Timesizing® Associates

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Good News, March 1-15, 2000
[Commentary] ©2000 Phil Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080

3/15/2000 glimmers of hope -

1. Washington state limits on taxation are voided, AP via NYT, A19.
   A ballot initiative that requires a public vote on all tax and fee increases in Washington state was struck down [yester]day by a county judge who ruled that it violated the state constitution.... Initiative 695...was approved by voters in November. In addition to limiting tax and fee increases by state and local government's, the measure replaced the state's motor vehicle excise tax with a $30 fee for license tabs.
   [Let's hear it for issue-oriented referendums and ballot initiatives! They are part and parcel of Bucky Fuller's dream of 24-hour telephone democracy, the one thing that could do an end run around our whole corrupt and dysfunctional "representative" democracy, even without campaign finance reform. We have the technology. However, one thing to provide for -]
   The cutoff of revenue left state and local government programs facing a $750m budget shortfall. \Even so,\ the state AG's office said it would file an appeal, and the case was expected to go before the state Supreme Court in July....

2. [1 UPsizing]
   Tower Automotive Inc., NYT, C4.
   ...Grand Rapids, Mich., the world's No. 1 maker of stamped vehicle frame parts, said it would spend $50m on a plant in western Virginia to increase sales of heavy-duty truck parts. The plant will have 120 workers.

3. [UNtakeovers #1 & 2 - totalling $24B]
   European regulators halt truck and aluminum mergers - New litmus: effect on competition, by John Tagliabue, NYT, C4.
   European antitrust regulators took some of their most strenuous action against big corporate mergers [yester]day,
   1. blocking a planned $7B purchase by Volvo of the rival Swedish truck maker Scania and
   2. forcing 3 large aluminum companies to withdraw their proposed $17B combination [- Alcan Aluminium of Canada, Pechiney of France, & Alusuisse Lonza Group of Switzerland].
   The moves by the EC's competition commission are not expected to slow the pace of global consolidation in the automotive and aluminum industries....

4. [UNtakeover #3]
   Nabisco adopts 'poison pill' to fend off hostile offers, Bridge News via NYT, C4.
   ...a stockholder rights plan to fend off any hostile takeover attempt by the investor Carl C. Icahn.... Mr. Icahn has made 3 previous attempts in the last 5 years.... The "poison pill" plan takes effect if any shareholder acquires 10% of the company's stock. Poison pills are intended to deter unwanted suitors by making hostile bids prohibitively expensive.

5. [UNtakeover #4]
   Zuckerman Fernandes and MARC USA part, by Stuart Elliott, NYT, C14.
   The planned acquisition of Zuckerman Fernandes...by MARC USA...announced in August, has been called off by mutual agreement.... In a joint statement, the agencies attributed the decision to an inability to agree on terms....

1. Protests on new genes and seeds grow more passionate in Europe, by Donald McNeil, NYT, front page.
   ...British newspapers routinely call ingredients from genetically altered plants "Frankenfood," and pollsters say just 1% of Britons think that genetically modifying plants has any value at all. Environmental advocates in Europe have destroyed fields of test plants.... Legally, the European Union requires labels on any food with 1% or more of genetically modified ingredients. Planting, importing or selling genetically altered seeds or foods has virtually stopped, because farmers will not plant the seeds, consumers will not buy the foods, and stores decline to stock them....
   [Thank God somebody has some sense and a loooong-term view!]

2. [Here's a BGO (blinding glimpse of the obvious) that we have long advocated -]
   Needed in 2000...[Job description for Presidency], letter to editor by William Vaughan Jr. of Chebeague Is., Me., NYT, A28.
   Frank Rich points out that those of us voting in the November elections don't really have a choice, given the similarity between the candidates (column, March 11). Perhaps this country needs a different approach to choosing who will head the government. In business and education, for example, a job description is generated, and then someone who best fits [it] is hired. And, if necessary, subsequently fired. Rather than voting for a particular person, perhaps we should be voting for particular [qualifications], which in turn would go toward making up a job description of someone who actually reflects what we as a nation desire.
   [Hear, hear!]

3. Educating the rich, letter to the editor by Abby Pratt of NYC, NYT, A28.
   Re "Teaching Johhny values where money is king" (front page, March 10):
   The best cure for rich parents worrying about their children's unreality is a family trip - and I don't mean a 1st class safari - to the Third World. Or better yet, a stint as an exchange student or a Peace Corps volunteer.
   Anyone who has spent time in a village in Africa, Asia or South America - or a ghetto in the U.S. - and has witnessed the hardships that ordinary people endure would never be able to stomach spending hundreds of dollars on dinner or a piece of clothing, much less 10,000s for a car.
   Not that we "haves" should forgo all of the advantages in life to atone for our wealth.... But young people who have rubbed elbows with the "other half" are much more likely to grasp the value of a buck.... [Our prescription, of course, is systemic, not random and individual. Our prescription systemically centrifuges the work, skills, income and wealth via Timesizing.]

