Timesizing® Associates

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

6/15/2000 glimmers of hope -

1. [1 UPsizing - unspecified new jobs]
   Consumer goods web site set up, Bloomberg via NYT, C6.
   The Procter & Gamble Co., the Coca-Cola Co., Nestle SA and 46 other consumer-goods makers are investing $250m in Transora.com, an online marketplace in which they can negotiate prices with suppliers, buyers and distributors to lower costs.... Transora.com will begin operations in the 4th quarter. Internet purchasing alliances are springing up in various industries as companies seek to cut costs and speed ordering. The consumer-products companies are following the lead of the auto and retail industries, which have set up similar exchanges [named?? - ed.].... The company's steering committee has been meeting in Chicago, which is one of the candidate cities for its HQ.... Transora.com is searching for a CEO.

2. [1 UNtakeover]
   Spinoff of Lucent [microelectronics] unit reportedly could fetch $40B - A spinoff could prove a useful weapon in Lucent's battle to lift its stock price, which has fallen 27% this year, Reuters via Boston Globe, C11.
   [But don't count on it. Better would be some solid growth in market share - without acquisitions.]

3. Germans reach deal to phase out nuclear energy, Agence France-Presse via NYT, A3.
   ...to shut down the country's 19 nuclear power stations over 32 years, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder announced early today. The deal makes Germany one of the first leading industrial countries to renounce the production of nuclear energy....
   [Getting rid of a process that produces radioactive wastes that don't "cool off" for thousands of years is a smart move. Germany is leading the world on this one. "Demm deutschers ain't so dumm!"]

4. France: McDonald's second thoughts, by Suzanne Daley, NYT, A13.
   After more than 800 shopkeepers in the Marais, the Paris district known for its synagogues and Jewish shops, signed a petition to keep a McDonald's restaurant out of the neighborhood, the company announced it was abandoning plans to open a restaurant there. The shopkeepers said a fast-food outlet would ruin their neighiborhood....
   [Hey, these Parisian Jews have a lot of good taste and common sense. They want to stay distinctive and unique, and keep out the homogenization that has blanded so much of the rest of the world. They're a bulwark against boredom.]

5. Protecting the wealthy, letter to editor by Douglas Lowenthal of Reno NV, NYT, A30.
   A June 13 letter asks "When did it become a disgrace in the United States to work hard, be successful, save regularly and invest wisely?" and "When did it become unacceptable [in the US] to want to pass on to your children and grandchildren something more tangible that good advice?"
   [The writer evidently doesn't realize the contradiction between the two questions, but Douglas draws it out -]
   The answer is: never. Plenty of wealth is handed down for no other reason than "accident of birth." Does the writer believe that America should revert to aristocracy?
   [In other words, let's make up our minds. Do we believe in getting money from working or by accident, like the accident of birth that makes so many idle young people rich via inheritance - and gives them so many problems (see badnews item on 6/12/00, "For today's wealthy parents, tips on brat control"). Phil Hyde is very aware of these problems, having inherited $100K in 1969 and lost it all 4 years later on the biggest brokerage collapse since the Depression - the Weis-Voisin debacle.]
   Haven't we been there and done that? The important question is why Congress, which supposedly represents 270m Americans, is doing backflips to ensure the financial well-being of the wealthiest 0.1% of the population.
   [Well said, and a d*mn good question, answered by Paul Krugman yesterday (see "Death and taxes" almost immediately below) in terms of No Campaign Finance Reform.]

1. [1 UNtakeover]
   Automaker to spin off Visteon unit to shareholders, Reuters via NYT, C4.
   The Ford Motor Co. said yesterday that it would spin off its Visteon Corp. unit...one of the three largest automotive [parts] suppliers in the world...on June 28.

