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[Commentary] © 2001-02 Philip Hyde, The Timesizing Wire™, Box 622 Cambridge MA 02143 USA (617) 623-8080

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Makework Stories, Jan-Jun, 2002

12/28/2002  1 makework case found in Wall Street Journal (WSJ) &/or New York Times (NYT) -

• Russia, citing changing needs ends its tie with Peace Corps, NYT, A4.
  MOSCOW...- Russia said [yester]day that it would not continue the agreement under which American Peace Corps volunteers work in this country. In recent months, Russia has increasingly criticized American Peace Corps volunteers...here, accused them of spying and refused to renew their visas....
  [And they can hardly overlook the fact that the Peace Corps goes primarily to Third-World countries, and do they want to be in that category? For the "world's greatest nation," the USA, well damn, it's another downer cuz the Peace Corps is a nice little makework campaign with the second advantage that it gets potentially troublesome idealists the heck out of the country. And hey, Russia was a nice big volunteer sink where it wasn't toooo dangerous to send your altruistic kid for some inexpensive travel experience.]

• Casino nation in the honeymoon capital - Down-and-out Niagara Falls warily embraces gambling venture - A new casino comes with a promise of 2,000 jobs, and some unpleasant surprises, by Leslie Eaton, NYT, A30.
  ...The new Seneca Niagara casino...is supposed to open in the former convention center...on New Year's Eve....
  [And a related op ed today -]
  Tribes of gamblers - The Indian casino scandal, by William Safire, NYT, A35.
  We were told that the glitzy gambling casinos springing up on Indian reservations across the land would lift poor Indians out of poverty. Certainly the slot machines and gaming tables produce plenty of money. The nearly 300 casinos pull in almost $13B a year in revenue, of which more than $5B is pure profit.
  But where is the money going? In Time magazine's cover story this week, titled "Wheel of misfortune: Look who's cashing in at Indian casinos," Donald Barlett and James Steele - a team twice awarded Pulitzer Prizes when at The Philadelphia Inquirer - present the troubling answer. A few tribes near big cities haul in as much as $900,000 per member. States with only 3% of the Indian population - Calif., Fla., and Conn. - take in 44% of the gambling revenue, while states with half our 1.8m Indians account for less than 3% of the take.
  The poorest of our aboriginal Americans are getting poorer, while non-Indians get rich hiring lobbyists to get federal recognition of a tribal front for the sole purpose of buying land to build a casino.
  • Lim Goh Tong, for example, is the Malaysian contractor billionaire behind the Foxwoods spread in Conn. As a foreigner, he can legally avoid most US taxes on his profit, likely to run about $40m a year.
  • The South African developer Sol Kerzner, "first of the Mohegans," worked a similar deal that was OK'd by a federal official now doing just fine as a lobbyist.
  • And Minnesota's Lyle Berman, a tycoon reported to have taken down $18m a year in salary and stock options in his leather business, has a hot casino deal going near Chicago.
  And those are only the most blatant examples of non-Indians cashing in.
  I'm a free-enterprise freak who doesn't begrudge big profits to investors who take big risks, but this is no gamble; rather it is a financial-political scandal of stunning proportions. Under the cover of helping the 28% of Indians now mired in poverty, financial vultures and highly paid, revolving-door lobbyists are ripping off the US taxpayer and promoting a noxious something-for-nothing slots philosophy.... The Dept. of the Interior, with its moribund Indian Affairs bureau, professes to have no authority to oversee the National Indian Gaming Commission [IGC]....
  [Hey, this is basically the story of the whole American and global economy today. Governments are shot through with taxpayer-bashing makework in the form of corporate taxbreaks, "investor" dba speculator taxbreaks, enterprise zones, block grants, The Drug War dba criminalized lifestyle, political patronage and pork, the Pentagon money sink, the prison-industry money sink, the "higher education" money sink, - you name it, if it's part of government today it's a good bet (to coin a phrase) that it's overt or covert job creation. Click here for our whole list.]
  The new chairman [of the IGC], Philip Hogen...notes that even the small, less profitable casinos far from big-city markets provide some jobs for Indians. [But] what about the secrecy, fraud, corruption and intimidation rife in so many lucrative tribal casino operations? Hogen's agency has only 63 employees to inspect and audit the $13 billion take in the nearly 300 all-cash businesses. Despite many complaints, that toothless tiger has never uncovered a single case of corruption.
  Here's why: The casino tribes lobbied for, and Congress supinely agreed to, a cap of $8m that can be collected from casinos to finance the nation's Indian gaming commission. That should be tripled....
  [Oh boy, even more government makework!]

• Kabul - Afghans plan a new army of 70,000, by Mark Landler, NYT, A21.
  Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, announced here [yester]day that his government would establish a streamlined national army of up to 70,000 troops, under civilian control, and conduct a redoubled campaign to disarm the militias that still roam the countryside. "We have decided to have an army that is small, effective, well paid and in the service of the nation," Mr. Karzai said....
  [70,000 new "jobs."]

