Timesizing® Associates

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Good News, February 16-29, 2000
[Commentary] ©2000 Phil Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080

2/29/2000 glimmers of hope -

1. U.S. takes aim at tax shelters for companies - Goal is to stop abuse by forcing disclosures, by David Johnston, NYT, front page.
   WASHINGTON - The government issued new rules [yester]day to discourage abusive corporate tax shelters.... The regulations are aimed at forcing the disclosure of new kinds of tax shelters as soon as they are created so that they can be reviewed by the IRS and, if found improper, can be banned before they become widespread. This would replace the current practice of uncovering abuses through audits, often years later, and trying to undo them in court, one case at a time....
   As an example, Mr. Summers cited one newly uncovered arrangement that is apparently spreading quickly. A company makes two loans of equal amounts at equal interest rates to a partner. Later the interest rate on one loan is dropped to zero [so it] can be counted as a loss on the company's tax return..\..while the interest rate of the other loan is doubled [and it] is placed on the books of an overseas affiliate not taxed in the United States. Mr. Summers said such transactions "are devoid of economic substance" and serve no purpose except avoiding taxes....

2. McCain confronts Christian right, citing divisiveness - Homes in on tolerance - Adress singles out leaders of the Christian Coalition and the Moral Majority, by David Barstow, NYT, front page.
   VIRGINIA BEACH - Taking his presidential campaign to a stronghold of Christian conservatism, Senator John McCain of Arizona delievered a harsh attack [yester]day on the "self-appointed leaders" of the religious right, depicting them as intolerant empire builders who "have turned good causes into businesses"....
   [Right on! They have turned God's House into a den of thieves and robbers! Wait a minute. Who said that?]
   Mr. McCain singled out for criticism two of the Christian right's best-known leaders, Pat Robertson, the founder of the Christian Coalition, and the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the founder of the Moral Majority. [McCain] compared Mr. Robertson to "union bosses who have subordinated the interests of working families to their own ambitions"....
   [Whoopee! A "rumble" on the right! We've been waiting for this for a loooong time. Maybe McCain can reverse Reagan's disastrous mistake at the 1980 GOP convention and get the Republican Party back OUT OF BED with the religious right and re-separate Church and State. It's the Third Millennium for God's sake. It's high time we were building on the separation of Church and State to regain the separation of State and Market. That we can only do by superceding the vast panoply of ineffectual government micromanagement represented by the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Society and its successors, with the approach that would have effectually managed the whole thing on a general basis with few regulation, essentially just one - convert overtime into training and hiring and CUT THE WORKWEEK. Make it easier for people to support and take care of themselves so that government and taxpayers don't get dragged into a gazillion half-baked ways of doing it for them. As technology levels go up, the workweek should automatically come down to keep everyone employed and self-supporting. Enough of layoffs and "oh they'll get another job - sometime, somewhere." Yeah, that's why we have record levels of homelessness and incarceration in what used to be the nation with the world's highest living standards. And for every one of our 2,000,000 prison and jail inmates, we are paying $25,000 a year. And now single moms want government childcare. They don't need government childcare. They need shorter hours and more pay to look after their own kids! CEOs don't need more visas for pretrained workers from overseas. They need to invest colossally in continuous training and retraining and crosstraining for the millions of Americans who want a better life, and drop their stupid and boring CEO "ambitions" of more and more and more and more and barf- personal wealth. This isn't ambition. It's boredom. And instead of turning America into a giant sweatshop with 20-somethings working 70-hour weeks on a 40-hour salary, we need to ration our availability to the job market by cutting the workweek and insisting that you quit at the new lower levels or reinvest overtime earnings in skills and jobs for others - in overtime-corresponding areas. We call it Timesizing.]