2. [Takes some chutzpa to take this one on -]
   Death and taxes [- The distribution of wealth and the inheritance tax], op ed by Paul Krugman, NYT, A31.
   The distribution of wealth does not look like the "bell curve" [but] a "power law," a sort of elongated ski slope [with] a lot of [its] mass far out in the right tail - which means...that a large share of the total wealth is held by a small number of families....
   • 25% of US families own more than 80% of private assets.
   • But well over half of the wealth of that 25% is actually in the hands of the top fifth of that group, that is, the wealthiest 5% of families.
   • Roughly [half] of that wealth is actually in the hands of the top fifth of that group, the top 1% of families....
   • It's [probable] that most of the wealth of the top 1% is actually in the hands of the top 0.2%,
   and so on up to Bill Gates [or whoever has displaced him in the wake of the tech stock slide - ed.]
   The hate-mailers and right-wing pundits are already firing up their word processors. Wealth distribution is one of those subjects where even a bland statement of the facts is met with furious attacks on the messenger. If someone says that a small number of people own a lot of assets, and does not assert in the same breath that this is a good thing - the politically correct statement is not that people "have" wealth but that they "create" it - he will immediately be denounced as a dangerous leftist.
   And the protesters have good reason to be upset: it's important to suppress these facts if at all possible. If middle-class Americans had any realistic sense of how rich the rich really are, policy moves that cater specifically to the wealthy - like the repeal of the inheritance tax, voted by the House last week - would face a much rougher ride.
   The current inheritance tax applies only to estates of more than $675,000, with the cutoff scheduled to rise to more than $1m over the next few years; as a result, only about 2% of estates pay any tax at all - a fact that opponents of repeal tried in vain to publicize. But even that 2% figure quite literally doesn't tell the half of it. Because of the power law [curve, mentioned above], a good deal more than half the value of that top 2% of estates actually lies in the top 0.4%. And since only the amount over $675,000 is taxed, and the tax rate rises with the size of the estate, the bulk of each year's inheritance tax is actually paid by only a few thousand multimillion-dollar estates. This really is a tax levied almost entirely on the very, very well off.
   [And every sustainable human culure has had some kind of reset, like the Hebrew jubilees, when debts were forgiven and slaves were freed. As resets go, even America's current inheritance tax is an extremely weak one.]
   So why did most members of the House vote to repeal a tax that yields $30B a year, yet doesn't touch the vast majority of their constituents?
   • Perhaps because they were moved by sob stories about salt-of-the-earth family farmers and small-business men forced by estate taxes to [sell their farms and businesses and] abandon their heritage - although a quick check of the facts would have revealed that such stories are actually quite uncommon, and that the compromise bill offered by the Democratic leadership would have made them vanishingly rare.
     [A man in Bedford, Mass. came up with that argument the other day while Phil was getting signatures for the US Senate race - man, "What do you think of inheritance taxes?" - Phil, "They constitute a valuable centrifuge mechanism." - man, "But inheritance taxes force the next generation to sell the business just to pay the taxes!" - Phil, "That can be obviated by careful design, but if we don't have inheritance taxes or, my preference, a reinvestment threshold, we suction the spending power out of the markets for our own humungous investments in productivity and topple our own stored wealth."]
   • Or maybe Congress is really truly worried about incentives - about the potential entrepreneur who thinks to himself: "Why bother? Even if I make millions, I can only pass 61% of it to my kids. So I'll stick with my job as an insurance salesman."
     [This is a really strange argument - as if the rich need more incentives than the poor. It's also a variant on the Chesterton flaw (the assumption that no one will want more than his share, including his share of incentives). The extreme concentration of income and wealth, aside from its self-undermining propensities, arguably constitutes as much of a disincentive as an incentive to the nonrich, many of whom think, "Why bother? Second and third generation wealthy don't have to do an honest day's work. Why should I. So I'll just
     • panhandle,
     • apply for disability, or
     • disregard the property laws, etc."
