Timesizing® Associates

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Good News, January 16-31, 2000
[Commentary] ©2000 Phil Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080

1/31/2000  The globalization backlash - The problem won't be solved by PR exercises, by Wm. Pfaff, Boston Globe, A17.
...Globalization's problem will not be solved by public relations exercises or a newly "democratic" WTO. The problem of the reeling "life sciences" industry, for example, is not that its attempt to make a corporate takeover of global agriculture is unpopular but that it is unacceptable....
The "new" capitalism [ed: our quotes this time] which serves only stockholder interest, approaches a crisis. The new globalism, which serves only business corporation interest, is already in crisis.... In both cases the cause is easy to identify. It is the subordination of workers, customers, public and social interest - even patriotism - to profit.... In the United States and much of Western Europe, the last two decades have seen gross distortions of the democratic balance of interests. Since that is politically intolerable, a movement to restore balance has begun.

1/29  1 beam + 1 glimmer of hope -

1. Unemployment at seven-year low, by John Tagliabue, NYT, B2.
   With vigorous growth fueling job creation, French unemployment dropped in Dec. to 10.6%, its lowest level since Oct. 1992, against 10.8% in November.
   [As the vanishing work spreads onto more people and gives them more secure feelings about spending and more time to shop, stronger growth is exactly what we would expect.]

2. No banks for Korean conglomerates, by Samuel Len, NYT, B2.
   The South Korean government will not allow the nation's major business conglomerates to own banks [said] Lee Ki Ho...senior secretary to the president for economic affairs....
   [Hey, while we're unlearning the hard lessons of the '30s by repealing Glass-Steagle and mooshing together banks, brokerages and insurance companies, the South Koreans are smart enough to be drawing some lines in the sand.]

1. The phantom surplus, by Robert Reischauer, NYT, A27.
   ,,,According to the..\..Congressional Budget Office's new projections...the surplus could be as large as $1.9 trillion over the next decade.... But before expectations run amok...
   [Too late!]
   ...some realistic accounting is in order. [The] surplus will materialize only if Congress adheres to the spending caps enacted in 1997 or freezes discretionary spending for 10 years.... Let's be clear. The polar ice caps will melt and flood New York before Congress accepts either of these starvation diets....

2. Group sues to halt low-level training flights, by Steven Myers, NYT, A12.
   WASHINGTON - A coalition of environmentalists, ourdoorsmen and rural landowners sued the Air Force today, seeking suspension of low-level training flights that they say have gravely disrupted wildlife, livestock and recreation, especially in the wild deserts, canyons and forests of the West. The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court here, is the most serious legal challenge so far to the Air Force's training program, which has been beset by political and legal attacks around the country.... The coalition's challenge is the first to try to suspend all low-level training....
   [More power to them!]

3. The fight for an open presidential primary - McCain supporters document New York's ballot tricks, 'editorial observer' by Dorothy Samuels, NYT, A26.
   ...The intricate ballot rules for the Republican primary [in N.Y. state] are...calibrated unfairly to exclude as many candidates as possible except for the one favored by state party leaders.... A test of grassroots support is one thing. A regimen of petition torture that could end up keeping Mr. McCain off the ballot in about half of the state is quite another.
   [The N.Y. state Republican rules are an outdated disgrace to the party of Lincoln and T.R.  State GOP leaders are a pack of totalitarian hypocrites who should be packed off to tent in Tyenanmen Square until they're ready to serve their members instead of forcing the reverse.]

• [The concentration of wealth has made it to the cartoons -]
  Rhymes with Orange, cartoon by Hilary Price, Boston Globe, D18.
  3 frames:
  1. Frame 1 - title "The widening gap" and pie chart with one small slice & all-the-rest slice
  2. Frame 2 - 2 people on park bench, one reading newspaper & other leaning over and reading headline - "Top 1/5 of U.S. population owns 4/5 of wealth"
  3. Frame 3 - Newspaper holder lowers paper & says "May I help you?" - other person says, "Whoever came up with the phrase 'I wonder how the other half lives' was louzy with fractions."
  [The more concentration, the less circulation. That's how speculative bubbles eventually fragment after Ponzi-ing upward on the money that would have been invested in wages at the grassroots if labor hadn't been so superfluous & over-accessible - insufficient distributed spending power to support the titanic, relatively monolithic "investments" in productivity. Solution? Remove labor hours from the job market. How? Usual ways: war and disease. Intelligent way: enforce overtime and lower the workweek = Timesizing.]