1. U.S. surprise: 6.9% growth in 4th quarter - Economy 'is screaming ahead,' figures show, by Kenneth Gilpin, NYT, B1.
   The economy barreled ahead at a breathtaking 6.9% annual rate in the last 3 months of 1999, the most rapid reate of quarterly expansion in more than three years, the Government reported yesterday. The figures released by the Commerce Dept. are revised estimates from a month ago, when GDP was estimated at a 5.8% rate. The 6.9% rate matches a similar growth spurt recorded in 2Q96. It is the fastest rate since 4Q87 when the economy grew at an annual rate of 7.2%....
   [But not only does the GDP ignore middle-class fade and accompanying loss of diversity and versatility, it doesn't compensate for the diminishing marginal efficiency of wealth concentration (the "income effect" - which Greenspan interprets backwards as consumption boosting), it also ignores stagnant wages, disability, homelessness, incarceration, suicide. One measure that takes much of this into account is the Cobb-Daly ISEW = Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare, plus ecological enhancement or deterioration. Some of it is in the area of over-employment, as indicated both by the apocryphal remark of the woman who said in response to Clinton's claim several years ago to having created 10m jobs, "I know, I've got three of them myself," and by the number of people with "full time" jobs today who are so anxious that they're working a 60-hour week, one third of it without pay because they're on salary (necessarily a 40-hr salary according to the Federal Labor Standards Act of 1938). But the most crucial measure still ignored is just the measure of under-employment, - the fact that the official unemployment rate is not catching so much under-employment and working poverty. Our suggestion - define under-employment in comprehensive time terms set and adjusted by regular electronic referendums of the affected population - we outline this in Phase 1 of our Timesizing program.]

2. Lehman paid its chief $16.8.m in '99, Bloomberg via NYT, B2.
   Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. paid its chairman and chief executive, Richard Fuld, $16.8 million last year, up 26% from 1998, after a record year for earnings. Mr. Fuld received a salary of $750,000, a cash bonus of $4.5m and restricted stock valued at $7.5m. He also got options to buy 350,000 shares valued at approximately $4m, according to the company's filing with the SEC. Lehman said in its filing that Mr. Fuld got his raise because "the actual financial results of the company for fiscal 1999 were significantly higher than for 1998"....
   [Guess this is part of the greatest income disparity in the developed world - pushing America down to 3rd world status where such disparities are commonplace. Our middle-class wipeout continues and the ratio from ordinary employees' pay to CEO pay is 1:409. This ridiculosity is only going to be corrected gradually. It will take at least 200 years, because the first step is to balance the skills and the workload and that could take a cool century. Each step we take toward economic democracy (and not just the increasingly cosmetic democracy of "one person, one vote" - voting for "representatives" who are bought and paid for by Big Money) unleashes participation, diversification and creativity beyond anything we have dreamed of. It unleashes whole new vistas of business volume that will make our current economic "boom" aka Internet bubble look sick (well, let's face it, it IS sick). It enables taking on previously insuperable odds - as when newly democratic Athens took on the might of the Persian Empire in 480 BC, and won. As we know, there has arisen thus far in all the mind-boggling complexities of social evolution one and only one complete economic design of the core institutions required for the first step in this economic democratization process, the employment and skills balancing step. We call it Timesizing.]

1. France, philosophy and [birth control], letter to editor by John McCumber of Northwestern U.'s Philosophy Dept., NYT, A20.
   ...Diane Johnson's Feb. 22 Op-Ed article..\..gives several societal reasons why France was able to make its decision to dispense the morning-after pill in junior high and high schools - among them
   • that France "is only a nominally Catholic country. [From original: Fewer than 1 in 10 French people go to church even once a year.]"
   • that in France, "the separation of church and state is taken seriously. [From original: The French do not accept the idea that any religion should have a say in private behavior or public policy - these are matters for individuals, families and responsible public officials to decide.]"
   I would suggest two other factors.
   • One is that philosophy is taught in French high schools, which makes reasonable public debate on controversial issues much easier to conduct in France than in the U.S.
   • The other is that France has no significant fundamentalist movement.
   French bishops, confronted by a relatively educated and thoughtful populace and not having the Protestant fundamentalist allies enjoyed by their American brethren in this debate, long ago declared abortion and birth control to be sins for their fellow Catholics but did not try to force such sectarian views on their fellow Frenchmen.
   ["Sounds like a plan!"]

