Timesizing® Associates

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

3/31/2000 glimmers of hope -

1. [One sighted man in the land of the blind -]
   Modigliani's message: It's a bubble, and bubbles will burst,
   by Floyd Norris, NYT, C1.
   Franco Modigliani says that the current mania for Internet and other technology stocks is not irrational. But it is a bubble, and it will burst. "I can show, really precisely, that there are two warranted [i.e., rational - ed.] prices for a share," Dr. Modigliani said in a telephone interview. The one he prefers is based on such fundamentals as earnings and growth rates. But, he added, "The bubble [price] is rational in a certain sense." The expectation of growth "produces the growth, which confirms the expectation; people will buy it because it went up."
   [= the classic self-fulfilling prophecy dba pyramid scheme.]
   The trouble, he said, is that the bubble price is naturally unstable. It can keep rising only so long as expectations keep growing. "But once you are convinced it is not growing any more, nobody wants to hold a stock because it is overvalued. Everybody wants to get out and it collapses, [even falling below] the fundamental [price]."
   Dr. Modigliani knows something about the fundamentals.... He won the Nobel...Prize in economics in 1985 in part because of his pioneering work in just what those fundamentals are.
   [He'd get along well with Julian Robertson in the story right above this on p.C1, "The end of the game" (3/31/2000). Robertson was essentially a stock fundamentalist too. Modigliani signed Phil Hyde's nomination papers at the Belmont SuperStar Market in Feb/98 when Phil was running against Joe Kennedy in the 8th Mass' Congressional District the second time (Joe resigned the following month). Hendrik Houthakker signed in Feb/98 too (at the Mt. Auburn Star Market in Cambridge). Are there any other congressional districts in the land where you can get the signatures of two Nobel-winning economists without even trying? At the time, Modigliani was surprised that Phil recognized his name. As is his wont with people bearing Italian names, Phil thanked Modigliani in Italian.]
   One of his insights...was that the value of a company's securities, including stocks and bonds, should be based on expected future profiits, discounted by an appropriate interest rate. That applies also to the market as a whole. By that light...Dr. Modigliani argues that it is impossible for the economy to grow as fast as \the\ huge price-earnings ratios [of the current] market seem to be forecasting, even if some companies will do very well. "You cannot believe that corporate earnings will rise forever at 7% [p.a.]," he said. Eventually, "the entire national income [would] be taken by profits."
   [This may be an elliptical way of making our point that in the further stages of wealth concentration within an economy, the density of the accumulation tends to reduce the consumer base and suction away the markets supporting its own mega investments (if there were any in the first place).]
   Such calculations can be ignored when investors think they see a bright new era arriving, as happened in the 1920's with broadcasting and is happening now with the Internet....
   At his only previous address to..\..the Boston Security Analysts Society...in 1976, he mocked Wall Street for undervaluing stocks. [But now] he thinks the Dow Jones industrials could fall to 8,000 or 9,000, but that technology stocks are far more vulnerable. "In the case of the Internet, it is so hard to establish fundamentals, to understand how much is a bubble.... In my view, it is very much a bubble." And then? "There is no bubble that quietly deflates. A bubble by its nature will burst....
   [We have switched terms/metaphors from "burst" or "crash" to "fragment", because when you look at the charts in 1929, it really was an exceedingly volatile rollercoaster, not smooth up and smooth down.]
   "...I don't know when."
   [That, of course, is The Problem.]
   But it will happen, and the pain will be greater if the bubble has grown. He says the Federal Reserve is right to raise interest rates, but may be moving too slowly.
   [Hey, maybe they're right not to raise margin requirements too, because that would delay the bubbleburst - or would it have no effect on timing and just make the burst less violent when it occurs?]
   It's not hard to find money managers who will privately admit they are petrified but fully invested. Most of them studied Dr. Modigliani's work in business school. Most have also seen peers who did not buy the hot new stocks lose their jobs.
   [Yeah, like Julian Robertson of Tiger Mgmt in the article directly above this one called "The end of the game" (3/31/2000).]
   Their nervousness increases with the market's volatility.
   [And as mentioned, the charts for summer-fall 1929 show bigtime volatility.]
   With yesterday's rout, the Nasdaq composite has suffered back-to-back declines of more than 3% a day for the first time since the 1987 crash.
   Dr. Modigliani began selling [his own] stocks about a year ago, and has no apologies.
   [He held a lot longer than us, our friend Rob, or for that matter, Alan Greenspan.]
   "The only people who did well in 1929 were those who sold too soon," he said.
   [Great line! And followed by a truly stoical humility and Buddha-like disclaimer -]
   "The final test will be if the collapse comes. It it doesn't come, I'm wrong."
   [And out of the market like us, he's in a position to not care - about himself personally. The many money managers still in - and on tenterhooks - aren't.
   [Our prescription, rather than just sitting around & waiting for trouble, is to gett busy on 2 fronts - increasing the solidity of the bubble on the bottom and reducing its inflation on the top. We do this by strengthening the wealth-centrifuging mechanisms in our economy and weakening the wealth-concentrating ones - which have left the beneficiary top income brackets with nowhere to put their astronomical lucre except into further inflating our already humungous stock bubble and further corrupting our already cosmetic democracy.
   [We solidify with a design for an intuitive, highly functional mechanism to give us what we should have had all along the path of accelerating technological innovation - a continuous (re)training system built efficiently right into the workplace and market-oriented. We do this by using the incidence of overtime to target, trigger, size, pace, and fund the on-site training and hiring. (This is in Phase 2 & Phase 3 of our Timesizing.com program.)
   [We centrifuge now-wasted spending power from the huge Wall Street bubble - into wages for a huge now-deactivated addition to our consumer base - by gradually re-adjusting the amount of overtime (and the consequent jump in training and hiring) according to the number of would-be consumers represented, for example, by our record homelessness and incarceration. In short, we vary the workweek inversely with unemployment - not in our current rosy definition, looser than any nation except So. Korea, but returning to counting part-time as only part-time (not as FTEs) and now including welfare, disability, homelessness, incarceration, and any of the other victims of private-sector problem "externalization." This spreads the vanishing market-demanded human employment and skills onto everyone instead them to concentrate on ever-fewer (not to mention the wealth) and solves the increasingly dangerous Ford-Reuther paradox (Ford: "Let's see you unionize these robots"; Reuther, "Let's see you sell them cars." ) This is in Phase 4 and Phase 1 of our Timesizing.com program. Full details in our handbook, Timesizing, Not Downsizing.]