     [Also, with an unbounded concentration of wealth, no citizen is really safe, because the average citizen among the nonrich will think, "I can never get close to the rich category, let alone the richest of the rich. They will always have infinitely more than me, so much more that I will always be totally at their mercy." And the perceived danger of the richest of the rich is also dangerous to them, placing them frequently in a virtual prison lifestyle. Flaunting their wealth can be especially dangerous, not to mention inflationary. And the decision-making power that goes with wealth, when concentrated can have a severe and negative impact of societal diversification, experimentation, imagination, and bottom line, adaptibility and survivability. Foundations tend to fund projects within circumscribed parameters. For example, few fund projects that obviate the "need" for foundations themselves, and design their re-absorption into the general economy. In a wealth-concentrated economy, adaptibility and survivability is also crippled by the fact that people with concentrated wealth have plenty of resources to insulate themselves from any negative consequences of their decisions. Witness the frequent mass downsizing decisions today that rarely affect the CEOs who make them. When the decision-making agent cannot feel the full impact of wrong decisions (e.g., incentive damaging and market damaging decisions in favor of firing without cause), we do not have a feedback system worth the name.
     [Also, the problems the rich pass along to their kids along with superbloated pocketbooks are stupendous, as chronicled in our 6/12/00 omen/item, "For today's wealthy parents, tips on brat control - What to do when little Johnny throws a tantrum for a gold card," by Blaine Harden.]
   • Or, finally, maybe Congress just figured that $30B a year isn't a lot of money - although it is roughly what the federal government spends on the earned-income tax credit, a program that helps millions of poor workers but draws a constant barrage of criticism from economy-minded conservatives. Oh, and it's more than twice our total spending on foreign aid [which is so politicized and double-edged that we should also be criticizing it - ed.], and around five times as much as the non-military component of that aid.
     ["Military aid" usually turns out in practice to be an oxymoron, like giving a gun to a kid. Foreign aid is often just international charity, and (A) charity begins at home, and (B) any system that relies on charity, which is discretionary and capricious, for vital functions (like the centrifugation of spending power and the resulting dynamization of markets) is fatally flawed.]
   But if you believe any of these explanations of last week's vote, I've got this bridge you might be interested in buying [the "Brooklyn"?! - ed.]. The truth is that the vote to repeal the inheritance tax was just an unusually blatant demonstration of a much simpler power law - the one that says that money talks.
   [Money talks by buying Congressmen, our so-called "representatives," via direct and indirect campaign contributions. Hence our need for campaign finance reform and issue-oriented referendums. If only the rich were smarter, but a lot of them are just so near-sighted, they don't even realize their own dependence on markets to support the value of their vast stored wealth, let alone their markets' dependence on centrifuged spending power.
   [The downside has a very effective limit, zero. The upside has no effective limit whatsoever and this is the biggest energy and efficiency leak in the American economy. It relates critically to Chesterton's pan-utopian flaw - the naive (or cowardly) assumption that no man will want more than his share - which in turn is the answer to Leacock's "unsolved riddle of social justice" = why do we have so much poverty and misery in the midst of so much technology-borne plenty? Answer: because we never challenge our naive (or cowardly) assumption that no man will want more than his share.
   [So the economic problem is not scarcity. It is unshared super-abundance and the lack of a flexible and agreeable sharing mechanism. This third millennium will see either the filling of this gap or tremendous setbacks for the human race, now with nuclear and biological killing tools. [More to the point, the unbounded concentration of wealth is the biggest drag on the American economy, in many dimensions: morale, growth, dynamism, internal cohesion and security. Past a certain point (the point of diminishing returns), the concentration of personal income and wealth approaches zero, by the law of the diminishing marginal utility (or efficiency) of wealth. American society is tearing apart as money trickles down but POURS up, and the rich get richer, and the richest of the rich get richer, and the richest of the richest get richer... constantly strangling the markets away from their own colossal investments, and stagnating any human progress except - bottom-line - superficial and rather trivial technological whizzbang. The same old huge human problems remain, and go on and on and on - they are BORING and an insult to the intelligence of us all, especially to the rich and powerful. Progess for intelligent social species depends critically on advances in their technology of sharing, and that requires identifying the appropriate sequence of dimensions for sharing as well as designing flexible mechanisms for doing the actual sharing. Our sequence: ...reproductive share (one husband, one wife)...political share (one person, one vote), economic share (one person, one range of natural market-demanded employment);.... America already has political share worked out (though now it's being dysfunctionalized by the economic disparity). Economic share is very much the huge design challenge of the 21st century. Our entry is the five public-sector phases of Timesizing, introduced by a long voluntary private-sector stage.]