1. ["Good, but..." Dept.]
   Gore to embrace campaign finance as central theme
   [But isn't this a "Physician, heal thyself!" scenario?]
   - Acts on vulnerability [of Bush]
   [But then there are the recent disclosures about Janet Reno's suppression of investigations of Gore's own vulnerability.]
   - VP offers bluntest condemnation of Bush as beholden to his donors, by Berke and Seelye, NYT, front page.
   [But "let him that is without sin cast the first stone."]
   CHICAGO - In an audacious attempt to turn one of his greatest vulnerablities into an asset, Vice President Al Gore said [yester]day that he would make overhauling the campaign finance system a central theme of his presidential bid. He brushed aside fresh questions about his own conduct in raising money, insisting that he had learned from his mistakes and was seizing the issue with the passion of a convert....
   [But there's nothing quite so unreliable as "the passion of a convert."]

2. [1 weekend UNtakeover]
   Aetna fends off a takeover offer and plans a split - Price is called too low..., by Milt Freudenheim, NYT, front page.
   Struggling to keep control of its business, Aetna Inc., the nation's largest health insurer, yesterday rejected a $9.9B takeover offer [from Calif.-based Wellpoint Health Networks and Dutch-based ING Group] and announced plans to split the 147-year-old companyy into independent health care and financial services companies this year. Each new company would have its own stock. Aetna also said it would sell some of its overseas health care units and use the money to reduce debt and buy back stock later this year....

• Chairman of Amazon urges reduction of patent terms - Should the long protection for older inventions apply to new technology? - Bezos suggests 3 to 5 years, instead of 20, by Matt Richtel, NYT, B4.
  ...and to require a period for public comment on patent applications in [software and Internet business models] before they are granted....

• Canadian joblessness at 24-year low , by Timothy Pritchard, NYT, B2.
  Canada's unemployment rate was unchanged at 6.8% in February, holding at the lowest level since 1976, Statistics Canada reported.
  [Impressive would be if it was at a 48-year low, back when 2% unemployment was viewed with alarm.]
  Although the economy added 35,700 new jobs, roughly the same number of people entered the workforce.
  [Time to smarten up and start work-sharing on a dynamic basis.]

1. New Coke chief says diversity is high priority, by Constance Hays, NYT, C2.
   In a striking move intended to counter accusations that the Coca-Cola Co. has not cared enough about building a diverse work force, Coke's chairman and CEO said yesterday that management compensation at the company, including his own, would be closely tied to diversity goals that have yet to be announced.
   [Hey, anything that includes CEOs with the rest of the human race....]
   "What gets measured gets done," said...Douglas N. Daft, who was elevated dto Coke's top job last month.
   [It will be interesting to see how they design these incentives. Here's hoping they aren't just "daft."]
   ...A company spokesman...said diversity would "include, but be limited to, race, gender, lifestyle, national origin, age and religion".... Mr. Daft plans shortly to appoint a VP for diversity strategies.... A possible candidate is Ingrid S. Jones, a VP who is black and who has [already] served on committees trying to improve Coke's diversity....
   [When are we going to get beyond being a society that employs so many minority people on the "business" of being minorities? Only a much more general, measurable and enforceable integrating mechanism, such as Timesizing, can get us beyond this rather pathetic stage. Timesizing would get us beyond the increasingly meaningless diversity-integrator, wealth-centrifuge of "one person, one vote," to "one person, one set of market-demanded skills and one range of market-demanded employment."]

2. ["Good, but...." Dept.]
   G.O.P. leaders back plan to help abandoned babies, by Winnie Hu, NYT, A19.
   Desperate parents who do not want their newborn babies would be allowed to abandon them at hospitals or other safe places without fear of criminal prosecution under legislation endorsed yesterday by Republican leaders in the [NY] State Senate. The Republicans said the proposal was intended to address the growing problem of infants who are left to die every year in dumpsters, bathrooms and other...hiding places. Under [current] state law...child abandonment [is] a felony. The proposal comes at a time when nearly two dozen states have introduced such legislation.
   ["Good, but..." the fact that there is a need for this in the first place shows America has taken another huge step down into the Third World. Let's face it. We're a split society and we've completely lost it. We chant "More immigrants! More immigrants!" and we're far from taking care of the millions already here. Our politics and economics are back in the 19th century and are sliding us further back - into the Dark Ages. What a way to enter the Third Millennium! What would a really fair, balanced and sustainable 21st-century economic design look like, with all the essential core features and none of the airy rhetoric? How could we transition toward it, and when we're ready, beyond it? Timesizing, Not Downsizing.]

