Doomwatch^TM vs. Timesizing^®

1. Meddling with Oregon's [assisted self-euthanasia] law, editorial, NYT, A26.
   There is something cruel and intrusive about a bill passed by the House of "Representatives" [our quotes] this week making it a federal crime for doctors to prescribe lethal drugs so that terminally ill patients can end their own lives.... The Oregon law, a responsible effort to ease suffering at the end of life..\..approved twice by the voters of Oregon...allows physicians to aid suicides of the terminally ill under carefully defined circumstances....
   [One thing we remember from our two-year purgatory in "theological cemetery" (Emmanuel College) in Toronto was boy-sterous theologian David Demson's idea that freedom is always at least two-way - freedom from and freedom for. And here's its most basic application. If we aren't free from a decent and comfortable life, then we aren't really free for a comfortable and decent life. In other words, if we aren't free for a decent and comfortable death, then we aren't really free for a comfortable and decent life - we are shadowed by fear.
   [These so-called representatives in congress are acting more like grand inquisitor-torturers of the 13th century than intelligent humans on the doorstep of the 3rd millennium. They should all be thrown out for representing, not just the past but the worst of the past. Dr. Jack Kevorkian was the one person who took ownership of this issue and also "took the spear" for it. All future generations are indebted to him and he will be regarded as a great hero, championing the most fundamental of human rights during the darkness of this slow-learning century.]

2. A reminder - Standard time resumes at 2 A.M. tomorrow, NYT, front page.
   ...Clocks are set back one hour.
   [This is the kind of societal stupidity we need a wave of citizen initiatives to change. We should actually be doubling Daylight Saving in autumn to keep it lighter later in the evening and save energy. Here we are making it even darker even earlier and wasting energy bigtime. Dumbdumbdumb.]

3. Illegal workers' rights, letter to editor by Bruce Afran, Princeton NJ, NYT, A26.
   [Here is an extension of a common contemporary but curious opinion that seems to say we can save the world by bringing everyone to America, regardless of such silly considerations as, hahaha, our "immigration laws," not to mention our record-breaking immigration rates throughout the 1990s, our generation-long flat wages, our widening income gap, our ever-relengthening average workweek despite more timesaving technology than ever before in our history, our rising homelessness, and our record-breaking prison population.]
   The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's extension of anti-discrimination laws to illegal immigrants (news article, Oct. 28) is an important gesture in bringing an often exploited class of workers within the rule of law.
   [Never mind getting them back where they came from as quickly and gently as possible, and fixing the sloppy enforcement of our immigration laws that let them in in the first place - now we're going to forget about that overriding issue and zoom in on the should-be-preempted issue of employer discrimination against illegal immigrants? Why the heck does the EEOC think employers bring them here in the first place - to exploit them of course! The problem is not with the discrimination and exploitation of illegal workers, the problem is with the violation and unenforcement of our immigration laws right at the gitgo. In short, our real problem is scoff-law employers, not illegal workers.
   [The only way we see to fix this is to re-enact our immigration laws by regular national referendums, element by element. To get every American involved in this so we can put an end to this partitioned thinking about "ohyes, we need some immigration laws" and "ohyes, let anybody who wants to, come here." Money-drowned "representatives" will never make, in public votes in congress, hard decisions that modify the American identity, e.g., as an "immigrant nation." However, the the public can and will do so in secret ballots in local polling stations throughout the country, or by phone once we advance enough to get voting by phone en route to Buckminster Fuller's 24-hour, issue-oriented, telephone referendums. As Bucky was wont to say, we already have the technology.
   [But now our bizarre letter-writer really goes for the chaos - ]
   Illegal immigrants are an essential source of labor in industries like food service, tourism and light manufacturing,...]
   [WHAAAAAT?!! So it's "essential" for these whining industries to break the laws of the land?!! What virulent nonsense! By violating our laws, these industries are simply able to depress wages, impoverish people already here, and consolidate profits faster, thus bringing us quicker into depression. They should obey the laws, like everyone else, and work to change them if they don't like them, like everyone else.]
   ...but many employers have regarded [illegal immigrants] as being without legal rights.
   [This writer clearly has a missing chip on his motherboard. If they're illegal, how can they have any legal rights except to an expeditious trip back. And why would employers regard them as having rights when those same employers have brought them here for the express purpose of circumventing the rights of legal workers?! Neither the illegals nor their employers respect our laws, and the illegals need to be deported and their scofflaw employers fined and jailed and if they can't do business without breaking the law, they need to be run right out of business. If any employers don't like our immigration laws, let them circulate petitions and advertise to change them. But we suspect that the whole game here is dependent on the illegality and the exploitable vulnerability of these workers, so the fining and jailing and unchartering of these ILLEGAL EMPLOYERS should proceed posthaste.]