2. Senate OK's coverage of contraceptives, by John McElhenny, Boston Globe, B2.
   Insurance companies in Massachusetts would be required to pay for birth control pills and other contraceptives under a bill passed by the state Senate yesterday. The proposal would require insurers that already paya for prescription drugs to also pay for women's contraceptive drugs and devices, including diaphragms, intra-uterine devices, and implantable devices such as Norplant.
   Supporters had argued that women were paying for contraceptives out of their own pockets while many insurance companies paid for men to get the anti-impotence drug Viagra....
   [Another tiny area of the planet takes another tiny step into the 21st century.]

1. Ukraine: closing Chernobyl, AP via NYT, A8.
   The government decided to close down the Chernobyl nuclear power plant by the end of this year, as Western countries have long demanded....
   ["Requested" would probably have gotten them faster satisfaction.]
   The plant [was] the site of the world's worst nuclear accident.

2. UST ordered to pay $1.05b in suit - Conn. firm accused of violating antitrust laws, Bloomberg via Boston Globe, E3.
   GREENWICH, Conn. - ...The number one seller of chewing tobacco was ordered by a Kentucky federal judge to pay $1.05B to competitor Conwood Co. for violating antitrust laws in promoting Skoal and Copenhagen moist snuff brands....
   [Antitrust nails a little chewing tobacco firm and lets Fleet and BankBoston slip through? What was it Jesus said about blind guides "which strain out a gnat and swallow a camel" (Matt. 23:24)? What cowards.]

3. [The workforce in the Boston area is slightly less desperate, but we now get more whining by employers spoiled by the previously more desperate workforce.]
   Temp agencies find labor pool evaporating, by Michael Crowley, Boston Globe, front page.
   How tight is the labor market in Boston?... For the past several weeks, Franklin Pierce [Temporaries] recruiters have been methodically plowing throught the Boston Are White pages, cold-calling everyone in the city with a listed phone number. Their question: Are you or anyone you know looking for work? "You've got to be creative nowadays, and try everything," said Dave La Fauci, Franklin Pierce's VP.... With the state's unemployment rate hovering around 3% for the past few months, employers throughout the city and across the state have been strapped to fill new jobs created by the economic boom. Temporary agencies say their once-reliable pool of people seeking short-term work are drying up, and the response to traditional newspaper and magazine advertisements has dropped significantly.
   [It's been sooo easy for them that now that the narrowly funneled 'boom' has created a reduction in desperate jobseekers in the Boston area, spoiled and lazy employers are squealing loudly.]
   Increasingly, they say, they must resort to financial incentives...
   [Oh noooooooo, not "financial incentives"! Not actually paying people good wages for a change! Oh nooooooooooooo.]
   ...and innovative recruiting techniques to recruit people they need.
   [How about dropping into the Pine Street Inn and training & hiring some of our record homeless population - or some of our record prison and jail population? Too tough? How about some of 17% unemployed in high tech - over age 50?]
   "In the past, for any job you would advertise, you would seven or eight responses," said Stephen Flynn, owner of ComForce temp agency in Boston. "Now if you get one or two, you feel very fortunate...."
   [Oh life is tough when the scales are even slightly more level instead of functionally absolute power in the job market for employers!]
   ComForce has begun putting flyers on parked cars...and is devoting new energies to job fairs as well as the Internet. But Flynn said that strong recruiting isn't enough. Referral bonuses at ComForce that once peaked at $100 now run as high as $500. And the company is offering benefits, paid vacations, and holidays to some of its longer-term employees.
   [Oh no, not financial incentives, benefits, and vacations? How drastic. Poor Flynn. But how long is "longer-term" to get these goodies? In Europe they're standard right at the gitgo. And what else is all our miraculous technology for if not to make our lives easier and more pleasant?]
   Wages are up too, by as much as 15-20% over the past few years, according to temp agency executives.
   [Of course, with the ongoing hardware and software revolution, productivity is up thousands of percent - but that windfall is all going to the top income brackets. And besides, "it is difficult to quantify."]
   La Fauci said basic receptionist jobs that until recently paid between $9 and $10 per hour now pay $11-12 an hour. "That's just phones," he said....
   [You mean somebody still uses human telephone receptionists?!]
   Flynn added that data-entry jobs that paid as little as $7 an hour in the late 1990s now offer up to $10 per hour. "There is definitely a shortage," said Jeanne Fiol...president of the temp...division at KNF&T Staffing.... Fiol said staffing problems are especially acute in positions that require employees with more than the most basic skills. "There just aren't enough qualified computer-literate candidates to go around," Fiol said....
   [Ooops, better get some more visas to bring them over from India. God forbid we should ever TRAIN our own people. Today's employers have never had to train. It never even occurs to them.]
   Fiol said [rather than scouring the phonebook] she preferred to boost advertising budgets and spend more time surfing job-seeker Web sites such as monster.com, a resume repository that has become a temp-agency favorite.... "There's high competition among my competitors," [La Fauci] said. "Everyone in the world has this problem right now."
   [No, just everyone in Silicon Valley and its satellites. And why? Because our consumer base, battered by 20 years of downsizing, isn't a fraction of what it should be - all the income and wealth are in the top brackets where those who have it can't use it because there's just far far too much of it. We run on a starving-market shortage of jobs and business opportunities instead of a shortage of labor - which we really approach only during and after wars and plagues, like 1918-28 and 1942-67. But insofar as there is a slightly reduced labor glut in the Boston area today, that indeed is good news for the economy, because it centrifuges wealth and reverses the widening income gap.]