• Economic scene - Is the relationship between inflation and unemployment a curve or more of an economics knuckleball?, by J. Bradford DeLong, NYT, C2.
  Whatever happened to the Phillips curve?... For more than 25 years mainstream economists' forecasts have rested on the idea that should unemployment fall below an unknown (but very real) level called the natural rate of unemployment [alias the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment or NAIRU], then inflation would start to rise. And [it] would keep rising...until unemployment climbed back to or above its natural rate.
  [This is one of the biggest pieces of linguistic damage (among many) that standard economists have inflicted on the economies they supposedly nurture - calling any level of unemployment "natural." What a pathetically unimaginative and self-justifying lot they are.]
  Today, however, the Phillips curve is missing. All of a sudden, economists are a lot less useful as forecasters. For as it stands now, economists' forecasts of economic growth, unemployment and inflation are no longer projections based on [ed: superficial] historical patterns but, instead, pure guesses...about when, how and if the Phillips curve will return. If economists are to be of any use for forecasting, they need to come up with a better - and probably more complex - theory about inflation.
  [Here's our theory, straight from the worktime economics of Timesizing Assocs and the Timesizing.com Party. Inflation is Nature's way of reducing the value of stored money and enhancing the value of circulating money - as long as it's not manipulated into uncontrolled inflation ("hyperinflation") as it was by the monster Stinnes in the early 1920s in Germany. Let's put that another way. Suppose, with Cantillon, that income comes from 3 sources: wages, profit, and interest, and these represent the 3 major classes in society. Profit feeds on wages (insofar as they get spent on purchases), and interest feeds on profit. The upper class lives on the unearned income of interest. The mid-class in our simplified model lives on profit from sales of products and services. And the lower class lives on wages (including the "blank check on your life" wage called "salary") from making the products and performing the services. Moderate inflation moves value down from the upper class to the mid class and from the mid class to the lower class. It tends to equalize the share per person in the largest sense. If we were running a Monopoly game that needed to end, we wouldn't need to have some running method of equalizing share per person. The game ends when one person gets all the money. Fine. But what if we need the game to continue indefinitely? We need to keep our sports leagues together, year after year, so we reset "Games Won" by each team to zero at the beginning of each season. If we didn't, League would split apart as some teams' cumulative scores went into the stratosphere and others didn't. No suspense, no game. However, in our present primitive state of economic theory, there are many economists who want no reset. No way to centrifuge wealth. No inheritance laws. No graduated income tax. Just let'er rip - laissez faire, laissez passez. They assume that any necessary balancing or centrifugation will happen automatically, as by some 'invisible hand.' But one big part of the invisible hand in recent years has been moderate inflation. But economists are paid by the wealthy and they don't want shares equalized because that would reduce the holdings of their patrons, so they abandon their laissez faire idea and start fighting inflation. Instead of inflation being seen as a natural balancing process, they see it as a Bad Thing in every way, shape or form. They bemoan the widening income gap, but just let wages start to go up and these economists start warning about the dangers of inflation - never mind how the income gap is going to get narrowed if wages continue to stagnate or sag. And of course, they don't even notice the inflation in our population of disabled, homeless, incarcerated, or the inflation in our Internet stocks as the upper class gets SOOOO much money from technological time savings, taken as downsizing instead of workweek reduction, that they absolutely have nowhere else to put it - it's far too much for them to spend in many lifetimes.
  [So we see inflation as a natural process, not unemployment. In an integrating (not disintegrating like ours) economy, inflation has many components and unemployment is the largest and most actionable one of them, because you're paying people for standing in unemployment lines, and naturally that dilutes the value of the currency - more currency around than products&services because the unemployed are getting money without exchanging something for it. So prices go up.
  [Better to have well-paying on-the-job training (OJT) pervading the economy than unemployment insurance. Today the theory behind huge downsizings is that the downsized can just jump into an equally good or better job. In fact, this is only true in Silicon Valley & its satellites. Because nobody's doing any training. The real key to training is to automatically convert overtime into training, wherever it appears. The OT to OJT connection. Now that everybody in America has forgotten that the 40-hour week is a maximum so that no salary can cover any more hours per week than that, it is in every employer's short-term self-interest to push salaried people into as much overtime as possible, because the employer is actually getting free work. Never mind that unpaid work is technically slavery.
  [So in many ways, large among them the fighting of wage raises as Bad Inflation, mainstream economists are building fences across the San Andreas Fault. They may slow down the adjustment slightly, but that just means that when it comes, it will be bigger and more destructive.]
  ...Economists began spinning theories of what had caused the "natural rate" [ed: of unemployment - our quotes] to fall...[doing] a better of matching workers needing jobs to vacancies...faster productivity growth that allowed wage increases to be consistent with relative price stability...workers' fears for their jobs generated by the memory of the recession and wide-spread layoffs of the early 1990s.
  [Funny how he assumes that layoffs are down - 1998 was an all-time record and 1999 was only slightly lower. Funny how he puts the real reason last. We have a huge global labor glut that has so spoiled our employers that they assume they don't have to do any training and so we have acute spot skill shortages, especially in high tech, which somehow get sloppily referred to as "labor" shortages. The lag in rehiring is lengthening, and each new job tends to be lower-wage than its predecessor. Or maybe just part time, with no benefits.]
  ...Truth be told, the Phillips curve has not worked well outside America.... Elsewhere, the causes of inflation have always been too comples to be summarized by simply comparing unemployment to even a semistable "natural rate." Thus...perhaps the surprising thing is that the complicated economic processes determining changes in inflation could be summarized for so long by such a simple relationshipo as the standard Phillips curve. In any event, it is now clear that the simply theory of the [seesaw] relation between inflation and unemployment that economists have peddled for a quarter-century no longer works. If economists are to be of any use, they need to come up with a better - and in all likelihood more sophisticated - approach to understanding why inflation rises.
  [And Timesizing controls inflation by setting a real maximum on work per person whether at the 40-hour level or some lower level that would absorb all underemployed and chronically dependent people. We're talking about a thorough work sharing program here, and when people feel that they're shares are roughly equal, they don't envy one another and start wanting more - the root of inflation. In fact, Timesizing balances inflationary money motive below the 40-hour (or whatever) level with deflationary inherent incentive above the 40-hour level - because the only people it allows to work overtime are those who so love their job that they're willing to reinvest their overtime earnings in training and hiring. Urgently market-demanded human employment, in an age of escalating robotization, is now every nation's most precious vanishing resource. Up to the 40-hr level you can be a consumer of this precious resource, but over 40 if you keep working, you must shift gears and become a producer of this precious resource. No work hogging. No overtime alone.]