1. Massive federal R&D initiative to fight terror is under way, by Bob Davis, WSJ, A4.
   WASHINGTON - A Pentagon project to build a computer system to sift through billions of consumer records for clues to terrorist activity gives privacy adocactes fits. But it is just the start of a lavish federal research and development [R&D] effort shaped by 9/11/01.
   • Congress recently approved an 18% increase in military R&D, to $58.8B for the current fiscal year - more money, after accounting for inflation, than the Pentagon ever spent on research during the Cold War.
   • Early next year, the National Institutes of Health is in line for a similar-size boost to around $26B, partly to examine biological-warfare defenses.
   In all, the federal government will likely spend about $115B on R&D in the year ending Sept. 30, far more than Japan and the 15 [now 25 (12/13/2002)] European Union governments will spend collectively....
   [Massive Republican makework, funneled, as is usual with "conservatives," through the military. They will do anything before giving the Palestinians justice, and reigning in the hawks that have taken over Israel and made it one of the premier racist states in the world today. Note the squib on the front page today -]
   What's news - ... World-wide, WSJ, front page.
   ...• Israel barred Church of the Nativity services after retaking Bethlehem in response to last week's bus bombing.... Two Islamic Jihad suicide attackers wounded 4 Israeli sailors with a bomb-laden boat on Saturday. ...
   [And with all the fuss about nuclear-weapon potential in Iraq and Iran and other Islamic nations, the "impartial" USA has never mentioned nuclear-weapon potential in Israel, which has never opened itself to UN inspectors. Perhaps this one-sidedness explains the sentence we clipped from the middle of the above squib: "Israel said its forces mistakenly killed a UN official near Jenin Friday." So injustice, one-sidedness and racism are big tools of makework advocates to keep massive military spending motivated.]

2. [A related makework story today -]
   Small firms see promise in homeland security - Small-stock focus, by Karen Talley, Dow Jones Newswires via WSJ, C8.
   NEW YORK - Many small companies are counting on the Dept. of Homeland Security, which pResident Bush is expected to sign into law this week. The agency is one of the first embodiments of the administration's effort to hand out more government contracts to small businesses.... But it won't be easy for them because federal procurement practices have historically favored large companies, and it's hard to change practices in Washington, even under a presidential mandate. ... The Homeland Security Dept. [is] expected to spend billions of dollars over the next several years in an effort to make the country safe....
   [As we said in comments on the above article, the plutocrats running the biggest world "democracy" will do ANYthing but follow the Hebrew Bible, which says, "Let justice flow down as waters, and righteousness as an ever-flowing stream." (Amos 5:24.) Massive technological efforts and monetary outlays - with no taxpayer input - in response to an act of terrorism that relied only on $4.95 boxcutters and "got lucky" when the buildings unexpectedly collapsed. The desperate grasping for alternatives to simply sharing the vanishing work scurry on.]

• [gov't meddling in community development via AmeriCorp spawns superfluous strife over separation of church & state -]
  Revised pledge for AmeriCorps draws critics, by Christopher Marquis, NYT, A25.
  WASHINGTON...- A proposal to change the pledge taken by AmeriCorps members to include references to God and defending the Constitution has stirred an outcry among current and former participants in the federally supported community service organization....
  [Ah, let's go back to the prior question - why is government forcing taxpayers to support this charity anyway? We can choose our own charities, thank you very much. This is nothing but another chunk of desperate goverment makework that is necessary only because we have been too stupid to implement a flexible nationwide worksharing program. We're in absolutely no position to talk about efficiency when our public and private sectors are corrupted through and through with this and much worse kinds of artificial busywork totally undemanded by the free market and merely the result of some arrogant plutocrat's arbitrary decision. We'd do a lot more for domestic community development simply by implementing overtime-to-training conversion and an unemployment-adjusted workweek instead of perpetuating the pork and patronage and forced charity and arrogant arbitrariness of AmeriCorps, and we'd do a lot more for international development simply by dismantling the CIA than perpetuating the similar futile counterbalancing function attempted by the "Peace" Corps. As Joseph Trento says, his Secret History of the CIA (Forum/Prima/Crown/Random House: Roseville CA/New York, 2001), which he came to write "because I realized the intelligence service has more to do with how the U.S. behaves around the world than any other government agency..\., is the record of what happens when a free society engages in an activity that is totally alien to its character." (Page xii.) And what happens? "These men and women of the CIA were trusted to do their work without any real accountability or oversight.... From the very day the CIA opened for business, its management risked the lives of mostly innocent people who were not combatants in the spy wars. Over the course of the Cold War, hundreds of thousands of people died in a series of proxy wars and secret operations, often for purposes that had little to do with our national interest." (Page xi.) AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps are the best and the CIA is the worst of our bloated-to-bursting public-sector makework.]
  [Followup]
  AmeriCorps, with shortfall in trust fund, halts recruiting, by Christopher Marquis, 12/11/2002 NYT, A26.

• Dissecting bilingual education's poll defeat - Movement lacked money, message, by Anand Vaishnav, Boston Globe, B9.
  ....About 68% of Massachusetts voters approved controversial Question 2, which replaced bilingual education with all-English classes, much to the chagrin of many teachers [who presumably want the potentially infinite extra work, trainees, and pay - ed.], parents, and community activists....
  ["Bilingual education" - what exactly was it - that we are now going to "replace" in Massachusetts? And who can tell what it is (or should be)?
  • a bottomless pit for taxpayer money to fund the teaching of any number of courses in any number of languages?? (This could easily mount up to an unsustainable budget line considering there are 3000-odd languages in the world and endless debates on exactly how to define them because, e.g., of considerable borrowings and areas where dialects gradually diverge or converge.)
  • or a covert campaign to make Spanish the second official language of the USA, as French is in Canada?
  • or a campaign to make native speakers of Spanish the primary beneficiaries - at least in terms of jobs - plus any other language groups who "buddy up" to them?
  At any rate, it's expecting a lot, to put it mildly, considering the welcome mat this country has extended to record-breaking numbers of immigrants in the last 10 years. And it's not at all something expected by previous generations, who were just glad to be here and not at all interested in "wearing out their welcome." But this referendum was a good example of people making a tough decision on a secret ballot that would be almost impossible to make in a public vote in Congress or a state legislature because of the confusing mixing-in of inflammatory charges of being "anti-immigrant" on the negative side and traditional myths on the positive side - eg: "Miss Liberty" - the Statue of Liberty - "Give me your poor, your huddled masses longing to be free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shores...." - apparently America - and maybe every other "rich" country (never mind considerations of wealth maldistribution) - is supposed to rejoice in indefinitely serving as the Third World's "refuse" bin and population safety-valve.]