• Japan pulls license of atomic plant, AP via Boston Globe, A21.
  TOKYO - The government revoked the license yesterday of a uranium processing plant for causing Japan's worst nuclear accident, in which one worker was killed and two others made seriously ill.... The death was the first ever in a nuclear accident in the country..\.. More than 400 residents were exposed to radiation on Sept. 30, 1999, at the JCO Co. plant in Tokaimura, about 70 mi. northeast of Tokyo....
  [This is a technology that is appropriate only on the surface of stars and larger objects, not on the surface of small green planets. Let's phase it out.]

• Profit sharing set by airline, Bloomberg via NYT, C13.
  The Southwest Airlines Co., the largest low-fare carrier, said this week that it would pay a record $138.3m in profit sharing for last year, with the average payout growing to 14.1% of salary.... The money is put in a tax-deferred savings plan, with investment options that include buying Southwest stock..\..
  Southwest bases the plan on pretax profit and includes each employee who worked at least 1000 hours during the year..\.. For 1999, 25,119 of Southwest's 29,000 employees will get profit-sharing payments, the Dallas-based company said. The per-employee average works out to $5,507.... In 1998, Southwest paid $120.7m in profit sharing, or 13.7% of annual salary....

• Million Mom crusade - Jarred by violence, women to march for gun control, by Mary Leonard, Boston Globe, front page.
  [Last eve NRA chief, actor Charlton Heston spoke at Brandeis U. in Waltham, a suburb of Boston ("High-profile activist," Bos Globe, B1. And right next to that photo caption, we read "4 murders in 72 hours puts city's toll at 9...almost all unfolding in sprays of gunfire - have suddenly pushed the number of homicides in Boston to more than twice the number at this time last year," by Francie Latour.]
  WASHINGTON - ...At a day camp in Granada Hills, Calif., Donna Dees-Thomases was so shaken last August by the televised images of those little children, hand in hand, being led from the Jewish Community Center where a gunman with a semiautomatic weapon shot and wounded five people, including four youngsters, that she hatched the idea for a Million Mom March for gun control on Mother's Day in Washington. The goal...is to send Congress the message that women stand together for stronger national gun-control laws.... Fashioned after the Million Man March that bonded black men, the Million Mom March is expected to be the nation's first large-scale demonstration against guns....
  [Boy, it sure took a lot of incidents to hatch this idea. Guess it's like Churchill said - America is like a sleeping lion - takes a long time to wake him up but once he's awake, watch out!]