4. Flat-tax follies, editorial, NYT, A26.
   ...It was especially discouraging that..\..the Republican candidates who debated in New Hampshire Thursday night...embraced a flat tax to replace the progressive income tax. In the 1996 GOP primaries...Bob Dole demolish[ed] the idea by pointing out the absurdity of lowering tax rates on rich people...and raising them on the middle class.... Republicans would do well to drop [this issue] or risk being seen as a servant of the [short-sighted] privileged....
   [The far-sighted privileged have always been willing to share their luck. They have never bought this braindead idea because it further concentrates wealth, widens the income gap, and dampens economic dynamism..."the more concentration, the less circulation." Even Peter Jennings' little squib on ABC World News Tonight last evening around 6:30 about the 70th anniversary of the Great Crash had Robert McElwaine of Millsaps College dispensing the now-folk wisdom that the Depression was an imbalance of productivity (more and more) and spending (less and less) caused by the lack of "diffusion of profits" during the 1920s. Timesizing - reinvesting overtime profits in OT-targeted training and hiring and tying the weekly onset of overtime to a much more comprehensive unemployment rate (such as a dependency rate) - is the best way we've found to sufficiently diffuse profits (and do it with all the vital versatility and pervasiveness of maximum market synergy).]

1. [Banking & financial loonies undo the hard-learned lessons of the Great Crash - ]
   Financial services industry faces a new [wrong, this is the old disaster-prone] world, by Joseph Kahn, NYT, B1.
   During the careers of every living executive in the finance industry, bankers have made loans, brokers have sold stocks, insurers have underwritten policies to protect against disasters, and, with exceptions that sometimes made headlines, they rarely trespassed on one another's turf. This gentlemanly division of labor was intended to make sure that a catastrophic failure in one part of the finance industry did not invade every other part - or, more precisely, that a stock market crash would not undermine the entire financial system as it did in 1929.
   It worked, and it has more or less endured: Even today, after a decade that has witnessed extensive consolidation and diversification in finance, it is not inaccurate to think of Chase Manhattan as a lender, Merrill Lynch as a broker, and Prudential as an insurer, though they all do other things as well.
   But with Congress about to [rescind] the rules that underlie that tripartite division of financial services...it is only a matter of time before changes already under way mean that...
   [The reporter here says something braindead about everybody doing everything - no guts - but we'll put the end on this sentence that his article so far has all but articulated =]
   the Great Crash will recur with a vengeance!
   [How can they be so stupid, you're all asking. We think we're so smart with all this technology, don't we, but if we don't learn the lessons of history, guess what - we're doomed to repeat them. These clowns are blurring the boundaries at a time when everybody except the die-hard pollyannas is waiting for the bubble to burst, and even the short-side interest of the market pro's has rocketed recently - see yesterday's (10/22/99) article "Uncovered short sales rise 4.7% on New York Exchange [for month ending Oct. 15 & 9.4% on Amex]," NYT, C10 - "...In a short sale, an investor borrows shares from a brokerage firm and sells them, hoping to buy [them] back at lower prices and make a profit.... Uncovered short sales...have been borrowed and sold but not yet covered by repurchase. Large short-sale positions have been considered an indicator of bearish sentiment...."
   [All we can say is - Mommy, it's coming ba-a-a-a-ack....
   [Here are some other snippets today that'll add scientific support to your superstitions about the end of the world - the financial world, at least...]
   