• Students’ 'demands' push tuition higher, letter to editor by Assoc. Prof. Saranna Thornton of Hampden-Sydney College Economics in Hampden-Sydney VA, A19.
  In your Oct. 23 editorial "Flunking Tuition 101," in which you discuss the spiralling costs of college tuition, you conclude by saying that "government subsidies amount to a reverse wealth trtansfer in which Peter, the working stiff, is taxed to underwrite college-bound Paul and the tenured faculties living in Madison and Chapel Hill and other leafy latte towns."
  [Lordy, why on earth would the Wall Street Journal be complaining about a reverse wealth divestment??? We thought that's what they were all about! Apparently they sometimes try to sell papers on the 'wrong' side of the track.]
  ...It's not the salaries of tenured faculties that are driving these costs.... No one goes into teaching for the money, or the "leisure"..\.. (The American Assoc. of University Professors {AAUP}...reports that full-time faculty work 53.6 hours/week on average.).... A primary reason for rapid tuition increases is that today colleges and universities compete for students the same way baseball teams compete for free-agent [players]. Students now demand -
  • cable TV in every room,
  • Internet connections for their computers,
  • and large servers in the college computer center so they can download music and video files.
  Computer technology in the computer labs and classrooms must be replaced every other year or it becomes obsolete....
  [What a bizarre marriage of public and private sector makework our colleges have become, the hidden agenda being a worklife-control mechanism to keep young people shadow-boxing with credentials and OUT of the job market as long as possible. All this claptrap is swept away by shortcut on-the-job training during perceived labor shortages (actually balances, not shortages) as, for example, when World Wars I and II withdrew massive amounts of manhours from the job market in the worst possible way (draft'em and pour 'em into the firing lines). For the general makework realm of "education," see item 19 on our realms of makework page, and for the ever-rotating versions of technology such as software, see items 13-14. What an insult to intelligent species we humans are, yet we have the gall to talk about "efficiency"!   Our alternative? Sharework however few hrs/wk that may come down to, not makework to maintain the historical accident, and anachronism, of a 40-hr workweek.]

• Lesotho: Canadians fined for bribery, Agence France-Presse via NYT, A6.
  The High Court fined a Canadian engineering company, Acres International, about $2.2m for bribing a top official in a major water project...the former head of the Lesotho Highlands Development Authority, Masupha Sole, from 1991 to 1998. In June, Mr. Sole was sentenced to 18 years in jail.
  [A Canadian engineering company is that desperate for work???]

• Defense Department [DOD] contract seen offsetting loss of Aetna, WSJ, B5.
  Express Scripts Inc., St. Louis...expects a contract with the DOD to "more than replace" the loss of Aetna Inc. as a client.... The number of prescriptions supplied for Aetna had declined 10% over the last year.
  ["Prescriptions" for what?? Drugs? Or does this somehow refer to software scripts? We aren't told. But it's yet another case where business from the private sector is declining while business from the public sector is increasing, even under the self-styled "conservative" Republicans.]
  The company will hire and train as many as 500 people for the DOD contract..\.. [But note these jobs, though indirectly so, are government jobs funded by taxpayers, and as such, are part of the Republicans' favorite makework campaign, bloating the military-industrial complex.]
  Barrett Toan, Express Scripts CEO, said the company will be ready by March 1 to fulfull the DOD contract's obligations....
  [Followup - Timesizing.com reader *Ken Ellis emails (10/26 1:48pm), "ExpressScripts is like a drugstore." His mother "is enrolled in Joe Kennedy's Citizen's Health program...to get a minor discount for her prescriptions." But later he learned that sending their "prescriptions away to ExpressScript's Arizona facility would net even greater $ savings.... It works smoothly enough."]
  [Note another story today, "U.S. posts $159 billion deficit," WSJ, A4, which states, "The red ink...represents a remarkable turnabout in the federal government's fiscal fortunes. The government ended 2001 with a $127B surplus. Outlays for fiscal 2002 totaled $2.012 trillion, while receipts totaled {only} $1.853T, the White House Office of Management & Budget reported late yesterday." And didn't we see somewhere recently that the Pentagon was getting something in the neighborhood of $350B this year?]

• [speaking of Dubya's dopey poking at random rattlesnakes -]
  By wide margin, House passes 2 military spending measures, by Carl Hulse, NYT, A25.
  WASHINGTON -
  1. ...House members, by a vote of 409 to 14, gave their final approval to a $355.4 billion Pentagon bill, a $37.5 billion increase over last year....
  2. They also adopted by a 419-to-00 vote a $10.5 billion measure that pays for military construction projects.
  3. [and additionally -]
     Spy wars begin at home - Rumsfeld is displeased with the C.I.A.'s information, so he wants his own, by Patrick Tyler, 11/03/2002 NYT, 4-3.
     ...When the CIA failed to find any significant link between Osama bin Laden's Qaeda network and Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, the Pentagon set up a competing intelligence unit this fall under Douglas Feith, Under-Secretary for Policy....
  [So much for pounding swords into "plowshares" by switching from the military-industrial complex to the prison-industrial complex. The non-representative Democrats have joined the GOP in the decades-old Republican big-government makework campaign, Pentagon spending, instead of stopping the strain of keeping everyone busy for all five of the whole 8-hour workdays, outdated even when they started 62 years ago, and just sharing the vanishing work, however short the workdays that may lead to, and letting market forces restore wages to where they would be without legions of desperate jobseekers willing to do our jobs for less.]

