Doomwatch^TM vs. Timesizing^®

11/27  2 clunkers right across the page from each other -

1. U.S. is prepared to approve merger of Exxon and Mobil (continued from p. A1) on the top left of p. B2, and on the top right,

2. California gasoline prices are a focus for regulators - Most sales are controlled by 6 companies, by Andrew Pollack, NYT, B2.
   ...about 26¢ more for a gallon of gasoline than other Americans....
   [If federal regulators approve Exxon-Mobil, there'll just be 5 companies and if they also approve BP Amoco-Arco, there'll just be 4.  Hel-lo-o. Wakey wa-key. Anybody home?]

11/21-22  2 clunkers -

1. 11/21 Globalization and the World Trade Organization, presentation by Mike Prokosch representing *United for a Fair Economy at Community Church of Boston 11 am service.
   ...325 people own more than half (3 billion) of the world's population of 6 billion.
   [Imagine the size of the markets and the economic dynamism we'd have if that incredibly tight concentration was even partially centrifuged. How do you centrifuge wealth? You must centrifuge skills and work first, so you don't just generate dependency. So how do you do that? Step one is to enforce your existing laws regarding work-share per person. This is not a single figure but a range, for example, 12-40 hours/week. The low end of the range is not the problem when we're talking about concentration of skills and work. It's the top end that we have to worry about. The top in the USA is in fact 40 hours a week. Forty has been the legal maximum workweek per person since 1940. So step one in the USA is to enforce the existing 40 maximum workweek, bearing in mind that the major violations are not relative to wage workers but salaried employees. We have several proposals to make enforcement easier -
   • a shadow time accounting system to monitor working hours of salaried employees, similar to the billable time concept of consultants
   • starting enforcement on salaried employees at the highest actual workweek, say, 100 hrs/wk; getting enforcement operational and debugged at that level and then gradually bringing that level downward to 40 at a rate of no more than 1 hr/wk per month and no less than 1 hr/wk per year - this "rate of descent" could be decided by referendum of the affected population.
   • fixing the action taken in the case of overtime; right now, overtime is motivated for employees because they want the time and a half; to really discourage it, we must not compensate it at all. But we can avoid the stifling effects of EVERYONE STOP WORK HERE by just stopping those with inflationary incentive; that is, the people who are just working for the money and for whom no amount is ever enough. And we can generate on-the-job training (OJT) and hiring at the same time if we simply require reinvestment of overtime profits (corporate) and earnings (individual) in overtime-targeted OJT and hiring. This could be done by a tax on overtime profits and earnings, with an exemption for OJT and hiring. Revenues from the tax could be used to simulate the OJT and hiring that the private sector should have done.
   • adjusting the level where overtime starts (that is, the length of the workweek) to offset unemployment. Of course, this would require getting an unemployment rate that really counted the problem of non-self-support, including prisons and homelessness, and setting low target rates by referendum, instead of the undercounting rate we use today mainly for self-congratulation. This calls the bluff of those who really believe that technology creates more jobs than it destroys, because under this system, the workweek is bidirectionally adjustable. If unemployment becomes too low (that is, if we really do have a labor shortage and not just a skill shortage because nobody's doing any training), the workweek can increase again.
   Note that job creation under these "Timesizing" proposals is overtime-determined and so it is market-determined, not artificial like government makework, and it does not allow the concentration of skills and wealth - it centrifuges them.]
   The lower half of the global population averages less than $2/hr in wages....
   [$2/hr sounds high to us but we think that's what he said.]

2. [Talk about "shooting yourself in the foot."] 11/21 Handgun offered as prize in GOP raffle - Group in Maryland county raises eyebrows with fund-raising tactic, by Andy Carpenter, Boston Globe, A12.
   ...a new $550 Beretta model 92FS 9mm handgun....
   [Now the Republicans are shootin themselves in the other foot. The 2nd party in this country has got so dumb, the 2-party system is toast. Colleague Kate Jurow recently read that if a woman owns a gun, she's 50% more likely to be murdered by one. We believe the chances are up for the overall population as well. There's some kind of reflective function at work in Reality that tends to bounce back the same kind of vibes as we project. Check out our goodnews story today on Denmark's crime situation.]

