4/29 Vital signs - Soaring markets in Asia, Brazil prompting some to say global crisis ending; others not so sure, by Aaron Zitner, Bos Globe, D1.
[It only takes 0.000000000001% rise to "soar" above zero, and even less to "soar" above negative growth.]
..."The global financial crisis is now officially over," George Soros, the international financier, declared last week after investors gobbled up $2 billion in new bonds issued by Brazil.
[Is he serious? Honestly, we thought George had more common sense. Clearly big investors all over the world have consolidated so much spending power that they couldn't possibly spend (thereby suctioning the markets away from their own investments) that they're getting 'the rapture of the deep' without a helluva lot of options in terms of investment targets on the scale they want to operate.]
4/28 IMF fails to reach agreement, AP via Boston Globe, p. D2.
...on how to prevent or at least better manage future Asian-style currency crises.
[Could that possibly, even remotely, be because they haven't even solved this one yet, and so the whole question is just a teensy weensy bit premature?]
Financial officials from the seven major industrial countries couldn't even agree on measures for ending the recession being experienced by one-third of the world because of steep currency devaluations.
[Touché!]
Instead [it] issued a 10-page communique pledging to continue efforts [blah blah blah].... It hailed as its one major achievement the creation of contingent credit lines...for...countries pursuing sound economic policies.
["Sound economic policies" in a world where less than one percent of the population can still accumulate 99 percent of the spending power without spending it? - we don't think so. And as the IMF racks its tiny brains for easier credit for black-hole nations, guess who's now gonna GET TOUGH on them wimps thet goes around declarin' bangcrupsy all the time?! - see today's story on our bankruptcy page. Get the picture? Toughen bankruptcy laws, boast of lower bankruptcies. Toughen unemployment definition, boast of lower unemployment. Toughen welfare requrements, boast of lower welfare.... what have we forgotten?]
[Problems with cats - ]
4/28 Senator asks Brazil bankers [including the 'cat'] to testify - , by Christian Plumb, Bloomberg via Bos Globe, D3.
BRASILIA - Brazil's senior senator [Antonio Carlos Magahaes] yesterday urged the government's top economic policy makers to...come forward and ask, 'What do you want to know?' \in response to\ allegations the central bank leaked information on devaluation to select private banks. The ex-central bank president [Francisco Lopes] was arrested Monday...for failing to cooperate with the probe.... [He] paid 300 real ($175) bail [1-2-3, all together, "ouch"! - clearly he's got friends or at least, remoras] and was released after five hours of detention....
Cardoso [Brazil's president] said he named Lopes to head the central bank...only for lack of a better alternative.
"If you don't have a dog, you hunt with a cat," he said.
Lopes emerged from...police headquarters...to find his assets frozen by the government. Senators also ordered an investigation of his phone and banking records..\..
An investigation into the bailout of two small banks could bring a wider probe into the government. At best, [this] could paralyze the Brazilian Congress, which has a full plate of legislation aimed at cutting the country's 132.3 billion real [=US$??] budget deficit. At worst, it could uncover...wider wrongdoing in the Cardoso administration, or a failure to properly supervise the central bank, which in Brazil isn't independent from the [government, but under the executive branch = formula for fraud?].
[Well with soundbytes like 'hunt with a cat', Cardoso is doing his best to avoid the first 'worst'. In the USA, the second 'worst' wouldn't even register, since Congress has sloughed off its responsibility to supervise our central bank (the Fed) - so with the 'dogs' at bay, the 'cats' can play any time.]
[A bad sign...]
4/27 Former president [Fancisco Lopes] of Central Bank of Brazil arrested, AP via Bos Globe, C3.
...after he refused to sign a document committing him to tell the truth at a parliamentary inquiry [in the wake of last year's 1.9% contraction in Brazil's economy]....
4/27 Workplace deaths down in '98, up sharply in '99, by Diane Lewis, Bos Gobe, C6.