1. Business leaders urge steps to close the 'digital divide', by Diane Lewis, Boston Globe, D6.
   Technological advanc ements and an ongoing labor shortage in the high-tech field [ed: a field-specific "labor" shortage would make it a SKILLS shortage, Diane - let's quit abusing the language and misleading ourselves!] are widening the nation's "digital divide," experts said yesterday...during a hearing at Northeastern University...called "Bridging the Workforce Digital Divide"...sponsored by the 21st Century Workforce Commission..\..
   [And technological advancements in and of themselves aren't widening the divide - the way we treat them is. We've been using technology to downsize the workforce and overburden the survivors, instead of making the whole workforce's job easier and automating continuous training and hiring in skill areas under pressure. Timesizing takes care of this automatically by simply converting overtime into training and hiring. Timesizing designs overtime to target, trigger, finance, gauge and pace its own resolution. And once we finish with overtime on a corporate basis, we launch into overwork (overtime from all sources) on an individual basis. The new importance given to the incidence of overtime makes the whole solution maximally general and market-determined, far superior to the kind of "oh somebody else do it" solution always whined for by spoiled employers in today's flat-wage boom-for-the-rich, as here -]
   The solution will require business leaders to join with local schools and communities to find ways to train and educate Massachusetts' youth and unskilled residents....
   [Again, the attempt of the private sector to pass along the responsibility for training to the the public sectors and taxpayers. Of course, they're far too busy in the gogo world of financing IPOs and mergers to bother with doing any training themselves. Besides, they've got the workforce so cowed by downsizing that jobseekers are all too ready to pay for courses on their own, courses that still leave them behind the accelerating wave of technology and outside the job market. And the training budget, if anyone has one anymore, is still the first thing that gets cut in a crunch - it sure isn't executive pay. Even the flops have negotiated ironclad 'golden parachutes' - cushy fortunes they receive even if they ruin the company, like "Chainsaw Dunlap" & ilk. The only thing that's going to change this is to take Art Dahlberg's suggestion and stop running the economy on a shortage of jobs and business opportunities, and instead, reverse that, as it reverses during the legendary booms during wars and plagues, by running the economy on a shortage of job seekers - a real labor shortage and not just a loudly bemoaned skills shortage caused by spoiled employers drowning in resumes who can barely raise qualifications fast enough to keep whining about it. And the way to engineer this genuine labor shortage is to ration employee availability to the job market - by adjusting the workweek downward. We did it for 150 years and kept things roughly in balance. We didn't do it far enough, fast enough, after the Great War (World War I) so we got the Great Depression. But "luckily" World War II came along soon enough to ration employee availability to the job market on an unprecented scale (by killing and maiming while blocking immigration and conception) and spoiled by the wonderful economic benefit of the war, we completely froze the workweek at the 1940 level and have left it there ever since. Wow, aren't we modern! We have totally blocked the dream of centuries, - more free time. Timesizing does what war does without the killing - and it points on to further areas for balancing after we've mined employment-balancing for all it can offer.]

2. Productivity in 4th quarter revised higher, Bloomberg via NYT, C5.
   ...Output for each hour worked rose at a revised [from 5%] annual rate of 6.4% in the period, up from 5% in the third quarter \and\ the fastest pace in seven years....
   [So if wages corelate to productivity, WHERE ARE THE RAISES? On the contrary -]
   ...and labor costs fell for the second consecutive quarter, the Labor Dept. said today.
   [This is a big problem with our current primitive mixed-market capitalism: low productivity growth is always trotted out as an explanation for why wages haven't risen, but wages are never mentioned when high productivity is announced. Heads CEOs win, tails ordinary employees lose. This is a formula for under-consumption and depression. And it's already here in some sectors (agriculture, manufacturing). It remains only to spread enough to wake up the big boys and that probably requires bringing down the financial markets. Which raises the question: Is it any longer possible for the financial markets to collapse? With so much capital sloshing around, can Greenspan and Summers and their buds keep rushing in with trillion-dollar bailouts indefinitely, as they did in recent years for that huge busted hedge fund and the whole Asian-Latino currency debacle? As long as they can, they are going to delay the next generation of economic design, where the sine wave of the business cycle is a lot narrower and America moves beyond its homelessness-incarceration solution to under-employment and technological displacement.]

