5/15 Consumer prices stagger markets - Inflation scare depresses Dow, hammers bonds, by Kimberly Blanton, Bos Globe, F1.
[Note the assumption that the be-all and end-all indicator is the financial markets, full of absentee "owners" who are focused on increasingly short-term speculation. What a formula for, among other things, national security!]
The government reported yesterday that consumer prices rose last month at the fastest pace [0.7%] in the 1990s economic expansion....
[They're talking 'inflation scare' when they should be relieved that the pervasive underlying deflation of this deflationary 'boom' has been checked for a month?]
A record spike in gasoline prices fueled inflation, as analysts had predicted.
[Well that alone would give us the stagflation of the mid '70s - the simultaneous rocketing unemployment and inflation that economists said should be impossible. Then we could ricochet back and forth between stagflation (disastrous for the majority) and deflationary 'boom' (disastrous for the majority). But there's more - ]
More worrisome, the Labor Dept. said the "core" inflation rate...everything from prescription drugs and cigarettes [Lord, those morons still have CIGARETTES in the "core" rate when we're trying to tax them out of existence?! - talk about artificially inflating inflation!] to clothing..\..minus energy and food prices....
[They call it the "core" inflation rate and they exclude FOOD and include CIGARETTES?! - Folks, if you ever had any doubts about the suicidal stupidity of our government, here is Exhibit A.]
Inflation is viewed as the single biggest threat not only to the economy [they should say, "not at all to the economy"] but also to the stability of a delicately balanced stock market....
[There's nothing 'balanced' about today's stock market, "delicate" or otherwise - it is grossly and precariously inflated. Note these reporters' constant attempts to hijack the language of sustainability and apply it to ludicrously unsustainable situations. And here's the proof - ]
Investors are "trying desperately to sustain these price-equity ratios...," said [Charles] Clough at Merrill Lynch....
[For once, Clough has a clue.]
In another sign of unabated growth, industrial output rose 0.6% last month after rising 0.5% in March.
[Again, output is only meaningful when there are purchasers, which remains to be seen. Supply side alone is as much 'the sound of one hand clapping' as demand side. We need a 'balance side' economic design that automatically coordinates the two - because, contrary to many people's assumptions, it ain't automatic now and the down parts of the business 'cycle' are proof.]
[More on the wonderful US health insurance system vis-a-vis the 'flawed' Canadian one - ]
5/15 All of [Massachusetts'] major HMOs report operating losses - Insurers estimate premiums will be hiked 5-10% when contracts renewed, by Alex Pham, Bos Globe, F1.
[Morale - you can have difficulties with everyone insured (Canada and all the rest of the industrialized world) or you can have difficulties without everyone insured (USA). Nothing's perfect - it's just that some people in the world get to worry at a much more sensitive level.]
[In the 'words' of the immortal (and incoherent) teletubbies - "Oh oh!" - ]
5/14 BankBoston expanding operations in Mexico, Dow Jones via Bos Globe, E5.
[Even a standard-economics-brained investor newshound is mad enough to "kick Gosman when he's down"! - see main story below on 5/12.]
5/14 Timing is everything, by Steve Bailey, Bos Globe, E1.
Just once in my life, I'd like to really screw up, resign, and be handed a $25-million check to go away.... I was disinclined to kick [Gosman] when he's down - until he took the $25-million payout at Meditrust Cos., a payout that showed up this week as a huge charge to the Needham company's earnings. Haven't Meditrust's shareholders paid enough for Gosman's mistakes? Over the years, Gosman built a reputation as an astute investor who makes people money. That rep has taken a big blow....
[Steve, as we said below, the only thing that's going to bury this massive perverse incentive crap - and it ain't gonna happen overnite - is Timesizing - one of whose major features is its automatic targeting and implementation of massive (to our eyes today) reinvestment back and forth across the grassroots, and up and down the front lines, of the economy - no government intervention unless there's a screwup - all this implemented ultimately by an advantage-reversing tax on overtime with a complete exemption for overtime-targeted hiring and training.
[We're saying that the most dangerous, insidious, undermining (and completely overlooked) practice in a modern technologizing economy is overtime, especially unpaid overtime. There will be absolutely no substantial human progress until we lose it. Overtime is the concentration and hoarding, the unsharing, of work. And because human progress is always and only progress in the technology of sharing, if we can't share the work, we'll never share the wealth in any kind of healthy way. And sharing the wealth in a general and healthy way is the next step in human progressive evolution, which if we continue to balk at, we'll continue to spiral round in an eddy of increasingly torpid, sordid, and boring water-treading, as we have the past 66 years, with nothing to show for our decades but more flavors and colors of high-tech whizbang, complete with spreading absenteeism among owners, voters, and parents, and resulting school shootings, car wars, lotteries, lawsuits, downsizings, bankruptcies, homelessness, and biggest of all, high tech prisons.]