   • Accord reached on lifting of Depression-era barriers among financial industries, by Stephen Labaton, NYT, front page. [Oh yes, those silly, old-fashioned, out-dated, Model-T-Ford era, unnecessary, stifling, suffocating, bureaucratic, financial restrictions!]
   • Criticisms raised, 2ndary headline, NYT, front page. [Where were they before?!]
   • Banks win right to sell stocks and insurance under single roof, 3rtiary headline, NYT, front page. [They didn't "win a right" - they lobbied and lobbied until they got a good 60-year-old law rescinded!]
   • "It's probably the most heavily lobbied, most expensive issue to come before Congress in a generation," said Ed Yingling, the American Bankers Assoc.'s chief lobbyist. Blowout excerpt, NYT, B1. [Not as expensive as the disaster it's going to allow! Please, God, will our great grandkids be able to roast these morons alive when they start talking like this again after the catastrophe they're opening us all to? If only we could restrict it to just them, they'd bloody well learn, but unfortunately....]
   • The lobbying - Surveying the results, 20 years and millions of dollars later, by Joel Brinkley, NYT, B4. [Millions of dollars, not only wasted -which would be neutral, but actually invested in a disastrous financial future for the nation and for millions individuals and families therein. This should read, "20 years and millions of dollars invested in America's financial armageddon."]
   • Consumer safeguards deemed necessary in the 30's are tossed out. Blowout headline, NYT, B4. [Speaks for itself.]
   • The once-clear lines between industries had already begun to get fuzzy. Blowout headline, NYT, B4. [So we react to fuzziness by making it fuzzier instead of refocusing?! - dumbdumbdumb.]
   • Clinton forces give ground, and small banks will face less scrutiny. Blowout headline, NYT, B4. [Yeah, all those little unregulated bankrupt banks in the 1920s and 30s faced less scrutiny too, so less bank scrutiny turned into more public screwtiny - and a lot of bankers and financiers did not escape unscathed.]
   • Financial services industry prepares for a new world, continuation headline, NYT, B5. [Again, this is not a new world. This is the old disaster-prone world of the Roaring 'Twenties and depressed early 'Thirties.]
   • Consumer groups have already begun to raise red flags about privacy. Blowout headline, NYT, B5. [No kidding. When humans fail to learn the lessons that are appropriate at each technology level, the improved technology at the time of the "repeated grade" makes the "school of hard knocks" a lot harder. Examples? Recall troglodites like Idi Amin or Saddam Hussein with high tech surveillance and torture techniques. Or the big one, Hitler's technological efficiency in the Final Solution. This century's prime "if-only's" -
     • If only Woodrow Wilson had not killed his own "baby" (the League of Nations) with absolutist self-righteous rigidity, and Cabot Lodge not put petulant pride before the well-being of the world (see Thomas Bailey's "Woodrow Wilson and the Great Betrayal"), we would not have ground Germany's face in the mud and elicited World War II. And soooo many more people died in WW2 than "The Great War" (WW1).
     • If only FDR had pushed the 30-hour workweek bill through the House in 1933 after fellow Democrat Hugo Black had pushed it through the Senate (see Benjamin Hunnicutt's "Work Without End") - and we had shifted to sharing the vanishing work instead of straining, with ever increasing effort, to maintain a first-time-ever frozen workweek against the efficiencies of all future technology, we would not have the marginalized labor, widening income gap, and record prison population that we have today - and be sitting here waiting for a replay of the Great Depression, aka "the economic Black Hole extends its event horizon."]

1. [A good goal but a bad method - Brazil goes Luddite.]
   Brazil move to save jobs, by Simon Romero, NYT, C4.
   In a move to ease unemployment pressure, Brazil's lower house of Congress approved a bill prohibiting self-service gasoline stations. The bill's supporters hope to save the jobs of about 300,000 attendants at 27,000 gas stations. The bill is sponsored by Brazil's Communist Party.
   [More and more of these "Luddite" (technology-resisting) measures will multiply until we get it through our heads that the problem only persists until we start sharing the vanishing work by trimming the workweek. India is the really big economy for Luddism, with 20 women "mowing" the lawn with tiny hand scythes instead of one motorized lawnmower. In America, our "solution" has been to turn our whole economy into a gigantic makework campaign with junk mail, spam and incessant advertising trying to convince us we need all kinds of stupid stuff, from a new "only $43,000" Jaguar every year, to God-knows-what new mouthwash/deodorant/hairspray/webservice. We incessantly dun ourselves about our low unemployment, low unemployment, but then why are wages flat, soup kitchens mobbed, prisons breaking records? And why is there so little private-sector training and so much income gap? We're a "house divided" also with our private sector trying to cut jobs and our public sector trying to create them. If only we'd avoided the strain and just took the fork to sharing the vanishing work back in 1933. Sooner or later, we'll have to start timesizing, and stop downsizing by business and upsizing by government. Check out the following story for how South Korea undercounts its unemployed - and you thought we were bad.]

