - restore cut social programs
3 - pay down the debt
4 - return any real surplus to taxpayers]
[Need shift from Education to job training (and on-the-job training)?! - ]
1/29 Education Dept. aide terms survey 'unsettling', by Anjetta McQueen, Bos Globe, A8.
WASHINGTON - Four out of five US teachers say they are not ready to teach in today's classrooms.... The survey, answered by 3,560 teachers nationwide, asked teachers of kindergarten through 12th grade about their college studies, professional certificates, on-the-job training and support from parents and colleagues.... Though 78% of teachers said they had training in technology, just 20% felt they were "very well prepared" to use it in their classrooms.
["Very well prepared" is asking too much. What percentage felt simply "Well prepared"?]
The survey illustrates the need to change how teachers are trained for changing classrooms, said Education Secretary Richard W. Riley. The findings echo those of a 1993-94 teacher survey, with little change in teachers' attitudes....
1/29 Rhetoric and reality on welfare, editorial, Bos Globe, A18.
Governor Celluci...would bump up work requirements from 20 to 30 hours a week. Two-parent families would have to work a total of 40 hours. And recipients would have to pursue work actively in their first 60 days of receiving benefits..\..
In the State House's Doric Hall, [there's meanwhile] an exhibit of photographs [that] show how real lives - sick children, a husband who dies at 35, struggling to get an education, and years of beatings - can be crippled by shortsighted...government policies....
Since welfare reform passed, the Mass. caseload has sbeen cut by 42.8%. Many of the former recipients have gone to work. But too little is known about the others - and their children. What is known is that demand at many of the state's food pantries is up, suggesting that the "work first" policy may not be getting some families into jobs that pay enough to cover [food] as well as the high cost of housing, transportation, and other living expenses.
[And a couple of years ago when welfare reform started, then-Gov. Weld was able to find jobs, mainly entry-level jobs were called for, for less than half of the state's welfare mothers. There just weren't enough of such jobs in the job market.
[Phil Hyde's view of welfare reform is this - it puts the cart before the horse. Before we dismantle a big leaky lifeboat, we should have a smaller leakproof one ready in the water. Before we pull the rug out from under the poor, we should have PLENTY of good jobs out there to accommodate them. And that requires a new and flexible technology of work sharing such as Timesizing. Until we get rolling on timesizing, we should stop cutting welfare and in fact restore everything we've already cut. Corporate welfare, "welfare for the rich," costs us taxpayers thousands of times more than welfare for the poor. Let's stop bullying the weak and save billions there first.
[And right now, let's add free contraception and contraception training in every shape and form to the welfare budget and spread it to the nation's poor generally. Think for one moment about what currently passes, by default, for our nation's birth policy - we assume that once families get out of poverty they will automatically cut down their birth rate. Result? - the poorest families have the most kids and the richest families have the least kids - in other words, the families that can least take care of them are having the most kids and vice versa. And since we've been following this head-in-the-sand policy, our nation's prison population has grown to 1.8 million - the largest in the world exceeding even China's though they have over five times our overall population!
[And if we can't get our representative government to enact it because of lobbying by the nation's Roman Catholic hierarchy (despite anecdotal evidence that the majority of sexually active hetero Catholic laity practice birth control anyway, let's put it to national public referendum. Better to suffer the tyranny of the majority than the tyranny of the minority. Note the related story below.]
1/29 Celucci's 'road map' takes [welfare] mothers out of school, by Derrick Jackson, Bos Globe, A19.
1/27 Brazil's real continues its wild slide - Worries about country's debt send currency down another 4.5%, by Chris Kraul, LA Times via Bos Globe, D2.
RIO - ...worries that the government may be buried under an avalanche of debt that gathers force as the currency slides. The currency has now lost about 52% of its value against the dollar, significantly more than predicted, since Jan. 12 when it stood at 1.21 to the dollar. It closed yesterday at 1.84.... The weaker currency increases Brazil's cost of paying its billions of dollar-linked or -denominated debt, while higher interest rates at home are increasing the burden of its domestic real-based debt as well....
Result: spiralling waves of the budgetary red ink that was the source of investor disenchantment with Brazil all along.
Brazil risks being sucked into "an unmanageable debt spiral," said Lacey Gallagher, a Latin American debt specialist with Standard & Poor's of New York....
Central bank president Francisco Lopes assured...that Brazil will "meet its obligations"...by continuing to attract foreign capital....
[Riiiight. Sounds like Russia. Sounds like Amazon.com - "loses $22m in 4th but sales quadruple" on next page. We've got to get it through our heads that current megaproblems have nothing to do with success in traditional terms. They are new (since 1929). They spin out of the self-limiting nature of extremely highly concentrated wealth. There winds up to be no place for it to go except under its own giant mattress, because it has sucked in more money than there is left circulating beyond itself to give it meaning. It has concentrated to the level of the dread "Black Hole economy"! (OK, there's another name for our present form of auto-immune capitalism, Black Hole Capitalism. Our opposite, timesizing name would be something like Balanced Centrifugal Capitalism.)]