3. [Qiki #1]
   Report seeks big changes in I.M.F. and World Bank - A sharply divided panel says too much global aid is wasted, by Joseph Kahn, NYT, C4.
   ...IMF and WB should be radically shrunken and overhauled because they often do more harm than good in the developing world, a Congressional commission will recommend [today]. The commission...also asserts that both the IMF and the WB waste billions of dollars making loans to middle-income countries that could rely on private capital instead.... The institutions...often interfere too much in the domestic policy and even the politics of countries they seek to help and...they had generally failed to lead nations out of poverty....
   [Here is one Good Thing our Republican-led Congress is doing!]

4. [Qiki #2]
   Proposed rules on organic food lauded as world's 'strictest', by Philip Brasher, AP via Boston Globe, A3.

5. [Qiki #3]
   Colorado - Gun control measure signed by governor, AP via Bos Globe, A6.

6. [UNtakeover #1]
   Dime Bancorp board rejects North Fork [Bancorp $1.7B] takeover bid, Reuters via NYT, C4.
   ...saying the offer was inadequate and would result in huge layoffs and branch closings.
   [That's the good news - you don't often hear them expressing a moment's pause about layoffs. Now the bad news...]
   Dime is expected to step up its campaign to win shareholder support for a $1.3B pact with Hudson United Bancorp....

7. [UNtakeover #2]
   Ziff-Davis to spin off its [ZD Events] trade show business, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   [And the bad news -]
   ...as it prepares to merge with its Internet unit, ZDNet.... Ziff-Davis is...69% owned by the Softbank Corp.

8. [UNtakeover #3]
   RoweCom and NewsEdge take partnership over merger, Dow Jones via NYT, C4.
   [Or in the more informative Boston Globe version -]
   Stock woes, costs doom RoweCom-NewsEdge union, by Ross Kerber, Boston Globe, D3.

9. [UNtakeover #4]
   Deutsche Telekom ends bid to get Qwest and U S West, by Schiesel and Sorkin, NYT, C2.
   ...spooked by Qwest Communications International's apparently ironclad deal to acquire U S West Inc. [but now free to] focus its attention on Global Crossing Ltd....but [probably not willing] to pay the more than $70B that Global Crossing might demand....

10. [UNtakeover #5]
    Board hears wide opposition to U.S.-Canadian rail merger, by Anthony DePalma, NYT, C5.
    A bold [ed: but braindead] plan...to form the biggest network of tracks and trains in North American history ran into stiff opposition [yester]day from shippers, competing railroads and members of Congress who told regulators that the merger would cripple service and dampen competition. In an unusual day of hearings before the Surface Transportation Board...witnesses painted a gloomy picture of how the proposed merger of the Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway and the Canadian National Railway [CNR] would force the remaining large railroads in both countries into another round of consolidations. By the time such mergers ended, several witnesses predicted, only two national freight railroads would be left to serve the entire North American market.
    [And why not only ONE?]
    ...Many shippers, annoyed by long delays and costly mix-ups that continue to plague railroads in the U.S., have not embraced the merger proposal....
    [Wasn't it the merger of the Burlington Northern RR and the Santa Fe RR a couple of years ago that created the biggest freight traffic snarl "in North American history," and already these testosterone-poisoned clowns want to add insult to injury?!]
    "Our customers think we're nuts to start a new round of mergers today," said Richard K. Davidson, chief executive of the Union Pacific RR.
    [You are. You're completely out of your incompetent gourds.]
    Mr. Davidson and the executives of the four other so-called Class I North American railroads [CPR? Conrail, B&O? Union Pacific?] urged regulators to impose a moratorium on mergers for up to five years to give the industry and shippers a chance to digest the last round of consolidation....
    [How about a merger moratorium for eternity?!]

1. BP Amoco to cut sulphur levels in gasoline, NYT, A14.
   ...sharply by the end of 2002.... The Ford Motor Co. said the step would cut air pollution by up to half for cars burning [premium gasoline]....

2. The Greens - This time Nader promises a serious run for president, by Evelyn Nieves, NYT, A18.
   ...He plans to spread the Green Party message...environmental protection, an end to corporate welfare, and health care...for all.... ..."It is time to stand up to the rich and powerful corporate interests that dictate policy in this country"..\..said Mr. Nader, the founder of Public Citizen, the consumer advocacy group.... "Who else is talking about people before profits?" said Joe Mann, a...student at UCal/Berkeley....
   Mr. Nader seemed buoyed by the crowd \of\ more than 400 people...at a middle school auditorium.... He was also tickled by the response to his Web site. "It's *www.votenader.com," he offered. "We've got a great deal of response to it. The message of giving people power is not a marginalized message."

3. Boeing's brains develop brawn on picket line - Engineers resent not being offered a deal similar to the machinists' pact [e.g., 10% cash signing bonuses] - Members of the engineers' union at the Boeing plant near Seattle have been on strike for nearly five weeks, their first major act of defiance, by Sam Verhovek, NYT, A1, A20.
   TUKWILA, Wash. - The chants and placards along the picket lines outside the Boeing Company's jet plants are a bit unusual. "No nerds, no birds," proclaims one sign. And many Boeing engineers [are] on strike for the first time in their lives.... The increasingly bitter protest here by the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace has mushroomed into one of the largest strikes by white-collar workers against a private company in years. It is an unexpectedly fierce action by a group long considered a union in name only, whose sole act of defiance in its 56-year history was a one-day walkout in 1992....