[Concentration of wealth - and with it, its own self-limits - proceeds apace - ]
5/12 [Needham, Mass.-based] Meditrust Cos. gives Gosman $25m farewell, Bloomberg via Bos Globe, D9.
...One of the nation's biggest financiers of health-care properties and owner of La Quinta Inns...said it agreed to pay $25 million in cash as part of a severance package for former chairman and chief executive Abraham Gosman, who was fired in August....
[Hey how about that - guy gets fired - and a $25m golden-parachute kiss-off. For that, we'd get fired any day. What an 'efficient' use of money! Is this an insult to human intelligence or is this an insult to human intelligence? And afficionados of our current primitive short-term capitalism think they're experts on 'incentives'. HA! We have started the elimination of this current kind of obscenity by designing the first installment of long-term capitalism. We call it Timesizing.]
5/11 Brazil to cut interest rates, push tax reform, Bloomberg News via Bos Globe, D3.
[Why should cutting interest rates help when Japan has virtually cut them to zero? And as long as tax reform is defined as lowering taxes on everyone including the wealthy, and raising government debt owed to the wealthy, we haven't touched the problem, the extremity of the wealth of the wealthy and the fact that "the more concentration (of wealth), the less circulation." Ah the love/hate affair with the rich. How difficult it is to redesign for balance, because how strong and rigidifying the conflicting emotions it evokes! But we've been there and back several times, and our first-cut solution is Timesizing.]
5/11 Helping poor keep up with inflation - It's time for the state Legislature to link the minimum wage with inflation, by Robert Jordan, Bos Globe, D4.
[Oh no it isn't. That way lies hyperinflation, like Brazil's earlier in the 1990s and Germany's in the early 1920s, where all those on moderate fixed incomes starve to death. We have a better way, but first, let's look at Robert's rationale - ]
Both the current federal and Massachusetts minimum wage laws are designed to keep poor families from falling into deeper poverty - but just the opposite appears to be happening.... Many workers [at or near minimum wage] are barely able to support themselves and their families....
[Robert starts by admitting that the minimum wage approach is failing. We suggest it is failing because it is arbitrary, rigid, uniform and stifling of diversity, flexibility, adaptiveness and competitiveness. The existence of a widespread living wage movement is another admission that the minimum wage approach doesn't work, because the living wage idea is simply a higher (but still arbitrary, rigid, uniform and stifling) minimum wage which has to be repeatedly relegislated at a higher level as inflation restores the skills it covers to the market prices, usually lower. To tie the minimum wage to inflation is the next level of simple-minded 'sophistication' where you are trying to automate it, but still not designing a way for market forces to automate it. So you are still fighting market forces. Fighting market forces in economics is like fighting nature in biology.
[The real question for economic designers and social software engineers is, how do we get market forces to do most of the work? How do we line up with them and harness them?
[Cruel Malthusian nature does this by taking working hours on offer by labor OUT of the job market by killing people - starvation, plague, war, what have you - what Malthus called the 'active constraints' - but absolutely effective. For example, when the Black Death killed 25% of Europe in 1348, labor became very expensive (because it was scarce) and wealth centrifuged out of the vaults of the rich, and the economy boomed, as it always does during these post-disaster periods. That's why "war is good for the economy."
[How do we get these benefits without killing people? Well go back to the beginning of the last paragraph and notice that the whole solution starts, not with killing people but with "taking working hours on offer by labor OUT of the job market." Regardless of how all those hours got in there - high birthrates, immigration, imports, technology-borne breakthroughs in efficiency - all that is required is to take them back out. There is an alternative to killing to do this. It is worktime regulation. Isn't that communist? No more communist than vote regulation (one adult, one vote) or stoplights (one direction, one turn to go). No more communist than holding a conversation where the parties take turns. (You might even call it "sharing" - oh nooooo). You can regulate worklife by child labor laws and mandatory retirement at an arbitrary age such as 65. You can regulate the workyear by mandatory minimum vacations or annualized maximum workweeks for seasonal workers. You can regulate the workmonth if you want. You can regulate the workday.
[Or you can regulate probably the most all-round convenient unit, the workweek. Isn't it communist to regulate the workweek? Only if the God of Moses is communist - recall that the 4th of the Ten Commandments shortened the workweek from seven days to six - "Six days shalt thou labor and do all thy work, but the seventh is the sabbath of the Lord thy God. In it, thou shalt not do any work...." Exodus 20.