2. Korean jobless rate drops, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   South Korea's jobless rate fell to a 20-month low of 4.8% in September, a sharp drop from 5.7% in August. The number of people unemployed fell to 1.07m from 1.24m. Korea has a population of about 46m....
   [But hold the jubilation - ]
   ...Anyone who works at least an hour a week is considered employed.
   [ONE HOUR A WEEK and you're out of the jobless rate?!! Hel-lo-o. Guess that beats us here in the good ol' USA for top prize in the contest for the phoniest unemployment rate - specially designed to undercount our dependency and desperation so our CEOs can keep looking for sympathy in these bogus binds that "force" them to downsize and "give them no choice."]

3. Uncovered short sales rise 4.7% on New York Exchange [& 9.4% on Amex for month ending Oct. 15], NYT, C10.
   ...In a short sale, an investor borrows shares from a brokerage firm and sells them, hoping to buy [them] back at lower prices and make a profit.... Uncovered short sales...have been borrowed and sold but not yet covered by repurchase. Large short-sale positions have been considered an indicator of bearish sentiment....

4. Survey says 78.7 million own stocks in United States, by Robert Hershey, NYT, C10.
   The number of stock owners soared to 78.7m people early this year, 85% more that in 1983 when the long bull market was getting under way. Among households, 48.2% now own stock directly or through mutual funds, more than double the 19% with such a stake in 1983, according to a survey by the Investment Company Institute and the Securities Industry Association [so, not unbiassed researchers]....
   [So what's wrong with that? Wall Street is trying to spin the household figure, wherever that comes from, to suggest that roughly half of Americans are stockholders, that's what - not only finessing the incredible concentration of stock ownership among the top income brackets, but also glossing over the irrelevance of household figures here in the first place. So, the argument goes, we taxpayers should further subsidize the financial industry because half of us are involved in it - except that it's now a huge bubble already oversubsized and all-destructive when it pops, the sooner the milder, the later the harsher.]