• A Senate candidate [former N.J. Gov. Jim Florio] runs against the 'boom' [our quotes - ed.], by David Kocieniewski, NYT, front page.
  ...In New Jersey's U.S. Senate contest...a convergence of unusual circumstances has transformed the Democratic primary into a race that has put the economic 'boom' on trial [our quotes - ed.]. Jon S. Corzine, the former co-chairman of Goldman, Sachs & Co., has swathed himself in the flag of prosperity, asserting that his work on Wall Street helped New Jersey companies create and retain hundreds of thousands of jobs. If elected to the Senate, Mr. Corzine says, he will use his business acumen to spread that wealth to the poor by offering a banquet of expansive social programs [such as] an urban redevelopment bank to encourage business growth in inner cities and...bountiful subsidies for health care, preschool, long-term care and college education [i.e., let the center stay unbalanced but keep trying to balance the sides - let the income gap keep widening but expand government's role as the discretionary, money-flinging charity of last resort - ed.]..\..
  Those arguments have prompted his opponent, former Gov. Jim Florio, to warn voters that a dark cloud has been obscured by the economic silver lining.... He has accused Wall Street titans of raking in billions in profits at the expense of poor and working-class Americans, and has blamed Goldman, Sachs for underwriting corporate mergers that cost more than 75,000 Americans their jobs under Mr. Corzine's leadership.... "Every week, you hear stories about economic disparities in this boom period, with more and more people in the top end doing better and better and people in the lower end doing worse in terms of purchasing power," Mr. Florio said.
  At the heart of the [debate] are two starkly different visions of the economy and the Democratic Party. Mr. Corzine...is convinced that the economic expansion [ie: Internet stock bubble - ed.] has brought benefits to enough people that his Wall Street resume will inspire confidence in working-class voters [never mind our record homelessness and incarceration - ed.]. Mr. Florio believes that the Democratic Party's traditional base in New Jersey - factory workers, union stewards, minimum-wage employees and retirees - is inherently wary of the rich....
  Candidates like Hillary Rodham Clinton have occasionally suggested that some pockets of the country, like upstate New York, have not shared equally in the boom. [How about "Only some pockets of the country, like Wall Street and Silicon Valley, have experienced a boom at all - the rest of the economy is flat"! - ed.] But no one has critiqued the economy's performance as directly, or as harshly, as Mr. Florio, said Larry Sabato, a political science professor at the University of Virginia. [New Jersey's] per capita income - $35,559 in 1998 - is the second-highest in the nation. [But that income is highly concentrated and there is a worsening income gap -] Mr. Florio cited several studies that show the gap between New Jersey's rich and poor widening..\.. What has emerged is a series of increasingly heated disagreements about economic disparity and the corrosive power of wealth that at times seem more at home in the Dust Bowl era than the Microsoft era.
  [This IS the 'Dust Bowl' era for most Americans - Bill Gates with his $100B has more money than the bottom 45% of Americans put together - but they don't make the front pages, or get any media for that matter - ed.]
  On the day Mr. Corzine released his new television commercials this month...Mr. Florio held a news conference in which a prominent supporter ominously suggested that Mr. Corzine's fortune might actually be worth more than $1B. "There are 450 billionaires in the U.S.," warned the supporter, Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., a Democrat from Paterson [NJ]. "And it they fan out across the country, they can [control] all of the [435] congressional districts"....
  "I think Jim Florio is just out of touch with where the economy of the U.S. is in this day and age," Mr. Corzine said.
  [Or is Corzine along with the 'power elite' out of touch with the majority of Americans, only 49% of whom bothered to vote in 1996's presidential election (the lowest since 1924) and for that matter, out of touch with the history of the Roaring '20s, when all this happened before, including the tunnel vision and blind happytalk of the "have's"?]
  Mr. Florio ridiculed [Corzine's assertion that he helped New Jersey companies create and retain hundreds of thousands of jobs] saying it was absurd for an investment banker to take credit for jobs created by his borrowers [so many of whom use the loans for mergers and acquisitions which are frequently followed by downsizing]. But Mr. Corzine maintains that the ads are technically accurate....
  [Maybe so, as far as they go, but if he hasn't mentioned the jobs he can 'take credit' for eliminating, and if he's created 700,000 jobs, he's lost at least twice that many, and the ones he's lost were higher paid than the ones he's created, except in spot skill areas because resume-drowned employers have stopped doing any training.]
  Mr. Florio is scheduled to release an economic position paper early next month. Drafts of the document call for tax cuts aimed at certain segments of the population, money for worker retraining and trade sanctions against countries that do not uphold environmental and labor standards.... Jon Shure [of] New Jersey Policy Perspective...said it was heartening to hear any political candidate making Mr. Florio's call for economic justice. But Mr. Shure...also warned that those people left behind by the boom also constitute the segment of the population least likely to bother voting.
  Mr. Florio says he is undaunted. "No one ever accused me of taking the easy way," he said. "But that's what leadership is about. Talking about important things that many people aren't yet ready to address."
  [Hear, hear! More power to you, Jim Florio! This is all very ironic, because from the photos given of the two contestants, it appears that Jon Corzine looks very much like your intrepid editor with whom he would disagree, while Jim Florio looks quite a bit like billionaire investor George Soros.]

1. 3/27 Policy seminar on reduced worktime in Europe: Lessons for the United States?, 12:30-2 pm, Mayflower Hotel, New York Rm, 1127 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, DC (lunch served).
   Presented by *Economic Policy Institute (EPI - contact Brian Lustig at blustig@epinet.org or 202-331-5530).
   Discussants:
   • Hartmut Seifert, Director, Economics and Social Science Institute, Berlin
   • Hubert Martin, Labor Attaché, Embassy of France
   • David Smith, Director, Public Policy Dept., AFL-CIO
   Moderator: Jeff Faux, President, EPI.
   In the face of persistently high unemployment rates, European leaders have tried to spur job growth while at the same time preserving the social safety net for their workers. One approach seen as a way to balance these two objectives is the introduction of reduced, and more flexible work schedules. Reducing working hours will [hopefully] spread the work more broadly, while increasing flexibility is said to make it more attractive for employers to hire workers. Germany is attempting this through collective bargaining, France through legislation.
   The US, on the other hand, does not have [or "admit to"? - ed.] Europe's unemployment problems. Yet the economic expansion of the 90s has come at a price: longer hours of work, forced overtime and multiple job holdings. Business-led efforts to change US labor law to make it more flexible have been rejected as one-sided efforts to undercut American labor standards and union security. Does the European experience suggest that work-time policies might reduce the pressures of work on US families while maintaining workplace protections?
   Hartmut Seifert will describe the introduction of a 28.8 hour work week at Volkswagen through collective bargaining and its impact on workers, employers, and the community. Hubert Martin will discuss the recent French legislation providing for a reduced, more flexible work week. David Smith will comment on the relevance of these experiences to US labor markets.

2. [A slice of the future arrives early, in primitive form -]
   3/26 Glow, little glowworms, by Richard Carpenter, Boston Globe, M8.
   ...You can no longer pretend to be James Bond - MGM put a stop to that - but you can be Sean Connery or Audrey Hepburn or any other celebrity, via a fantasy package at the Wyndham El San Juan Hotel & Casino in Puerto Rico. You will be addressed by the celebrity's name, stay in a deluxe room, and receive VIP treatment throughout your stay. The 4-day, 3-night package for the celebrity and a companion is $1,392 or $1,137, depending upon when you visit. For more information or reservations, phone 800-544-3912 x1474 - and use your celebrity's name.
   [There is a natural order in which, across centuries of human>social evolution, we have been "chilling out" various arenas of competition and balancing access to various dimensions of value. Voice in the decision-making of city-states was finally balanced by universal suffrage, that is, the principle of 'one person, one vote.' Now as the ecological age forces itself upon us, or rather, we force ourselves upon it, the societies that survive will be going through some comparatively rapid balancing of the economic dimensions of value on a per-person (not per-job!) basis, to wit, skills&employment per person; income, payments; (- these will take centuries -) wealth, debt; credit, discredit; reputation, disrepute; personality, unsociability; celebrity/notoriety, anonymity;... Ooops, we've hit it - though we may not get there for another 2000-3000 years. The balancing of celebrity - the ability to become, not just somebody else, but somebody famous. When we do get there it will be in extremely complete and convincing form - conjure up today's sexchange operations and attendant plastic surgery to get some inkling. This is the stuff of sci fi for us today. But behold, wondrous to relate, a primitive form of celebrity sharing has already dawned upon us primitive humans way back in Y2K, thanks to a hotel-casino in Puerto Rico.]