1. A cocktail of oil and politics - US seeks to end Russian domination of the Caspian - Tapping for crude and political allies, by Steve Levine, NYT, B1.
   [Here's one where the U.S. should just get its big fat nose out of other people's business. Where is U.S. "isolationism" when it would be really intelligent?!]

2. The downside of a social security promise - It will prevent using surpluses for needed investments, by Michael Weinstein, NYT, A26.
   [What's the matter with these morons that they suddenly don't understand the words "bankrupt in 2030" and "TRUST funds" any more? They suddenly "need" to use social security TRUST funds for "investments" - i.e., more gambling?! Give us a break!]

11/19 Pursuit of stock wealth brings a world of swindlers, pointer headline, NYT, C1 (pointing to A1).
Along with the "greatest bull market in American history" [our quotes] comes a world of low-priced stocks and high-priced dreams, of grimy offices and sham companies, of swindlers who bilk Americans out of roughly $2b a year, securities regulators say. The problem is so severe that regulators and prosecutors have made it one of their chief goals to crack down on what they used to dismiss as "penny-stock fraud"....

11/19 Minimum wages, city by city - As more local laws pass, more businesses complain, by Louis Uchitelle, NYT, C1.
LOS ANGELES - ...Here and elsewhere, a small but increasing number of employers who do business with government are suddenly finding themselves required by local ordinances to grant big raises and benefits to their low-wage workers. Forty cities and counties in 17 states, particularly those with large constituencies of low-wage workers, have enacted such wage laws since the movement began 5 years ago.
As one follows another, lately at the rate of a new ordinance a month, the movement has begun to broaden from a single emphasis on higher wages into a wide range of requirements involving health insurance, vacations, sick pay, job security and incentives to unionize.
"You have to look at the living wage movement in the context of the utter failure of federal labor law, now so stacked against workers," said Madeline Janis-Aparicio, director of the Los Angeles Living Wage Coalition. She cited what she said was Washington's failure to raise the national minimum wage to keep pace with the needs of the working poor or to strengthen labor's bargaining power.
[The question Madeline needs to ask herself is, If the minimum wage law has failed, why would what is essentially just a higher minimum wage law succeed? And if it has failed because it's a high-maintenance approach that requires frequent updating, why is the living-wage movement now getting into "health insurance, vacations, sick pay, job security" which are even more "high-maintenance"?
[And why on earth would you expect a minimum wage law to strengthen labor's bargaining power? It can only weaken it by forcing employers to pay premium prices for a surplus commodity, - that is, high wages for low skills. All this does is motivate employers to move out or automate, to decrease payroll.
[The alternative to this whole futile exercise finally dawned on our grandfathers, and that was, hard as it sounds, to reduce the surplus of labor by refocusing on maximum working hours, not minimum pay. You can't really help the bottom by focusing on the bottom. The real problem is at the top in the reluctance among those at the top to share, and it's easier and healthier to share the wealth via work than directly. Focusing on enforcing overtime laws and reducing the workweek would shift what employers are perceiving from a labor surplus to a labor shortage, and at their own pace and with an incredible diversity of approaches, they would sweeten the bargain for workers - wages plus "health insurance, vacations, sick pay, job security" - all these would be taken care of by market forces now adjusted so employees are no longer in an overwhelmingly weak position by reason of their surplus situation. Timesizing takes this approach.
[But isn't there already a labor shortage? The only people making that claim are employers, and their claim is belied by the lack of training programs they could set up and the lack of pay raises they could be offering. Employers have gotten used to being spoiled by such floods of resumes, they figure they have no need to train or pay. The windfall profits from new technology are still pouring to the top income brackets, including many of the most loudly complaining employers, widening the income gap, and reducing their markets. The incentive for them to cut hours and spread the work is the larger markets they will all have by centrifuging some of the legendary wealth of the "new economy." It should be possible to quantify this advantage and throw some figures on it.]