2. US orders suspension of gun sales into Canada, by Raymond Bonner, NYT, A8.
   ...after discovering a large volume of sales in the past nine months, American and Canadian officials said today.
   [Great, how about extending that suspension to ALL OTHER COUNTRIES!!!]
   Since last April, when the US began requiring licenses to export weapons to Canada, licenses have been issued for 115,000 handguns, 25,000 rifles and 200m rounds of ammunition, according to US government data. American officials said they do not know where the firearms are going.... One official said that it was "extremely possible" that the handguns were being smuggled back into the US along the long, relatively porous border. In recent years, Canada has become a transshipment point for weapons from the US, including sophisticated missile technology. The weapons have ended up in countries like China, Iran and Libya, according to US Customs Service records. The number of handguns licensed to be sold to Canada in the past nine months is more than to any other single country, and 10 times greater than the combined total of handgun sales to Britain, France and Italy in 1998.... A similar suspension of firearms sales to Britain two years ago has been lifted.
   Although about 4.5m new firearms are sold every year in the US, the number of the licenses for sales to Canada are viewed as unsettling by Clinton administration officials, because Canada has one of the strictest handgun control laws in the world - far stricter than the US. In Canada, with a population of 31m people, possession of handguns is limited to collectors, target shooters, and people who can demonstrate that they need guns to protect their lives, Canadian officials said.... The Canadian government sent a letter to the State Dept. Wednesday [2/23] asking the US to suspend the issuance of further licenses, pending an investigation....
   [Hey, it's been a decade since the Cold War ended. When do we get to "pound our swords into plowshares"?]

1. U.S. loses dispute on export sales - Europeans win their challenge to billion-dollar tax break - A huge trade case with consequences both political and economic, by Joseph Kahn, NYT, front page.
   [The blowout on C1 has a better headline and a worse first paragraph -]
   U.S. loses trade dispute with Europe on tax policy
   The U.S. has suffered its largest defeat ever in a trade battle, losing a dispute with Europe over tax policies that force American companies to pay billions more in taxes.
   [Now doesn't that make it look like those nasty Europeans are costing ivorypure American companies a lot of unnecessary taxes? But reading on in the blowout, we find the current situation that Europe objected to characterized as an illegal export subsidy - so we start thinking, maybe slimeball US corporations have extorted some more corporate welfare from our government and us taxpayers again - this time to do something we always complain about if anybody else does it, namely, subsidize their exports. And the front page tells us the mechanism of this tax evasion -]
   ...The U.S. must scrap a law that allowed companies to avoid paying taxes on some overseas sales by channeling them through offshore subsidiaries.
   [So this has actually been more like a tax loophole (for tax evasion) than a positive subsidy.]
   The decision...orders the United States to rewrite its tax code by Oct. 1...or face sanctions.
   [How often do you hear that phrase - somebody is "ordering" the mighty United States to do something, or rather the even mightier U.S. corporations - instead of USA Inc. throwing its weight around as usual. Almost gives you the illusion that the world is a safe and sane place after all.]

2. Setback in court for big credit card issuers, Bloomberg via NYT, C2.
   ...The complaint asserts that Visa and MasterCard force retailers to accept their debit cards if [retailers] also want to handle purchases made by their credit card holders. Visa and MasterCard charge [retailers] eight times the amount per transaction that competing debit cards charge, the suit contends. The plaintiffs [Wal-Mart, Sears Roebuck and 11 other retailers] seek $8.1B in actual damages, which would be tripled under federal antitrust law. \Visa and MasterCard\ suffered a setback yesterday when a federal judge [John Gleeson in Brooklyn] certified the case against them as a class action suit....

1. DaimlerChrysler shows 72-mpg test vehicle, AP via Boston Globe, D2.
   The Dodge ESX3 test car offers the interior space and many of the creature comforts found in DaimlerChrysler's other midsize sedans, with one exception - it gets 72 miles per gallon of gasoline. But if Chrysler built it today, it cost $7,500 more than the Dodge Intrepid, which usually runs about $21,000. That's far more than buyers would be willing to pay for high fuel economy, say the Chrysler engineers....
   [No it isn't. New car buyers are willing to pay all kinds of ridiculous prices today. What's the new VW bug, $18,000?]
   ...who built the car as part of a federal program to develop high-mileage vehicles. So engineers have set a new target of making such cars affordable, rather than squeezing out even more fuel economy. Bernard Robertson, DaimlerChrysler's senior VP for engineering technologies, said Chrysler shose not to try to hit the 80-mpg goal set by the federal Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles, but to come close with a car that looked and operated as much like an everyday vehicle as possible....
   [Wouldn't it be nice if there was a federal Partnership for a New Generation of Economic Designs?!]