...17 workers have been killed on tthe job in the first quarter of this year, up from 10 in the year-ago quarter..\.. Released yesterday, the report "Dying for Work in Massachusetts" says 41 workers were killed in preventable accidents last year, down from 66 in 1997. But..."if this [year's] trend continues, 68 workplace deaths will have transpired by the end of [1999]," Robert J. Haynes, president of the state AFL-CIO, said yesterday.... "The biggest causes of job-related deaths were lack of protectin from falls, unguarded machinery, and improper lockout of machines," said [Nancy Lessin, a policy analyst for the Mass. Coalition for Safety and Health and coauthor of the report,] who attributed last year's decline to a drop in the number of fishermen killed at sea and a decline in workplace homicides..\.. [The report] said an additional 1,000 workers died from occupational diseases, 1,200 developed work-related cancers, and 50,000 Mass. employees sustained serious injuries on the job in 1998.
[So does that mean that workplace homicides are already back up this year?]
...The most frequently reported workplace injury [was] 32,000 people...with some form of RSI [repetitive strain injury].... The report recommended greater workplace safety surveillance by [OSHA] tthe Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which has been criticized...for assessing small fines and for being too slow to enact and enforce safety standards. Nationwide, there are 1,200 federal safety inspectors for nearly 3.6 million workplaces that have a total work force of 55 million.... [Said Lessin,] "Too many employers recognize the small size of the OSHA fines [averaging $19,317 per worker death last year] and calculate that it is cheaper to violate the regulations than comply with them."
[And it's cheaper and more effective for a population to engineer a general labor shortage (via shorter hours) so that market forces impose massive flexible improvements in workplace safety, than to go on with this charade of inspection.]
4/26 IMF approves new program to prevent global crisis - To create 'contingent credit lines' for nations at risk, by Martin Crutsinger, AP via Bos Globe, A11.
[More superficial 'prevention' from some pretty superficial minds - since "anything can be solved by throwing money at it", get ready to throw money at anything.]
4/26 Volunteers of America, editorial, Bos Globe, A16.
...AmeriCorps has more than 50,000 mostly young people contributing a year of work for subsistence pay and a $4,725 education award....
[Are they really 'contributing' or avoiding a hostile job market for another year? Is this really an "Oh isn't that lovely!" or something ominous - another way of keeping kids out of the job market a little longer, or a way of intensifying the wage-depressing general labor glut, or simply a step backward toward agism and slavery?]
President Clinton wants to increase AmeriCorp's budget.... The expansion should not be traded off against basic needs; it should be embraced as a good investment.
[Investing in chronic age-bracketed near-slavery is never a good investment. See also article below.]
4/25 Power of the Purse - In the increasingly key role of corporate giving, women dominate, by Steven Wilmsen, Bos Globe, G1.
Hundreds of groups will submit proposals for a piece of the $14 million that Fleet Financial Group will give away this year....
[Why are corporations in the ongoing practice of charity, which has nothing to do with their corporate mission? Is it to enhance their public image? If so, why don't they enhance it directly by doing their corporate mission better instead of getting into totally irrelevant activities? Why don't they offer a lifetime employment guarantee like Lincoln Electric of Cleveland and a fluctuating workweek to support that guarantee, instead of downsizing thousands and maybe rehiring some, maybe not, maybe at the same pay, but usually at lower pay? Why don't they offer free tellers and ATMs like they used to? Why do they have an image problem in the first place unless customer service is declining and their treatment of their own employees is deteriorating? Why don't they offer a credit card option which reverses the frequently devastating practice of no annual fee but high late fees, the way it used to be? Why are they creating a subeconomy of desperate, begging, parasitic organizations?
[For that matter, why do we have charity on an ongoing, predictable basis? Is this not a symptom of an inadequate economic design? Should not charity be reserved for the unpredictable, for crisis situations, and not for a steady diet?
[In the series of economies along the Timesizing evolutionary path, charity is only for the unpredictable, not for 'business' as usual.]
4/25 Ethnic violence racks Indonesia - Enforced harmony undone, hatreds range wide, by Indira Lakshamanan, Bos Globe, A1, A9.
...The currency crisis, runaway inflation, and food shortages that began last year have fueled animosities and shortened tempers.... In the past three months, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people have been killed, and tens of thousands have been driven from their homes in several parts of the world's most populous nation....