11/18  3 clunkers -

1. Need for computer experts is making recruiters frantic, by Matt Richtel, NYT, front page.
   [But this is not their problem. It's CEOs' problem. MMMM-as we've asked so often before, can they spell T-R-A-I-N-I-N-G? They've got advanced software technology but retarded corporate-design technology. And my, how they whine.]

2. A tale of 2 markets and their widening gap - The triumph of technology - The bull market in technology stock has driven the Nasdaq index up 50% since the beginning of the year, compared to a 15% rise for the broader Standard & Poor's 500 index, by Syre & Stein, Boston Globe, C1.
   We've got two stock markets at the moment: a broader market that is doing OK and a technology market that is doing spectacularly. The gap between the two gets bigger every day. "The polarization is more extreme than anything we have ever seen," says Thomas O'Neill, chief investment officer at FleetBoston Financial Group.
   [But then Tom is just a young whippersnapper who doesn't remember and hasn't looked at the 1920s when this all happened before.]
   ...Can the new world really be that much greater than the old one or is the growing gap in valuation a sign of a market that has gone bonkers?...
   [The new world can be that much greater than the old one but not on our prevailing, primitive economic technology for centrifuging spending power and balancing the huge deliverables in productivity with strangled levels of consumer spending.
   [Major prediction: this technology, non-technology split was there in the 1920s but not this pronounced. We predict that, without improvement in our supply-demand, productivity-consumption balance, the large degree of split this time will ordain that the next great stock crash will occur in two distinct phases: (1) mad dash to escape from Internet stocks into "solid" stocks on the 35% lower curve. Then after a long or short period of time - still without centrifuging spending power to solidify the stock bubble, (2) a mad bailout from stocks and almost all other financial instruments similar to what we think of when we visualize 1929. What determines all this? The fact that for all our vaunted sophistication, we still have the possibility of 1% of the population compacting in their own busybusy No Time! hands fully 99% of the spending power of the nation. And then we get a dose of The Marginal Efficiency of Wealth, alias "The more concentration, the less circulation." De Sismondi predicted it all in 1819, in a book that has STILL not been translated into the language of us global happyhappyhappy merchants (any volunteers?), called Nouveaux principes d'économie politique, available in 1st edition on Bookfinder.com for NG8500 (nearly US$4K) or in print from Schoenhof's in Cambridge, Mass. by order for $18.95 + shipping, (617) 547-8855.]
   Surprisingly, quite a few money managers and economists say there [are] fundamental reasons for the triumph of tech stocks. Like what? The bulls point to 3 things...
   1. The tremendous growth in high-tech earnings....
      [Growth from zero is always easy.]
   2. The US economy is hooked on technology....
      [Hooked on efficiency, ie: work-saving, ie: job-trimming, ie: market-trimming? That's the whole reason the stock boom is just a bubble in the first place.]
   3. The rest of the world is playing catchup....
      [Here's hoping they still have some supply-demand balance left by the time we crash, and can help pull US out.]
   Thomas O'Neill thinks there could could be a technology correction even without any change in fundamentals. He points out that there have been other technology booms in the past - the personal computer boom of the early 1980s was a famous one [oh yeah? and that's not very far in the past, or very big] - and that booms have a way of ending in busts.... "This thing will end badly for the vast majority of stocks," he warns.... O'Neill calls the current infatuation with tech stocks a mania and describes the current valuations as mindboggling....
   [We agree.]

3. Year 2000 computer cost put at $365 a person, AP via NYT, C17.
   WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 - The government said today that the cost of repairing the Year 2000 computer problem would be $100 billion, or $365 for each man, woman and child in the United States. For all that, the Commerce Dept. predicted that the effect of computer failures on the economy would be merely "something like a tangled shoelace for a world-class runner."...
   [Ah, tangled with what and at what point in the race? For those of us who are tempted to deify high tech and techies, here is Exhibit A in assessing their common sense and long-range planning.]