1. Early-bird life catches on, by Irene Sege, Boston Globe, front page.
   ...Lisa Thomas slips into a pew for the 6 a.m. Mass at St. Anthony's Chapel on Arch Street [Boston, Mass.]. At Fitcorp on Federal Street, Linda Groves steps onto the stair climber. Over on Franklin Street, the operations desk staff at State Street Brokerage Services has been logged onto a new workday for a good half hour.... People like these have helped to push the morning rush hour earlier and earlier. Call it a byproduct of prosperity.... When business is good, the busy...get going sooner....
   Statistics from state transportation agencies support the observations of commuters. The weekday morning starts earlier now. Traffic heading [citywards] south on Interstate 93 at the Medford-Stoneham line between 5 and 6 a.m. is up 58% in a decade.... The number of cars traveling [citywards] north on the Southeast Expressway past Southampton Street between 5 and 6 a.m. is up 41% since 1987....
   It's people who arrive early and leave early in an era when 28% of the nation's work force is on flex-time, up from 15% in 1991.
   ["Arrive early and leave early" is OK, but...]
   It's people who arrive early but don't leave early at a time when the United Nations reports Americans increasing their annual work hours while those in other industrialized countries are decreasing theirs....
   [This is not OK. This is worsening the global labor glut even worse than those who at least keep to the legal American 40-hour workweek maximum, frozen though it's been for the last 59 years. And if they're on salaries, which must legally be 40-hour salaries, they're working overtime without overtime pay.
   [Unpaid work is slavery. And people working for wages, however low, cannot compete with slaves working for nothing, so slavery depresses the wages of working people everywhere. And the underlying reason we fought the Civil War was to abolish the unfair competition of slavery and make it possible for the wages of working people to rise and earn them a better standard of living.]
   Forget the notion of bankers' hours and think instead of managing other people's investments while monitoring a worldwide economy.
   [Sounds like a setup to sucker some poor sap into a fantasy of self-important indispensability. A little altruism ("other people's investments"), a little globalism ("worldwide economy"), a lot of responsibility ("managing") and a sneer at an easier life ("forget the notion of bankers' hours").  Sure enough, it's caught someone - ]
   Ralph Constantino...marketing director for State Street Global Advisors, arrives at his office at 6 a.m. so he can put in the 11 hours a day his job demands and still be home in Andover for dinner, time with his three children, and "some semblance of meaningful conversation" with his wife. As for sleep? "That's what I have to be more disciplined about," he says....
   [Let's see, the 11-hour day, 55-hour workweek on a 5-day week, went out around 1910 for most American industries. The 11-hour day, 66-hour workweek on a 6-day week, went out around 1895. Which one are you on, Ralph? Have you undone 104 years of progress or merely 89? We assume you're on salary and therefore working 15 or 26 hours a week of unpaid overtime, or to put a finer point on it, you're working as a slave 15-26 hours a week, every week. And you've bought the idea that you can and must put in the 11 hours a day the "job demands" - because it's sooo important and you're sooo indispensible. Well, we think you're trapped in a fear-driven squirrel cage designed by a bunch of spoiled, short-sighted, narrowly focused and just plain bad managers, and we'd like them to winch your hours up an hour a week every year, just to see if there's any end to this process of going backward in time.
   [The most backward American industry, big steel, had an 84-hour workweek (12x7) as recently as 1923, until it was stopped by the Republican administration of Harding, with Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover leading the charge that finally embarrassed Judge Gary and the other impassive steel moguls into cutting hours to 48 a week (8x6).
   [Ralph, how long is your wife going to be satisfied with "some semblance of meaningful conversation"? And you don't even mention time with your three kids. "As for sleep?" - we doubt it's a matter of being "more disciplined." We think you're been sucked into some kind of self-enslavement, and you're dumb enough to think it's making you important. "Oh, I work 15-26 hours a week without pay for rich people - I'm IMPORTANT." Yeah sure you are, Ralph. You're also stupid and you're hurting other people by taking far more than your share of vanishing market-demanded employment in an age of burgeoning worksaving technology. And you're probably kidding yourself about your family. Your kids are gonna be prime candidates for the Black Trenchcoats when they hit highschool.
   [And your employers are part and parcel of the problem. Why are we splitting into a dual economy? Because we're piling more and more work on fewer and fewer people and mesmerizing employees with mirages of megalomania to "keep them under." This concentrates the work and skills and money in our economy on the few, and marginalizes the many. This gives us the widening income gap, the vanishing middle class, and a prison population that will be the biggest in the world next year. And most ironic of all, it strangles markets. That's what we said. It absolutely starves domestic American consumer markets because of the marginal utility of wealth - "the more concentration, the less circulation."
   [Congratulations, Ralph, you're a prime candidate for burnout and divorce and heart attack, but maybe you'll quit and go into the clergy or something - like the people in our 2nd goodnews story on 10/17/99 - and get more of a life of your own.]

2. Low on cash, Dole withdraws from G.O.P. race - Says she can't compete against the fortunes of Forbes and Bush, by Katherine Seelye, NYT, front page.
   WASHINGTON, Oct. 20 - Elizabeth Dole, the first woman to be taken seriously as a candidate for her party's [or any party's?!] Presidential nomination, dropped out of the race today.... Her withdrawal came before a single ballot had been cast....
   [...despite global name recognition!  Shame, shame.  Now a miracle can happen at the turn of the century and the turn of the Millennium, and it won't matter, because there'll be no one ready and waiting. What a boost it would have given girls all over America to see Liddy Dole in the Presidential Primary debates! We in Somerville, Mass. went out of our way to elect a woman as mayor and now we're seeing a tremendous surge in women candidates for office, as related in "Women dominate a Somerville ballot - Mayor Kelly Gay seen as inspiration," by Sarah Fishman, 9/05/99 Boston Globe, City Weekly section p.1.
   [This is the third huge setback for America engineered by Republicans the past week - (1) clobbered the test ban treaty that America had been pushing everybody else to sign, (2) clobbered campaign finance reform that's been on the agenda for 4 years, (3) clobbered any chance of entering the new Millennium with a woman at the helm of the world's biggest economy. If American voters next year don't have the sense to beat the living daylights out of the "Grand" Old Party in its visionless and obstructive present-day manifestation, America is "shifting into second" on its trip to the Great Dumpster in the sky. As "Big J" said of the hypocrites of his day (paraphrasing Matt. 23:13), "They neither make any real progress themselves, nor let anyone else who's trying do so."]