[So the question for economic designers is not "How do we automate an approach that fights market forces?" but "How do we automate an approach that works through market forces?" We have a brainstorm of answers to this question in our layman's guide Timesizing, Not Downsizing.]
5/11 Jobless rate high in S.E. Mass. - Report: Region isn't benefiting from boom
, by Diane Lewis, Bos Globe, D1.
[...Assuming the bubble is a boom...]
At the same time Massachusetts boasts one of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation - 2.8% in March - the average jobless rate in the state's southeast region is 10.2% [according to] an economic report released yesterday by the Massachusetts AFL-CIO [which] also found that:
5/10 Shelters for battered women found lacking - More victims fled abusers last year, but 12,000 found their safety nets full, by Doris Wong, Bos Globe, B1.
...Lack of space force shelters to turn away nearly 12,000 women and children in Massachusetts last year, according to the first survey of its kind by Jane Doe Inc. Massachusetts Coalition Against Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence. For every woman or child admitted...at least three were shut out....
Domestic violence shelters in New York could take in only 6,000 of the 11,000 families seeking refuge in 1995.... In Oregon, similar shelters harbored just over 5,800 adults and children last year, but had to refuse more than 24,000.
"We encourage women to make all these changes," said Stacey [Plichta of Old Dominion University in Virginia.] "But if [they all responded] we wouldn't be able to help them all."...
[Sounds like we can't even cover it when only a fraction of them are responding. We encourage
5/09 NAFTA after 5 years: 'Free' trade is often costly, by Kathy McCabe, Bos Globe, C1.
[Globe editors must be asleep at the switch - NOBODY spells NAFTA 'Nafta'! Nafta is short for the chemical 'naphtalene'.]
...Two years ago [Jostens Inc., maker of school rings] shifted most of the production at its flagship Attleboro [Massachusetts] factory to Mexico after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA] was enacted. But it recently moved back, citing high production costs and poor craftsmanship south of the border. "The obstacles we had to overcome were more enormous that we imagined," said David Sears, vice president of jewelry operations.... In February, Jostens [closed] its contract facility in Nuevo Laredo and hauled its equipment back to Attleboro, a nationally known jewelry making center, where Jostens has operated for 31 years. The move to Mexico...had led to layoffs of 200 nonunion workers.... Since returning to Attleboro, Jostens has invested $500,000 to retool the plant and is now looking to hire up to 200 full-time and seasonal workers by October. Some of the 30 workers it has hired so far are the same workers it had previously laid off.... Even after heading south, Jostens had kept about 175 workers in Attleboro producing a line of fashion rings.... Said 16-year veteran Jim Durand as he stood polishing a black-and-gold ring..."It was just hell on earth here when the jobs left. The stress was unbelievable. I was worried about losing my home."
[And these are the same captains of industry that are always blowing off about "efficiency" and "saving costs"! What a pack of clueless goofs.]
70 miles north...none of the 570 workers..\..laid off in the shutdown of Osram Sylvania Inc.'s light bulb plant in Danvers...since July, when Osram moved production to Canada, has taken retraining benefits guaranteed under NAFTA, saying they are too restrictive and skimpy.... For Bob Bosse [who had been an Osram worker for 21 years] the devil wasn't just NAFTA, which he blames for costing him his job as a quality inspector.... It was in the details of NAFTA's "side agreement," which provides displaced workers with extended unemployment and job retraining benefits for up to 78 weeks.... NAFTA's strict rules require qualified displalced workers to enroll in a retrainin program no later than 16 weeks after their layoff, or six weeks from when a company is NAFTA-certified by the US Dept. of Labor, whichever date is later. Many former Osram workers say it [rushes] them into a retraining when they don't know what they should retrain for. For a worker on the job for decades, or an immigrant laborer who might have inadequate English skills or education background, such a safety net has a big hole, Osram workers say. [They] consider themselves luckier than most other...workers laid off under NAFTA [because Osram] was also certified under the Trade Adjustment Act [TAA] enacted in 1974 to provide benefits to workers displaced by international trade. TAA [provides similar] assistance as NAFTA [but] workers have up to two years to enroll in a retraining program. Not one of the 570 workers opted for the NAFTA package; all chose TAA benefits instead. "NAFTA...requires that people get over the shock of losing their job and...make a decision about their future [in just] four months [and] many people just can't do it," said Diane Zold-Isenberg, program manager at the Osram Worker Assistance Center, which was set up at the closed factory.... A bill pending in Congress would consolidate the NAFTA and TAA benefits..\.. "It's been a flawed experiment...," said Roul Hinojosa [of UCLA]....