1/27 Russia, IMF in talks, AP via Bos Globe, D2.
...over access to a load frozen due to Russia's economic crisis....
[Just as the IMF must stop giving Russia and other countries the illusion that they can borrow their way out of crisis (see Brazil article above), it's got to stop giving them the illusion they can export their way out of crisis (see Les Thurow article below) as well. So what's left? How then do you get out of economic crisis?
[You SHARE your way out - among your own people. If the word "share" is too soft for you, try BALANCE your way out - among your own people. You don't need an outside "angel" - you don't need "the cavalry" from Ft. Elsewhere - you don't need a "deus ex machina." You just need to update your sharing technology. This raises the question of exactly HOW this is done - and timesizing provides the most developed answer that we know of in print.]
[Now some temporary backflow in the spreading gloom - ]
1/27 Consumer confidence edges up in January, AP via Bos Globe, D2.
NEW YORK - ...the Conference Board...reported its index of consumer confidence rose 0.9 point to 127.6 from a revised 126.7 in December. The index dropped sharply in October and has since been making a steady recovery. Looking ahead to the next six months, the Conference Board finds consumers aren't quite as secure. [Only 28.7% in December expected] their incomes to increase over the next half-year [and that] dropped 5.3 points...to 23.4% [in January].
[Some genuine good news - training is always good news - ]
1/27 Training to be offered for positions in finance, by Kimberly Blanton, Bos Globe, D7.
The Urban League of Eastern Mass...in cooperation with the New England College of Finance..., State Street Corp., Fleet Financial Group [and other community organizations and financial companies] announced a program for training [Boston?] residents who lack college degrees for entry-level positions in the financial industry....
1/26 Limits to power of IMF - The IMF is at best a sideshow to the real problems facing global economy, by Lester Thurow, Bos Globe, D4.<
...The key to today's global problems is found in Japan. Japan's economy is far bigger than the economies of all the countries that have melted down combined.... Japan's financial reserves are far bigger than those of the IMF.... 1999's fundamental global problems cannot be solved without a recovery in Japan \and\ the IMF is out of the...loop in Japan since Japan does not need IMF loans....
[OK, so the IMF is irrelevant. What then is relevant, Lester?]
The real problem is as simple as it is difficult to solve. A global economy is emerging to replace national economies, much as national economies emerged to replace local economies 100 years ago. This global economy will need some regulation....but that could only happen if a global government were to exist. This global government is not in place and it is not going to be in place. No one wants it.... Experience teaches us that this leads to financial instability and volatility, but this is just the way it is going to be..\..
[So you've gone from "it's difficult to solve" (i.e., solvable)" to "financial instability and volatility...is just the way it's going to be" (i.e., insolvable). Lester, make up your mind.
[We at The Timesizing Wire believe it's solvable, and it does not require a global government to solve. Let's scan the rest of your article for some clues to build on.]
The IMF is run by smart individuals who understand international economics [i.e., conventional superficial international economics of the mid-20th century]. It can and has made mistakes, but when IMF systematically fails to stem a widespread decline, as it has in Asia [and Brazil], it is because it is being asked to do a job that it does not have the tools to do [or rather, the ideas to do].... Probably the IMF's biggest mistake is to let all those in meltdown...think that they can export their way out of their problems.
[No, Lester, you've already mentioned the IMF's biggest mistake and that is to let all those in meltdown think they can borrow their way out of their problems. Remember what you said about Japan and its reserves being far bigger than the IMF's? And the irrelevance of borrowing is corroborated by Brazil's experience - see Brazil article above, 1/27. But let's peg the export panacea as the IMF's second biggest mistake.
[Conclusions so far - borrowing isn't the heart of it and exports aren't the heart of it. If all that leaves us with is global government which isn't going to happen, the problem is indeed insolvable and not just difficult.
[But there is something else that we're left with after we discard borrowing, exports, and global government, something that has never been tried on the scale of a modern first-world nation like Japan, something that the New Deal put off indefinitely by bandaiding with borrowing long enough to last until World War II, something that World War II did that corrected the fundamentals of the economy enough to last a generation before the problems started returning again, something that World War II did in one of the worst but most effective and often-used ways - it SHARED our way out of global depression (and it motivated sharing by removing enough labor hours out of the job market to engage market forces to raise wages, centrifuge wealth out of the black hole it had concentrated into by the late 1920s, and BALANCE the investment, production, and consumption functions of the world's economies).