[Let's see, that's China, India, USA??, Indonesia.... What about Russia?]
In the long run, unresolved disputes over resources, power sharing, and cultural differences could fundamentally destabilize this country of 200 million people....
[Seems that, as shortages clamp on, diversity becomes less of a delight and more of a tinderbox - ever more and poorer people fighting ever more viciously for less and less. Where now the abundance promised by technology? The truth is, without a new technology of sharing, it doesn't matter how much abundance you have, it can still be co-opted by a tiny minority so that most people have less and less.
[Yugoslavia started disintegrating when the Presidency, always shared by the Serbs and Croats on a take-turns basis, was not relinquished by the Serbs. Russia started to disintegrate when the few new entrepreneurs who made out like bandits in the new free market had no new technology of sharing, no guidelines for automatic massive reinvestment, and instead grabbed their "share" (without limits) and sent it out of the country for safekeeping. Russia could have been one of the most prosperous places on Earth right now - if only they had had guidelines for massive automatic reinvestment, for a new technology of sharing, a new 'social software', like Timesizing.]
4/24 IMF moves to free $4.5b for Russia - NATO allies hope aid would reduce tensions - by Kimberly Blanton, Bos Globe, F1.
Pressured by NATO allies to help relieve tensions with Russia over war in Yugoslavia, the International Monetary Fund is negotiating to lift an aid moratorium and extend $4.5 billion in funds to the country's battered economy, a Russian official said yesterday.... Although Russia has not reached economic targets set by the IMF [themselves a major source of disaster], the specter of future debt defaults by Russia at a time NATO is bombing Yugoslavia - over Russia's objections - has created a mix of international finance and politics that make agreement likely, analysts said. "The whole IMF package is far more poltical than economic now," said Peter Westin, an economist at the Russian-European Center for Economic Policy in Moscow.... In August, the IMF suspended its $22 billion package to Moscow, because Primakov's government failed to come up with a plan to lift the country out of a financial and economic morass. Fresh funds would open the door for Russia to negotiate with other creditors breathing down its neck, including the Paris Club of countries...Germany [holds] the largest...debt - and the London Club of commercial creditors....
This is like a shell game - Debt, debt, who's got the debt?! It's like the lemming-like compulsion to merge and downsize (including your own markets). Who can clobber the company, the employees, and customer service the most and get away with the biggest golden parachute? Is anyone else besides us getting the feeling we're watching a horror movie where the young woman is just about to go upstairs to look behind that closed door and we're thinking, Real people aren't that stupid! Now we look at CEOs and the IMF and the Paris Club and the London Club and we hafta say, Oh yes they are! Because check out the story below - Russia not only hasn't made the IMF's stupid targets, but it's actually defaulted on another $1.3b! To paraphrase the old guy in Shakespeare's Henry IV, "Jesu, Jesu, what mad days we've spent!"
[Oo oo oo, another chance for the Big Meltdown - ]
4/21 Russia defaults on $1.3 billion in bonds, by Anna Dolgov, AP via Bos Globe, D2.
...Russia is in one of the deepest depressions ever suffered by an industrialized nation....
[Boy, do THEY need Timesizing® because you can start where you are, however far down, and you don't need outside "help" - but we haven't been able to get through to them on email....]
4/21 Trade deficit hits record $19b; Clinton calls for global changes, by Martin Crutsinger, AP via Bos Globe, D2.
...as aftershocks [don't you mean "ongoing shocks" - it ain't over!] from the global financial crisis further limited the ability of American manufacturers and farmers to sell overseas. The trade deficit widened to $19.4 billion in February. That was a 15.6% increase from the previous record, January's imbalance of $16.8 billion.
...President Clinton called on the international community to redouble its efforts to overhaul the global financial architecture to "tame the cycles of boom and bust" and prevent future Asian-style currency crises....
[Never mind the "international community" - just pass fair trade protections, not free trade suicide pills.
[And never mind "future Asian-style currency crises", they can't even tame the present Russian one (see story above).]
[More responsibility without more pay - ]
4/21 Secretaries [they still exist?!] taking on management's tasks, by Brian O'Neill, Bos Globe, D4.