[As in "Not worth the paperwork? That goes for a lot of government 'fixes', doesn't it?! They pass some huge simplistic departure from status quo with insufficient impact studies and then pass a lot of inadequate palliatives while disaster careens through the economy.]
In the bigger picture, NAFTA has not lived up to its goal of narrowing the US trade imbalance and expanding the American economy by spurring American exports, some economists and critics say.
[Amen to that! NAFTA is just one big dumb economy saying "rape me" to the rest of the world! They get the jobs and we get the unemployment and crime. Of course, our CEOs don't care about that because they live insulated in gated enclaves, with ever larger numbers of security guards. Our richest and our poorest live in prisons, virtual or real. Well, boys, it ain't the poorest who are going to heal this, it's you. All the poorest are going to do is climb over your walls and infect your sanctuaries with their spreading violence if you let this fester long enough. The fix requires massive automatic reinvestment at the grassroots and up&down the economic frontlines, guided by a reinvestment threshold such as discussed in Ch.7 of our 'social software manual' Timesizing, Not Downsizing.]
Last year, the US trade deficit hit a record $230 billion, compared to $150 billion in 1994, the year NAFTA took effect. The trade gap has grown wider with Mexico and Canada, too. A $1.3 billion surplus with Mexico in 1994 turned into a $15.7 billion deficit last year. The deficit with Canada grew from $13.9 billion to $18.5 billion last year.
[The Republican Party used to favor sensible tariffs. They used to be the more intelligent, far-seeing party. What happened to that? Now they're full of jocks with nothing but suicide pills dolled up as fast and simple 'solutions'. Ain't it funny how they don't like Kevorkian for the individual American but they ARE Kevorkian for the American economy and our whole country! And that's an insult to Dr. Death because he makes sure the patients are terminally ill first and want termination. The idiots in D.C., goaded by our kamekazi CEOs, start with an economy that ain't terminally ill and doesn't want a radical simple-minded solution like 'free' trade. Let's hear from one of the idiots now - ]
Commerce Secretary William Daley attributes the surging deficit more to the global financial crisis and the strength of the US economy than to trade pacts such as NAFTA.
[The only thing this turkey got right is his hunch that the trade deficit is not the central problem, but he has failed to identify the central problem (concentration of spending power without spending). And if we had fair trade instead of 'free' trade, in other words, sensible tariffs instead of "rape us!", the 'global financial crisis' and 'the strength of the US economy' would not be doubling our trade deficit.]
NAFTA has not proven to be a magic bullet. And for employers and employees alike, the trade agreement has brought hidden costs and unexpected [difficulties]....Jostens aimed to save $5-10 million annually. But...it discovered that cheaper labor - its Mexican work force earned about $4/hr - came at a high cost. The company was forced to spend more money to train low-skilled workers who struggled to master stone setting, enameling, toolmaking, and other skills.
[And we all know how much American companies hate to spend money on training!]
Also, most of its work force didn't return after a Christmas shutdown, a problem Jostens attributes to severe instability in the labor.
[Well, we attribute it, sight-unseen, to poor communication by management, who were probably already thinking of pulling out.]
"There were a lot of challenges, but the major one was the constant turnover...," Sears said. "When companies go abroad, it is easy to misjudge the costs," said Sushil Vachani, an associate professor of management policy at Boston University. "Along with lower wages might come lower productivity, because the people are not skilled and their work ethic is different."
[How often do innocents-abroad American CEOs have to be reminded that cultures differ? They don't even grasp the diversity of corporate cultures until 6 months after merger. They fly overseas and stay in Hiltons everywhere they go. If they venture outside the hotel at all, they look for a Macdonald's. "Garkon, burn the fries! Duh, what was that about cultural differences?"]
5/08 Unemployment rate inches up in April - Labor market not seen tightening; black joblessness falls to record low [but still nearly twice rainbow rate], by John Berry, Washington Post via Bos Globe, F1.
The nation's unemployment rate ticked up to 4.3% last month as the pool of available labor grew faster than the number of jobs. But joblessness among blacks dipped to 7.7%, the lowest level [on record. It was] 1972, when such separate figures were first kept, the Labor Dept. reported yesterday.
[Boyoboy, when even our count-nothing unemployment rate indicates that "the pool of available labor grew faster than the number of jobs", we must really be in trouble. And as for congratulating ourselves on a black unemployment rate of 7.7%, what is this, a sick joke? We are letting our black citizens down and then turning around and blaming them. Great American pastime = "blame the victim".