1. [1 UPsizing - 2000 new jobs]
   McKesson creates new Net unit for doctors, Bloomberg via Boston Globe, D2.
   McKesson HBOC Inc., of San Francisco, the largest US drug wholesaler, formed an Internet unit that will sell software and services aimed at helping doctors use the Web to manage their offices and cut costs. The McKesson unit will have about 2,000 employees.... Doctors and hospitals will be able to order lab tests and see results, prescribe medicine and maintain patient records....
   [The tests and prescriptions are OK, but maintaining patient records on the Web sounds neither efficient nor confidential.]

2. [1 UNtakeover - $450m]
   Time Warner Telecom cancels purchase of GST [Telecommunications], Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   ...A provider of telephone and Internet service to businesses canceled [a] planned $450m purchase.... It could not reach favorable terms on a final agreement with GST and its creditors....

3. Parents try to reclaim their children's time - Rethinking rush of afterschool activities - Seeking to ease demands on children and put family first, by Pam Belluck, NYT, A14.
   [This is all very dandy, but don't they have it backwards? The only reason kids' time has got cluttered up is that parents' time was too cluttered to have time with the kids. Well, one of Timesizing.com's big slogans all the way through from the first Congressional campaign in '96 to now is, "More family time for family values!"]

4. Urban mayors share the (not unwelcome) burden of coping with prosperity - A meeting where the complaints are of too many high-skill jobs, by Timothy Egan, NYT, A14.
   [This is all very lovely, but it's about too few training programs, not "too many high-skill jobs and not enough people to fill them." Timesizing.com integrates continuous training right into the workplace by using the incidence of overtime to target, trigger, gauge, pace and fund on-the-job training, and hiring. And if there aren't enough overtime-triggered jobs to take up our on-welfare and disabled people, and our record homeless and incarcerated, then we adjust the workweek very slowly downward, so we hit overtime earlier each week.]

• [The hopeful thing is, at least we're starting to notice our...]
  Unhealthy way to live, letter to editor by Sharon Smithline of ForestHills Queens NY, NYT, A26.
  You report that "the United States falls behind almost every country in Europe as well as Canada, Australia and Israel in what the World Health Organization calls 'healthy life expectancy'" (news article, June 5). This should not come as a surprise.
  The United States does not have a national health plan, and many elderly people (and not so elderly) can barely make ends meet, let alone buy health insurance. There is no reason that the richest country in the world cannot provide medical care for all who live here.
  [Perhaps we need a better definition of "richest country in the world." A country might have 99% of the money held by 1% of the population, qualify as "the richest," but manifest matchless misery.]
  We must also examine the ridiculous work ethic forced upon us. We are expected to work a great deal of overtime (often without pay) and have to be happy with two weeks of vacation. In many of the countries mentioned, four to six weeks is standard.
  [Clearly we Americans don't know how to live. We're terrified of free time. And our lives are spent slaving on someone else's highly marketed but not-at-all unique vision. And we're getting more and more resentful and violent. Time to change course. We suggest Timesizing, Not Downsizing.]

1. The most private issue, letter to editor by Robert Jaffe of New York, NYT, A26.
   As highlighted in "What are you afraid of? A hidden issue emerges" (Week in Review, June 4), politicians of both parties are vying to define themselves as committed to protecting Americans' privacy.
   Sadly, no such consensus has emerged around the most profound privacy matter: the decision of whether and when to bear a child.  The basis of the 1973 Supreme Court Roe v. Wade case rested on the constitutional principle that the decision to continue an unintended pregnancy or obtain an abortion is fundamentally a private matter.
   While some politicians, like George W. Bush, may seek the high ground in the privacy debate, they show no such commitment to protecting a woman's right to make private reproductive health decisions.

