[If we don't design and legislate the sharing of the one key thing in the middle (vanishing market-demanded worktime), we're forced to design and legislate the sharing of an endless list of secondary things, such as - access to prestige tax-funded clubs...]
6/14 Calif. admissions quandary could resonate in [Boston], by Beth Daley, Bos Globe, front page.
SAN FRANCISCO - Public school officials here are stumped: How do they design an admissions policy to include more blacks and Hispanics in the city's top high school without using race in the formula? After an April court settlement prohibited using race to admit students to the 143-year-old Lowell High exam school [here], administrators have tried [giving preference] to students [who were] from single-parent homes,...were poor, could not speak English.... Nothing worked. The number of blacks and Hispanics invited to the largely Asian school dropped by more than half from the previous year: Only 64 of the 864 ninth-grade invitations for this September went to members of those two groups....
The quandary has a familiar ring in Boston, where school officials are struggling to establish a similar policy after a court in January threw out a race-based admissions policy to the prestigious Boston Latin exam school....
[One dumb question. How can they call these fancy clubs "exam schools" if their admissions policy is based on anything but exams? And the contradiction of meeting a racial requirement without being racist??! We're getting into the kind of burgeoning contradictions in our society that an outworn "scientific theory" gets into, for instance, Earth-centered astronomy in the 1400s, according to Thomas Kuhn in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Pour on the "epicycles"!
[Another dumb question: What does it matter what race the poor are - as long as they are being included, every race is ultimately going to benefit.
[We suspect the answer to that second one is going to be - "That could take centuries." OK, let's quit fiddling around the edges and balance the center for a change. Let's CUT THE WORKWEEK and spread the diminishing, natural, market-demanded work and skills via overtime-to-training conversion and workweek-to-underemployment linkage. We call it Timesizing. We had a chance to enact a primitive form of it in 1933 when the Black 30-Hour Bill passed the U.S. Senate, but we blew it in the House. Let's start planning how we're not going to blow it the next time.]
[Shouldn't we be applauding the Swiss for refusing to further subsidize population growth?]
6/14 Swiss voters stun activists, reject maternity leave, AP via Bos Globe, A24.
GENEVA - ...Swiss voters yesterday threw out government plans to introduce paid maternity leave.... [The Swiss system bans] women...from working for two months after childbirth but [does not] guarantee wages..\.. The proposal would have given working women 14 weeks of maternity leave at 80% of their salary, bringing Switzerland into line with European standards. It would also have given a lump payment of up to $2,680 to low-income women..\.. The final tally was 39% in favor and 61% against....
[That means a lot of women voted against it as well as men. These plans were clearly sexist, but that could and should have been resolved by translating them into paid birth-related parental leave and a subsidy for poor new parents. Then their nature as increased societal subsidies on human reproduction during an age of mounting over-population would have become clear. However, the story does not say if the Swiss take the intelligent further steps of repealing the two-month work ban on new mothers and heavily subsidizing contraception to avoid problem situations in the first place.]
Parliament last year agreed on the proposed maternity benefit, costing the equivalent of $333 million per year. But opponents forced a referendum....
[The Swiss have the most advanced system of direct democracy in the world - they have the easiest and most frequent binding public refendums - we are not being sarcastic here. There are many aspects of our current liberal mindset that have not yet caught up with the new ecological realities of this planet, and the whole warm and fuzzy tradition of subsidizing reproduction is right up there with charity (instead of job-market redesign) among the top two. Having children is rapidly attaining the status of a personal hobby, albeit a very demanding one, just as Church and Army (weekend reserves) became hobbies before it. Few societies on the planet in 1999 AD have any need to subsidize their reproductive continuance, because they're all so big relative to the ecological carrying capacity of the biosphere in whole or in (their) part. Outdated activist goals can sometimes be sidetracked as here by brainstem environmentalist instincts of the public, however unfashionable at the time.]
[If jobs so abundant, why flat wages & cowering legislators?]
6/11 Raytheon rapped for layoffs after tax break, by Ross Kerber, Bos Globe, frontpage.
...In return for helping the company obtain tax breaks worth as much as $8 million a year...Raytheon [was expected] to maintain...jobs in Massachusetts. Instead, [Raytheon has laid off nearly 6,000 people since the agreement in 1995 (NPR News, WBUR-FM Boston, 7 am, 6/11).] Raytheon [for example, laid] off 1,200 workers in the state last fall and closed its Waltham plant.... Today, its Massachusetts workforce totals 13,800, down from 19,500 in 1995 [giving us 5,700 jobcuts to be exact].
Feeling stung, leaders such as the president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, Robert Haynes, now support legislation that would tie the tax benefits to an employee headcount....
[Wrong. It's time to just get government OUT of this silly game of job blackmail. After all, if we've got the rip-roaring "shortage of workers" that these same CEOs are always claiming (so they can get visas for more low-wage workers from India), let's call their bluff and stick it to them. Remember, the following year Fidelity Investments (despite record profits) copied Raytheon, sticking up Mass. state legislators (and taxpayers) with more job blackmail. And other firms have tried it since. This is just more pathetic behavior on the part of grotesquely overpaid CEOs and should be laughed out of court.