[And you don't want to know the "what a coincidence!" comparison with incarceration and other depressing rates on our prisonwatch page in stories on 3/07, 2/28, 2/15 (victimization by violence), 1/11 (prosecutor prejudice), 11/08/98 (small-time drug offenders who have the book thrown at them under mandatory sentencing), 10/02 (zoom-in on California prisons). Clearly we have made it a lot easier for many people to earn a dishonest living than an honest one, especially people of color, regardless of what our eyewash "low unemployment rate" ignores.]
[Making Depression Easier dept. - ]
5/07 Senate passes sweeping banking overhaul, AP via Bos Globe, C2.
...that would lift Depression-[forged] barriers and let banks, securities firms, and insurance companies get more deeply into each other's businesses [and all of us deeper in doodoo]. The mostly party-line vote was 54-44 on the bill, which faces a likely presidential veto. [Phew!]
[Ya know, the GOP used to be the smart party. Now they just "don't know much about hi-stor-y" and they're trying to doom us to repeat it.]
[Misleading Cheerleading and Happytalk Dept I. - ]
5/07 Greenspan sees potential for inflation - Fed chief voices concerns on labor shortages, runaway markets, Bloomberg News via Bos Globe, C2.
[Huh? oh, "potential labor shortages" - Greenspan is hallucinating again. Calm down, Alan, and try pushing for training - remember T-R-A-I-N-I-N-G? And who could we possibly train, you ask? How about our forced part-timers, forced "self-employed", forced early retirees, 17% unemployed in high tech over age 50, those on welfare, disabled, homeless, 1.8 million incarcerated! You blindered, unimaginative, rut-minded man. "Labor shortages" indeed!
[And "runaway markets"?? What CAN he mean? Oh, "the runaway US stock market! Don't tell us he's at last getting worried about inflation in the stock market! And so he's poised to raise interest rates (and clobber business activity) to attract money into the bond markets and out of the stock markets? With central bankers like this, who needs the Hemlock Society?!]
...Greenspan cited a tripling of labor productivity to about a 3% rate as the leading reason the nation has "remained an oasis of prosperity" in the last two years, the best since 1984.... "At some point, labor market conditions can become so tight that the rise in nominal wages will start increasingly outpacing the gains in labor productivity, and prices inevitably will then eventually begin to rise," Greenspan said....
[Lordy, it's awful strange how a guy like Greenspan can see productivity tripling to 3% while "wages, salaries, and benefits rose a mere 0.4% in the first quarter of this year" (see item below on 5/02 "Nation/World - Our economy, part I"). Did wages also triple, Alan, so they could be commensurate with productivity, which is the advertised determiner of wages under our CEO-spun labor shortage that contradicts a market-based supply-and-demand determination because wage hikes are virtually nil?
[And how in God's green earth can you continue to see productivity racing past wages without worrying about how the hey that productivity is going to be purchased and consumed? Instead, you and your blindered brethren sit and watch the Great Depression II gestating every day while you make pronouncements like "The performance of the American economy over the last seven years has been truly phenomenal." We'll tell you what's phenomenal - your insulation from what's really happening!]
[Happytalk Depts II and III]
5/07 Shoppers splurge as sales up 4% for retailers, Bloomberg via Bos Globe, C2. [Hint - "springclothes tiiiiime, and the credit is floooow-ing..."]
5/07 IMF: Brazil's economy stronger than expected , Bloomberg via BG, C2. [Hint - so who expected anything?]
5/06 Fraud in visa programs for skilled jobs on rise, AP via Bos Globe, C2.
[We have a solution. Never mind the crass favoritism for multinationals, ditch the whole program and do some TRAINING of people already here in this country for a change. Remember training? That's where you quit whining about labor shortage and create the skills you need by yourself, no government required.]
5/5 Senate, again, takes up banking overhaul bill - Members eye plans to wipe out Depression-era laws, by Aaron Zitner, Bos Globe, D2.
The U.S. Senate, making another attempt to pass a bill that has failed about a dozen times in the past two decades, yesterday began considering a measure to wipe out Depression-era laws that prevent banks, brokerages and insurance firms from entering one another's [businesses]....