[We now need a better technology of sharing than catastrophe-induced sharing. We need a way to remove colossal amounts of labor hours from the job market without killing people. And we at The Timesizing Wire have a well-developed design for doing this along the lines of flexible, bidirectional work sharing, an approach that we Americans actually followed successfully as we adjusted the workweek upward but mostly downward, from 80-84 hrs/wk to 40 hrs/wk, in the century and a half between the years 1790 and 1940. We call our design Timesizing.
[But leave us not get too monosyllabic here. "Sharing" might be giving too sentimental an impression. It might give the impression that we're talking about redistribution here (oh noooo, Mr. Phil!). Let's substitute a more interesting term from the strange dialect of economese. Let's substitute "reinvesting." Timesizing basically works by providing a grassroots, frontline guideline to hugely augment the much neglected reinvestment function in current "skimming and charity" capitalism. In fact, the economic design underlying Timesizing could be called Reinvestment Capitalism, because it continuously and decentralizedly reinvests in its own markets via grassroots spending power via wages hiked by market forces in response to what employers perceive as an aggregate labor shortage (and not just a rhetorical shortage of qualified labor, as now, to get visas for more cheap programmers from India).
[Thurow goes off on the need for a global lender of last resort, eventually admitting he means a global "charity" of last resort. Timesizing makes local, state, and finally national and international governments the Reinvestor of Last Resort. And all reinvestment is market-determined by the incidence of overtime. And all reinvestment is funnelled into human resources, either into hiring or (if necessary) on-the-job training - and that means it's funnelled into centrifuged spending power and markets via wages and earnings. And if that's not enough to take in, the aggregate overtime-targeted reinvestment fluctuates because overtime fluctuates with unemployment - if unemployment rises, the workweek falls (and overtime rises) - if unemployment falls, the workweek rises (and overtime falls).
[Pooh, says you (with Dahlberg) - that won't provide enough reinvestment. Ah but it will if we redefine unemployment (UE) to be more than window dressing. UE should include everyone dependent on the taxpayer - welfare, disability, homelessness, prison, forced part time.... And if we find insoluble difficulties with adequately determining UE, as Frances Perkins certainly anticipated, we can switch to employment, in which case, if employment falls, overtime and reinvestment automatically rise, and vice versa. If we're starting the program at an inadequate level of employment, we start with a transition period to ramp up (gradually) to an adequate level of employment - as defined by regular referendums of the affected constituency. And of course, the whole public-sector stage of the Timesizing program is preceded by a long private-sector stage which is voluntary, company-level, and public-education oriented.]
[Boosting the incentives to increase the workweek, the health insurance-employer connection - ]
1/26 US health costs up 6.1% in '98 - But in Mass., rates rose only 1.5%..., by Alex Pham, Bos Globe, D1.
...in terms of total premiums paid by employers and employees, according to Mercer's nationwide survey of 4200 employers with 17 million employees in the US.... Nationally, it was the first major hike reported in the annual survey since 1993, when premiums rose 8%..\.. The Massachusetts increase was lower because insurers in the Bay State were slower to boost rates....
1/25 [Mass. Gov.] Celucci taking tough welfare line - Proposes stricter work requirements, by Tina Cassidy, Bos Globe, frontpage.
[And this when we have a state budget surplus??! Ancient Rome had its coliseums, where the strong could watch the weakest get eaten by lions. But we're more civilized. We just pile the burdens on the weak and strut our 'tuff. Didn't ex-Gov. Weld recently try to get entry jobs for a slew of welfare mothers and succeeded only for half? As long as we're getting stringent with welfare recipients with young children, why not do something intelligent for a change and head off a big chunk of the problem by going with California and offering reversible, surgically implanted contraception?
[Meanwhile, Weld discovered the hard way that the entry level jobs just weren't there. So we went ahead and capped welfare anyway. Now we're going to require 11,000 recipients to immediately seek work or be cut off welfare. We're also going to increase the number of hours "all other transitional beneficiaries" must work. To address the child-care crunch, we're offering an additional $56 million for baby sitters. The added flood of welfare recipients into the job market will depress wages even further, and then we'll start attending to the need to make prison inmates earn their keep. Stage by stage we are building ourselves into Hell by prolonging the terminal illness of our current form of labor-surplus job-shortage capitalism. Arthur Dahlberg 66 years ago indicated what it would take to switch that and have a balanced labor-job capitalism which employers, of course, would view as acute labor-shortage job-surplus capitalism, as they do every time wars or plagues harness market forces to elicit the solid economic booms that come from less concentration and more circulation. Land sakes, they even Newspeak our current grotesque labor surplus as "labor shortage" in the increasingly Orwellian world they're creating for themselves, and us. Hey, let's call it Coliseum Capitalism!]