2. [1 UNtakeover]
   At Home, Dow Jones forming joint venture, Bloomberg via Boston Globe, D2.
   At Home Corp. is spinning off its Work.com site to create a company with Dow Jones & Co. that provides news and information to small business....

1. As British sour on euro, Blair puts the onus on Europeans, by Alan Cowell, NYT, C4.
   ...The [euro] since its introduction in January 1999, has lost 14% of its value against the pound, pushing the price of British exports to the Continent ever higher. Opinion surveys have shown sentiment in [Britain] swinging not simply against joining the euero zone, but for a sizable minority, against remaining a member of the European Union.... Euroskeptic adversaries have delighted in developments - ranging from the continued ban on British beef in France and Germany, to European Union calls for harmonized tax policies - citing them as evidence of Continental malevolence....
   [We Timesizers are against all this simplistic "one economy" fixation as grossly premature. You need an integrated workforce before you can get an integrated currency. Otherwise, events will happen over which you won't have national economic control when you need it. Our big boys like private property on the individual level but communism on the international level. Nonono. Economic nationalism, like private property, is nature's way of sticking someone with the responsibility and giving them the control they need to discharge it adequately. From the Continent's viewpoint, keeping Britain out is a Good Thing because the UK is the little puppydog of the USA which is gungho to stockbubble its way back to 1929 with long outdated workweeks, huge uncounted under-employment featuring record homelessness and prisons, and the ongoing sacrifice of living standards of the majority to the unbelievable and unspendable wealth concentration of the few. Without a separate Continental Europe, there'll be no chance of any developed economic area in the world with enough stability left to pull the US and the UK out of the Great Depression II once the Internet bubble fragments, because the stupid policies of the UK will infect the whole EC with the contagion of general glut as well. It will be hard enough anyway, because although the Continent has much smarter workyear policies than the US-UK (5-6 week vacations help spread the vanishing work rather than letting it load up on the few), they still have not realized the strategic imperative of workweek policies. France's 35-hour workweek is only a poorly designed beginning.
   [The separateness of the Continent also allows us to run two disastrous experiments separately, the US-UK experiment in unlabelled Frankenstein foods (funny how their CEOs yap about free markets but no freedom of information for consumers!) and the Continent's compulsive tendency to micromanage which shows up in attempts to homogenize tax policies and even in specifying what kind of oven you can make pizza in (not wood fired). They too have failed to grasp the limits of government responsibility in simply full-disclosure labelling and leaving the rest to free-market caveat emptor.
   [From the British viewpoint, the Continent has unified its currency way prematurely and will experience ongoing difficulties as it tries to make necessary regional and national adjustments without only clumsy EC-wide tools. Basically, the EC (and globalization in general) suffers from the same problems as monoculture in the agricultural area - any blight knocks out your whole crop and you've got no diversity to fall back on.]

2. European regulators frown on a combined MCI-Sprint - It would have nearly half of basic market - Withdrawal from the Global One venture is called insufficient, by Edmund Andrews, NYT, C4.
   The European Commission's antitrust regulators said [yester]day...in a toughly worded statement from Brussels..\..that they had "serious concerns" about the plans of MCI Worldcom to acquire the Sprint Corp. for $130B and that they would carry out an extensive 4-month investigation into the deal....
   [Can't count as UNtakeover because "frown" probably not lethal.]