1. [Wealthy "wrinkled radical" pleads for sanity against own short-term interest (but for own long-term interest) -]
   3/06 Making the rich richer - Social security checks for high-wage 68-year-olds, by Richard Rorty of Stanford faculty, NYT, A25.
   A few days ago I got a...letter from the Social Security Administration telling me that I was entitled to some $1600 a month, but that unfortunately I couldn't receive it because I was still earning a lot of money. Last week I opened the newspaper to find that the House of Representatives has voted unanimously to have the money sent to me anyway....
   I do not feel entitled to that money. Like a lot of other Americans who are 68, I am making a very good living. When I stop working, I will get a pension that ensures that I still live perfectly comfortably. I would like Congress to use the Social Security taxes I've paid over the last 45 years to promote the general welfare.
   [Radical! Arrest this man! He's mad, quite mad! An American who is actually concerned about the general welfare in the wake of the "Me" Decade of the '80s and the Go-go '90s.]
   That means leveling things out a bit so that my fellow 68-year-olds who could not go to college, and could not get nice, highly paid, white-collar jobs like mine will have a better chance at a reasonably comfortable old age. Congress could have sent the extra money it wants to send me and millions like me, to some of my fellow sexagenarians who do need it. These include all those arthritic 68-year-olds who are shelving groceries, or standing on their feet all day making change, for $7 an hour. They are doing this because their monthly Social Security payments will probably never rise above $1,000.
   Members of Congress know perfectly well that the rich have been getting steadily richers and the poor poorer - that Americans like me are getting a bigger and bigger share of the GNP whereas the people who clean the toilets in my office building are getting less and less of it. But this knowledge seems to have no influence on them whatever. They act as if promoting the general welfare meant promoting the interest of people who make more than $50,000 a year. As Nicholas von Hoffman has put it, we live under "government of the comfortable, by the comfortable, and for the comfortable."
   Once the boom stops, and the Silicon Valley bubble bursts, we can expect our elected representatives to take considerable pains to see that the comfortable remain comfortable, while letting the poor assume any burdens that must be borne. The man who puts in 8 hours a day making sandwiches at a cafeteria on the Stanford campus, and another 8 hours bringing glasses of ever fruitier cabernet and ever spicier chardonnay to us comfortably off folk in one of Palo Alto's better restaurants, will probably lose his second job, because many of the professionals in Silicon Valley will start drinking jug wine at home.
   This will mean that this man cannot move his kids into a school district where they might learn something, andthat they will never get properly educated. Our elected representatives can be expected to look with equanimity on this steady reinforcement of our present system of hereditary castes.
   President Clinton...is a decent and generous-spirited man [ed: at least at the end of his term, trying to make amends].... He could use his last year in office to speak out.... He could ask Congress to take the bill back and make it a little less absurd - a little more fair, a little less selfish.
   Our president has been good at political compromises, but unless he takes a few uncompromising stands before leaving office he will go down in history as having acquiesced in our nation's moral decline. This decline has nothing to do with our sexual mores. It has everything to do wtih our increasing willingness to let the rich take more and more from the poor.
   [Thank you, Richard Rorty, for this powerful op-ed.]

2. [Brunei government sues for sanity vs. royal spendthrift -]
   3/06 Brunei's glitter fades - Economic warning, royal lawsuit shake nation, by Indira Lakshamanan, Boston Globe, front page.
   ...After nearly 30 years of a petroleum-lulbricated free-for-all \during which\ the world's richest ruler [built] the world's largest palace, with plenty left over for free health care, free education, even free vacations for his loyal subjects...the party is over for Brunei, its psendthrift royalty and its coddled citizenry. In the most dramatic sign that the time has come to pay the piper, Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah's government filed suit late last month against his playboy younger brother, Prince Jefri Bolkiah. The state is demanding that the prince pay back what sources peg at more than $10 billion in public funds that he allegedly frittered away, buying himself luxury hotels and expensive jewelry....