The new proposal is certain to renew the debate over whether the Republican administration [in all but hiring and party building] is being too tough on the jobless, particularly single mothers who cannot afford or find child care.... Since the Welfare Reform Act became law in February 1995, the number of families receiving benefits has dropped from 103,000 to 59,000, with the ranks decreasing for 64 straight months. Likewise, state Aid to Families with Dependent Children has plummeted from $759 million to $402 million over the past four years. Last month, [a key provision of welfare reform forced] 5,000 cases [25%] off the welfare rolls under a two-year benefits cap.
Why are we still "fixing" everything else but the center?
Why are we again (as in the 1920s) assuming that our economy can take any amount of high- to low-wage and full- to no-benefits job replacement without reducing domestic buying power and markets, and secondarily reducing our job market, regardless of the happyspin of the rich?
Why are we again assuming that the top 1% can concentrate 99% of the nation's wealth and still have anything remotely like the America we knew between 1947 and 1967?
[Great cartoon - ]
1/25 Wasserman's view, Bos Globe, A14.
[Two women reading the paper...]
"Since when are Republicans big supporters of sexual harassment laws?"
"Since Clinton got sued for sexual harassment."
"Can we get him sued for universal health care?"
[They admitted they wasted the other $63b or so, so why not give them another $63b? - ]
1/24 IMF introspection, Bos Globe, D2.
In the blame game, the IMF has been the tackling dummy. Now [the IMF itself] is joining the criticism, with a 147-page self-assessment that said it had "badly misgauged" the Asian financial meltdown of 1997 and 1998. The fund bluntly acknowledged its early efforts failed to douse a fast-moving financial firestorm that differed from any crisis it had even seen.
[Well, maybe if it could open its eyes a bit beyond the last 5-10 years and check out the 1920s....]
[The IMF maintained] that its basic approach to upheavals in Thailand, Indonesia, and South Korea ended up on target.
[You think it's over for these three? You think economic collapses are straight-line? Apparently! - Give these penitents more money! - ]
1/24 IMF's coffers to grow $63b as nations approve new donations, Bloomberg News via Bos Globe, D3.
...to spend fixing economies around the world....
[Yeah, the IMF "fixes" them all right! The names of the sucker nations are (wisely) omitted from the article.]
1/24 Brazilian plan advances, Bos Globe, D2.
As the global turmoil has spread, each economic basketcase has popped up closer to America's doorstep. [So America was relieved when Brazil accomplished step one in its recovery drive.]
[Hey, if you can tax the rich by calling it part of an austerity plan, we've got no complaints - as Will Rogers pointed out, they're the only ones with any money.]
1/24/99 [HUD] Funding cutoff for care of Maine's homeless, by Donna Gold, Boston Globe, p. C1.
[Gang violence draws nigh the rich, chaos gnaws at order, "the center cannot hold" - ]
1/24 Mall shooting breaks old pacts, clergy says - New code of violence feared, by T. Robertson and E. O'Brien, Bos Globe, B1.
When violence erupted at [Boston's] exclusive Copley Place mall on Friday afternoon, it shattered an unspoken understanding among streetwise teenagers that [such places] were off-limits.... Christopher Martin, a 15-year-old...High School student wounded in the neck...in the 4:15 p.m. shooting, was in stable condition yesterday at Boston Medical Center....
1//23 Gunshot sends shoppers fleeing, by Lynda de Jong, Bos Globe, B1.
...Yesterday...gang violence apparently erupted in [Boston's] most upscale shopping mall....Police and patrons alike were stunned by the...shooting in a spot where a group of dentists was enjoying pre-dinner drinks, and a pregnant waitress trembled following the chaos.... The shot stunned the crowd at the Terrace Bar, just a few feet from where [the victim] was hit. "The bar was crowded to begin with," said John Collins, a Mendon dentist in Boston for a convention....The shooting comes as Boston is gaining national recognition for its decreasing crime rate and safe streets. "I have seen nothing of this magnitude in the 13 years I have been here," said Captain Celucci, referring to the location....
[High tech CEO's still inching the snickersnee into their own gut - ]
1/24 High school talent hunt - Facing labor shortage and technology advances, some firms are tapping skills of teenagers, by Diane Lewis, Bos Globe, D1.
[Still singing that "labor shortage" song with 17% unemployment in high tech in the over-50 age range?]
The number of teen computer specialists increased to 22,000 in 1998. That was up from...4,000 programmers in 1994, according to the US Dept. of Labor..\..
[Time to update our child labor laws?]
A 1998 study by the...Information Technology Association estimated there were 346,000 high-tech job vacancies in the United States, but not enough...computer scientists to fill them..\..
[What about those 17% unemployed in the over-50 age bracket?!]
"The technology is just moving too quickly for the educational system and society to catch up," [according to John Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an international outplacement firm in Chicago]..\..
[And why should it if they're inefficiently separated from the workplace?]