...Just in time for Secretaries' Day today, The Office Professional, an office training publication, has released the results of its survey of 1,200 office professionals.... The survey also reveals...unmet needs, including increased compensation to match those higher skills and responsibilities, and training opportunities for new technology skills.
[From "suggested" donations, to "voluntary" overtime, to "voluntary" megahours on salary, to "voluntary" volunteerism - why not just bring back the "utopian" plantation with all those "happy" slaves?!]
4/18 Volunteer work at work - Corporate charity offers firms a chance to burnish image, recruit workers [or slaves?], by Diane Lewis, Bos Globe, F4.
[Oops, bad beginning. Diane Lewis of all people has bought the "low unemployment" fraud - ]
With a tight labor market forcing large and small companies to attract and keep good employees, volunteering is fast becoming a corporate recruiting tool....
[Our take on the "tight labor market" - there are spot shortages, but if it were really tight, real wages would not have been stagnant for the last two decades and we'd have some healthy wage-push 'inflation' instead of just executive pay and stock market inflation and a huge income gap. The 'tight' labor market is mostly a function af spoiled employers being flooded with resumes and raising their expectations and job requirements accordingly.]
At a time when many working people barely have enough time for community service, employees say they are attracted to a menu of volunteer choices many big employers offer....
[Huh? Talk about 'the prisoners love their chains'! At a time when people are working 50-60-70 hours a week on salary so they're giving charity to the rich already, exactly who are these 'employees' Diane Lewis has unearthed? And are people getting so passive that they can't choose their own charities?! And what happens when these sucker-employees get laid off by their oh-so-altruistic corporate masters? Bet they feel real good about themselves then.]
One year, Lisa Joyner [significant name!], a...community-development officer at [Fleet] Bank, painted a barn at Franklin Park Zoo [and took away paid work from a housepainter]. Another year she worked at a day-care center [and helped depress wages for day-care workers]....
[What's the scoop here? Banking is laying off 95,000 people a year 1995-2000 and now they're trying to smell like a rose? Are Fleet executives scared that the 5,000 people they're going to lay off (page down to the 3/15 story on our downsizing page) are going to 'go postal' and invade the executive suite with MK-14s? Are they trying in a covert way to further build the much-denied labor glut and depress wages? Or is this a matter of some more desperate specializations - "corporate community development" or "corporate community relations" - trying to legitimize their jobs and whitewash kamekazi corporate downsizing strategies at the same time? (Or is this just hidden self-interest? - Joyner's own daughter Alyss is apparently in the day-care center where Joyner "volunteered" - according to the accompanying photo.)]
...Some workplace advocates worry that employees who do not volunteer may be viewed as having little or no management potential, or could miss out on lucrative bonuses and perks. A 1997 survey by the BC Center [for Corporate Community Relations] found that 85% of 227 coporate relations professionals had encouraged managers at their companies to volunteer. Twenty-three percent required that managers volunteer [isn't that a contradiction in terms? and isn't it illegal?], and 17% said community involvement was an important criteria in evaluating overall performance. IBM, for example, has included community involvement and volunteerism among its objectives or gaols [freudian slip] for a select group of senior executives. Among the goals: serving on non-profit boards, encouraging employees to volunteer, and participating in the company's employee charitable campaign. Community involvement also is part of the executives' bonus structure.
[Didn't IBM have a big layoff last year? Charity begins at home. Why don't they just treat their employees right so they don't have an image problem in the first place?! They could be cutting their workweek instead of their workforce and making everyone happy from the gitgo.]
What happens if a senior executive chooses not to 'volunteer'? [our quotes] "Obviously, community service is not the only measure of evaluating a person's performance," says Stanley S. Litow, vice president of corporate community relations at IBM in Armonk, NY. He adds that...IBM also contributes$1,500 to the charity of [who's?] choice for any volunteer who contributes more than 100 hours of time [per year?] to a school or community agency. Says Litow: "These are incentives at the employee and management level that support strong corporate citizenship."