2. Innovation isn't the Microsoft way - A defense built on an incongruous self-description, op ed by Jacob Goldman, NYT, A27.
   Bill Gates, protesting the government's antitrust initiatives against Microsoft, has asserted from the first that limiting the scope of his company's activities or breaking it up would stifle the innovation that helped Microsoft catalyze the information revolution into existence. The incongruity of this response...is inescapable: Microsoft soared to its powerful heights on the backs of innovations that were largely the work of others, [most] having been developed in the era before software was patentable..\..
   • DOS operating system...from the tiny Seattle Computer Products [for] $75,000....
   • Word came virtually intact, along with its developer, from Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC
   • Excel derived from the very original Visicalc program of a company called Software Arts and was later expanded and refined by Lotus
   • Windows originated at PARC and went to Microsoft via the Apple Macintosh. Windows and icons as the interface between a human and a computer were installed in Xerox's Alto personal computer pretty much as they appear today; the Alto was introduced in 1973, more than a decade before Microsoft brought Windows out as a product....
   • Even Internet Explorer...was a Johnny-come-lately into the Internet browser market, having been introduced by Netscape. The browser was invented at the University of Illinois, and its inventor, Marc Andreesen, went on to become a founder of Netscape.
   [So much for the high-tech puppydogs who used to mutter regularly, "But I don't begrudge Bill Gates his money," as if Gates had personally originated all these innovations.]

1. [UNtakeover #1]
   Fluor says its board has approved plan for a spinoff, Dow Jones via NYT, C4.
   ...into two publicly traded companies: one to assume its struggling coal-mining business and the other, its engineering and construction operations....
   [We get a little more info six months later in "Fluor to take a charge for reverse spinoff," Bloomberg via 12/30/2000 NYT, B3, "Fluor was separated into two companies earlier this month [Dec/00]. The old Fluor, based in Richmond, Va., was renamed Massey Energy and retained Fluor's coal businesses: the new entity took the Fluor name with it, thus the term 'reverse spinoff.'" Here's a case where some rushed analyst came up with a really misleading term for something. "Reverse spinoff" should refer to a spinoff that is halted and reversed just before or soon after completion. We suggest the term "name-stealing spinoff" would be more accurate, descriptive, intuitive and fun, and if analysts are uncomfortable with "stealing" they can substitute "scooping" (as in "name-scooping spinoff") or just "taking."]

2. [UNtakeover #2]
   Adaptec, NYT, C4.
   ...Milpitas, Calif., a designer of cards that speed computer communications, said it planned to make its software unit an independent company and make a public offering of shares for part of the unit.

3. [the ideal obit -]
   Jeff MacNelly, 52; cartoonist who won three Pulitzer prizes, by Dave Barry, Boston Globe, B7.
   ...Jeff started cartooning for the Daily Tar Heel at his beloved University of North Carolina, from which he nearly graduated in 1969, when he joined The Richmond News Leader. In 1982, he went to the Chicago Tribune, although he rarely appeared anywhere near an actual newspaper office, because of the danger that he might be asked to attend a meeting.... He was a guy who would genuinely be much happier drinking a beer with his plumber than having dinner at the White House.... He saw himself as a guy plugging away, getting a job done, no different from a guy running a drill press in a machine shop.... He would never let me say to his face that he made the world better. But he did....