[If state legislators are really as worried about jobs as they're repeated caving in to these criminal scams suggest, let them design and introduce the world's first complete and automatic worksharing program here in Massachusetts, and turn this now incessantly ongoing, boring, yes, boring concern with training and jobs into past history. Timesizing is just such a complete and automatic program. Enough strained and phony job creation. It's time to accept the easy and obvious solution. Let's simply share the vanishing work as technology does more and more of it for us. That's the whole purpose of all this technology for heaven's sake!]
6/08 Jeers, cheers for 10-year-old ["free"] trade pact - Some Canadians feel their country sold its soul to 'America Inc.', by Colin Nickerson, Bos Globe, C1.
George Bush and Brian Mulroney [the most unpopular PM in Canadian history] chat at 10th anniversary observance of [US-Canada Free Trade Agreement] = photo caption.
[Stupid for the US, stupid for Canada - plus we lost the the "Train across Canada."
[And here's some ammo straight from the beginning of US history and Federalist (= Republican) history at that! - when the Republicans still had some intelligence.]
"'From 1783 to 1789 the trade of the thirteen old States was perfectly free to the whole world. The result was that Great Britain filled every section of our country with her manufactures of wool, cotton, linen, leather, iron, glass, and all other articles used here; and in four years she swept from the country every dollar, and every piece of gold.' (Bolles's Financial Hist. of U.S., II, p. 437.) This was our first and only experiment in absolute Free Trade." Jacob Harris Patton, Political Parties of the U.S., their History and Influence (1902).
[This simplistic, cure-all, free-trade fanaticism is ruining Canada and Mexico, and without trading partners, the wealth that we've suctioned up from them won't last long.]
6/05 Labor market is seen tightening - Report shows slower job growth, by Kimberly Blanton, Bos Globe, F1.
Growth in the nation's payrolls slowed sharply in May to just 11,000 new jobs, surprising experts who attributed it to a shortage of workers to fill jobs that remain plentiful in a robust economy....
[Note the unquestioned assumptions that the economy is robust and that jobs are plentiful, and every apparent counter-indication must be painstakingly interpreted so as to support or at least not threaten those fundamental canons of faith. This is EXACTLY what went on all through the 1920s when the conditions for the Great Depression were spreading under the surface of the American economy and throughout the world.]
Economists said evidence of a tightening labor market, which could eventually push up wages and inflation, may add pressure on the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates....
[Evidence, WHAT evidence?! These clowns have drawn a forced and foregone conclusion from two unquestioned and sacrosanct tenets of faith and then turned around and presented their vaporous conclusions "evidence" for something that could "eventually" happen but has not happened since the spiral of downsizing got going over 15 years ago, namely higher real wages and wage-push inflation. And how they plan to close the widening income gap without higher real wages and wage-push "inflation" is a total mystery.]
...Said William Cheney, economist for John Hancock..."The problem is supply. People can't find the bodies to hire."
[What total BS. They "can't find the bodies" when they deluge the want ads and don't raise wages or cut hours. They "can't find the bodies" when they whine forever and offer zero on-the-job training.]
The US unemployment rate dipped 0.1% to 4.2% last month.... Economists [all paid by short-sighted employers and with no long view of economic history] said that the remarkably low jobless rate has remained below 5% since June 1997.
[Any unemployment rate above 2% was regarded as problematic during the War, and 4.2% would sound sirens throughout the economy!]
As the labor market tightened, it caused a decline in the unemployment rate for blacks, a segment of the population that has suffered chronically high joblessness, for a third consecutive month. Unemployment among blacks was 7.5% - the lowest level ever recorded....
[Oh come ON. We're supposed to rejoice because our black citizens have an unemployment rate of "only" 7.5%?! The cause of the decline in the unemployment rate for blacks is the fact that we've got more of them locked up in jails and prisons than ever before in our history. We've broken all historic records with our current prison population (1.8 million), most of which is minorities, and next year we'll beat Russia and "win" the world record. Whoopeedoo.]
Workers' wages rose 5 cents last month to an average $13.19 an hour.
[Do you know anybody getting $13/hr? We don't. We're only getting $12.50 ourselves. Where do they get these figures? Are they including top executive salaries and perks converted into total-compensation-per-hour terms? Are they subtly selective about where they do their sampling? If wages rose 5 cents in May, and 3 cents in April and 4 cents in March, does that outpace inflation? Does it keep pace with the huge technology-borne leaps in efficiency and productivity? Why aren't these little increases registering as dramatic real-wage growth over the last 30 years? Why the widening income gap and the fading of the middle class?]
...John Hancock's Cheney said there is little consensus among economists about the Fed's next move....
[So there must be little consensus even at the Fed about the true state of the economy, despite the relentless happytalk. The spin doctoring rolls on into ever more pathological optimism. Heads employers win, tails employees shouldn't be losing (but are). If job growth speeds up, it's prima-facie good news simply because "job growth is speeding up." Now with this story, if job growth slows down, it's good news for jobseekers because there's a shortage of them. The only catch is that this mythological "shortage of workers" mysteriously never results in closing the income gap, wage-push inflation or even higher real wages, nor does it ever result in the kind of pervasive on-the-job training (OJT) that we had during the last real nation-wide worker shortage of World War II that solved the Great Depression when all else (i.e., the New Deal) had failed.]