• [don't think there's makework in the private sector? what do you call this? -]
  Canadian union reaches accord with Ford Motor, by Heinzl & Shirouzu, WSJ, A2.
  TORONTO - The Canadian Auto Workers union agreed to a 3-year labor contract with Ford Motor Co., after the automaker pledged to provide new work for 900 of the 1,400 employees who work at a Ford-pickup truck plant that is slated to close.
  [It's going to be a long tough course of hard knocks before either management OR labor gets the message - technology assumes and removes human jobs - we need to share the vanishing work. Quit straining to "provide new work" and just spread around the work that's still not done by automation or robotization.]
  Union president Buzz Hargrove acknowledged the 900 saved jobs was a "compromise" from his earlier insistence that all 1,400 jobs be saved....
  [And we thought Buzz was hip to Walter Reuther's flexible adjustment of the workweek.]

• Hearings set on measure to promote digital TV, by Amy Harmon, NYT, C6.
  The House Energy & Commerce Committee will hold hearings today on a bill intended to spur the development of digital television. It would render most current televisions obsolete by 2007
  [and require that everybody waste their old TV and buy a new one = ecology-bashing makework]
  and require the FCC to support copy-protection technology designed to prevent consumers from copying and distributing digital TV programs.
  ...Consumer groups contend that the proposals signal a troublesome willingness in Congress to favor the interests of copyright holders over those of consumers in the face of new technology....
  [never mind the environment with all those perfectly good but now useless TV tubes lying around, waiting for kids to bust them and release their toxic gases and glass shards]

• Indian summit goal: Job creation, by Nichols & Gilbertson, Arizona Republic, front page.
  The lack of jobs on reservations across the country is deplorable, Neal McCaleb, asst. secy. for Indian Affairs, said while in Phoenix on Monday for the National Summit on Emerging Tribal Economies, which begins today. McCaleb cited statistics that show half the people on reservations are unemployed, and of those who are employed, a third are below the poverty level....
  More than 1,500 participants from across the country are expected to attend the summit, which runs through Thursday at the Phoenix Civic Plaza. The Summit's goal is to create 100,000 jobs by 2008, which McCaleb admitted was only "a drop in the bucket," and to build sustainable market-driven tribal economies by 2020.
  [The only way they're going to do that is to drop the strain of keeping everybody spinning their wheels 40 hours a week, and just share what little work they have à la Timesizing, thereby activate, maximize and optimize their spending power, and move on up from there.]

• The Export-Import Bank: Who is helping whom?, letter to editor by Exec. Dir.Consider Ross of Bankers' Assoc. for Finance & Trade of DC, NYT, 3-9.
  Re "A guardian of jobs or a 'reverse Robin Hood'?" (Sept. 1), which discussed the roles of the Export-Import Bank of the U.S. in providing credit aid.:
  The article included much criticism of the bank's operations but dealt inadequately with the very real contribution of this government entity - in fact, its mandate - to create jobs for Americans through exports....
  [Yet another boondoggle for the well-heeled, rationalized on the basis of "creating jobs." The whole makework approach of the '30s was necessary only when we bolted at sharing the work-savings of incessant waves of technological innovation by modernizing our approach to cutting the workweek.]
  This mandate was strengthened in June when Congress and the Bush administration reauthorized the bank to increase its small-business commitment and provide greater support for companies owned by women and minorities. By law, it must now allocate 20% of its appropriation to small and midsized firms.
  [Then we stiffen up the rationalization by stirring in a little special bleeding-heart pleading for "diversity" and "smallness," all of which wastes taxpayers' money and bloats government. But hey, Ross then goes on to ask what the hell's wrong with bigness in this context?! -]
  Boeing is criticized in the article as a big company that has used the bank's financing. Yet Boeing employs more than 30,000 suppliers to build its jumbo jets. Many are small business contractors.
  [And many aren't.]
  All presumably contribute jobs to the American economy.
  [Some less than others, and none with any guarantees against recession-inducing income concentration. And only after 1933 when we spooked at cutting the workweek and sharing the vanishing work did the American economy suddenly become a charity case requiring "contributions" of jobs. Pathetic!]
  Consider the world in the absence of the Export-Import Bank....
  [A better place!]
  American businesses big and small face a hugely competitive global marketplace. No less than 16 foreign credit agencies aggressively support their domestic exporters.
  [Worldwide lockstep taxpayer charity for exporters. Sick. But only necessary when you accept Ross's other bogus fixation, "free" trade alias "inevitable globalization." But thankfully, this simplistic hypocrisy is now falling apart thanks to the buildup of "tiny little" exceptions we deem it fine and necessary for ourselves to make - unilaterally. Witness tomorrow's note in the Wall Street Journal, "The EU released a list of billions in US goods it may target with high tariffs, increasing pressure on the US to repeal tax breaks for its exporters," pointer digest (to A12), 9/16/2002 WSJ, front page.]
  Wh[at] better to have on our side than the Export-Import Bank?
  [What better? Flexible adjustment of the workweek vs. comprehensive unemployment a la Timesizing, that's what.]

• France: Billions more for military, by John Tagliabue, NYT, A6.
  [There they go again. As soon as the rightwing gets back in, they try to quit sharing the vanishing work via a shorter workweek and they go back to upsizing government. What, sez you, the right upsizing gov't?! Yep, the makework program of the right is always the military -]
  The cabinet approved a 36% increase in military spending on new equipment, maintenance and R&D, in line with promises made by Pres. Jacques Chirac during his campaign for re-election in the spring.... The number of people in the armed forces, including the paramilitary gendarmerie, is to rise to 446,000 by 2008, from 437,000.
  [The French are losing the "French exception" - leading the world with the shortest nationwide workweek of 35 hours - and becoming just as stupid as the rest of us again - pouring money and makework into the military. So here we have 446000-437000= 9,000 new "jobs."]