• [The upside of the downside - Vt. hiker Guy Waterman designs an inspiring suicide -]
  Climber chose his own path, even in death - Family, friends say outdoorsman knew it was time...- Waterman...intentionally froze to death on Mount Lafayette, by David Arnold, Boston Globe, B1.
  ...On the Sunday morning of Feb. 6, temperatures across northern New England were below zero, the winds fiercely out of the northwest, the skies cloudless. For a man who had chosen to die of exposure with a favorite view from a 5,260-foot peak, the conditions were perfect. By midweek, [his wife] started making calls to a few close mountaineering friends, some of whom were just discovering letters in their mail slots from Waterman explaining his love for them, his hope that they would accept his actions, and where they would find his body. A group of five climbers quietly organized themselves and got permission from state authorities to conduct a private retrieval. Around 9:30 a.m. on Feb. 11, they started their quiet, slow climb up Lafayette.
  Waterman lay where he said he would be, just below the summit on the Old Bridle Path Trail. A favorite, it was a trail he and Laura had helped maintain for the past 15 years.... Guy Waterman, never one for fancy wear, was found in old gloves, woolen pants and pullovers, and a simple windbreaker. By design, he did not intend to survive long.... He lay on his side, looking northwest, perhaps 3,500 miles over the horizon toward Mount McKinley [in Alaska, which his son Johnny died trying to climb 22 years before].
  [The NYT version of this story is -]
  Guy Waterman dies at 67; wrote books about hiking - A love for the mountains of New England and a desire to preserve them, by Douglas Martin, NYT, A35 (NE).
  [And the story also appears in "A Natural Death," by Rob Buchanan, June 2000 issue, Outside Magazine, 106ff.]

1. Chilean dam halted, Bloomberg via NYT, B3.
   Empresa Nacional de Electricidad S.A., Chile's No. 1 power generator, said it would halt construction of a $520m hydroelectric plant, temporarily shelving plans for the country's biggest dam ever. Endesa, as the company is known, plans to stop work on March 1 on the 570-megawatt Ralco hydroelectric dam in southern Chile. Endesa's board told Chilean regulators that the company lacked the concessions needed to move ahead with construction and did not have the necessary transmission lines.
   [And God knows what further ecological damage the monster dam would inflict. There are plenty of ways to generate electricity without screwing up riverine ecosystems - wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, side-sluicing for starters.]

2. In search of a gold standard for social programs - Social programs can't be tested like a new drug, op ed by Lisbeth Schorr & Daniel Yankelovich, Boston Globe, A18.
   ...Whether in education, welfare-to-work, or crime prevention, everyone agrees we must be...focusing our investments on what works. Yet nowhere does confusion reign more than in how to determine what works [because of] the mistaken assumption that we can evaluate social programs with the same methods that led to the nation's great medical advances. Economist Alan Krueger urges that we test education reforms the way the FDA tests drugs. A Brookings Institution symposium concludes that finding out what works requires randomized field trials in which "one person gets the pill and the other person gets the placebo."
   Unfortunately...the interventions needed to rescue inner-city schools, strengthen families, and rebuild neighborhoods are not stable chemicals administered in standardized doses. Social programs are sprawling efforts with multiple components requiring constant mid-course corrections, the involvement of committed human beings, and flexible adaptation to local circumstances.... We should stop treating methodological issues as religious quarrels and put our energies into...new ways of learning from what works so the public can keep score of whether socal programs are on track....
   [Sounds like these folks are ready to quit trying to make antiseptic theories work and just open their minds and learn from the messiness of history - including currently unfolding history - despite its frequent dismissal as "merely anecdotal" or the work of "charismatic leaders." Somewhere we got off the track of history and experience in the social (and a few other) sciences. Was it when theoretical economist Alfred Marshall argued for "partial analysis" instead of going with historical economist William Cunningham, thus spawning a pack of economist-sycophants who are repeatedly surprised at depressions? Was it when Einstein talked incessantly about "thought experiments" such as riding on a light beam, instead of sorting out the experiential dimensions of measurement (and their limits), thus spawning a brood of physicists who proliferate particles, strings, "charm," chaos, quarks, and endless wordgames and notwithstanding, still have no grand unified theory because they enshrine a contradiction by talking "relativity" while absolutizing the speed of light? Let's hope the pendulum is now swinging back.]