1. [One smart fund manager -]
   Some who missed tech mania go quietly, but not Ken Heebner, who awaits a bubble burst, Syre and Stein, Boston Globe, C1.
   For years, they were revered as three investment giants...but none of them was ready for the roaring high-tech stock market, and their stellar records...were smudged....
   [Or maybe they were the only ones who were ready - for the the roaring stock bubble, and stayed out - like Alan Greenspan himself, for instance.]
   Fund manager George Vanderheiden called it quits this month after 29 years at Fidelity Investments. Chuck Clough, chief market strategist at Merrill Lynch & Co...retired last week after 12 years in his post.
   Then there's Ken Heebner [of Capital Growth Mgmt] with no plans to go anywhere.... Heebner's central point: We're in a "titanic" investment bubble, and if a manager was lucky enough to make money with go-go stocks, he should get out now.... Heebner manages about $8 billion in many different funds and accounts, but [his returns haven't kept up with the high-tech run-up]. The reason: He is more conservative than usual in measuring risk and reward, fearing that new tech companies can steal away market share with a better silicon mousetrap.... "I think these multiples and this tech sector represent the most grotesquely exaggerated speculation I've seen in my career," he said.
   [We agree.]
   Heebner's complaint, in part, is that all those big stars feed off the dot-com mania. When those IPOs and venture-funded Web companies can no longer issue more stock to pay for equipment, the Ciscos [equipment suppliers] of the world will suffer. He thinks it's not too far off.... "Several years from now, people will look at this as a period when valuations and investor behavior were totally unrepresentative of the long term. The hero will be the person who was smart [better make that "lucky"] enough to buy [tech stocks] two years ago and sell now."
   [We just don't know when or how this whole thing is going to collapse. In 1929, the economy was a lot smaller, so it had less momentum. Also, we have a lot more socialism "in the basement" doing some centrifuging against the huge tide of concentrating wealth today. But every merger consolidates it further, every downsizing, every repeal of the "old fashioned" laws of the 1930s like Glass-Steagall.... What can we do? We can centrifuge wealth by having another world war or black plague to create a wage-raising labor shortage that will boost demand and adjust and solidify the stock bubble - if we survive. That's the stupid way to do it. Or we can do it the smart way that we did in the business sector in the century-and-a-half before the 1920s and nearly did in the government sector in 1933 when we got a 30-hr bill through the U.S. Senate - but not through the House. An updated version? Timesizing.]

2. [Doubleheader -]
   [Gary Burkhead,] Vice Chairman of Fidelity to retire next week - An executive says he wants to spend more time with his family - Gail J. McGovern [will succeed him in most duties], by David Johnston, NYT, C1.

3. Intel will add 1,000 jobs at new chip plant in Arizona, Reuters via NYT, C4.
   ...The world's largest semiconductor manufacturer said yesterday that it would spend $2 billion to build a chip plant in Chandler, Ariz. that will use larger dinner-plate-sized silicon wafers. The new plant will create an estimated 1,000 jobs in the next 5 to 8 years. The chip industry is gradually moving to the larger wafers, which are 300 mm, or about 12 in. in diameter, from the currently prevalent wafers, which are 200 mm....

4. Boston firm to open global weather center, by Jerry Ackerman, Bos Globe, C4.
   Applied Insurance Research of Boston...is opening a global weather and climate prediction center to develop long-range predictions of potential natural disasters.... The center will use 40 high-speed computers to analyze data.
   [And how many staff??]