"We are now seeing companies actually going into high schools to hire talented teens for the summer or to train them to take permanent, full-time jobs when they graduate"..\..
[If they had adequate (colossal) continuous on-the-job training and retraining going on in the first place, they wouldn't always be whining and cheating like this. And if they weren't burning people out working 80 hrs/wk "full time" on a 40-hour salary while they work on yet more "labor-saving" technology.]
"Innovation could be walking around in Nike shoes somewhere with his pants drooping around his rear end," [said Bob Cohen, spokesman for the Information Technology Association in Arlington, VA.]
[Sure, Bob. Innovation to you is seeing teenage hacker buns on the street and hiring them cheap while you lay off your 50-somethings. One question, Bob - where you gonna get your markets when you start laying off your 40-somethings, then your 30-somethings, then...?]
[One success story and one revelation in welfare reform - ]
1/24 Welfare reform through a child's eyes - Better food, a room of her own, by Sally Jacobs, Bos Globe, B1.
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. - ...On welfare, [Alicia's mother, Janice] Mezzetti pocketed a monthly $250 in food stamps, a cash benefit of about $525, and a rent subsidy, all of which amounted to roughly $14,000 a year. Now she earns about $7 an hour, or an annual $13,670.... Mezzetti will continue to receive Medicaid, state-funded health care, for one year; she will be eligible for benefits at her job in April....
[Economic designers, take note of this next bit - ]
When the family received monthly food stamps, Mezzetti bought groceries once each month. By mid-month, supplies were often running out. Now that she gets a weekly paycheck, Mezzetti shops every week, and while there may not actually be more food coming into the house, it comes more often.
[Again, about that $525 cash benefit which was also apparently monthly - ]
"I don't have to wait for the check to come in the mail every month," she said... "I have money during the week instead of just once a month."
[Personally, it seems incredible to Phil that we stress some of the most stressed people in our society by requiring them to stretch food and money across a month instead of just a week. If you want to get mercenary about it, this story suggests that you could send them a check on a weekly schedule instead of monthly and you could probably trim the annual amount slightly with no effective reduction in living standards, because you've eliminated the stress of monthly budgeting (and months are notoriously odd lengths - weeks are always exactly, predictably, seven days, no matter what month they're in).]
[Shrinking family time - ]
1/23 Longer workweek burdens couples, researchers find - Women frustrated by fewer job options, by Daniel Haney, AP via Bos Globe, 3.
ANAHEIM, Calif. - A study of two-career couples finds that the number of hours they spend on the job has risen substantially in the past two decades. And they don't like it.... Marin Clarkberg, a Cornell University sociologist...and other researchers [surveyed 4,554 married couples in 1988 and 1994 as part of their National Study of Families and Households and presented their findings] yesterday at a meeting of the American Assoc. for the Advancement of Science. Both sexes feel stressed [but women more so].... The reason: too few part-time jobs for women with families. Existing part-time jobs often pay poorly and do not offer health insurance or other benefits....
[Yet part-time jobs are always included in "jobs created" data to outweigh "jobs lost."]
The job market is still largely geared toward...working full-time or not at all [and "full time" is still rigidly regarded as a minimum 40-hour workweek. Technology is supposed to make life easier] but the researchers said the technology often seems to result in people working still more. "People can work any place, any time, but they can also work everywhere, all the time," said [Phyllis Moen, another Cornell sociologist.] Between 1972 and 1994, couples' total average working time has increased by seven hours a week..\.. Half of all the women and 20% of the men said they wished they could work part time.
[Wake up, Republicans - you ain't gonna git family values with no family time!]
1/23 [Russia] Reaching for lifeline - Moscow appears confident IMF will come to rescue despite signs to the contrary, by Jean MacKenzie, Bos Globe, C1.
1/23 Deepening Brazil fears rattle markets, by Paul Blustein, Bos Globe, C1.
[Our 'gentrified' indexes stay ambiguous - ]
1/23 [Massachusetts] unemployment rate rises but so does job growth, by Kimberley Blanton, Bos Globe, C1.
[Naturally we have job growth at Christmas - but to have even our gentrified, count-nothing unemployment rate rise from 2.9 to 3.1% at the same time must really mean our current protracted replay of the 1920s is nearing 1929.]
[The return of voodoo economics (see also 'Good news - or is it' below 1/22) - ]
1/23 A $4.4 trillion surplus? Forecast raises doubts, by Aaron Zitner, Bos Globe, frontpage.
The White House said it is banking on the booming economy to produce budget surpluses over the next 15 years...greater than the combined value of the French, British, and German economies this year..\.. [The projections recalled the unrealistic numbers that Reagan cooked up] to show that the nation could afford to cut taxes while building up the military. [Clinton wants the spurious windfall for massive spending on] Social Security [where it all belongs], Medicare, defense, and education.