1. Long lines form in the Bronx, but hope of jobs, not Yankee tickets, is the attraction - 'Maybe the world needs to see' that the economic boom is not the whole story, by Amy Waldman, NYT, A27.
   By 9 A.M. yesterday, the line snaked around three sides of the Bronx County Building.... More than 40 employers were inside at a job fair, trying to fill positions from sales clerk to registered nurse. About 5,000 potential job candidates - from welfare mothers to recent college graduates - showed up, some waiting more than three hours to get into the fair.... Most said they were drawn by desperation....
   [The two-tiered economy lives.]

2. [And speaking of jobs - ]
   Cleveland warns Newark an arena is no cure-all, by Ronald Smothers, NYT, A27.
   [Are they in time to warn Boston & the Bay State?]

3. New York City raised illegal obstacles to AIDS welfare grants, top state court rules - A rebuke to the Mayor's efforts to make it hard for the poor to get benefits, by Raymond Hernandez, NYT, A29.
   [Here we are, still kidding around with the AIDS epidemic.]

4. [And speaking of epidemics - ]
   Market's new worry: lawsuits - Analysts believe wave of litigation just beginning, Syre and Stein, Boston Globe, E1.
   [American litigiousness rages on. Along with lack of health insurance, homelessness, prison construction, school shootings.... Are we an integrated, harmonious society? Suuuuuure we are. Are we ready for a new millennium? Suuuuuure we are. Going from "one person, one vote" to "one person, one range of working hours per week" is the best integrating mechanism we can come up with. Better get moving on it before we completely split apart.]

5. A larger legacy may await generations X, Y and Z, by David Johnston, NYT, C2.
   A platinum era of giving is foreseen by researchers, blowout headline, C1.
   Far more wealth will be transferred to younger generations over a half-century than the $10.4 trillion previously thought, Boston College researchers say. They put the amount at $41-136 trillion.
   The new figures suggest that charities stand to benefit from a platinum era of giving with bequests of $16-53 trillion between now and 2055.
   [But the problem is the concentration of wealth, and this doesn't touch it. It doesn't matter if the concentration is in the private sector, the public sector or the non-profit sector, it still runs up against the marginal utility of wealth = "the more concentration, the less circulation." And setting lower limits doesn't help. We need to solve Chesterton's pan-utopian quandary. We need to set an upper limit and define share per person, in a more relevant dimension than "one person, one vote." We need to share the wealth, but trying to do that first just generates dependency. The first step is to share the work. If we can't get a population to share the work and the skills, there's no way they're going to be frontrunners in human progress. They'll slip further and further behind. "A house divided against itself cannot stand."
   [The Wright Brothers had flown kites. They'd spun tops and spinning flyer toys. They'd done gliders. They'd built and ridden bicycles. They'd driven motorbikes. Now all they needed to do was put all these elements together into a workable, powered, controlled flying machine. What's the minimum that needs to be controlled to avoid a crash? How can it be made easy and intuitive enough for a person to control?
   [Our challenge 100 years later is to do the same thing with a corporate, state, regional or national economy. How can we design and fly an economy that will stay up, with no "black boxes" or unswept corners of blind faith and cheerleading self-deceiving rhetoric? What are the relevant dimensions, how few of them do we need to control and how can we do it with maximum convenience and intuitiveness?
   [Check out the Timesizing program. It's the first time anyone has dispassionately asked all the relevant economic-design questions, let alone come up with a brace of simple, gradual, unforced answers.]