1. Justices uphold $1,000 limit on contributions to campaigns - 1970's cap does not limit access, court rules, by Linda Greenhouse, NYT, front page.
   WASHINGTON - Ruling in a Missouri campaign finance case with important national implications, the Supreme Court yesterday upheld limits on political contributions and rejected the argument that...
   [now get this...]
   ...the $1,000 limit it upheld 24 years ago no longer buys enough political speech to be constitutional....
   [Whaaaaaaaat? So freedom of speech is something to be bought and sold? This country is toast. The fact that the Supreme Court even wasted time considering this outrage instead of immediately dismissing it with a roll of the eyes means this country's on the Big Skid. Enough already. We gotta get money RIGHT OUT of the facetiously named "democratic" process.]

2. [UNtakeover #1]
   Oneok cancels planned [$1.8B] purchase of Southwest Gas, Bloomberg via NYT, C3.
   ...[citing] fraud accusations by [rival bidder] Southern Union as well as opposition from Arizona regulators....

3. [UNtakeover #2]
   Legato Systems cancels [$134m] purchase of Ontrack Data [International], Reuters via NYT, C3.
   ...[without giving] a reason for its decision. Legato has been the target of a string of lawsuits after its..\..lower-than-expected quarterly...earnings announcement last Thursday....

4. [UNtakeover #3]
   Procter & Gamble ends drug merger negotiations, by Holson and Petersen, NYT, C1.
   ...The consumer products giant...ended merger talks yesterday with the drug concerns Warner-Lambert and American Home Products after investors panned the combination and Procter suffered its worse stock price decline since the market crash of 1987.... As the prospects for a deal became more promising, jittery investors feared that Procter earnings would suffer because of it.... When one adviser was asked about what killed the talks, he did not offer the usual explanations like price or executives' clashing egos. It was much simpler: "The stock market opened," he said....
   [Hey maybe the speculators on Wall Street are regaining some sanity.]

1. 1/24 The Greening of McDonald's - Environmental Houdini act transforms chain from rogue to role model, by Scott Allen, Boston Globe, C1.
   City councils banned its styrofoam burger boxes, calling them "McToxics" that pollute the environment. Martha's Vineyard banned the Golden Arches altogether, blaming McDonald's for everything from litter to traffic congestion. And there were dark rumors, never substantiated, that tropical rain forest land was being cleared for its cattle to graze.... McDonald's waste problem had gotten so bad in 1989 that the company proposed installing incinerators at restaurants to burn the trash rather than having it hauled away.
   \Now\ turning to professional environmentalists for advice...the restaurant has reduced waste by more than 30% over the past decade by making subtle changes in the way food is packaged. \It has\ become one of the country's leading buyers of recycled materials [and] in April, the company expects to announce a timetable for cutting energy use by 10% at its 12,500 restaurants....
   [Well, bouquets to the Goldern Arches for turning this around, but it's STILL against our religion to go into that big and homogeneously bland a chain. Give us a little local diner like Kelley's in Somerville or an old-fashioned eatery like the Crystal Restaurant in Watertown, NY every time. Small (i.e., unchained) is beautiful.]

2. 1/23 Unions flex new muscle as overseas ties grow, by Diane Lewis, Bos Globe, H1.
   ...With union support from four British unions, US utility workers secured a contract with [New England Electric System, recently taken over by National Grid of London that assured them] there would be no layoffs [and] gave them the right to use card checks [huh?] to organize customer service, technical and field workers in the US. And the company said it would remain neutral. Welcome to the new world of union[s] joining with their counterparts...abroad to build the size and strength they need to take on these new, larger [merged] corporations.... [More] changes are afoot:
   • Last week...workers at [US plants of] Imerys, a multinational ceramics and construction materials corporation headquartered in Paris, joined with Belgian unions and ICEM [International Chemical, Energy and Mine workers] to launch an international organizing campaign....
   • In 1999, the Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers signed a 3-year pact with DSM Polymer in Virginia [even though at first] the company's Netherlands parent, DSM, declined to bargain. DSM changed its mind after the workers contacted the Dutch union, FNV Bondgenoten [and together they] persuaded the company to negotiate.
   • Two years ago, the ICEM convened a meeting in Washington with the leaders of 350,000 utility union workers from Britain and the U.S...to find new ways to collaborate....