• [Special to the Timesizing Wire -]
  Ralph Nader speaks at the Massachusetts Green Party Convention in Cambridge, Mass.
  Having cut his economic designer's teeth on ecological economics (Limits to Growth, Steady-State Economics) before discovering the leverage point of worktime economics (Juliet Schor, Ben Hunnicutt), Phil Hyde attended the afternoon sessions of the Mass. Greens today to present a copy of his handbook, Timesizing, Not Downsizing, to Ralph Nader. Phil had presented a copy to Noam Chomsky last year at the Kennedy School. (What a team Nader and Chomsky would make!) *Nader was in town to speak at the state Green Presidential Primary and Nominating Convention at the Friends' Meeting House in Longfellow Park in Cambridge.
  He spoke for about 35 minutes from 3:15-3:50. Then statements were read from two other Green candidates, *Jello Biafra and *Stephen Gaskin. No statement was read from a 4th candidate, *Joel Kovel. Then Nader returned to the lectern and answered three questions from the audience, before withdrawing for a 30-40 minute press conference in the adjoining building.
  Gaskin's statement was short (5 min) and colloquial. He had some good emphases that the others' missed, e.g., empowering women. The young woman who read Biafra's statement was a very effective presenter, and elicited lots of applause and vocal support from the audience as she went through the 15-minute statement. Biafra had many imaginative ideas (e.g., maximum wage) and came across with wisdom and perspective, a realistic assessment of his chances (minimal), and a generous anticipatory support for the probable winner (Nader). On the whole, he surprised many of us and we left with a much more serious respect for this candidate than we had when we entered.
  Nader spoke for 35 minutes. He was as craggy of face and articulate of expression as Abraham Lincoln, but not as tall or high-voiced. In his mastery of his wide-ranging subject, he was reminiscent of Chomsky.
  He ran across 3 worktime issues in his first few minutes. (1) He mentioned the corporate world's "commodification" of personal relationships, e.g., of family relationships as families have to commute farther and farther and work longer and longer hours. (2) He mentioned that Americans are working 163 hours more per year for less money than 20 years ago - this is the kind of data Juliet Schor came up with in her still-valuable 1991 opus, The Overworked American. (3) He mentioned that the labor movement "gave us our weekends" because they gave us shorter workweeks.
  All this was interspersed with info such as how 47m Americans have no health coverage and 20m more are undercovered, how the top 1% has made by far the most gains and much of the rest has gone to the top 10%. He stressed democracy-building issues, mentioned that the major-party presidential candidates never talk about corporate welfare or corporate crime, contrasted the paltry bill for welfare for the poor with the huge bill for corporate welfare. He mentioned that even if Gore won and wanted to change things, he couldn't because the White House is a "corporate prison as things stand now." [This was something that Teddy Roosevelt was already complaining about nearly a century ago though he loved being President.]
  He spoke of the need to build democracy with the complete, public financing of campaigns. [Timesizing.com tends to abandon this approach in favor of spreading and extending issue-oriented public referendums.] He wants national health insurance, public transit, a reversal of the concentration of land ownership that is squeezing out family farms, and adequate budgets for prosecuting corporate crime.
  He dwelt on labor issues. He wants stronger trade union laws and mentioned that we have the most difficult laws for labor and lowest union membership in [missed his exact phrase here, but probably "the developed world"]. Union membership has recently dipped below 10% of the workforce.
  He digressed upon the desirability of legalizing industrial hemp, which has 50,000 known uses and was only criminalized in the 1940s. He had some Barlett and Steele-like soundbytes on how the Pentagon is using our taxmoney to subsidize mergers of military suppliers and even give $$m bonuses to their CEOs as a kind of "tip." He said that Bill Gates with his $100B has the equivalent of the combined wealth of the bottom 100m Americans, the poorest 45%. He said that in the top 300 companies, the top executives in 1940 only had 12 times the entry-level wage. By 1980 this became 40 times, but by now it has become 415 times! [Timesizing.com believes there is a flipside to this, which is dramatized by an old Black man, Michael Todd, who runs an antique store on Mass. Ave. in North Cambridge and says that the ghetto is expanding a mile a year in every direction.] Nader mentioned several recent 'golden parachutes' awarded to failed CEOs as severance, one @ $3.6m, another @ $11m. He mentioned that the 2-party oligarchy corrupts the core of democracy and brings new dimensions to the term "gross injustice." He described two hopeful case studies, one where green activism in the Midwest eventuated in 1993 in a $1.3B refund from a utility for overcharging consumers, and one where greens against 1000-to-1 odds helped block a huge boondoggle stadium from being built near Hartford at tremendous taxpayer expense, and only in use 8 days a year.
  Jumping to a positive part of the question-and-answers in the press conference, James Williamson of MIT radio asked Nader what he said to people who thought that since Geo. W. Bush was so evil, we should support Gore instead of playing the "spoiler" with a 3rd or 4th candidacy. Nader said that we've been following this strategy for a number of elections but every 4 years things get worse. The strategy isn't working - we're losing ground, because the lesser of 2 evils is still so bad.
  [Similarly, Timesizing.com maintains that we've taken the grocery-list approach to reform for decades and we're still losing ground. It's time we agreed on a comprehensive leverage point - one master reform that will facilitate the majority of other reforms of all kinds and at all levels. Our candidate for this master, most strategic reform is workweek reduction to create a wage-and-benefit raising shortage of labor on a wartime scale (without the war) and an overtime design that automatically transforms overtime and overwork into training and hiring - in short, "Timesizing".]
  Nader cited two precedents in American history where people successfully rejected the lesser-of-2-evils strategy. In the 1850s, the Free Soilers started a progressive movement which successfully became a major party (GOP - progressive at its birth) by winning the Presidency with Lincoln in 1860. In 1887, some farmers started a progressive movement which successfully influenced both major parties for 25 years and brought in all kinds of reforms (populism). Nader stressed we need to learn from our own history....