1. A costly deal on U.N. dues, editorial, NYT, A28.
   ...To win the House Republican leadership's assent to give almost $1 billion in back American dues to the United Nations...White House bargainers agreed to new statutory language restricting international family planning assistance....
   [More evidence that Clinton is a small man with restricted perspective and judgement. Will there be a Teddy Roosevelt or an Abraham Lincoln soon in this new century, or do they only come from a young Republican Party uncoöpted by money-blindered slogan-thinkers?]

2. "Looking for a company with a solid customer base?" fullpage ad for MyFamily.com, NYT, C5.
   [Ominous. The fact they're now advertising this claim indicates a rising awareness of a problem with Internet (and other?) companies - non-solid customer bases. Dare we call them "hollow" customer bases and compare them with the hollow stock "bubble" and our economy in general, "hollowed out" by nearly two decades of downsizing and middle-class shrinkage?
   [Time to shift the profits from Wall St and the Executive Ste back into markets via wages. Automatic reinvestment at the grassroots is the only approach that can deliver the necessary colossal levels of spending required by our inexorably rising productivity, relative to our present paltry levels of wage&market investment.]

3. Study details immigrants' importance - [Mass.] increasingly reliant on poor workers, by Kimberly Blanton, Boston Globe, D1.
   Massachusetts' need to replenish its work force [or need to train its labor pool?!] makes it increasingly reliant on an immigrant population that labors under poverty and a need to acquire skills and education [yeah, like it's all their problem], according to a study released yesterday by a nonprofit think tank [MassInc.]....
   [And how do we change this and reverse the increasing pampering of our business sector with passed-along training costs? We engineer a real, and not just rhetorical, labor shortage by enforcing overtime and reducing the workweek. How will we know when there's a real labor shortage, and not just a skills shortage caused by resume-flooded employers' unwillingness to train? Why, when we see the OJT (on-the-job training) popping up all over our economy, of course, as it did during World War II, the last time we had a real labor shortage (or was it actually a labor balance that we call "shortage" because we're so unused to seeing it?!).]

4. Next, it's E-ducation, op ed by Thomas Friedman, NYT, A29.
   [Or E-deterioration.]
   ...Amazon.com...shipped so many copies of "Mein Kampf" to Germany over the summer, Hitler made Amazon's top 10 best-seller list among German buyers.... Ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a whole other set of walls is starting to fall as we move deeper into the Internet revolution. And this...will [not] automatically bring out the best in people....
   [No, it's not that easy to bring out the best in people. That project must be one of social design and incentivation. And of course, we must first decide what the "best in people" is, and it probably helps to realize that we're only talking relatives, not absolutes, here. We're talking the best of our present society, not the all-time or even the all-place "best", because we just don't have that data. The implication is that we must grow up a bit and design-in plenty of room for further improvement, and not assume we're onto "one step to perfection" as we've dopily done so often in the past.]

5. Ever-bigger ships, by Edwin McDowell, NYT, C12.
   Bigness may not be everything, as the economist E.F. Schumacher argued in his 1973 book "Small Is Beautiful," but you couldn't prove that from the cruise industry's ever-bigger ships. On Nov. 8, Carnival's Cunard Lines announced that it had completed plans for what will be the longest passenger ship ever built (1,100 feet [sounds small - error?]), to be introduced in 2003....
   [Maybe they'll eventually put themselves out of business introducing a ship that stretches from St. John's to Galway Bay and blocks the whole North Atlantic. That seems to be the strategy of trucking companies. Their semis are getting so big, they can hardly get into the loading bays at supermarkets, and the traffic they block! - We all pay, sitting waiting.
   [And as colleague Kate Jurow opined, "Just what we want, a 'cattle-car vacation' with crowds and crowds of people. Oh well, mob facilities will keep the herds away from the secluded spots that we prefer."]