[Bullroar! For 'strong corporate citizenship,' they need to stop sucking up to 'community agencies' irrelevant to their corporate mission and re-establish the social contract with their own employees, and further, dump the downsizing 'strategy' and offer guaranteed lifelong employment like Lincoln Electric. Only in this way will they stop the spiral of contraction that they've created in their own markets by downsizing their workforces instead of their workweeks.
[And let us not omit our basic assessment of our prevailing short-term generation of economic designs - "any economic design that depends for vital functions on charity, is to that extent seriously flawed." Our own proposals for transitioning to a long-term capitalist design strengthen the continuous private-sector training-hiring-remunerating functions so dramatically that nothing remotely approaching an 'underclass' is able to resist being drawn into the job market, now sweetened beyond anything seen since World War II - but without the war. We call the first program Timesizing®.]
[The American Dream has become suing the deep pocket or...hitting the lottery - ]
4/18 The lottery is rigged for the rich, by Robert Kuttner, Bos Globe, D7.
...[Government-sponsored] lotteries are a kind of voluntary tax on the poor, who buy a disproportionate share of tickets....
[Compare the cartoon on p. D5 by Signe Wilkinson of the Philadelphia Daily News - view of the front page of the "Reality" section of a newspaper, headline "Millions lose in largest lottery jackpot - win 'nada' in suckers' game", then caption under 6 photos "Some of the losers".]
[Isn't corporate infiltration of the environmental movement getting a little too obvious about it? - ]
4/18 ENVIRONMENT - Bulldozing our way to a greener world?, by Robert Braile [another significant name - is this guy blind?], Bos Globe, D1.
Can America Build its way to a better environment?... From eco-design to "smart growth" to "industrial ecology", many environmentalists are [steam?]rolling their way into this week's Earth Day with a new look....
[Relentless rollout of misleading statistics - ]
4/17 Bay State [=Mass.] jobless rate drops to 2.8% - Number of workers reaches a record, by Kimberley Blanton, Bos Globe, F1.
[This ongoing charade has finally motivated us to 'take the spear' and do the digging in our 2-year data collection for a background story that unmasks the fraud of our constantly trumpeted "low unemployment" charade.]
[A direct step backward - unTimesizing! - ]
4/16 The Hartford [Financial Services Group Inc.] employees to work 40-hour week [not 36.5], Bos Globe, D7.
[We should reserve some kind of booby prize for this CEO.]
...getting a little extra personal time, but not any more pay. About 4,900 employees are currently on a 40-hour week, and the rest average 36.5 hours a week, including most staff in Connecticut. The Sept. 6 switch will affect about 20,000 employees...to improve productivity, customer service, and competitiveness, said Cynthia B. Michener, a company spokeswoman.
[Watch - they will go down in all three of these categories! They're bashing 80% of their employees and they expect to improve productivity? Ha! Productivity deteriorates fastest and the most errors are made in the last hour of work per day anyway. And newly resentful employees on customer service? Cancel your Hartford policy now before you have a question for these bears! And competitiveness. They'd be more competitive with the happier employees they've got now! Plus, assuming most employees have their own company's insurance, they'll have more stress and sickdays and premature deaths, and force the company to pay off more. Dumb and dumber! If CEOs are so smart, why are they so self-destructive? If this is such a 'robust economy', how come CEOs are making most people's lives worse, not better? Are they trying, ever more desperately, to start a class war? Are they begging to be stopped? They will stop themselves soon enough when it's clear that there are virtually no markets underneath Wall Street, because the Black Hole economy has grabbed and pressed wealth into such tight little balls that the once rich and diverse general markets are starved and stagnating. The 'marginal utility of wealth'.]
The Hartford and its majority-owned Hartford Life Inc. in Simsbury [CT] will join many other companies that have already converted to 40-hour weeks, sometimes with no additional compensation.
[Result - the top 5% compact more money into fewer market-supported investments = the usual formula for major depression. When will we ever learn? Well we at The Timesizing Wire have learned and have designed an alternative to ongoing stupidity. Check out our new economic design in our layman's handbook, Timesizing, Not Downsizing.]
4/16/99 Sharing the bounty, by Steve Bailey, Boston Globe, p. D1.