3. 3/06 Do neo-Republicans know what they're getting into?, letter to the editor by Bennett Hammond, Boston Globe, A11.
   ...Open-minded Democrats have often admired a Republican candidate so much they forgot why they didn't register as Republicans in the first place. Now it seems that McCain-omania has some Democrats actually re-registering in order to vote in the Republican primary.
   [Well voters should be advised that in Massachusetts, independent voter status (dba "unenrolled" or "no party" - the Democrats have tried to make it sound as unattractive as possible) is by far the most flexible and powerful position for a voter to be in anyway. However, this Democrat does go on to make a powerful case against the GOP (though we suspect an almost equally powerful one could be made against our one-party "Democracy" here in Massachusetts).]
   ...Let me remind any sudden Republicans that membership in the GOP isn't about fiscal responsibility [ed: though it was in the days of Lincoln and TR]. It's about your relationship to your fellow human beings. Any Republican who is not deluded must believe
   • that market values are the bottom line, not human values;
   • that money alone is worth saving, not the spotted owl or anyone's job or neighborhood;
   • that the oceans and the forests are only worth the money that can be made from them [ed: except the "Green Elephants" - the Republicans for Environmental Protection - swimming strongly against the stream].
   • As a Republican, you must believe that serving the economy is the best you can do.
   • You'll learn to equate property with virtue and
   • to argue that giving anything to those who don't work for it is unfair to those who do. Luckily, you won't have to explain why it isn't fair when all the real money is made by the people who don't have to work for it.
   • As a Republican, you'll have to believe that a permanent underclass is necessary for prosperity.
   • Decently ashamed of this, you'll learn to justify the injustice on the pious grounds that helping the victims will actually be bad for them, robbing them of the incentive to save their own lives. Luckily, you won't have to explain why helping the rich doesn't seem to rob them of greed - I mean incentive.
   All in all, it's just too many impossible things for me to believe before breakfast.
   [A wonderful tour-de-force indictment of contemporary Republicans, Bennett - and you didn't even mention the Moral Majority and the Religious Right! We'll watch for one of contemporary Democrats, though we fear we'll have to write the really relevant one ourselves - to nail you for your obsolete liberal vision consisting of wads of ineffectual grocery lists of Good Causes, instead of just giving us all more free time and more money to take care of the all these individual improvements ourselves. You Dems have cooperated with the GOP in freezing the workweek for the last 60 years at the outdated 40-hour level and forcing us to compete ever more unequally with armies of robots, first in agriculture, then in manufacturing, now in services (like banking now that we have ATMs). You Democrats want control, you want to micromanage the solutions, the improvement process, the remedies, and for all your crocodile tears for the poor underclass, your visionless perpetuation of the 1940 workweek regardless of inrushing worksaving technology has guaranteed that we're all redundant, and those of us who still have full-time jobs are working 60 hours a week as we did in 1910, one third of them with no overtime pay. You sanctimonious, self-righteous, obsoletely 19th-century brained Democrats haven't even caught up with your own Depression-Era prophet, Senator Hugo Black (later, Supreme Court Judge) who pushed a 30-hour workweek bill through the U.S. Senate on April 6, 1933 by a vote of 53 to 30 (S. 5267). You still worship uncritically your beloved but very blind FDR who took one look at that bill, said "It isn't mine!", branded it "Socialism!" and proceeded to block it in the House, regretting it two years later when he found that what he'd actually embraced was more like socialism, because it was a burgeoning horde of detailed regulations instead of a stable minimum of generalized ones, essentially just one. The 30-hour bill wasn't perfect, but at least we could have been tinkering in the right garage for the last 60 years instead of wasting our time with fiddly Keynesian/New Deal socialism (soc sec, workman's comp, unemployment insurance, minimum wage, "protections" for unions, WPA, CCC, NRA, NIRA, TVA..., none of which cured even half the unemployment of the Depression until 1942 when the War geared up - meaning the War cured the Depression, not the New Deal. The work sharing of the 30-hour bill would have cured the Depression in one year, even faster than Hitler's immediately militarized version of the New Deal (2-3 years). You Democrats are ahead of the selfish simpletons in the GOP (except for the Republicans for Environmental Protection) but your "vision" has not evolved from an undelegated fistful of grocery lists of detailed fixes into a strategic Pert chart of essentially one new ground rule ( Timesizing) that would allow us to decontrol practically everything else and cut your huge "Democratic" bureaucracy, which at bottom, is just as money-drowned and corrupt as the Republicans, especially in one-party, Democratic-establishment states like Massachusetts.]

4. 3/05 Maine tree-cutting goes out on environmental limb, by Donna Gold, Boston Globe, D11.
   [But in this case, it's not a shaky one -]
   ...Maine's timber industry has been negotiating [a tricky course] recently under the bright light of environmental awareness. With 90% of Maine covered in forest, what happens in the woods is scrutinized. Just last week, the state announced that yet another petition drive to restrict clear-cutting has been approved for public vote in November. It will be the third such referendum in five years.
   But a new tool - the carrot-and-stick of economics - has emerged in this forest fray. And it may prove more influential than the club of legislation, which has so far failed at the ballot box. Last August, The Home Depot, the nation's largest buyer of lumber, announced that suppliers of wood from forests that are "envionmentally approved" would have the edge in getting contracts with the chain. Within weeks, Irving Woodlands LLC, Maine's largest landholder, expects to be first in Home Depot's "green." For the past year, Irving has been examining all of its practices - from how it cuts trees to how it pays loggers - and altering them to meet Home Depot's new standards.... Before the snow melts in its northern Maine woodlands, Irving hopes that a team of independent scientists will approve the changes it has made on one-third of its Maine land, a half-million acres. If so, it can begin stamping wood from these forests as "green".... "It's time for environmentalists to celebrate...," said Robert Seymour, a U Maine forestry professor and...member of the Irving assessment team. "I've been here over 20 years and this is by far the best thing that's ever happened to forestry"....
   [Thank you, Home Depot!]