1. Technology investors tune out Greenspan [& his hint of further raising rates], by Floyd Norris, NYT, C1.
   [There's two reasons for this. First, they're no longer investors. They're just short-term speculators who think they can get out before the bubble fragments. Second, Greenspan and his tools are superficial anyway. Japan for several years now has had zero interest rates and it hasn't stopped their depression (they need to spread the work and the skills - and the spending power - and rebuild their middle-class consumer base) and now we're demonstrating the irrelevance of high interest rates to stopping a bubble economy (which also needs to spread the work and skills etc. - à la Timesizing.
   [Ooops, the expected market drop happened the next day - or was it triggered by disappointed brokers, anxious for the commissions from the churn? -]
   Investor fear of rising rates sends stock market plunging - The Fed chairman's remarks cause a reaction one day later, by Jonathan Fuerbringer, NYT, B1.

2. FTC reviews of mergers getting tough, [FTC chairman Robert Pilotsky] says, AP via Boston Globe, C2.
   [And about time too!]

3. Bell Atlantic to pay 'bonus' to retirees, by Peter Howe, Boston Globe, C9.
   ...to soothe the bitter feelings among thousands of New England Telephone retirees who have not had an across-the-board pension increase since 1991...despite bull-market gains in its pension funds.... The company has raised the minimum monthly pension, which will climb to $700/mo. next year..\.. The offer covers 100,000 Bell Atlantic retirees, including tens of thousands from the former New England Telephone and New York Telephone \who if they\ retired...before Feb. 1995 will get one-time bonuses of $2500-20,000 [depending] on length of service....
   [As Will Rogers said, "Money is like manure - it's no good unless you spread it around." Or mainstream economists call it (though they try to avoid mentioning this), "the marginal efficiency of capital." Or as we like to put it, "The more concentration, the less circulation, and vice versa."]

4. [1 UPsizing]
   U.P.S. to open 4 test retail stores in suburbs, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   ...to attract individual customers shipping from their homes or home-based businesses..\.. The world's No. 1 package-delivery company...wants to...step up competition with the US Postal Service and FedEx. [It] also wants to handle more of the packages being ordered over the Internet.... The first retail test store will open in the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta, Ga., next month.
   [And this may be in partial compliance with the following arbitration decision -]
   U.P.S. told to create jobs, AP via NYT, C8.
   ATLANTA - An arbitrator has ruled that UPS must create at least 2,000 full-time jobs under the terms of its five-year contract with the Teamsters union. In a decision released late Wed., the independent arbitrator, George Nicolau, gave United Parcel 90 days to add the full-time positions.
   [It's this kind of otherwise insane contract clause that is going to force the more flexible definition of "full time" so it can adjust below the 60-year frozen forty-hour level, a level hardly appropriate for the start of the 21st century when the population of industrial robots is skyrocketing and an ever larger proportion of what full-time jobs survive are devoted to developing more worksaving technology.]

5. [UNtakeover #1]
   Ucar [International] will keep its graphite specialties unit, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   Ucar...said yesterday that it would reorganize its graphite specialties business instead of selling it, several months after the company settled lawsuits from a price-fixing conspiracy. Demand for graphite specialties has slowed and Ucar has been unable to get a fair price for the business.... Net sales of the unit, which is based in Clarksburg, W.Va., represent about 9% of Ucar's total sales....
   [So what the hey IS the "graphite specialties business" and why is it slowing down?? Do we have a clue to something big here, or mere chaff?]

6. [UNtakeover #2]
   Auditing firm plans to split its business [over] integrity concerns, by Diana Henriques, NYT, C8.
   The world's largest accounting firm, Pricewaterhouse Coopers...announced yesterday that it planned to separate its auditing and consulting businesses into at least two, and possibly more, free-standing organizations....

1. [How sad are we Americans? This sad -]
   >DANISH WORKERS BARGAIN FOR SIXTH WEEK OF VACATION, NEWS FROM 32 HOURS www.web.net/32hours via swt-digest@swt.org, Thu, 17 Feb 2000 12:02:33 -0500.
   >Bargaining between the Confederation of Danish Industries and the
   >Central Organization of Industrial Employees in Denmark concluded in
   >late January, nearly 3 weeks ahead of the deadline. The highlight of
   >the deal is an additional 5 days of paid vacation, bringing the total
   >entitlement for industrial workers up to six weeks. Workers who do not
   >take the five additional days, which can be taken all in a lump or
   >individually, will receive wages in lieu. Workers also gained
   >additional occupational pension contributions. Meanwhile, the term of
   >the agreement was extended to four years (they are typically two year
   >deals) providing employers with some much sought-after stability. The
   >agreement also creates more flexibility in negotiating working
   >conditions and wages at a decentralized, local level.
   >
   >The choice between wages and free time means that work time reduction is
   >only a possibility, rather than a done deal. A similar choice between
   >wages, time off, or increased pension contributions was offered to
   >Swedish paper workers in 1998. A follow-up study showed that the most
   >popular selection (at about 39%) was the additional free time.
   >
   >Details of the Danish "Stability Pact" are available at
   >http://www.eiro.eurofound.ie/2000/02/inbrief/DK0002166N.html