[As if there aren't already enough signs that we're reliving the Roaring '20s. Do they think those laws appeared by magic in the '30s? No, they were learned the hard way because the conflicts of interests from mixing banks, brokerages and insurance that they prevented had been big factors in inducing the Depression throughout the 1920s. Ain't these politicians got no History?! And how about our suicidal no-longterm-memory bankers?! Trying to mix gambling (brokerages), damage control (insurance), and security (banks) all over again. How many times to we have to learn the same hard lesson? It's like our suicidal dairy industry. After decades of telling us how safe and natural milk is, they start fooling around with hormones whose long-term effects God only knows!] Is it our imagination, or are we having a huge resurgence of the Death Wish? Maybe it's just that our titans of industry are getting like those boys in Littleton, Colorado the previous five years - they're uttering *cries unheard - cries for rational, realistic and non-arbitrary LIMITS. "Somebody stop us!" "Please, please, somebody STOP US!" - and a lot of our politicians are too dumb or corrupt to get the message.]
5/5 Globe, Herald weekday circulation down over 6 months, by Steven Wilmsen, Bos Globe, D3.
Both Boston daily newspapers showed declines in average weekday circulation for the six months ended March 31, according to new figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulation....
[And who is still claiming that "technology creates more jobs than it destroys"? TV and the Internet are supplying more people with news (or "news"), the market for hardcopy news is inching downward, and even today America doesn't have nearly as many newspapers as it used to. New York City used to have 7-8 dailies. What does it have today? 2-3?]
The Boston Globe [weekday down 0.7% to 469,311, Sunday down] 2.4% to 730,420.
The Boston Herald [weekday? down 9.4% to 262,317, Sunday down] 8.9% to 169,184.
US newspapers struggled during the period, falling 0.5% on daily circulation, continuing a long-term trend.... Sunday circulation fell by 1.0%.
The top 10 papers [however, managed to hold their own with a negligible] gain of 0.02% over the same six-month period a year ago....
[Some advice for the Globe and the Herald - maybe if you'd start giving equal coverage to all political candidates, regardless of how little money they had, more of the public would have more of a reason to buy you. Both of you had a disgraceful record during the 8th Congressional race last year. Both even hosted TV debates - for the Democrats only, excluding the other three candidates, and belittling most of the races after the primaries. With "news reporting" like that, you're worthless to anyone who wants to be fully informed. You hurt yourselves - and the two-party system - for the six weeks after the primaries - why should anyone buy a newspaper to find out about upcoming November elections if you're pre-empting the voters by spinning the results as a foregone conclusion, instead of suspending pre-judgment and staying open for the unexpected? You both even turned down several negative stories on candidates before the primary that either came out in smaller weeklies (Boston Tab on Keyne) or after the primaries (Herald on Capuano). You're not serving the public with news. Why should the public pay for your own self-serving? We can search what we want on the web and avoid your option-bashing cynical non-news coverage.
["Didn't have enough room." Then drop some of the crap. During the week before the election, the Globe was ignoring the ideas-only candidates in many races while lavishing valuable frontpage space on a ditsy 'twenty-something' who just moved to Boston.
[And your coverage of futuristic corporations (Lincoln Electric, Nucor, VW...) and economies (France, Netherlands,...) that are saving jobs by slowly adjusting downward to working hours more in line with our inpouring jobs-usurping technologies is virtually nil. Where is your leadership? You follow the fads more and more like dismissable tabloids (OJ, Woodward, Monica...). The public was BEGGING for relief from MonicaMonicaMonica and you refused to get the message! Look at the papers whose circulation increased - NY Times, LA Times... - papers that really deliver some news. Give people a reason to buy you, and that means delivering the real news instead of more of the crap that we can easily see on TV.]
[Another long-term private firm goes short-term public = another form of the "tragedy of the commons"?]
5/04 Goldman [Sachs] sells $3.66b in stock, becomes 4th-largest US broker - 69 million shares sell for $53 each, or 19.6 times 1998 earnings, Bloomberg News via Bos Globe, C2.
5/04 Dow leaps 225 to sail over 11,000 - Market seen broadening as investors change their patterns of buying, by Ianthe Dugan, Washington Post via Boston Globe, p. C1.
...as investors continued to sell high-flying technology stocks and buy shares in long-neglected manufacturing firms.
[Prudent and sound, right? Or an increasingly anxious search for solidity as the realization dimly dawns that nowhere is productivity supported by spending, and the infinite sponge of the stock markets is the reason. Time to move from investment (in vapor) to reinvestment (in employees and training and wages - and actual spending!).]
A late-day bargain hunt, fueled by a positive economic report, pushed the Dow average up 225.75 points, or 2.1%. It closed at 11,014.69. The new milestone came just 23 trading days after the barometer of blue-chip stocks first closed above 10,000.