6. G.M. and Canadian union reach tentative agreement, by Robyn Meredith, NYT, C2.
   DETROIT - Dodging a threatened strike, the General Motors Corp. reached a...contract agreement with the Canadian Auto Workers union that will provide generous raises to the company's 21,000 Canadian factory workers even as it allows the company to continue to downsize....
   [Unions are still making the same stupid mistake they made in the 1930s. They still haven't learned. As long as they allow downsizing, they are allowing a continued buildup of downward pressure on their wages and benefits. They aren't a true "union" because they are continuing to split the workforce into temporarily protected high-wage jobs and marginalized jobs, and they are even allowing this to happen to their own members. What happened to the All Unions Committee to Shorten the Workweek that existed back in the 1970s? They had some sense. What happened to the CAW's, to Buzz Hargrove's, interest in shorter hours a couple of years back?]
   The Canadian union had threatened a strike after GM proposed eliminating 1300 jobs. GM reversed course, promising to invest C$1.1 billion in various factories. "We're saving a lot of jobs here," Mr. Hargrove said. Still, GM is expected to downsize through attrition....
   [And that means the CAW will be downsized through attrition, just as the whole union movement has been downsized "through attrition" the last two generations, ever since they sold their birthright, control of their own labor supply via shorter hours, for a mess of pottage (social security, workmen's comp, unemployment insurance, minimum wage, and a continuing alphabet soup of government makework programs). They abandoned the fight for shorter hours, and they're at 14% of the workforce and falling - until they get back on the hours issue.]

7. Vote on campaign finances is blocked by Senate G.O.P. for fourth year in a row - Filibuster stands - McCain-Feingold bill is 'dead for the year,' Senator Lott says, by Alison Mitchell, NYT, front page.
   [The Republicans really seem intent on making the nation furious with them. Let's see how this contempt for the public pays off in the elections next year.]

8. A new form of soft money belies much talk of reform - Leadership PAC's growing in both parties, by Don van Natta, NYT, A22.
   WASHINGTON, Oct.19 - The Senate minority leader [Democrat], Tom Daschle, was one of the staunchest backers of the campaign finance reform bill [which] would have banned soft money, the unrestricted contributions that fall outside Federal election law. But in February, Mr. Daschle created his own political action committee, which immediately began raising soft money....
   [This is echoed by a story the next day, 10/21 - ]
   Kerry event raises soft money, scorn, by Bob Hohler, Boston Globe, A3.
   WASHINGTON - Brimming with indignation, [Democratic] Senator John F. Kerry this week clamored on the Senate floor for an end to soft money, warning that the large, unregulated contributions are poisoning the nation's politics.... Tonight, only two days after his impassioned speech to the Senate, Kerry is scheduled to host a private fund-raiser at this townhouse in Washington's Georgetown section that is expected to generate $250,000 for the Democratic Party - in soft money....
   [Let's face it. The only cure is to get up citizen initiatives to make getting citizen initiatives a lot easier, and then do an end run around this whole corrupt mess of so-called "representatives" with issue-oriented referendums and initiatives. These monsters can invent new scams faster than Wall Street can invent derivatives, and they're not passing the already outflanked protections they've been jawing about anyway.]