[Reader sets record straight -]
1/21  Canada's 'impaired' care, letter to editor by Dr. Don McCanne of San Juan Capistrano and board member of Physicians for a National Health Program, NYT, A30.
Re "Full hospitals make Canadians wait and look south" (news article, Jan. 16): The implication that Canadians covet the health care system of the United States is not warranted. Canadians emphatically reject an inequitable system, like ours, that leaves tens of millions without coverage. What Canadians do want is adequate public financing to provide comprehensive services but without an unreasonable wait to get them.
With our great wealth and our infamous excess capacity to provide health care, the United States should be so fortunate as to have universal coverage without impaired access. We need only the political will.
[And "the Canadian system" is actually a set of 10-11 different provincial/territorial systems anyway - a point that was never brought out in the original article. So if it was Quebec that was unloading its hospitals south of the border, maybe neighboring Ontario and New Brunswick were fine.]

1/20/2k  6 glimmers of hope -

1. [UPsizing #1]
   Tesco plans to expand, by Alan Cowell, NYT, C4.
   Britain's leading supermarket chain...said it would create 7,000 new jobs this year as it expands the number of stores offering home shopping on the Internet to 300 from 100 and widen its online offerings of nonfood items like books, clothes, furniture and banking services. Tesco's online service says it is the world's biggest Internet grocer, with 250,000 registered customers generating annual sales of more than $200m. The expansion of its 170,000-member work force reflects an anticipated boom in e-commerce.
   [We'd be surprised, considering what happened to Beyond.com today (1/20).]

2. [UPsizing #2]
   [Federal Express, which changed its name to] FDX is changing its name to FedEx [which everybody thought it was all along anyway], AP via NYT, C13.
   ...The delivery company...based in Memphis..\..is changing its name and is dedicating a business to home delivery with 1,000 extra employees to capitalize on the popularity of Internet and catalog shopping.
   [Must be something in the trans-Atlantic air today.]
   Its RPS Inc. division, a small-package and business-to-business delivery service based in Pittsburgh, is being renamed FedEx Ground. It will also be responsible for the new residential delivery service called FedEx Home Delivery, which should be operating in March.

3. [UPsizing #3]
   Merck to build Boston biotech center - Research building to employ up to 300, by Ronald Rosenberg, Boston Globe, D6.
   ...The nation's largest pharmaceutical company expects to break ground on a 10-storey biotechnology research building behind Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital Medical Center early next year, an expansion that company chairman and chief executive Raymond Gilmartin said will add 250 to 300 scientists and researchers....
   [Quick, somebody warn them to keep clear of the collapse of "Frankenstein foods" in article below.

4. [Hey, we sure don't want to eat this untested stuff when proper tests could take a couple of centuries.]
   Rise, and fall, of 'life sciences' - Drugmakers scramble to unload agricultural units - Carnage over backlash from 'Frankenstein foods', by David Morrow, NYT, C1.
   ..."The synergies between pharmaceuticals and the agricultural businesses turned out to be marginal," Dr. Vasella (chairman of Novartis) said....
   [Whatever. Just so long as we don't have to eat the stuff, especially if it's unlabeled.]
   The carnage has been enormous. American farmers lost some $200m in corn sales to Europe last year because of the backlash over "Frankenstein foods"....
   [Well, how stupid can you get? Natural food stores popping up all over the country and these morons want to start fooling around with bioengineered foods?! The dumbest are the dairy farmers. They spend 50 years convincing us that milk is "Nature's most perfect food," and then they start feeding their cows hormones right when the Brits, having fed their cows scrapie-infected mutton, are doing their big swandive into the empty pool of "mad cow disease"!]

5. [At last they nailed the rich guy - only took'em 24 years!]
   Skakel is arrested in '75 Conn. murder - Ethel Kennedy's nephew faces charges, by Ellement and Prevost, Bos Globe, front page.
   [The "luck" of the Kennedy's rolls on. Notice how the Globe always gives the story to more than one reporter when it's a little, shall we say, risky.]