• Unemployment fell in August, but drop is called insignificant - Government hiring accounted for 39,000 new jobs, by David Leonhardt, NYT, B1.
  ...The entire gain came from the hiring of new airport security guards and other government workers.
  [Ah, wars are so good for makework. Wars on poverty, wars on drugs, wars on terrorism. But they always tend to be too little too late for a genuine economic recovery without a genuine world war, but that's become sooo dangerous.. Dubya wants to see what Iraq can do despite the danger. So much easier to lose the wage-clobbering, income-funneling, demand-deadening surplus of manhours by cutting the workweek instead of killing people - not to mentoin more intelligent.]
  Companies remain reluctant to hire until economic growth improves....
  [And it won't improve until companies stop downsizing and start to hire. Isn't this reluctance to hire the same thing we've been criticizing Europe for?]

• Patents - A smokescreen to help workers keep an eye on the game while looking productive, by Teresa Riordan, NYT, C7.
  [Insufficient work for those too job-insecure to appear anything but 24/7 -]
  The Internet has proved to be a boon for workers who want to appear productive while in fact they are goofing off. Now comes something from IBM that may make goofing off in the workplace even easier: sports scores that update themselves automatically on a desktop computer.
  ...During a test run at Wimbledon in July, IBM researchers said, they found that their system, known as Gryphon, required a million fewer hits per minute that the old-fashioned screen-refreshing system. That translated to a savings of 35 megabits per second of Internet bandwidth, or carrying capacity..\.. With other Internet scoreboard systems, Mr. Sturman said, the screen might be refreshed, using what is known as a polling mechanism, every two minutes.... "Even in baseball, a lot can happen in two minutes," Dr. Sturman said..\..
  Fans have already been able to receive real-time scoring in various sports from sites like ESPN.com. But Daniel Sturman, a senior manager at IBM, says there is real-time and there is real-time. Moreover, he says, the technology, which was released as a commercial software product in July, has applications that go beyond the proving ground of sports information, including online stock trading and auctions....

• Jobless youths find hope in a university of work, by Alan Feuer, NYT, A23.
  The unemployment rate in the Bronx NY was 9.2% in June, the highest of any borough in New York.... The Job Corps Academy is the only place in the borough where a young man or woman can go to learn all there is to know about getting and keeping a solid job....
  [Presumably modeled on the Peace Corps and a Depression-era makework program of the "New Deal," the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). This should not distract us from the fact that our entire inefficient "educational" system is merely artificially prolonged preparation to find a job, particularly prolonged in the area of higher education. The phrase "solid job" here must be a highly relative concept, since there will be no secure jobs in the American economy until CEOs trade their kneejerk downsizing response to downturn for the buffering and recovery-building timesizing strategy.]
  ...The Academy is part of the national Job Corps program. [However,] certain difficulties come with a South Bronx setting.   60% of the students are highschool dropouts and many read no better than 5th or 6th graders do. There are students from Puerto Rico and Colombia. Often, they have problems writing Spanish and find writing English is twice as hard. In every [dorm] room, it seems, there is a student with another obstacle to overcome. In one room, it is a highschool drug arrest. In another, an absent father or parents who never worked..\..
  There are centers throughout the Bronx where jobs are listed and resume-building skills are taught, but the academy stands alone as a full-scale university of work. The students take classes in computer networking, nursing care, security and the culinary arts. They live in dormitories and are taught that a clean home is a happy home - that, in the future, after the workday is done and the bills are paid and the children are fed, they must still find time to do their laundry and mop their dirty floors. In the evening, there are fashion shows and poetry readings and trips to professional basketball games. There is also a good amount of plain, old-fashioned hanging out..\..
  The unemployment rate in the Bronx...does not give a complete picture....
  For that, it takes...
  • Travis Greene [who] is 19 and has no job. ...He [has been] living in a group home through his boyhood.... In a dozen years, he went to a dozen schools - in the Bronx and Brooklyn, in Queens and Manhattan - but he always got kicked out. He has been handled by an endless string of principals and teachers, drug counselors, social workers, welfare agents and family-intervention teams....
    [Imagine the fortune this one case costs taxpayers, and our ongoing policies of maintaining an acute labor surplus via a 1940-level workweek and inrushing technological efficiencies, forcing both parents to work, fostering divorce, fostering incarceration - especially for minorities, fostering illegal immigration with ambivalent enforcement and repeated nullifications of the immigration laws ("amnesties"), and discouraging contraception, are all synergizing to create thousands, soon millions, or Travis Greene's, and they will be America's chute to the Third World. And our solution so far is something we should have learned from the 1930s to be ineffectual ... makework -]
    These days, Mr. Greene is with the South Bronx Job Corps, living in its Gothic-style academy in Morris Heights as he prepares himself to find a job. He is studying fiber optics and learning how to function in the 9-to-5 world. Get an alarm clock. Open a bank account. Buy some khaki pants. And, while you're at it, cut your hair....
  • Jason Gotay is 18. He came to the Academy five months ago because, as he explained it, "I was bad." He was selling drugs and running with a gang. [He] attended Morris High School for a month or two but then dropped out. His mother did not stop him, so he closed his books and left. When he had a child of his own, however, his girlfriend had enough. "She told me if I didn't come here, we were through," he said last week. "At first,...it was boring and I felt locked up."
    ["Evil is interesting, good is boring," said old Bill Staples, the Hebrew professor at Victoria College, Toronto, in the 60s. "Locked up" - a reference to America's most extreme makework project of the last few decades, its bloated prison-industrial complex.]
    Then he started reading books on CPR and decided that emergency medicine would be his field. "Now," he said, "I'm destined to succeed."...
    [Good. Now he has a positive myth to play and replay in his head, to drown out the numerous negative tapes he's absorbed previously in his short life.]
    