[The wages of "free" trade - ]
1/22 US trade gap widens to $15.5b in Nov. [up 14% from $13.6b in Oct.], Reuters via Bos Globe, C2.
WASHINGTON - ...The Commerce Dept. said...imports rose to record levels while exports fell. Government officials sought to put the report in a positive light, but analysts said the record US trade deficit in 1998...is bound to deteriorate further in the face of global financial problems and would be much worse if it were not for lower oil imports and prices.
[And if OPEC gets it together again....]
[Speak of the devil, they did get it together again. Check out the 3/23 and 3/24 items on OPEC from our goodnews page.]
"Bad as these numbers are, we haven't seen the worst of the trade deficit yet," said NAM president Jerry Jasinowski.
[You sure nailed that one, Jerry.]
[Brazil plunges ahead, er, behind - ]
1/22 Despite vote for [IMF-mandated] taxes, Brazil's currency plunges 7.6% [to close at 1.72 to the $], Reuters via Bos Globe, C11.
SAO PAULO - Brazil's battered currency suffered another devastating plunge yesterday as markets shrugged off a key victory for the country's tough austerity plan....Capital flight threatened to drain the country's limited supply of the US currency. The [Brazilian] réal has dived 30% since last week....
[So much for austerity - for the poor. And as for hoping for salvation from a bunch of speculators whose sole aim in life is to make as much money for themselves in as short a time as possible - get real! (no pun intended)]
[Good news - or is it? - ]
1/22 Archer raps Clinton Social Security plan - Ways and Means leader calls idea 'budgetary manipulation'
, by Robert Rosenblatt, LA Times via Bos Globe, C2.
WASHINGTON - ...Republicans agree with the president that 62% of the budget surplus should be reserved until Social Security's long-range solvency is assured....
[Speaking of 'budgetary manipulation' -
1/21 Fed chairman sounds warning - Greenspan says economy and stock market are growing too fast - by Peter Gosselin, Bos Globe, C1
NEW YORK - ...Alan Greenspan said yesterday that, despite repeated predictions of a slowing, the US economy continues to race forward at a spectacular speed, perhaps too spectacular for its own good. And...the nation's stock market [here's where we started wrapping the stock market in nationalism] is roaring along at an even more spectacular rate, one that is putting it too far ahead of the economy for comfort.
["Growing too fast" is an inaccurate metaphor - "compacting wealth too tightly" would be more accurate and would automatically explain the inflation in the stock market, i.e., its outstripping of the economy at large.]
...Greenspan was renewing his drive to jawbone...the economy and the stock market into slowing down, an effort...at which he has been singularly unsuccessful....
[Greenspan is swimming against a powerful current of centuries of propaganda in favor of Growth, the Faster the Better. If he switched his main metaphor from "growing too fast" to "over-compacting wealth" his jawboning would have more success. And if he suggested a few ways to centrifuge wealth and keep markets up with investment funds, he'd have even more success. We suggest the automatic reinvestment feature of timesizing.]
The Fed is concerned [about] inflation....
[Greenspan has clearly not studied the economic history of the 1920s. When you have a huge global labor surplus - everyone everywhere on Planet Earth anxious about employment (except the richest 10% and their critically influential media cheerleaders) - you cannot possibly get general wage-price inflation, just spot price/wage hikes due to spot shortages of specific goods or services(/skills). And if you do get inflation (short of disastrous hyper-inflation), it's part of the solution, not part of the problem. It's part of the Economy's natural immune system healing itself by penalizing larger slower-circulating stores of capital in favor of smaller faster-moving capital. It's part of the wealth-centrifuging process which is so desperately needed at this pre-Depression point in the long business cycle (the Kondratief) to undergird the massive pools of concentrated investment capital desperately seeking disappearing giant market-supported productivity centers to invest in (or even just retain value in).
The Fed...is fearful that the long stock boom is turning into a financial bubble where investors bet on shares' further increases regardless of how the underlying companies are doing [or bet on currencies' further strengthening regardless of how the underlying economies are doing].
[Alan, you're too late. The stock boom has long since turned into a financial bubble. Why else the market drop of October/87? Why else the market drop of Aug-Sep/98? And more significantly, why else the gradually and erratically increasing market volatility of the entire decade of the 1990s? The deep-structure problem (apologies to Chomsky) is unbalanced concentration of wealth (and work and skills). And with wealth compaction above a threshold that we passed in 1967 when we got the first ominous flickerings of stagflation (the standard 3d-world MO, says Jane Jacobs) - the more concentration, the less circulation.]
On its face [i.e., we're talking surface-structure here], Greenspan's testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee was nothing but good news. He labeled the economy's recent performance..."solid"...