[Steve is trying to make the point that there is more charitable giving today, but as to the assertion that this is really sharing more, he's got an argument on his hands. "To his credit, Ted Turner set an impressive standard with his $1 billion pledge to the UN, but others have not been so generous....General Electric CEO Jack Welch...earned $138.6 million in 1997 but gave away just $134,168...." Click and page down to Collapse story on 2/26/99 "Mogul worship" by Jason Gay, Bos Phoenix, p. Styles4. The same story makes the point that "the public should question not just how much today's moguls are giving away, but whom they are giving to. [So much is "coals to Newcastle", for example, going to the wealthiest colleges such as Harvard and MIT.] There's a difference between using wealth in a way that benefits society as a whole and using 'philanthropy' to advance status privilege and...the status quo...." Also, "Corporate philanthropy has undergone a historic change, becoming narrower and less dependable." Click and page down to Collapse story on 3/21/99 "Gone forever?" by David Warsh, Bos Globe, C1.]
This long bull market has created more new wealth than any time in our history. There are 189 billionaires on Forbes magazine's list of the 400 richest Americans....
[189 billionnaires at a cost of millions pushed below the poverty line and into homelessness? This is nothing to crow about. This is an insult to human intelligence - an indictment of humans' lack of imagination and dearth of design smarts.
[Otherwise intelligent people like Steve mistake hollow stock inflation for solid market-supported wealth. When are these really stupid 'analysts' going to smarten up and look at even one long 'wave'? They typically look no further than 50 years into the past to the end of World War II, but we have not been in a deflationary boom like this since the 1920s.]
What are all those super-rich people doing with all that money?... Increasingly they are giving it away.... Foundations are proliferating and giving is skyrocketing. Over the past two years grants from foundations have risen 41% to $19.5 billion last year, says the Foundation Center in New York.
[It doesn't matter how much charity there is. It's a dead end. It's pathetic. Any economic design that relies for vital functions on charity is lethally flawed. Charity is non-systemic, arbitrary, capricious and unreliable. It's not a step forward. It's a huge step backward. It's a step backward to the Feudal Period when there was proportionately even more charity, because there was even more wealth concentration and even more poverty and even more spreading stagnation than today. The feudal period had two islands of income and wealth separated by a vast gulf - except the bottom island was a huge continent and the top island was tiny. There was little innovation, little social mobility, and lots and lots of starvation and disease.
[And let's push the charity model. Let's imagine that we go all the way with this. We wind up with maybe 18,900 billionnaires. This would be only a brief situation because with this concentration of wealth, everyone else would be jobless, starving, or in prison. Pathetic. Unsustainable "skimming and charity" capitalism instead of sustainable "reinvestment and earning capitalism". "Cheap labor and hollow markets" capitalism instead of "valued employee and solid markets" capitalism.
[Engineering a scarcity of labor by reducing the workweek is the most effective, flexible, diverse and reliable method of centrifuging income and wealth - and integrating a population - that we know of. By comparison, charity is hopeless and usually only leads to genocide or war. It's temporary, unsustainable. For example, communism amounts to skimming and charity by the central government. There is an intimate connection between charity and communism. Recall that the early Christian church was effectively communist in its economic design, such as it was. This is not advanced. This is primitive. In an advanced economic design, the income is reinvested right at its unimaginably diverse sources, and markets are sustained at their roots.
[Charity is the past, not the future. Consider that there has always been charity to make up for the flaws in whatever is passing for the 'social design' of the present moment. Charity is palliative, not curative.
[And the fact that we have sunk back into war at the same time as Steve can claim that charity is rising is no coincidence. War is "good" for poorly designed economies. It relieves the much denied labor surplus that is depressing wages by killing people, many of whom, feeling noble, go willingly to the slaughter under the blizzard of propaganda from the consolidated media.
[And charity does something else. It stifles the incentive for real progress, because it broadcasts constant examples of wretched horrible conditions to America, such as conditions in the refugee camps, so that people in America with problems on the level of a higher standard of living feel unworthy for even thinking about those subtler problems - let alone getting them corrected.]
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