10/10-11  3 zingers -

1. ["Pro-life" movement proven hypocrites.]
   10/11 Study links abortion laws, aid to children - 'Prochoice' states found more generous, by William Claiborne, Washington Post via Boston Globe, A4.
   ...Said Jean Schroedel, an associate professor of political science at the Claremont Graduate University in California, "To put it simply, prolife states make it difficult for women to have abortions, but they do not help women provide for the children once born".... "When I started this research, I really thought I'd find evidence of how prolife states were respecting the lives of children...," Schroedel said..\..For the nearly eight years that she researched the issue she was not an abortion rights activist or affiliated with any abortion rights movement. But...in the past six months, after she sent her manuscript to the publisher, she joined Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League and "sent off money.... I became convinced by my own research"..\..
   States with the strongest antiabortion laws generally are among the states that spend less on needy children and are less likely to criminalize the battering or killing of fetuses in pregnant women by a third party, according to [Schroedel's] academic study. The survey, the first of its kind to examine the relationship between states' abortion laws and their spending on at-risk children, says states with strong antiabortion laws provide less funding per child for foster care, stipends for parents who adopt children with special needs, and payments for poor women with dependent children than do states with strong abortion rights laws. "As you move from the strongest prochoice states to the strongest prolife states, the amount of spending in these areas becomes increasingly lower," said Jean Schroedel....
   [So our worst fears are confirmed. Advocates of forced parenting of foetuses don't really give a damn about the unborn - they're just on a self-righteous power-tripping crusade to shove their simplistic 100%-black-or-white worldview down the throats of the rest of the nation. "Let him that is without sin cast the first stone." It's time the misnamed "pro life" movement put down their stones and started demonstrating by their actions and their giving and their state taxes that they can provide a menu of better alternatives to women "in trouble" than just bringing unwanted children into the world. Where are the positive incentives for these women, because just shouting No at them and calling them names is doing more for the shouters than for the children.]

2. 10/10 Russia - From 'wild west' to 'kleptocracy' [gov't by thieves], by Lynnley Browning, Boston Globe, E1.
   Not long ago, observers proclaimed Russia a Klondike of oil, gold and promise, and predicted that the old communist giant would head into the new millennium looking like a Western-style market economy.
   But the decade that began with sanguine visions of a frontier of opportunity is closing with a fin de siècle fear of corruption and chaos....
   [Largely because our impatient "experts" from Harvard over-ruled gradualism and tried to jump Russia into the free market in two weeks. Thanks, Jeffrey Sachs. See excerpted story below on 9/10 and click for fully commented story on 8/15/99.]

3. [Spin doctoring in America - here's a headline that provides another sample of our economic happytalk - ]
   10/10 Comeback city [Lynn, Mass.] - After losing 9,000 jobs and 400 businesses, Lynn is enticing dozens of small companies, by Thomas Grillo, Bos Globe, K1.
   ["Modified rapture."]

10/02 Japan's nuclear lesson, NYT editorial, A24.

• It was nowhere near as bad as the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in Ukraine, which spewed radiation over a vast territory.
• It was not even as scary as the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, which had the entire nation on edge wondering if the reactor core would break through its confinement and reach the outer world....
• But the nuclear accident this week at a fuel processing plant at Tokaimura was certainly the worst in Japan's history...

10/01/99 Median household income rose 3.5% in 1998 - But the gap between wage earners at top and bottom widens, by Kimberly Blanton, Boston Globe, C2.
[Obviously the median only rose because of the astronomical concentration of wealth at the top. That means a colossal failure to reinvest. It also means "the more concentration, the less circulation," and another step closer to a crash, as the dense concentration at the top actually suctions the markets away from its own investments. The amount of shopping just isn't the same when 1% of the population has 99% of the money, as when 1% of the population each has 1% of the money, because those with money don't have time (or need) to shop, and those with time (and need) don't have the money. That's why we need to balance the time dimension before the money dimension.  A time (worktime) balance provides the foundation for a money balance.
[And remember, we're not talking about balancing or equalizing on a point here, like Lenin in the 1920s when he equalized wages, destroyed differential incentives and triggered the biggest famine in Russian history. We're talking about balancing/equalizing on a range, such as between 10 and 30 working hours per person per week. Then all we have to do is define the two ends of the range as flexibly, dynamically, market-determinedly and automatically as possible, with the minimum necessary departure from status quo at each step, and lots of transition time for everybody. And tie in automatic reinvestment at rates and levels that would beggar today's. But all this is what Timesizing is all about.
[As for the NYT's happyspin on this story, "Rising incomes lift 1.1 million out of poverty" (frontpage), bear in mind that our "official poverty line" is a rigid and arbitrary figure with about as much meaning and relevance as perfect absolute pitch to a choir with good relative pitch. As Eliot Forbes used to say when directing the Harvard Glee Club, "Forget about perfect pitch and just sing together." Why? Because you get an awful sound if you don't. And that's what our society is getting with the biggest prison population in our history and, next year, the biggest in the world.]

For earlier collapse stories, click on the desired date -