[Better Technology, Worse Lives dept.]
6/04 Calif. to sell residents' income information - Plan to help lenders raises privacy concerns, AP via Bos Globe, E2.
[As if lenders need government "help." They just want to join the crowd of suicidal "free-market" corporations whining for (and getting) "government help." Check out Paul Weaver's *The Suicidal Corporation: How Big Business Fails America (1988).]
California will join a growing number of states [including Iowa, Minnesota, North Carolina, Texas, Pennsylvania, Florida, Indiana, Oregon, and Colorado] that sell confidential information about their residents' income to banks, lenders and car dealers.... Banks and other lenders hope to see similar systems in every state..\.. The programs are designed to speed up processing of loan applications and reduce fraud by allowing lenders to quickly verify information provided by people seeking credit.
[Like we don't have enough consumer debt sloshing around! Aren't we already at record levels?]
The states are not supposed to release the data unless the consumer gives written consent....
[Somehow we are not feeling reassured.]
"Once you establish electronic access to a large-scale database there are going to be illegitimate uses of the information," said Beth Givens, director of San Diego-based *Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.... "It appears that our lawmakers are acting in a policy vacuum," said Givens. "They don't appear to be looking at the long-term implications and the unintended consequences...."
[But when did our lawmakers ever worry about the long term? Are they not bought and paid for by CEOs imbued with our current primitive economic theories focusing exclusively on the short term - the next quarterly report or, at most, the next presidential term?]
6/03 Greenspan hits growing protectionist bent - Fed chief backs free trade...to promote growth..\..avoids rate talk, by Kimberly Blanton, Bos Globe, D1.
[Our ship of wealth is in the hands of an anachronism - a man who has fixed, simplistic, unexamined, unhistorical ideas. His kind of capitalism is 'black box' capitalism, capitalism where everything is supposed to turn out to everyone's benefit, but he can't explain how except to say burden Adam Smith's one-mention-only metaphor of an Invisible Hand that balances all. Well, as we have pointed out elsewhere on this website, that Invisible Hand has a few balancing tools that we might not like if we really took a look at them, like war for instance. War in the nuclear age is suicidal. Like indiscriminate growth for instance. Indiscriminate growth (bad physical growth as well as good financial growth) in the age of human overpopulation is suicidal is suicidal. Not that we have anything against suicide per se, but in both these cases we're talking about societal suicide, which, when triggered by a subgroup within the society amounts to murder-suicide, where the murder is much bigger than the suicide. (And by the way, talking about ecological limits instead of overpopulation misses the point that those limits have always been there, and been the same - but human populations were much, much smaller.)
[Greenspan has not taken the lesson of Limits to Growth, published 28 years ago at MIT. He has not taken the lesson of Buckminster Fuller's "doing more with less," published probably 50 years ago. He is an anachronism.
[Greenspan's bizarre balancing act is to keep printing money at an unprecedented rate and arranging for it to be poured into the one place where it won't create hyper-inflation; to wit, the financial markets. There it functions as play money for the rich, who only have one simplistic game = Get More. Only a tiny minority of the wealthy, with only a tiny minority of their wealth, really hit the philanthropist track. For most of them, like Bill Gates recently, it's simply a little PR that costs them relatively little, a gesture to stop the mouths of the stupid.
[This whole approach is the antithesis of Bucky's "doing more with less." It incentivates fewer people with more money, provides fewer jobs with more money. And since money is an all-accessing tool, our current approach is basically doing less with more in every imaginable field.
[What is going to change this? It could be the first really monstrous rich guy. He's probably already out there, but he's hidden it so far, or it's getting hushed up by his hangers-on.
[But evolution eventually tricks out every secret, from King Leopold's slave camps, to JFK's promiscuity and adultery, to the news-schedule-timed euthanasia of George V by his own royal doctor. What's that? You'd like to believe that but you don't? OK, here's a version of it that you'll like to believe even more = Jone's Law: "if anything CAN go wrong, it WILL." And so much can go wrong with such astronomical sums of money in the hands of so few, such insulated, people. It's a miracle much worse things haven't happened already. Let's face it, some actions are so hugely bad that they are rewarded, not prosecuted. Examples,
6/01 Curse of being 'superpower' - Refashioning rest of world in our image won't work, by Robert Samuelson, Bos Globe, E4.
...At the core of US foreign policy in the post-Cold War era lies a...conviction that...our ideas and ideals - coupled with our economic and military power - can slowly fashion the world into a prosperous and peaceful place....
["Ideas and ideals," eh? Let's see what this economics reporter in Washington regards as the "ideas and ideals" that make us reign supreme in our standing among nations - ]
We have more cruise missiles, stealth fighters, personal computers and McDonalds than anyone else.
[We don't know about you folks, but personally, it's against our religion to go into a McDonalds. And as for computers bringing happiness, we're in a strange era of better technology, worse service and worse lives - in so many areas. Look at -
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