• G.M. makes 3rd cut in Saturn production, Reuters via NYT, C2.
  DETROIT - GM said [yester]day that it would reduce production for the third time this year of its new Saturn L-Series midsize car, which has had slow sales since its introduction last summer. From next week until May 30, GM will halve production of the car by having the two shifts of 1,200 workers each a GM's plant in Wilmington, Del., alternate taking a temporary layoff.... GM temporarily shut down the plant in January and in the last week of February to reduce production of the L-Series, Saturn's first entry into the highly competitive midsize segment. The Wilmington plant has annual capacity of 200,000 vehicles on two shifts, although it has rarely reached maximum production since the introduction of the L-Series. Since arriving in dealerships in July, US sales of the L-Series through the end of February have totaled 35,099.
  [Overproduction and excess capacity are omens of depression, but GM's Saturn division, which values its employees a little more than GM in Flint, Mich. (which, as chronicled by Michael Moore, GM downsized to death) did not fire them but kept them on and cut worktime by alternating weeks.]

1. [Star Wars tries to crawl back out of the swamp -]
   Do we really need a missile defense?... "False missile deadline", letter to editor by William Jackson of Davidson NC (former gov't arms control advisor, 1978-80), NYT, A30.
   "False missile deadline" (editorial, March 22) says it all as to the non-necessity for the Clinton administration to proceed with deployment of some version of a national missile defense system.... There are sound technological, budgetary and foreign policy reasons not to go forward [i.e., backward - ed.] with deployment. It is a matter of common sense.
   [Isn't this the plan that would require more lines of software code than all previous programs put together - and require precision targetting or it would crisp vast swaths of the Earth with powerful lasers? The plan that would just be the biggest blank check on taxpayers' wallets than ever before in big government history? Whether or not Russia is in any position for a cold war rematch, this is a time for "we have nothing to fear but fear itself." The paranoiacs among us are itching for more self-fulfilling nightmares and it's time for them to lighten up and get a more PMA (positive mental attitude). Democrats should stay on their traditional side of socially oriented makework and leave the military makework to Republicans - until such time as Timesizing can nudge the private sector into taking care of its own and we can safely relegate both kinds of government makework to the dustbin of history where they belong.
   [The Nov-Dec/99 issue of Foreign Affairs had an article called "Star Wars strikes back - Can missile defense work this time?" by Michael O'Hanlon. The blurb in the Contents reads...]
   Ronald Reagan's dream never died; it only faded slightly. Star Wars is still with us in a scaled-back form. Although theater[-wide] missile defenses - popularized by the Gulf War's Patriot [missiles] - are now widely accepted, debate still rages over a nationwide system.... American is pouring billions of dollars into R&D, ignoring the fundamental flaws that missile defense has yet to overcome.
   [Here's another issue that cries out for a binding public referendum, at least to halt the default hemorraghing of taxpayers' money during the protracted debate.]

2. Finding jobs for welfare clients, editorial, NYT, A30.
   ...Mayor Giuliani [of NYC] has created the largest workfare program in the country, putting tens of thousands of welfare recipients to work cleaning parks and doing other unskilled work for the city in exchange for welfare checks.
   [Hey, just the WPA in the 1930s! What kind of economic "boom" is this when Depression-era solutions are alive and well in the midst of our largest city? - and under the care of a Republican mayor yet!]
   But the program does relatively little to help recipients train for and find permanent jobs. No one knows for sure how former recipients are doing because the city [i.e., mayor] irresponsibly refuses to monitor their progress..\..
   [So maybe we should hold the applause till we find out how this is working.]
   The City Council...would subsidize city agencies and community-based organizations to create a total of 2,500 jobs. The program would last 3 years, and would limit each individual's participation to one year....
   [The Times goes on to tout this plan, but if we should hold the applause till we find out how the current plan is working, we should also hold off on alternative or supplementary planning. So top priority = GET SOME FEEDBACK! and cut the sulky self-protective defensiveness.]
   The [Giuliani] administration says the [cost] is closer to $50m [rather than the City Council's $3m estimate]. It also says that the Council's program would create makework jobs and encourage dependence by paying them more money than private companies pay for comparable work, discouraging them from leaving welfare. But a program that limits participants to one year of subsidized work hardly invites long-term dependence.
   [No, it just enforces coddle&drop, a particularly nasty yoyoing kind of bait&switch to inflict on these poor guinea pigs. Sooner or later, we're going to have to quit this "oh what shall we try this year?" approach and just redesign the system so the private sector cleans up its own mess, does its own continuous onsite retraining, and generally quits leaving all the loose ends for someone else to clean up (i.e., the taxpayer). The whole thing can be maximally market oriented by making the incidence of overtime the targeter and trigger of onsite training (&/or hiring if the skills are at hand - without issuing more visas) and the whole thing can be phased in very gradually so everyone has lots of time to adjust. We call it Timesizing, Not Downsizing.]