1. [Here we go!]
   Russia seeks debt forgiveness, by Neela Banerjee, NYT, C4.
   [And how much forgiveness are we talking about?]
   ...Russia [will] ask the London Club of commercial banks to forgive about 40% of $30 billion in Soviet-era debt [they can distinguish??] the country owes....
   [Hmm, a cool $12,000,000,000. Why not call Bill Gates? He's got 8 times that.]

2. Once the enclave of a few old hands, lobbying is corporate and fast-merging - Spheres of influence grow in Washington, by Neil Lewis, NYT, C1.
   [Democracy sinks another fathom.]

3. Problem seen in [Massachusetts] for start-ups - Report says shortage of tech workers makes it hard to grow firms, by Peter Howe, Boston Globe, C1.
   [Ah, can anyone spell T-R-A-I-N-I-N-G?]

1. No action suggested on derivatives, leader headline, NYT, C1.
   Oversight of derivatives said to be adequate, by Joseph Kahn, NYT, C16.
   Despite the collapse of a giant hedge fund last year that required[???] a rescue by the Federal Reserve, top government regulators have concluded that they do not need to supervise the use of complex financial contracts [read "bets"] by hedge funds or other institutions [read "scams"].... The conclusion was contained in a report to Congress, which had requested the review....
   [In other words, they'll spend a fortune on cure, but not a dime on prevention. They're lazy and they're chicken, and it's going to take a totally unsaveable megadisaster to drag them in to leash these cowboys - a disaster that hurts millions of people.]

2. [Here we go again!]
   Haiti's paralysis spreads as U.S. troops pack up, by John Burns, NYT, front page.
   PORT AU PRINCE...- Five years after an American-led force of 20,000 troops invaded this island and restored constitutional rule, the Haitian people are entering a new and uncertain era....
   [Hold it, we're getting déjà vu. Didn't we already go through this in the 1930s after a US occupation of 19 years? Isn't it time Haiti held a referendum and petitioned to become part of Quebec?! The Québecois would be very interested in the project, we believe. They need to get out of themselves and get an outside interest, and the Haitians could sure use some help. And it would be an absolutely wonderful and magical cultural mix! Bonhomme Carnival meets Baron Samedi??? Whoaaaaah - ya GOTTA be there!!!!]

1. Bush [co-winner with Stefeforbes of GOP moneybrains contest] approach to pollution: preference for self-policing, by Jim Yardley, NYT, front page.
   [Ah, what does he think we've been doing all along?? And if it worked, why would there BE any pollution to worry about?]

2. On spur of moment, billionaire makes $100m gift to MIT, by Kate Zernike, Boston Globe, front page.
   ...He [Kenan Sahin of Kenan Systems, bought by Lucent] wanted to make the largest donation in the history of the school, and one of the 10 largest donations in the history of higher education....
   [Too bad it wasn't a place that really needed it, but then, these guys don't have time to find them. You know, if just one of them had the concept of automatic reinvestment at the appropriate gargantuan levels relative to today, they could start an avalanche of improvement on this old planet that would turn it from a hell for most people into a heaven, instead of basically just pouring the megadough from one storage vat to another and acting like they've done something great.]