2. Christians ask renewed attack on poverty - 'We want to put poor people on the national agenda [- they're not there now]', by Gustav Niebuhr [ed: any relation to Martin Niebuhr the famous theologian?], NYT, A14.
   WASHINGTON - Concerned that poverty exists in America despite a prolonged period of national prosperity, a broad group of Christian leaders gathered [here] yesterday to call for an effort by churches, businesses, labor and government to help poor people. The group's statement, a "Covenant to Overcome Poverty," urges religious organizations to make working on behalf of the poor a priority. It also asks people to evaluate political parties and candidates "by how they impact people who are poor."
   The document was signed by officials of evangelical and mainline Protestant organizations, including the National Assoc. of Evangelicals and the National Council of Churches, as well as by ministers of African-American churches and representatives of several Roman Catholic groups. The statement \written by\ Call to Renewal, a 5-yr-old coalition of religious organizations...noted that one in every five American children is growing up in poverty but that the proportion is higher - one in every three - among children of racial minorities..\.. The Rev. Jim Wallis, a leader in Call to Renewal [and] also editor of Sojourners, a religious magazine based in Washington..\..said the religious leaders believed that a "moral constituency" was needed to focus attention on finding ways to alleviate poverty, especially for children's sake.... "When you have rising inequality and record prosperity at the same time, it's a biblical issue."
   [We roll our eyes, we shake our head to see our former colleagues in the religious life still generating fine-sounding language and high goals for society, but almost totally ineffectually. Let's examine some of their language. They think a "moral constituency is needed to focus attention on finding ways to alleviate poverty, especially for children's sake." Look at the timid, almost apologetic indirectness of this need that they have identified. A "moral" constituency is one of the least effective constituencies you can get. How about identifying who might profit from helping the poor, - after all, they represent wasted consumers because they have time to shop but no money to shop with. These religionists want to focus attention on finding ways to alleviate poverty. Why waste time focusing attention? Why not just go for the jugular and "find ways to alleviate poverty"? And while we're at it, why not inject a strategic spin here, because, face it, there are dozens of ways to "alleviate poverty" staring us in the face, starting with charity, and they're evidently ALL USELESS because the poverty is still here, isn't it. So how about the strategic exhortation, "Let's find the most strategic, effective and minimalist way to alleviate poverty." And it's not like these ways are lying around under trees, so "find" is the wrong metaphor (unless they're talking about searching the Web, in which case we can suggest some key search words that would lead them to our site). The real process required here is DESIGN. They should be saying, "Let's design the most strategic, effective and minimalist way to alleviate poverty."
   [Continuing to translate their initiative into more effective and actionable terms, we note that poverty (an underbalance of money) is not the easiest, most accessible or even positive/sustainable place to start on this project, because giving money away just creates unsustainable, humiliating and unreliable dependency. It's a lot easier to share the work than the wealth, and so that's where we should be starting. And of course, when you start talking about sharing work, you've also got to start talking about sharing skills.
   [Let's cut to the chase here. Rev. Jim and all you others, suffice it to say that one of your number fully 35 years ago got royally frustrated with the way you continuously shadowbox with reality, and in a tremendous lust for relevance, vacuumed up everything Buckminster Fuller, Jay Forrester & the Meadows's, Herman Daly, Juliet Schor and Ben Hunnicutt had to say, and designed a gradually transitioned, market-oriented, directly democratic program to greatly alleviate, virtually eradicate poverty as we know it, by wiping out under-employment, low wages, and wasted, astronomically concentrated top executive pay. That program we call Timesizing, since it contrasts dramatically with downsizing. Still, religionists are real good at starting-gate rhetoric -]
   The statement called for making alleviation of poverty "a bipartisan cause".... Rev. Wes Granberg-Michaelson...chairman of Call to Renewal [ed: this name is not noticeably relevant to their cause] said that while the various participating Christian groups might disagree on "specific policy positions," they were united in their belief that a shared national effort on behalf of the poor was needed.
   [Oh great, they have have no consensus as to what to do, just that somebody else should do something. This is starting to reveal the standard hallmark of a religious initiative - hopelessly impractical and hopelessly disunited. It gets worse -]
   He said they agreed that poverty could be relieved neither by the churches alone nor exclusively by government programs.
   [Well, if you're gonna go through the list of who all can't relieve poverty alone, that just makes the tiniest dent in the list. It also wastes time. Who CAN it be relieved almost exclusively by? (They don't want to say because they don't want to take on the private sector - it gives them the donations that keep them alive - just barely.) Apparently Call to Renewal organized three days of meetings in Washington...]
   ...to discuss how local groups were trying to help the poor.
   [Well, that ain't gonna git you very far in designing or identifying a systemic approach, and as for addressing poverty locally, we've been doing that for 2000 years and it hasn't made a dint. Then there's always Jesus' steam valve on this issue, "The poor you have always with you." And here's a good pastime -]
   "We've been laying the groundwork all across the country" with such local efforts..."and now we're building a network" to link the groups....
   [Ooo, impressive! "Laying the groundwork" can take up a lot of time, and so can "building a network." All this reminds us of the title of a religionist-oriented book back in the impatient and radical '60s - evidently by another young-minded megaproblem-solver who had just about had enough of the irrelevance and impracticality of most religious people and their complete inability to organize anything beyond a two-car funeral. It was called, "Stop Pussyfooting Through a Revolution!" Well they do get off a couple of good sentences describing the early prerequisites for such a task, and here they are -]
   "...You reach a new millennium and find some questions that did not get resolved"..\.. Just as some of our religious forbears decided no longer to accept slavery or segregation, we decide to no longer accept poverty...."
   [Yes we would say it starts with a furious refusal to accept some situation that is an insult to human intelligence, and it continues with that fury every day thereafter, until methods and allies are found or invented and the situation starts to change and the change process goes firmly into the snowballing stage.]