  • For Latoya James, it was the child she bore in her senior year of high school. She could not leave the child at home because her mother had a job. She worked as a drugstore clerk herself but could not afford the daycare, so she quit. Now, at 20, she has enrolled in the Academy to study nursing, while the child's father takes over. She knows the jobless rate is high, but she also knows she has no choice.
    [Sure she has a choice. The current jerry-built design of the American economy thoughtfully provides her the choices of homeless shelters or prison.]
    The numbers might be bad, but she needs a job right now.
    [And with our current high levels of work-saving technology, she and people like her should be able to get 20 or 30-hour-a-week jobs right now with fulltime pay and benefits, but that will not happen as long as we rigidly control the workweek to remain at its 1940 level and prevent it from adjusting downward to its natural level as we inject more and more work-assuming technology.]
    "I think about it all the time," she said.
    [Just like we waste young people's time trying to rationalize the myth of Santa Claus.]
    "It's bad. Here, at least I'm on my own - at least I'm independent." [Except for the bill taxpayers get every year.]
    "Finally, I'm doing something just for me."
    [But as long as taxpayers strain along, lost in the fog of Keynesian makework and minimum wage, instead of breaking out into sharework and market-centrifuged wages, they will keep getting the bill for these small showcase programs that barely make a dent on America's huge ongoing disintegration and deterioration. "Homeland security"? What a joke while injecting technological efficiencies and maintaining a 62-year-old workweek. We expect demand for our wannabe growing productivity to magically keep up despite incessant mergers and downsizings and constant funnelling of the national income to those who already have more than they can spend in hundreds of lifetimes.]
    ..\..Latoya James, Ebony George and Geanelle Williams in the female living quarters of the Job Corps Academy in the Bronx.... [photo caption]
  "When you've got broken homes with no supervision, these kids tend to look at the street...as home," said Louis Joseph, the Academy's social development director. "What we do is grab hold of them in a residential setting. We teach them skills, but even more, we teach them drive."
  "Grab hold" may be the operative phrase, since discipline at the Academy is strict. The students are fined $5 every time they break a rule. The rules are posted in the dormitory halls and each begins with "No." As in, no gambling, no abusive language, no ethnic agitation, no horseplay, no hitchhiking, no drinking, no drugs, no cutting lines....
  [That's the trouble with frozen-workweek America - all we have is drive and a bunch of negatives. Drive toward what that is positive? The Timesizing.com answer is that evolution on Earth is a very long-term trend away from greater violence and drama and toward greater gentleness and diversity. From hysteria and histrionics to calm variety and its raw material, variability. Only when we make this transition can we get on with our long-term goal of extremely extended human life, because we won't risk prolonging the lives of violent monsters like Hitler and Stalin and Idi Amin...and Dick Cheney, "who has emerged in the last week as the administration's most public and hawkish defender of potential military action against Iraq," according to "Administration seeking to build support in Congress on Iraq issue - France and Britain press for working with U.N.," on the front page of tomorrow's NY Times. Then there's "Obituaries -...Robert Shelton, 73, leader of big Klan faction," 3/20/2003 NYT, C13. Death was invented for people like this. (Unfortunately, its sting then still reaches the rest of us.) Has the frozen workweek left America with no better solution to recession and hidden unemployment than wars of aggression - and the accompanying deaths? Only as long as we can't remember our own 150-year history of dividing the work and multiplying the wages, because the benefits of technology were getting spread to all Americans and not just congealing at the top. If we try to define progress in any other way than less work and more pay, we will create a monster, a monster that we will see when we look in the mirror.]

• [nearly missed this one, it was sooo obvious -]
  Taming the untouchable Corps, editorial, NYT, A16.
  There are not many issues that the liberal Tom Daschle of South Dakota and the conservative Robert Smith of New Hampshire agree on. But when Congress reconvenes, these two senators, along with the campaign finance mavericks John McCain and Russell Feingold, are determined to challenge the self-interest of may of their colleagues by instituting a top-to-bottom overhaul of the Army Corps of Engineers.
  Their objectives are twofold....
  1. to make sure that the Army Corps' multi-billion-dollar construction budget is spent on vital infrastructure, not wasteful pork-barrel projects ordered up by individual members of Congress....
     [i.e., MAKEWORK for un- and under-employed constituents instead of cutting the waste and strain and just SHARING the vanishing work]
  2. to make sure the Corps proceeds in an environmentally responsible manner....
     [Phew! Amen to that!]

• Taiwan is turning to tourism in bid to boost economy, by Jason Dean, WSJ, D5.
  TAIPEI - ...Faced with a steady outflow of the manufacturing operations that have been the core of its economy and a need for new jobs, the government earlier this year unveiled its "Challenge 2008" plan, an ambitious $75B package of public and private spending aimed at juicing up the domestic economy. One of its key planks is a plan to double the number of tourists coming to Taiwan annually to 2m in the next 6 years and double the number of total foreign visitors (including business travelers, etc.) to 5m.... The travel and tourism industry is expected to contribute 1.1%, or about $3.2B to Taiwan's GDP in 2002, according to estimates by the World Travel & Tourism Council. For tourist haven Thailand, the comparable number is 5.6%.