1. Panel on taxing Internet sales ends its meetings in disagreement, by David Johnston, NYT, C1.
   DALLAS - Amid bitter accusations that one company's desire for tax breaks for itself had blocked consensus, the commission created to advise Congress on Internet sales taxes ended its last scheduled meeting [yester]day in failure.
   [Thank God for that one company! It's time we stopped taxing circulation and started taxing accumulation. Besides timesizing instead of downsizing, this is a huge step we can take to reverse the income gap and solidify the stock bubble. All sales taxes should be abolished and revenues made up by the re-establishment of the graduated income tax at whatever levels necessary. Corporate taxes should be restructured as fees for government services.]
   The 19-member commission did reach agreement on one proposal...: that what it characterized as surplus welfare funds [what the heck is that?! - ed.] should be used to buy computers for the poor and to provide them with access to the Internet.
   [How these chieftains do love to micromanage, and lord it over "the poor." How they love to "do good with other people's money," as Milton Friedman so aptly puts it. These morons should just be reinvesting massively in their own consumer base and their own markets, via their own employees and employees in general - by converting overtime into jobs and training, and cutting the workweek until there are no "poor."]

2. Columbia drug aid in jeopardy, pointer headline (to A5), NYT, A2.
   A $9B spending bill to help Colombia combat drug traffickers and to pay for American military operations in Kosovo is imperiled because of stiff opposition from Sen. Trent Lott, the majority leader.
   [At last Trent Lott does something useful! On the so-called "drug war," it's time we admitted failure (see today's frontpage article in the Boston Globe "Drug deaths reach a peak as prices fall"), cut bait, de-criminalized drugs, and taxed/sued manufacturers for their social costs, just as we've been doing so successfully with guns and cigarettes. Billions for an endless unwinnable Vietnam-like "drug war" is just a subsidy for all the unhealthy and shadowy appendages of the US government that feed off the big profits of the illegality of drugs. And as for Kosovo, "Who can, by stirring, clear muddy water? - but leave it alone, and it will come clear by itself." - Lao Tzu. If we didn't nip the rolling disaster in Yugoslavia in the bud 10 years ago when the Serbs were refusing to keep taking turns with the Croats in the Presidency, we were nuts to go in at all. And as for now, it's just a sinkhole of misery and of sending "good money after bad." The public has Kosovo fatigue just as before we had Bosnia fatigue etc. It's not as if we don't have plenty of problems in America to spend billions of our own money on. And it's not as if we don't still have a national debt on the order of $5T. Now Yugoslavia has become like a bitter rankle where "the less said, the better." Or to return to Lao Tzu, "Who can, by stirring, clear muddy water? - but leave it alone, and it will come clear of itself." It's time we started modelling a better society of our own, and showing the way by example, instead of saying to everyone else in the world, "Do as we say (and not as we do)."]

3. [UNtakeover #1]
   Weyerhaeuser Co., NYT, C4.
   ...Federal Way, Wash. a wood products company, dropped plans to sell its custom-made door business to Saunders Karp & Megrue, Stamford, Conn., because they could not agree on terms.

4. [UNtakeover #2]
   Sawtooth spins off branding unit, by Jane Levere, NYT, C15.
   The Sawtooth Group in Woodbridge, NJ, is spinning off its branding unit as an independent brand development agency. The new agency [will] be called Trajectory LLC and will be based in Morristown, NJ....

1. [At last, a definitive statement from a sensible gun owner -]
   Armed but not alarmed - Why do hunters put up with the NRA? op ed by Richard Ford, NYT, A31.
   NEW ORLEANS - I find it hard to believe that my current hunting buddies and I have found a natural mouthpiece for our interests in the person of Wayne LaPierre and the National Rifle Assoc. For one thing, we have virtually no use for assault weapons when we're out there hunting pheasants and ducks and deer. These animals aren't that dangerous.
   For another thing, when we're sitting around the campfire we never speak in the tumid rhetoric of armageddon and violent conflict which Mr. LaPierre and his NRA associates use much of the time. Like most Americans, we're happy when the government stays out of our personal business. But my bird-hunting pals (all voters, by the way, some Republicans, some Democrats, some Libertarians) don't tend to think that Washington's at war with us or that our legally appointed federal agents are "jack-booted thugs" or bucket-helmeted Nazis intent on imprisoning us in our own country (as an infamous NRA fund-raising letter put it)....
   So we don't shoot a hundred pheasants a day; we shoot three. We purchase hunting licenses.... We are routinely required by law to pass a hunters' safety course before we go into the field with guns. And this is simply because guns (as well as people) are very dangerous, and we don't want to kill anyone. Such ordinary and sensible regulations rely on, among other things, our belief that in a sane and democratic nation regulation may become excessive, but need not, because reasonable people are watchful and can be relied on to do sensible things.
   All this is enough to make one think that the "natural" alliance between the usually moderate and conservation-minded American hunter, and the fear-mongering paranoiacs running the NRA, isn't an alliance at all.... Indeed, when sportsmen wake up to this garish incongruity, either the NRA leadership will start making sense or the organization will cease to hold our attention....
   [What a breath of fresh air into this whole fetid issue, which has become a total eye-roller for most of us.]

2. [1 UPsizing]
   Idealab's 4th office to be in Boston [22k sq ft, unspecified # of employees] - Net firm moving to Exeter Street Theater, Bloomberg via NYT, Boston Globe, E6.
   
   
3. [UNtakeover #1]
   Toys 'R' Us to expand stock repurchase [& spin off its Japanese unit through an IPO in Japan], Reuters via NYT, C4.

4. [UNtakeover #2]
   Brazil Internet spinoff [- Organizações Globo to spin off Globo.com], by Simon Romero, NYT, C2.