3. An economy British Air can't afford - With profit down 86%, coach seats will be cut, by Andrew Sorkin, NYT, C1.
   LONDON - Sipping coffee in his office, Robert J. Ayling seemed relaxed for a chief executive whose job is peril.... He dismissed skeptics who have assailed British Airways' dismal financial performance and have questioned his unusual plan to reverse it by reducing the market share of his airline, Europe's largest....
   [Note how EVERYBODY thinks they're going to make more money from a smaller market - that means they're going for the luxury market of course, giving us the increasingly desperate spectacle of more firms swarming ever more urgently around ever fewer, ever more astronomically wealthy people, who really just don't need a single 'nother thing in this world, - they've GOT absolutely everything. This is a real tipoff to the inadequacy of our prevailing sharing technology (the design of the ways we share stuff with one another on a BIG scale) and the proximity of depression. CEOs can't grow their market in the context of flat consumer spending, so they either have to acquire market share by buying up rivals (which many of them are doing, as you can tell from our daily takeover tracking), or, as in Ayling's case, they have to make a virtue of necessity, REDUCE market share, and pull some kind of hat trick...]
   That always cheers me up when people say, 'Nobody else is doing this," he said, "because you can be absolutely sure that if you're just going along with the herd you're likely to be wrong."...
   [Pray tell us, Mr. Ayling, what is the use of being "absolutely sure" about a mere likelihood? In any case, to continue our previous line of steeltrap logic:
   ...some kind of hat trick that involves very posh, very free-spending patrons, like business class, for instance - ]
   He is...planning some major innovations next year, notably beds in business class for long-haul flights..\..
   [Whoa, radical! Air travel catches up to Pullman rail travel of the 1860s! Pullman sleeping cars were born the same year as Canada, 1867. Betcha those beds are gonna be expensive! What else of the new and exciting does he conceive?!]
   He recently introduced a new team of executives whose average age is 44 - "to give the place some energy," he said.
   [Hooboy.]

1. 11/07 Workplace training hard to find - Many unwilling to teach employees, by Bob Weinstein, Boston Globe, N5.
   ...Education is general and conceptual, while training is targeted toward building competencies for specific workloads and organizations. "A lot of employers confuse the two," says..\..Ron Zemke, senior editor at Training Magazine and author of 25 books.... "There's a lot of talk about training," says Zemke. "There's research proving that training helps reduce turnover...." Companies that have good relationships with customers spend a lot of finding and training employees...up to 5% of employee salaries....
   [We believe France has a confiscatory tax on firms that don't spend 1.5% of their payroll budget on training.]
   This kind of thinking was popular in the 1960s and 1970s [and 50s and 40s]. But, by the mid-1980s, companies had different thoughts on "human capital." The new thinking was: Why waste time on training when you can reorganize? Running lean and mean meant dropping dead weight. Companies even invented terms to [dress up] the process. Rather than using blunt words such as "firing," they adopted terms such as "downsizing," "right-sizing," and "redeployment of human resources."
   "The thinking was, let's get rid of peple at the high end of the payroll who are costing the company too much in benefits," Zemke says. "Clear the slate, get fresh young [low-cost] bodies, and put the old [expensive] ones out to pasture."
   [We argue that this seachange in employer attitude was a function of the growing national and global labor surplus - the noticeable rise in the number of resumes received for each job opening that spoiled employers and seduced them into raising qualifications on one hand, and devaluing training and experienced employees on the other.]
   The problem with that thinking, Zemke says, is that you might be saving the company short-term dollars, but you are throwing know-how out the window. "You can't put human knowledge in a database," he says. "...It must be passed on from one generation to the next. It combines hard knowledge with experience and street smarts. Corporations discarded some priceless assets. After the fact, many realized that cutting the ranks wasn't the answer."
   [We argue that the problem is also that as a group, CEOs gradually downsize their own markets by worsening the background labor surplus and further depressing wages.]
   Profits improved [temporarily], yet the lack state-of-the-art training programs became more of a problem than ever. Now, schools are turning out computer-science graduates and engineers, but companies are failing to train them once they are in the workforce....
   [And boy, can't you see it in every field?! Telephone directory assistance, restaurant help, retail, airlines, BANKS - it's incredible! You walk into so many stores and businesses today and feel like you should apologize to the knots of pre-occupied employees for bothering them with your business. Trying to even find a cashier to pay money to at some of these huge new employee-lean superstores. Trying to find an employee with a key to let you into a change room to try on a pair of jeans. It goes on and on. More and more technology and less and less service, because the top people are sooooo spoiled with the increasing floods of desperate jobseekers and resumes. But don't let up on the spewing message of labor shortage and "lowest unemployment in 30 years." Never mind that 30 years ago, there were still plenty of good manufacturing jobs - wages were proportionately much higher and one parent could still support the family. Now it's all service sector and you're either flipping burgers on a 40-hour week or coding software 70-80 hours a week on a 40-hour salary. Why don't we cut to the chase and just repeal the Emancipation Proclamation, along with Glass-Steagall (7/02 #2)?!]