4. What about China? op ed by Peter Scoblic, NYT, A31.
   In its eagerness to persuade Russia to accept deployment of a U.S. missile defense, the Clinton administration has all but ignored China, a nuclear power in its own right and an opponent of these [missile defense] systems. China currently holds about 20 nuclear-armed missiles capable of striking the continental United States. For decades, it has relied on this small force not only to deter a nuclear attack, but also to guarantee it a place at the table with the other great powers and to offset their conventional weaponry....
   One point comes through in its foreign policy statements: China must never again be subjected to the humiliation that stronger powers inflicted on it in the past. Nuclear weapons are its protection against such disgrace.... As [our] presidential race heats up and the administration moves toward a deployment decision, missile defense proponents much explain why obviating a potential threat from a handful of third-rate states is worth increasing the certain threat from an established nuclear power.
   [Well said.  Hear! Hear!  This is what we should be doing for China = slapping down the repeated resuscitation attempts for Star Wars - not setting in concrete a "rape us with cheap imports" most-favored-nation trade status.]

5. Senate approves step to overhaul campaign finance - Surprise McCain victory - Tax-exempt groups are target, by Schmitt and Alvarez, NYT, front page.
   WASHINGTON...- The Senate approved a measure [yester]day to require the growing number of tax-exempt groups that now secretly raise and spend unlimited sums on political activities to disclose their contributors and spending....
   [It's getting time to begin dismantling the whole category of "tax exempt" in favor of "pay up or shut up."]

6. ["Good, but..."]
   Japan GDP rises 2.4%, ending 6-month slide, AP via NYT, C4.
   [A one-month blip does not guarantee a 6-month slide is ended. And the GDP measure counts as positive sooo much negative stuff, like medical services required for poor working conditions.... Basically Japan has made little structural reform, and without returning to its wealth-centrifuging lifetime employment policy, it's still "toast."]

1. [UPsizing #1, ?? new jobs]
   Tiffany plans more stores, Bloomberg via NYT, C2.
   Tiffany & Co. said today that it would open 3 to 5 new stores yearly and could nearly double the number of its stores in the United States. ...The nation's No. 2 jewelry chain could operate as many as 75 stores in the U.S., up from 39.... The company also plans to open 2 stores in Japan, adding to its 44 stores there.... Tiffany will also open stores in Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan....

2. [UPsizing #2, ?? new jobs]
   Lucent set to expand North Andover [Mass.] facility, by Peter Howe, Boston Globe, F9.
   Lucent Technologies Inc. is boosting the corporate role of tis 5,600-person optical-equipment factory and development center in North Andover [Mass.], making it one of three US "global systems integration centers" for new optical gear. The move...could lead to hundreds of new jobs at the site in final assembly and testing of advanced optical communcations systems. ...The world's biggest maker of telecommunications gear said in the last two years it has added 700 jobs at the site....
   [See other Lucent upsizing stories on 2/16/00 and 5/19/00.]

3. Norway - Government gives citizens a break, AP via Boston Globe, A17.
   [Norway appears to be a little less time blind than America, but note the American negative spin in phrases like "goofed off" and "lollygagging." Americans are still "prisoners who love their cages."]
   OSLO - Hundreds of Norwegians goofed off during working hours yesterday with the government's blessing in a campaign to remind people about the value of time. Throughout the country, people left their offices and other workplaces, switched off their cellular phones and just enjoyed life from noon to 1 pm, in addition to their regular lunchtime [which is 1-2 pm??]. "This is about thinking through what we use our time for," said Minister of the Environment Siri Bjerke, who joined about 200 people in lollygagging outside parliament in Oslo. A group had taken out newspaper advertisements throughout Norway urging people to take a break and think about their lives.
   [What group? Not a bad idea to ask "What is it all for?"]
   The group said people need independence from the tyranny of tight schedules.
   [But not Americans. We're set to repeal the Emancipation Proclamation and institute "smart and competitive" 24/7 work schedules. These frivolous Europeans are just "goofing off" and "lollygagging." We Americans with our 60-70-80 hour workweeks on our 40-hour salaries are obviously much better, i.e., more serious and competitive, than they are, even if we have to lock up 100% of our minorities (see today's jailwatch story, 6/08/00) due to our ongoing concentration of skills and work on ever fewer people and use of technology to replace people instead of making their lives easier. Can a "final solution" of our record incarceration problem be far behind? Wasn't it Pogo who said, "We have seen the enemy, and it is us."]