1. 3/20  Managing the world's water, editorial, NYT, A24.
   The most precious fluid on Earth is not oil, but water.... Humans are depleting the Earth's store of usable water at a rate that will soon threaten our food supply. Poor water management already kills millions of people a year and condemns hundreds of millions to hunger.
   The technology exists to solve these problems....
   [But it's not the technology the Times is thinking of. It's a new technology of sharing. We won't have a prayer of sharing the tough things, like money, or access to the future through reproduction, unless we can share the easy things, like skills and employment. And with our widening "digital divide" and income gap, we're clearly clueless on both. The most advanced design for a skills and work sharing technology is Timesizing. Europe is ahead of us with primitive versions (see Nations section ¾-down our case studies page). Let's stop committing G.K. Chesterton's pan-utopian error and get with it.]

2. 3/19  Conservation in the tank - Energy efficiency lacks glamour but stubbornly demands attention, by Warren Leon, Boston Globe, C2.
   Here is the Average American Household, with its annual 1,000 gallons of oil for running cars and heating the home, and its 5,000 pounds of coal to be burned for electricity [photo caption].
   ...Luckily, advances in technology - including high-tech wind turbines and advanced gasifiers that burn plant matter rather than coal to generate electricity - make it possible for us to kick the fossil-fuel habit without sacrificing our quality of life. With hybrid-electric cars such as the Honda Insight and Toyota Prius coming to market, and more revolutionary fuel-cell vehicles just a few years off [just as *Bucky Fuller called for, decades ago - ed.] we may be on the brink of an automotive revolution that moves us away from the gasoline engine....

1. Under legal siege, gun maker agrees to accept curbs - Industry is splintered - Smith & Wesson acts to avoid bankruptcy in a pact that lifts lawsuit threats, by James Dao, NYT, front page.
   [All RIIIIIIGHT!]

2. [Nice for a change -]
   The San Francisco Examiner is sold by Hearst to a local newspaper owner [ed: our italics], by Barringer and Nieves, NYT, A7.
   ...The new owner, Ted Fang, vowed that the Examiner would be reincarnated as a morning paper and would continue its two-fisted competition with The San Francisco Chronicle, which Hearst bought in August....
   [All RIIIIIIGHT! - Presents a nice counterpoint to the "Selling of the Los Angeles Times" mentioned in our 3/17/2000 Omens.]

3. [1 UNtakeover -]
   OfficeMax adopts a shareholder rights plan, Bridge News via NYT, B3.
   ...The 3rd-largest U.S. office supply chain said yesterday that it had adopted a shareholder rights plan [alias "poison pill"] limiting ownership of its stock by any person or group to 15%. ...Entities controlled by the Mexican financier Carlos Slim Helu have acquired at least 8% of its common stock.... The Cleveland-based company said it had no opposition to Mr. Helu's acquiring up to 15% of its stock, but acquisitions beyond that amount "could be detrimental to the interests of other shareholders."
   [All RIIIIIIGHT!]

4. [1 general UNtakeover -]
   US regulators impose 15-month moratorium on all rail mergers, by Anthony DePalma, NYT, B1.
   [All RIIIIIIGHT!]

1. France: Protests and tax cuts, by Suzanne Daley, NYT, A6.
   On a day when...teachers took to the streets...about poor working conditions, PM Lionel Jospin announced a range of tax cuts for the average citizen.... The bulk of a large budget surplus would go toward lowering sales taxes.
   [Sales taxes are the dumbest, most fiddling, inefficient, business-bogging form of taxation ever invented by the braindead. If CEOs are so all-fired in love with Efficiency, let's see them get behind efficiency in taxation, and that means moving it from nickel&diming the poor and the middle class and going for the gold by taxing those who really have it (and are massively wasting it cuz they couldn't spend it in a zillion lifetimes) - the wealthy - including themselves if they're like CEO Michael Hawley of Gillette whom the Boston Globe reported today as having had his pay more than doubled to $12.5m (p. D3). Keep going the other way, boys, and your concentration of wealth will absolutely strangle the markets out from under your huge mega-investments.]

2. Industry, lawmakers want repeal of phone tax, AP via Boston Globe, D2.
   The phone industry, aided by lawmakers, is taking another stab at getting rid of a 3% tax [costing consumers an estimated $5B/yr] originally enacted to help finance the 1898 Spanish-American War....
   [Yeah - when only the rich had telephones and this was a luxury tax.]
   They fear the tax could slow the growth of the Internet and other telecom services....
   [It certainly could.]

1. Main Street, USA, still in business, letter to editor by Kennedy Smith of National Main St Ctr of Nat'l Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington, NYT, A30.
   Re "In rural midwest, the suits and shirts shop for the man" (front page, March 12): Contrary to your article's suggestion, stores of all kinds on Main St. have been opening and thriving.
   Over the last 20 years, through the National Trust's Main Street Center, community leaders in 1,500 historic downtown commercial districts created 47,000 new businesses and 174,000 new jobs, and rehabilitated 61,000 new buildings....
   [Well, that's good, but spread across 20 years these figures are definitely not overwhelming, and 174,000 new jobs in 20 years isn't much considering the 171,628 lost jobs reported in the NYT and the Boston Globe in only the first 2½ months of this year so far. But government action tends to be more symbolic than functional anyway, especially when we're talking about preserving what is basically already history.]

2. [1 UNtakeover]
   Sinclair fails to win U.S. approval to sell 3 TV stations, Reuters via NYT, C4.
   The Sinclair Broadcast Group said yesterday that it had terminated a plan to sell 3 television stations [WICS-TV & WICD-TV in Ill. & KGAN-TV in Cedar Rapids] in the Midwest to the Sunrise Television Corp. after failing to get governmental approval for the [$81m] deal....