6. Two simple steps that would cut costs and broaden access to health care - A single claim form and a single set of minimum benefits, op ed by Dr. Joseph Martin of Harvard Medical School, Bos Globe, A17.
   [Two simple BGOs - blinding glimpses of the obvious. There's real genius in seeing the simple and obvious when everyone else is just making it worse.]

1/18  5 glimmers of hope (plus a lot of good letters (A26) in the Times today too) -

1. A Chilean socialist in the Clinton-Blair mold: Ricardo Lagos Escobar - The [president-elect] in Chile is more Keynesian than Marxist, by Clifford Krauss, NYT, A3.
   [ Clinton-Blair? Keynesian? This headline and sub-headline are bending over backwards, as is the happy photo of Mr. Lagos surrounded by children and looking for all the world like a friendly Catskills comedian, to get the paranoids at the CIA to leave Chilean democracy alone this time, instead of repeating the kind of murderous meddling they perpetrated in the early '70s when they moved in and, surprise surprise, somehow the democratically elected, but socialist [oh NOOO, Mr. Bill!], Chilean president Allende was assassinated.]
   ...During the Allende years, Mr. Lagos served as secretary general of the University of Chile.... Mr. Lagos spent only 20 days in General Pinochet's jails...but he played a key role in the 1988 plebiscite campaign that led to Gen. Pinochet's defeat. In a television interview that year, Mr. Lagos had the gumption to point his finger at the camera - as it to point directly at the dictator - and told him that the country had had enough of his repression, torture and executions. It was that brave moment of defiance that made him the leader of Chile's Socialists and a future presidential candidate....
   [Sounds like we've got a good man now in Chile, and another in Indonesia (see 1/14 story below), and we particularly like King Carlos of Spain as well - 3 guys with a lot of chutzpa.]

2. Effort to enforce gun laws, pointer headline (to A16), NYT, A2.
   The White House will ask Congress for $280m in new spending to enforce existing gun-control laws, a strategy intended to address one of the main complaints of those who oppose [additional] gun restrictions....

3. [And Jesus saith, "Wilt thou be made whole?" (John 5:6)]
   Camera helps blind man 'see', pointer headline (to D3), NYT, A2.
   A tiny camera wired to the brain has given a blind man a limited ability to perceive objects.

4. [Plant closure the way it should be done - no layoffs.]
   Hewlett-Packard to close a Colorado plant, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   ...The world's No. 2 computer maker said yesterday that it would shut a plant in Greeley, Colo., in the next 18-24 months and move the work and 640 employees to another plant nearby [30 mi. away] in Fort Collins.... In addition, 165 Greeley-based employees will join Flextronics International Ltd. [which is buying a company that's buying HP's tape-storage mfg business. HP is closing the Greeley plant...as part of a plan to shed real estate.

5. [1 UNtakeover (divestiture-sale, with bonus for minorities)]
   Banks' sale to create new minority firm, by Lynnley Browning, Boston Globe, C1.
   A [black] New York financier [Peter F. Hurst] said yesterday that he would acquire three Fleet and BankBoston branches in [Bloomfield, Bridgeport and Hartford] Connecticut [for $??] and transform them into that state's only minority-run financial services institution...to be known as Urban Financial Group.

• [A] 1998 ruling, one of the first in which an employer was ordered to make changes in a workplace, required that all senior and executive managers at SunGard Financial Systems Inc. of Waltham [Mass.] attend comprehensive training on gender discrimination.
• [In a] 1998 settlement of a gender-bias complaint against The Center for Coastal Studies, a whale research organization in Provincetown [Mass]...a woman who claimed she was forced out of her job after she became pregnant [received $60k out of court plus] health insurance, legal [and] education expenses [and] research..\..access.
• A 1999 decision in which Cabot Corp. was ordered to pay...$377,748 plus interest in back pay and emotional damages to Elizabeth Taggert, an in-house attorney who alleged unequal pay.... [The Mass. Commission Against Discrimination] found that the plaintiff was paid below the minimum salary range established by the employer....