1. [1 UPsizing, totalling ?? new jobs]
   Hearts, minds, and beards - Pursuing its overseas growth strategy, Gillette opens factory in St. Petersburg, by Chris Reidy, Boston Globe, C1.
   ...Monday...Gillette Co. chairman and chief executive Michael C. Hawley dedicated a $40m razorblade factory in St. Petersburg [Russia]. ...Hawley noted..."Russia was our fastest-growing major market worldwide" during the first three months of this year, up 40% from the same period in 1999.... Gillette's Russian sales soon could exceed $200m....

2. Ballot initiatives: good and bad, by Martin Nolan, Boston Globe, A19.
   [Here's a writer who dislikes initiatives and ends his column...]
   ...The initiative process should be curbed, but probably not eliminated.
   [...and yet there are a number of strikingly positive admissions about initiatives in this generally hostile article -]
   
   • ...[Americans have a] growing fondness...for initiatives, referendums, and other forms of direct democracy....
   • David Broder...asks, "Do we really wish to keep this a republic? That question is coming at us with the speed of e-mail"....
   • ...Scandals are rare here [in the California Legislature], especially since initiative-imposed term limits....
   • Citizens may actually read the ballot summary the secretary of state's office mails out in a pamphlet as hefty as the Fresno white pages....
   • Hiram Johnson..\..the godfather of [the initiative process in California] offered [it as] "a way for the citizens to get around the special interests running the Legislature...," says John L. Burton, the state senate president pro tem....
   [Burton goes on to say -]
   "Now it's a way for the special interests to get around the Legislature...."
   [This sounds like "the pot calling the kettle black." And we surely wouldn't expect a "representative" to approve of something arguably more representative than himself. As for special interests and the influence of money, it's a lot harder for special interests to "buy" hundreds of one-issue-oriented referendums voted on by the citizenry in secret ballots than it is for them to "buy" dozens of bundled-issue representatives voting in public legislatures. We heartily endorse the "end run" that electronic referendums are doing around the log-jammed money-drowned "representative" legislatures across the land. We have the technology. Why should little Switzerland be ahead of us in this fundamental area?]

3. FBI opens investigation of EBay bids - Suspicion of shills rises as Web auctions grow, by Judith Dobrzynski, NYT, C1.
   The FBI has opened an inquiry into whether several eBay users...committed fraud by bidding up the prices of one another's online auction offerings....
   [Now how about investigating the prevalence of this practice in the stock markets?!]

4. [NYT spins this one upbeat, Boston Globe downbeat -]
   Surge in worker productivity is recorded for first quarter, Bloomberg via NYT, C11.
   Worker productivity grew in the first quarter at the fastest pace in seven years [unmatched by wage raises - ed.], helping business contain labor costs [and market growth - ed.] and keeping inflation in check [and the centrifugation of the national income - ed.], government sources showed today. [Worker] productivity, a measure of how much workers produce for every hour on the job [and severely undercounted - ed.], was 3.7% higher in the first quarter compared with figures in the corresponding period a year earlier, the Labor Dept. said. That was the largest year-over-year increase since a 4.2% gain in the final three months of 1992....
   [Mainstream economists have always been slow to recognize the huge leaps in productivity as wave after wave of labor-saving technology pours into the economy, because it conflicts with two problematic (for them) shibboleths:
   • wages go up with productivity (they don't, they go up with supply and demand of labor, and with labor-saving technology taking over more and more work, the supply of labor is constantly increasing and the demand for labor constantly decreasing - hence 30-year flat wages and ever more desperate marketing, such as junk mail, spam, phone sales, slamming - see today's Corporate Fines, shilling - see story above,...)
   • technology creates more jobs than it destroys (it doesn't if it introduces greater efficiency, and if it only introduces higher quality, it is less urgently demanded and in need of more energetic marketing)]
   Gains in productivity let companies hold down their labor expenses [while jumping up their executive pay and perks - ed.] - which account for two thirds of the cost of doing business - and avoid raising prices for goods and services [and their rank-and-file wages and their own consumer markets - ed.]. Labor costs in the first quarter grew at the slowest pace in almost four years, the report showed....
   [Now watch them come out with a restiveness-quelling (but contradictory) "report" that wages have actually shown some increases lately. The Boston Globe's downbeat version of this story today is -]
   Worker productivity posts smallest rise in 9 months, AP via Boston Globe, C2.
   [AP must be more worried about employees saying, "Hey, then where's our share of this?!" "Our share" in the current, denied labor surplus and lack of labor leverage is constantly pouring up to the top income brackets and expanding the huge stock bubble (where else are they going to put it - they couldn't spend it in 100 lifetimes). So the distortion continues, and the top brackets continue to suction the markets away from their own mega investment targets - a setup for depression. Then the Globe gets worried that they may have worried small investors too much so they come up with the reassuring subtitle -]
   - But 2.4% jump in 1st [quarter] shows output remains healthy
   [In other words, don't bail out of the stock market and end the binge just yet, even though there are weaker and weaker markets for all this stronger and stronger output.]