3. [1 UNtakeover]
   Auto parts supplier decides against selling some units, Reuters via NYT, C4.
   The Federal-Mogul Corp...said yesterday that it would keep its lighting, wiper blade and fuel-system businesses, which it had previously said it might sell.... Dick Snell, the company's chairman, said the businesses contribute significantly to the company's earnings, and Federal-Mogul was unable to realize full value for them under what he said were unfavorable market conditions....

1. Move to protect sequoias is said to be considered, AP via NYT, A21.
   Pres. Clinton is considering making up to 400,000 acres of forests in California...a federal monument to protect remaining groves of the state's giant sequoia trees, administration officials said [yester]day....

2. [UPsizing #1]
   Mohegans to announce an $800m casino expansion - Second gambling hall, plus hotel and arena, by Paul Zielbauer, NYT, A27.
   ...The expansion...is also expected to double the 20,000 daily visitors to their casino..\..already the fourth-largest casino in the United States...and add 4,000 jobs to the entire complex, which currently employs 5,500 workers....
   [While we love to see Native Americans balance accounts with the White Man, sponsoring gambling is like sponsoring hard drugs.]

3. [UPsizing #2]
   Mpower will expand its Internet work force, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   ...A provider of local phone and communications services to businesses said it would triple its work force to expand its Internet services nationwide. The company, based in Pittsford, NY, said it expected to expand its work force to more than 2,500 employees over the next 12-18 months [from 833? now, for estimated 1667 new jobs - ed.]....

4. [UPsizing #3]
   Lucent Technologies Inc., NYT, C4.
   ...Murray Hill, NJ, the world's No. 1 phone-equipment maker, plans to spend $30m to hire at least 500 people and quadruple production of parts used in fiber optic gear.