[What goes up, can come down. What rises in 23 days can come down in 23 minutes - except for the upward-biassed market 'circuit breakers' on computerized trading. But what about non-computerized trading? Can we really force and imprison investors in the markets indefinitely?]
But in that short period, the psychology of the market has changed entirely. The narrow group of technology stocks that helped burst previous records has fallen out of favor, and investors are now searching intently for bargains they missed before.
[= The desperate search for solidity.
[Just remember, no matter how good things look, as long as 1% of the population can concentrate 99% of the wealth, the whole economic 'edifice' is on sinking sand - because the more concentration, the less circulation. Standard economists call it the 'marginal utility of wealth,' though they don't often talk about it.
[The people with the money don't have the time to spend it, and those with the time don't have the money. We need a time balancing program before we can sustainably balance money. Trying to balance money first just creates dependency. But balancing time first benefits from the obvious exchange value of leisure - take work away from A to give to B and you inherently give A leisure as well as giving B work and income.
[And all you yahoos who sound off about freedom and liberty - it's high time you recalled the most basic kind of freedom and liberty - free time. You 'family values' freaks? How about some family time?! As the ancient philosopher said, Unhappy he who must always be doing. Or Thoreau, Let your affairs be as one or two and not as a hundred or a thousand.]
[More simplistic solution selling from the well insulated - ]
5/04 Daley promotes US free-trade policy - Fall River union members say accords cost them jobs, by Diane Lewis, Bos Globe, p. C5.
Saying his goal is to promote free trade, US Secretary of Commerce William Daley yesterday [afternoon] visited a Fall River textile plant and met with business leaders [but not union leaders who obviously don't matter] while angry union members stood outside questioning the free-trade policy that has cost them their jobs.... "We want every man, woman, and child in America [but not union members] to understand that trade matters," he said [to a number of business and political leaders yesterday morning at the World Trade Center in Boston as part of a national tour]. "We want to hear their views [unless they're union members]...."
[A national tour to further shove free trade down Americans' already gagging throats? What a concept! And this guy is a Democrat?! Boy, with both parties trashing employees and domestic spending and markets, labor has no political advocacy (unless the US Labor Party starts running candidates), and the great US of A has a downhill expressway to Has-Been City.]
...While Daley urged business leaders to do all they could to support free trade, union leaders argued that the North American Free Trade Agreement (= nation-level communism, though we definitely believe in private property - but only on the individual person-level) has helped destroy the nation's ailing manufacturing sector and has stripped many US workers of viable jobs.... "I also believe that you and the president need to be educated about the insecurity of the American worker," [said AFL-CIO president Robert Haynes].
[Robert, you'll have better luck if you quit whining about the American "worker" and start lashing out for the American consumer and American spending and markets. Get with the spin doctoring, pal! Unions have been naive and defensive and apologetic too long, playing from a weak hand that isn't really weak. And drop the minnows and get back on your major issue, controlling the labor surplus by cutting hours.]
...At the office of the Union of Needletrade Industrial and Technical Employees, many workers said it would take more jobs rather than a national tour to convince them. "We don't want free trade. We want fair trade," said Claire Francoeur, a...curtain maker who was born and raised in Fall River. "We can't compete with foreign wages that are $1 an hour or less"..\..
[And the biggest economy in the world (though for how much longer?) has the size and diversity to sit out the Race to the Bottom that's inherent in 'global competitiveness.']
Daley said..."There is no question that there have been job dislocations over the last decade, not just because of trade but also because of technological change...."
[Whoa, note this signal departure from Party Line that "technology creates more jobs than it destroys"!]
[Economists oblivious, wage 'raises' a joke - ]
5/02 Nation/World - Our economy, part I, Bos Globe, C2.
What the economists laud, the grunts of the American work force lament.
[Let's pause here to note the irrelevance of the "scientific" economics profession to the vast majority of the American workforce. And possibly not only its irrelevance, but its downright hostility - masked hostility from
an "unbiassed" scientific community. That means the majority of economists are not doing their scientific job at a very fundamental level. If we need any convincing, here's Allen Sinai, economist, on the same page under 'They said it:' "This is a wondrous economy. Life is really beautiful." In other words, "I've got mine and I don't give a damn about you."]
Wages, salaries, and benefits rose a mere 0.4% in the first quarter of this year, a figure so scant that even today's miniscule inflation can wipe it out.
[Flat wages, by fundamental market theory of supply and demand, means a loose labor market - in short, a labor surplus of the kind that preceded the Great Depression of 1929-1941 and, we daresay, preceded the Great Plague of 1348. But then the media get behind the economists at distorting today's reality - ]
Despite a very tight jobs market, these modest labor costs are putting virtually no pressure on most firms to raise prices....