2. 11/08 Shrinking [skill] pool boosts female job seekers - Companies offer more benefits to attract women, by Sara Nathan, USA Today, 1B.
   Last month was the best month in 46 years for female job hunters. The unemployment rate for women over age 16 fell [from 4.4% in September] to 4.1% in October, the lowest since 1953.... [However,] the unemployment rate for men, which is typically lower than the rate for women, also was 4.1%, up from 4.0% in September..\..
   [Watch. This is going to be an historic crossover point, as companies go for lower-wage female employees as well as lower-wage younger employees, and lay off not only older employees but now, male employees in favor of females - all the wages of a 60-year frozen workweek despite waves of technology.]
   "Women are getting greater experience and greater education, and that's paying off in terms of employment," Labor Secretary Alexis Herman says.... "We don't have a worker shortage, but we do have a skill shortage," she says.
   More women have found jobs as service industries, such as health care, education, social services, engineering and management, added 215,000 jobs in October [and, be honest, retail and fast-food]. Overall, businesses added [only] 310,000 jobs in October....
   [So over 2/3 of the added jobs (69.4%) were in the low-wage service sector.]
   The increase in service jobs, which typically pay lower wages, could pull more of the unemployed single women into the workforce in coming months, says Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute. Average hourly earnings rose by [only] 1¢ in October to $13.37 [a pathetic 0.07% monthly, or .9% annually, not even a 1% increase!], reassuring economists who feared [our italics] businesses would fuel inflation by raising wages to attract workers. [God forbid they should ever raise wages for anybody but top executives! Then these same economists will turn around and cry crocodile tears over the widening income gap and flat consumer markets and act like they are inexorable acts of God. And check out these words that one of these morons puts in the mouth of employers - ]
   "Employers may want to raise wages and hire more workers, but they feel like they can't raise the prices of their products," says Bill Cheney, economist for John Hancock.
   [And why would they not be able to raise the prices of their products? Because the demand isn't there, that's why, and it's not there because so much money is going to the top income brackets who store it instead of spending it, and so little to the vast majority of employees who spend it instead of storing it.]
   The drive to keep wages in check may be causing businesses to recruit more women, who typically earn less than men, says Rosanne Calin, chief economist for Credit Suisse First Boston.
   [Great, so let's just widen the wage gap between men and women as well as the income gap between rich and poor. Let's just rip our society in half, and half again. What passes for "economics" today is nothing but a rationalization of the worst of the status quo. What a disgrace on the dawn of a new millennium!]

11/04/99  [1 chunka "bad news but..." -]
Speaker fills panel with foes of HMO bill, splitting GOP ranks - 'Even in cases where the House speaks very clearly, our leadership tries to subvert the will of the House by this underhanded tactic.' Rep. Greg Ganske, Republican who supports HMO bill, by David Hess, Knight Ridder via Boston Globe, A29.
WASHINGTON - House Speaker Dennis Hastert used a parliamentary maneuver yesterday to all but guarantee that a strong patients rights bill, passed with bipartisan support last month, won't become law this year.
[Keep it up, pal. Here, have some more rope.]
Hastert, an Illinois Republican, named 13 Republicans to a negotiating committee on the managed-care health bill - a dozen of whom voted against the measure. In stacking the committee against a bill that GOP leaders fought from the start, Hastert drove a deep wedge into Republican ranks, as backers of the bill objected loudly.... It is customary to appoint chief sponsors of House-passed legislation to a House-Senate conference in such cases. But the speaker bypassed both Ganske and Georgia Representative Charles Norwood in choosing Republican members to negotiate with senators over the vast differences between the two chambers' HMO bills.
Hastert [made his appointments] even as the House was voting 257-167 yesterday to instruct the conferees to fight for adoption of the bill.
["Hasdirt, will travel."]

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