[Alan Alan Alan, how can it be "solid" when you're worried about a "financial bubble" and when you guys just bailed out a hedge fund to the tune of $3.5 billion?! - see Collapse story below on 9/25/98.]
"To date, domestic demand and hence employment and output in the United States certainly has remained vigorous," [Greenspan] told committee members.
[Domestic demand based on record consumer debt and financial bubble is "vigorous"? And as Greenspan hints, the United States is alone in the world in kidding itself into a belief it's got high employment - what's high in the US is the highest prison population in the world, 20% higher than China's (1.8m/1.5m) despite their 367% bigger population (272m/1b) and a much bigger marginal workforce (part time etc.) than Europe.]
But behind [Greenspan's] rosy words were some darker messages: that the economy is growing "more rapidly than can be currently accommodated"; that the new run-up in stock prices "will have difficulty in being sustained" [hey at least we're starting to talk about that key value of Greens and ecological economists - "sustainability"]; that the Fed is caught in a bind between what to do about the economy [cut interest rates] and the stock market [raise interest rates].
[Aha, somebody's asking the Big Question. Here's what to do, Alan. Put interest rates on a referendum basis so we can exhaust this cosmetic solution and really face the question, What's the deeper, sustainable solution? Then we can start to get a more solid analysis and some more productively framed questions about what to do.]
But with so much of current growth based on consumers feeling rich [just like drugs] because of recent stock gains and with such a large fraction of those gains based on interest-rate cuts [= Fed brand drugs], rather than increases, the Fed is in a difficult position...."In the current state of financial markets, policy makers are going to have to be particularly wary of actions that...undermine confidence [i.e., puncture the bubble]..." [Greenspan] told lawmakers. Analysts said the problem will effectively sideline the central bank for some time...."The Fed is on hold," said William C. Dudley, chief US economist for Goldman Sachs in New York.
[In short, Greenspan would like the bubble to burst sooner [less mess] than later [messy, very messy], but he doesn't want himself or his lieutenants to be the ones that do it.]
1/21 Brazil's government wins key vote, by Chris Kraul, LA Times via Bos Globe, C2.
RIO - ...Legislator's willingness to tax civil service workers and retirees - something they had refused to do on four previous occasions - was a major victory for President Fernando Henrique Cardoso.
[Great, maybe now they can go beyond fiddling around with taxing the middle and go for real centrifuging of wealth - by taxing the rich. Better still, forget the whole lame taxation approach and go for timesizing to really get "less concentration, more circulation" going.]
[Further fading of our one-person one-vote order into one-dollar one-vote chaos - ]
1/21 Social Security plan is attacked, by Aaron Zitner, Bos Globe, C1.
...Pres. Clinton is proposing that the government try...buying stocks in an attempt to earn money that it would use to pay Social Security benefits.... Alan Greenspan...chairman of the Federal Reserve, told a House committee that Clinton's plan could become a drag on the US economy....the governmen, influenced by political pressures, might put its money in inefficient companies..\.. Clinton's plan would put [up to] $700 billion of future budget surpluses [viz. "surpluses"] into stocks over the next 15 years. At its peak, the Social [In-]Security system would own 4% of the US stock market....
[Let's get this straight - the entity that eventually, by killing off its surplus (i.e., unemployed) citizens in World War II, finally brought stability to the entity whose very name is synonomous with "erratic," wants to anchor itself in the latter's current bubble.]
...Some lawmakers and business lobbies fear that the government, once it owned a piece of a company, might be tempted to dictate corporate policy. "The possibilities for abuse in that arrangement are unlimited," said House Majority Leader Dick Armey....
[And finally, the sanest thing he's said in years - ]
Greenspan also said yesterday that he preferred using the budget surpluses to pay down the federal debt....
1/20 IMF defends its Asian austerity measures, by AP's Harry Dunphy via Bos Globe, D2.
...The report issued by the 182-nation organization yesterday did concede that mistakes were made in some areas. They included misjudging the severity of the recessions that followed adoption of IMF recommendations by Thailand, South Korea, and Indonesia in exchange for billion-dollar rescue packages.... [The report] says ways must be found to get the private sector involved in preventing and resolving [the crises caused by capital flight - global investors rapidly withdrawing money lent to developing nations at the first sign of trouble.]
[Timesizing, backed up by reinvestment capitalism, is the ultimate way to "get the private sector involved in preventing" capital flight. Timesizing automates massive reinvestment in domestic markets, keyed to the incidence of overtime. Overtime itself is indirectly controlled by under-employment. If under-employment rises, the workweek adjusts downward and overtime tends to rise. Overtime targets, triggers, paces and funds new hiring and, if necessary, on-the-job training. The worktime-focussed approach has the advantage of cutting the global labor surplus and job scarcity, and thus engaging market forces to raise wages in response to its engineered labor shortage and job surplus. Market forces centrifuge wealth and resolve the underlying problem of unbalanced wealth concentration. That's the general direction of the ultimate solution (of which we describe only the first major program). Now for more on the problem - its history...]