• New FCC requirement is aimed at speeding move to digital TV, by Yochi Dreazen, WSJ, front page.
  Federal regulators, frustrated by the glacial pace of the nation's transition to digital television, will [on Thursday] require TV-set makers to include digital tuners in all new sets by 2006.
  [A federal gov't makework program that shoves a costly unwanted technology down all Americans' throats during a Republican administration?! What good is the Republican Party if they can't stop this kind of big government looting of our pockets?]
  ...While digital TV offers a sharper picture and better sound than today's analog TV [yeah, differences that only an eagle can see or a dog can hear], only a tiny fraction of Americans are using digital TV sets. Cable and [wave] broadcasters are transmitting some programs using digital signals - but the amount varies by region.
  The FCC [autocratic] decision already is sparking a heated lobbying battle. Many consumer electronics makers oppose the mandate, which they say will drive the price of the average TV set up by more than $250. [They] also argue that the FCC requirement is unnecessary because most digital TV owners get their digital signals from cable or satellite providers and thus have no need for a separate over-the-air digital tuner inside their sets....
  [So what's behind this outrageous piece of big gov't shoving unwanted costs down Americans' throats?]
  By law, [broadcasters] have to eventually give all of the spectrum they use for analog TV broadcasts back to the government and only send out digital signals.... Lawmakers argued that the change would conserve valuable wireless spectrum - the lifeblood of the wireless phone and handheld computer industries - because an analog channel uses as much spectrum as six or more digital ones. The saved spectrum, in turn, could be auctioned to the private sector, raising billions for the government.
  [The first shoe drops.]
  Federal regulators also have wanted to spur the development of high-definition TV because they thought it would be a boon for the consumer electronics industry..\..
  [The other shoe drops - this is the makework part. This is like "Oh we want you to recycle but you have to clean up your cans and bottles first regardless of how much precious water that takes." "We want waveband efficiency regardless of how many perfectly good TVs and consumer dollars it wastes." The supreme insult -]
  FCC Chairman Michael Powell [has] general free market leanings....
  [Yeah sure.]

1. Talks in Mexico push regional growth, by Ginger Thompson, NYT, A3.
   The presidents of Mexico and Central America [yester]day reiterated their commitment to a regional development plan aimed at stimulating their struggling economies as they ended a two-day summit meeting in the southern Mexican state of Yucatan.... Projections for Plan Puebla-Panama include $5.5B in infrastructure spending - $1.5B in Mexico, the rest in Central America..\..
   The plan...calls on leaders to commit public funds and to pursue private financing to build roads, airports, railways and energy installations across a region that is largely cut off from the "advances" [our quotes - ed.] of globalization.... Critics of Puebla-Panama [say] a rush of foreign development [will] lead to the destruction of environmental reserves and the exploitation of the region's Indians....

2. Mexico is attracting a better class of factory in its South, by Ginger Thompson, NYT, A3.
   The numbers add up to doom for cheap labor, one of Mexico's most marketable commodities since World War II. In the last two years, some 280,000 jobs have vanished with the closure of more than 350 maquiladoras, the foreign-owned assembly plants that manufacture for export everything from blue jeans to blenders, televisions to toys.... The closing of so many maquiladoras reflects the harsh economics of globalization.... Cheap as Mexico's labor is, it is not as cheap as that in Asia or Eastern Europe. They now attract the kind of manufacturing that sprang up here, first along the border with the U.S. and then farther south, in places like [Merida, a] balmy part of the Yucatan peninsula .\..
   So Mexico has embarked [on] an effort to attract a new kind of maquiladora, one that requires more skilled workers and will , the government hopes, offer more satisfying, stable jobs....
   [The apologists for makework, starting with Tugwell, always make ambitious allusions to how "satisfying" their artificial jobs are going to be. But they just never create enough of them to reverse the prevailing labor surplus and the market-starving funneling of wealth and income. And Mexico still doesn't get it. It's still travelling the ambitious but futile makework route instead of going for modest but feasible sharework. It's still awhoring after Rex Tugwell and his "Industrial Discipline and the Governmental Arts" (1933) instead of reading the handwriting on the wall of "governmental interference and industrial control" remarked by Art Dahlberg in his "Jobs, Machines and Capitalism" (1932).]
   One such beacon of hope is...a subsidiary of an Ohio-based company that produces airplane parts for GE. ...Said Patricio Patron, governor of the state of Yucatan..."We want to give opportunities to higher level factories - and some are beginning to come." Nonbelievers say such sentiments are wishful thinking. They note the number of high-tech factories that have opened is relatively small and say Mexico's poor education system [is inadequate] for highly skilled jobs....

• Government's ship project is christened the U.S.S. Pork, by Leslie Wayne, NYT, front page.
  Two years ago, with waving flags and hula dancers swaying, the government announced an ambitious program to build two passenger ships - the first in a U.S. shipyard since the 1950s - and provided more than $1 billion in loan guarantees to get the program going.
  It did not hurt that [entirely by 'coincidence'! - ed.] the ships were to be built in the Pascagoula, Miss. shipyard where the father of Trent Lott, the Republican Senate majority leader [and one of the biggest 'porkers' in Congress - Kate] once worked. ...Senator Lott [was] one of the strongest supporters of the program, which was named Project America.
  Today...what remains of Project America is an unfinished hull the size of two football fields and pieces for a second ship lying around. The hull is not floatable; it has neither a completed bow nor stern; and its future is in doubt. The price to the government [i.e., taxpayers] of the failed project is $187 million - money the government is trying to recoup by putting the half-finished hull on the market. [But] who wants to buy a half-finished cruise ship?..\..
  Critics...call Project America coporate welfare [and] say it shows the dangers lurking behind tens of billions in loan guarantees the government has extended to an array of businesses, among them airlines, the housing industry and American exporters....
  "This has turned into a corporate welfare debacle," said Stephen Moore, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a Washington research group that promotes free-market economics....
  [And it was one of their own "free marketers" that spawned this pork.]