1. ["Good news, but..." Dept.]
   New York's economy, through another lens, letter to editor by James Parrott of NY's Fiscal Policy Institute, NYT, A30.
   Re "Jobs data for 1999 paint a rosier picture for upstate New York" (news article, Mar.2):
   It may be a little premature for Gov. George E. Pataki to herald a turnaround of the upstate economy. At least 40% of the private job gain last year occurred in industries like retail and social services, where the average wages are 40% below the average for all workers in New York State (leaving aside Wall Street jobs where the pay is off the charts).
   With many of these new jobs paying about $25,000 a year, the state has a long way to go before it can make up for the 400,000 middle-income jobs that it has lost over the last decade.
   It is also puzzling that Mr. Pataki links job growth to his tax cuts, since more than [20%] of all jobs added last year occurred in sectors (health and social services and education) heavily affected by government spending.

2. Netdirect, Internet [electronics] retailer, ends takeover accord, Bloomberg via NYT, B3.
   The Netdirect Corp. International...said yesterday that its board had decided to terminate a [$175m Dec.] agreement to be acquired by Compositech Ltd. because of a change in strategy....

1. A governor would give every student a laptop, NYT, A12.
   Gov. Angus King of Maine announced a plan [yester]day to give every seventh grader in the state a laptop computer, to use at school or at home. Under the plan, the first such statewide initiative, about 17,000 students a year would receive computers as well as Internet service, beginning in fall 2002. Within six years, all Maine students above the sixth grade would have laptops that would be their to keep. The governor said his goal was to bridge the "digital divide" between students who have computers at home and those who do not....

2. Advertising - In a shift, DoubleClick puts off its plan for wider use of the personal data of Internet consumers, by Bob Tedeschi, NYT, C5.
   Yielding to pressure from privacy advocates and Wall Street, DoubleClick Inc., the nation's largest online advertising company, said yesterday that it would put a hold on its plant to link personal information to anonymous data it collects about consumers on the Internet.... Said Kevin O'Connor, DoubleClick's CEO, "It was wrong to try to match that information in the absence of government or industry standards, so until there's agreement on it, we will not"....

3. [1 UNtakeover]
   Lear announces stock buyback and a takeover defense, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.

4. [1 UPsizing]
   Petsmart Inc., NYT, C4.
   ...Phoenix, the largest United States retailer of pet supplies, said it planned to open 50 stores this year.
   [Well, that should create a few low-wage jobs.]

1. Stock of company in big Hong Kong deal is sharply lower, by Mark Landler, NYT, C4.
   [Yegads! a flash of sanity in the stock markets?!]

2. A 'moral meltdown'?  letter to the editor from Tom Martillotti of NYC, NYT, A26.
   Re "The religious right is not a burden" (op ed, Feb. 29):
   I believe that what Gary L. Bauer and many other Americans refer to as the "moral meltdown" in this country is rather a moral diversification.
   In the last century, this country has undergone profound changes, both in social structure and, more impressively, in the variety of its [citizens'] heritage. Yet some, including Mr. Bauer, see this as nothing more than a moral failure.
   The morals of a time are and always have been subject to change. They are a reflection of the character of the people and the times we live in. Those who see our society's moral agenda as a stagnant entity lack a sense of vision or foresight....
   [We are entering the Ecological Age - the age of natural limits. We are shifting from the utopian Ricardian economics of "no limits" to the realistic Malthusian economics of limits, whether cruel or gentle, and beyond that, to the more empowering Sismondian economics where we design our own limits to be gentle. Ecology determines that we shift from quantity to quality, a particularly difficult shift when we're talking about "from quantity to quality of human life." Part of this is the change in our basic social unit from the reproductive pair to the productive individual, and hopefully beyond that, from the procreative couple to the creative individual....]

3. [UNtakeover #1]
   Defensive measures, by Alan Cowell, NYT, C4.
   Fighting a hostile $165m bid from the Sara Lee Corp., Courtaulds Textiles PLC of Britain said it would return more than $79m to shareholders. The move pushed its stock up by as much as 9%....

4. [UNtakeover #2]
   Lucent to spin off slower-growing units - A company will focus on sales to telecommunications providers, by Lawrence Fisher, NYT, C2.
   Lucent Technologies said yesterday that it would spin off three units, creating a new company that would have about $8B in revenue and would sell business telephone systems, wire cabling and office network systems....

1. French jobless rate improves, Bridge News via NYT, C4.
   ...to 10.5% in Jan., its lowest level since Sept. 1992.... The number of jobseekers declined by 28,000 to 2,711,000 in Jan.... In the 12 months through Jan., the unemployment rate fell nearly 10%.
   [Probably because the government offered incentives to induce companies to adopt the new maximum workweek in advance of the deadline of Jan. 1, 2000 (which was then postponed to Feb. 1).]

2. [1 UNtakeover]
   Mirage rejects [$3.3B] takeover bid by MGM Grand, by Andrew Pollack, NYT, C11.
   ...as inadequate and opportunistic, and it put in place a "poison pill" takeover defense....