The Asian financial meltdown began in Thailand in July 1997. It sprad to other coutnries in the region and then, in 1998, to Russia and Latin America - threatening the global financial system. Brazil, Latin America's largest economy, received a $41.5 IMF billion bailout last November. But investors kept pulling their money out of the country, leading the government to devalue its currency last week and raise interest rates Monday in an attempt to calm markets.
[The original problem, as usual, is to think the solution is external and that massive infusions of cash from the IMF or anyone else can solve the problems caused by unbalanced domestic wealth concentration, compaction so dense and massive that it sucks the spending power and markets away from it own domestic investment targets. So it stops investing domestically and goes scanning for a more egalitarian economy to invest in, where there are still markets on a scale that matches the astronomical investable money built up around the world by short-term oriented, work&wages concentrating, downsizing capitalism (vs. long-term oriented, work&wages centrifuging, timesizing capitalism). So we have fewer and fewer people with more and more huge investable funds looking for less and less market-supported investment targets around the world, when if they'd simply reinvest in their own domestic spending power and markets at home, the instability problems would not even arise. So it's a combined problem of concentrated wealth, too much discretion, too much impatience for quick return on investment, too much focus on the game of more-more-more regardless of what astronomical levels we may already be at, too much obsession with control to the point of self-derailing, too little concern with exhange although that is ultimately the basis of all modern currencies - downsizing is the measure of this disdain for exchange. Downsizing is a refusal to exchange your huge compacted wealth for somebody else's productive time, and yet all there is to invest in, is somebody else's productive time and here you are reducing it to gain and compact more paper wealth. Top executives think they want free trade, but trade is exchange. They don't want more exchange. They want more productivity out of more people they can pay less, or fewer people they have to pay a lot. At any rate, their desires constantly erode their own markets. Because their obsession with more productivity for less wages ultimately leaves them with a global glut of productivity, and no spending power and markets to buy it. Thereupon they liquidate their failing investments and wind up sitting with huge cash reserves while all around them people are starving for lack of cash to buy even the food products they need to survive - another great depression - worse than the previous one. Timesizing sets a different, more balanced course, safer for everyone, including the rich.]
1/20 Taxpayers group warns of fiscal strain from spending, tax breaks, by Hilary Sargent, Bos Globe, D16.
1/19 Brazil's future in the balance - Economic fate of country and Latin America could depend on leaders' ability to enact painful reforms, by Kimberly Blanton, Bos Globe, D1.
[This is the dilemma of standard economics - it has only two medicines in its doctor's bag, and both make the patient worse - government spending (favored by the World Bank) and government austerity (favored by the IMF). Austerity was the de-facto policy of the early Depression in the US and it made things worse, and government spending did not solve the later Depression until world war. And there are those who believe war did not succeed by "priming the pump" but by flipping the economy from a job shortage to a labor shortage (in the worst possible way - by killing people).]
1/19 Global wishful thinking - If nothing else, Brazil has shattered the soothing notion that the world economy is slowly but surely on the mend, by Robert Samuelson, Bos Globe, D4.
[NB. this is not Paul Samuelson, the great textbook writer and die-hard Lump of Labor critic. This is Robert Samuelson, an economics reporter in Washington. Robert offers no solution. He just offers a wake-up call that...]
This crisis...is genuine and menacing.
[but his "even if we muddle through" still indicates that even he is not taking it seriously enough because he thinks that "muddling" might still get us "through." He offers a review of...]
The powerful forces depressing the world economy...
[More stupid makework, more fuel for luddism -]
1/19 Another Y2K pest: lawsuits, by Aaron Zitner, Bos Globe, D1.
["Luddism" is hatred of machines and technology instead of hating the short-sightedness of managers who use technology, not for making human life easier, but for making it less secure - not for cutting working hours for all, but for cutting jobs for a few, and a few more, and a few more....]
1/16 Industrial production lags, but end-of-year advance offers hope, AP via Bos Globe, E1.
Output at the nation's factories, mines and utilities in 1998 grew at [3.2%,] the slowest pace in five years but...increased 0.2% in December from the month before...the Federal Reserve said.
[Production lags when demand lags. Demand lags when $$ circulation lags. Circulation lags when $$ concentration spurts. Concentration spurts when wages (excluding executive pay) lags. Wages lag when labor's bargaining position weakens. Such leverage lags when labor's in surplus. Labor's in surplus when time-saving technology is introduced without saving the time (for leisure) by, for example, adjusting the workweek downward as we did from 1776 to 1940. The workweek isn't adjusting downward because our overtime laws have incentivated overwork rather than hiring.]
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