• China faces problems creating jobs, officials say, by Craig Smith, NYT, A8.
  [Hey, don't we all. That's why we're giving up on that goose-chase approach and switching to sharing work however low the workweek required to employ everyone, instead of creating (rigid 40-hr/wk) jobs.]
  SHANGHAI...- China's State Council issued a white paper on employment and social welfare [yester]day, setting an eventual target of "near" full employment and of basic social security and other government compensation systems for a majority of the country's workers. But the paper said that both rural and urban areas [that pretty well covers the whole country!] will continue to face sharp problems in trying to provide enough jobs in coming years.
  [Wonder how long it's going to take before China wakes up, smells the coffee, looks across the Sea of Japan and picks up the worksharing approach from the land of the rising sun? See today's timesizing news, 4/30/2002.]
  The country's deputy labor minister, Wang Dongjin, was quoted separately in the state-run press as saying that unemployment is likely to rise to new highs ofer the next 4 years, with more than 20 million people out of work.
  Surplus labor is one of China's most pressing problems....
  [Never mind China - it's the whole world's most pressing problem - and don't let the spot skill shortages fool you! - they too are the result of labor surplus, because resume-flooded employers see no further need to shell out for training any more. Let the hordes of job candidates pony up - or government (and taxpayers).]
  ...with 12-13 million peple entering the labor market each year while only about 8 million new jobs a year are being created [i.e., demanded by the market].
  [There's our future in dramatic, un-ignorable relief!]
  At the same time, the government is closing many money-losing state factories and throwing millions more people out of work.
  [Sounds like China is determined to have another revolution.]
  Protests among laid-off workers are now common in many parts of the country, raising concerns that the problem could spread to broader unrest.
  The white paper acknowledged that "structural unemployment will become more serious," noting that from 1998 to 2001, more than 25 million people were laid off from state-owned enterprises and that only 17 million of them have since found new jobs.
  Millions more workers are expected to lose their jobs as Chinese companies succumb to foreign competition brought by China's new membership in the World Trade Organization....
  [So it seems that Russia and China, the two biggest socialist experiments in the world, have come off socialism just in time for Marx's prediction to come true - capitalism, at least in our current short-sighted downsizing (not timesizing) form of it, contains the seeds of its own destruction and, baby, them seeds are asproutin' before our eyes all over the world, especially in China, and Japan, and Russia, and Argentina....]

1. Bush pushes volunteerism...by Elizabeth Bumiller, NYT, A23.
   KNOXVILLE, Tenn...- Bush made a speech here to promote his new national volunteer corps.... Citizen Corps [is] a part of the national volunteer program that he first announced in his State of the Union address. Citizen Corps is to recruit and train retired doctors and healthcare workers for emergencies.
   [Many of these people have no pension to speak of anyway, so this gets them out of the generally candidate-swamped job market - although the way healthcare has slipped into megahours in this country, IT'S going to be one big emergency soon with zero job candidates. Us Canucksters don't like to gloat (much), but, guess what bunch of swaggering fat-brained morons it was who, until recently, were yelling and screaming about how great their private non-universal healthcare system was???]
   In a separate program called Operation TIPS - for Terrorism Information and Prevention System - the administration plans to enlist truckers, letter carriers, ship captains and others in reporting suspicious activity to the authorities....
   [Oh great. What a formula for a witch hunt!]
   "Without..\..guidelines to protect privacy and constitutional rights...the program has the potential to entirely circumvent probably cause and warrant requirements as well as promote vigilantism," said Rachel King, a legislative counsel for..\..the American Civl Liberties Union...in a statement....

2. [and yet another group of good-intentioned American pols are trying to siphon off excess labor into voluntary slavery -]
   Michigan: Promoting national service bill, by Jeremy Peters, NYT, A25.
   Senators John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, started a series of town meetings to promote their national service bill at the University of Michigan, birthplace of the Peace Corps. The bill would expand AmeriCorps to 250,000 members from 50,000 and encourage military service with an $18,000 bonus after 18 months of active duty and 18 months of reserve duty.
   [Well, that's one way of taking care of the floods of college graduates that our outdated economy, with its inrushing robots and frozen 1940-era workweek, can't absorb. See "Have degree, may travel - Many recent graduates of Boston-area schools would like to stick around - But with today's harsh economy, it's not easy," by Beth Greenberg, 4/07/2002 Boston Globe, City Weekly 1. Smarter, however, would be to modernize the economy with a flexible market-oriented worksharing system and spread the vanishing work.]

• [Military makework - our ultimate unemployment "solution" -]
  Sharon says Israel is in a war after suicide bombing kills 14; More tanks move in West Bank, NYT front page.
  [Sharon is becoming the Milosevic of Israel. Recall that Sharon is the fuse-brain who rekindled the whole recent flare-up of this blood-feud by provocatively visiting that super-sacred mosque a few years ago, sort of like the Protestants in Ulster parading through the Roman Catholic areas of Belfast and Londonderry on King Billy's Day, or the Serbs not giving up their turn in the Presidency of Yugoslavia a dozen years ago. Too bad Israeli youth aren't yet as smart as Serbian youth, who organized an imaginative nationwide non-violent expulsion of Milosevic 2 years ago - see PBS "Bringing down a dictator" 10 pm April 18 (Boston area Ch. 2). The only tactic that's going to stop this short of mutual annihilation, now that Israel has given the Palestinians absolutely nothing to lose, is if Israel takes a page from its "fallen son," gets very very generous with its neighbors and "loves its enemy...doing good to those that despitefully use" it. Meanwhile the U.S. should get right out of the situation - "Who can, by stirring, clear muddy water, but leave it alone and it will come clear by itself." - Lao Tzu. And that includes cutting off the incendiary $3½ billion that our "representatives" extort from us taxpayers every year to subsidize our arms industry via Israel. The idea that the huge financial backer and arms supplier of one side can "impartially" broker a peace is laughable. Boy, this ongoing Mideast disgrace is the best thing our arms manufacturers have seen since our own "war" on terrorism.]

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