["A very tight jobs market." There are certain periods where the wealth and power of the top 1-5% in the economy is so astronomically great relative to the majority of the population, that they can put their positive spin on the most negative of news. The 1920s was one such period. We are living in another.
[Now this is a poorly written sentence in another respect. "Modest labor costs" would never be expected to exert pressure to raise prices. Here's how the sentence should have been written - ]
Offset by these modest labor costs, a very tight jobs market is putting virtually no pressure on most firms to raise prices....
[But then, if it were phrased correctly, it would become more obvious that the real driving force today is "these modest labor costs" from which we might correctly deduce a job shortage, not "a very tight jobs market" from which we can correctly deduce only a very spoiled and petulant managerial class with enough power to get their whining repeated incessantly by their 'ad agency' (the economics profession) and the media.]
[Fed's unbudgeable inflation obsession - ]
5/02 Nation/World - Our economy, part II, Bos Globe, C2.
If the Fed was looking for a reason to raise rates...
[And they are, constantly, because they have dropped their primary mandate to fight unemployment, and dare we say, under-employment (and disability and welfare and homelessness and prisons) to focus exclusively on fighting inflation (which is the natural response of an economic organism to large, less active oceans of capital, i.e., penalize them). Anyway, as they were saying...]
If the Fed was looking for a reason to raise rates, it would look right past that wage report and focus instead on the first quarter's gross domestic product [GDP].... The US economy [expanded] far faster than expected, with GDP up at a 4.5% annual rate. This report [raised] fears...the Fed might boost interest rates to slow the economy and tamp potential price rises..\..
[More obsessional inflation fighting, based on the Fed's backup excuse (if the main excuse of a 'disastrous' full employment condition should be approached) - rapid economic growth, spun negatively as 'overly rapid growth' or 'an over-heated economy'. Here we have the spectacle of the top 1-5% of our society planting their fat butts on economic growth to restrain and block it, not to mention on the wage growth of the majority of our population, despite their crocodile tears about the terrible 'income gap' and the various targets of their much-trumpeted philanthropy. We no longer need the Limits to Growth team from MIT to warn us of the dangers of economic growth - we have our own CEOs to squelch it!
[What was it that someone said two millennia ago? - "But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in." Matt. 23:13. Today's 'power elite', as Galbraith called them, despite their rhetoric, neither 'go for' a much more secure society for themselves, nor allow others that want one to get it.
[But let's not leave it there. Let's improve on that ancient experimenter's methods, per his own admission ("He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do...." John 14:12). Let's flipflop like good gemini Jeckyll-Hyde's and take the power elite's part at this point. After all, what do we expect them to do? There is no widely known alternative to the way they are conducting things. They're playing the biggest game in town by virtually the only rules in town.
[It's not enough to say that plutocratic mixed-market capitalism is inadequate. What are the alternatives? Socialism-communism? It collapsed in Russia (and got replaced by gangster capitalism) and was doin' so poorly in China that they've been mixing more capitalism into it. Cooperativism? The most successful example (Mondragon) has never been successfully reduplicated beyond the Basques. If we expect better nowadays, we've got to elaborate and prototype a real alternative or a real line of improvement. We've got to 'release' a new version of our current economic and social 'software'. And that's exactly what we're doing on this website with Timesizing.
[What about the mixed-in attempt to inject a positive spin? - ]
The strongest consumer spending in a decade helped expand the economy....
[Well, as the top 'big picture' story on our bankruptcy page points out, this 'strength' is born of consumer borrowing, so don't grasp that straw too tightly.]
[What are we doing to ourselves when we turn our biggest crooks into gurus? - ]
5/02/99 Former junk bond king rules over new empire, by Michael White, AP via Boston Globe, p. C15.
LOS ANGELES - A decade after Michael Milken was indicted on securities fraud charges that led him to prison, the former junk bond king presides over a new empire of non-profit think tanks and cancer research programs. Banned for life from securities trading, Milken has used his personal fortune and contacts to become an influential voice in economics, education, and medical research....
[Morale - what scams can we invent to get rich quick, because if we do it on a huge scale, they're not going to take it away from us! As long as the robbery is big enough, we'll get our wrists slapped and do time for a couple of years and then - play the squire for the rest of our lives. Crime pays - if it's BIG!
[One more question - Was everyone paid back? - was everyone who was hurt by this new 'philanthropist' compensated - with interest?]
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