1. [UPsizing #1, totalling 25 new jobs]
   Expansion plans for 2 agencies [e.g., .Comies], by Patricia Lauro, NYT, C8.
   ...Paul Cappelli, president of the Ad Store in New York, opened .Comies, specializing in advertisingand marketing for Internet companies. .Comies begins with 25 employees at offices in Amsterdam, New York and Paris....

2. [UPsizing #2, totalling 20 new jobs]
   Expansion plans for 2 agencies [e.g., Deepgroup US offices], by Patricia Lauro, NYT, C8.
   ...Deepend in London, a digital communications agency that is part of the Deepgroup Companies, is opening its first American offices, in New York and San Francisco. At Deepend New York, with 12 employees...Fred Brown...will be managing director; he had been director at the Deepend London office. At Deepend San Francisco, with eight employees...Paul Cloutier...will be managing director.

3. Chirac seeks shorter term for president - The leader backs tenure of five years [instead of seven], by Suzanne Daley, NYT, A3.
   ...a move that could profoundly change the nature of French politics....
   [It should flex things up a bit. France already leads the world with the shortest national workweek (35 hrs/wk), contraceptives for highschool girls, and provisional marriages for gays and straights.]
   Mr. Chirac had long opposed such a change....

4. [Hey, we haven't heard much about this kind of thing before -]
   Putin travels to Rome to promote Russian arms control alternative, by Alessandra Stanley, NYT, front page.
   [It's almost as if Russia is a normal country with a normal president, who travels around the world, not just inside the old Iron Curtain, and sells ideas.]
   Leaving President Clinton behind in Moscow, Vladimir V. Putin came to Rome [yester]day to sell Europe - and the Vatican - on a Russian alternative to the United States missile defense proposal....
   [Let's hope he succeeds. "Star Wars" is crazy.]

5. Ukraine consents to shut Chernobyl before year's end - Clinton ends trip in Kiev, by Sciolino with Gordon, NYT, front page. KIEV, Ukraine...- President Leonid Kuchma of Ukraine used the occasion of a brief visit by President Clinton [yester]day to announce that the Chernobyl nuclear power station, site of the worst radiation accident in history, would be closed by Dec. 15....
   [How in the world did they keep it open??!]

6. Perot is unlikely to challenge Buchanan, his aide says - Clearing one of the last obstacles to a nomination, by Michael Janofsky, NYT, A20.
   [...and moving the Reform Party from personal fiefdom to real, stand-alone, political party.]

7. [Get the hook and clear Starr off the stage - tiresome white dwarf!]
   Justices say Starr broke Hubbell immunity deal, by Linda Greenhouse, NYT, A15.
   The Supreme Court ruled today that the office of Kenneth W. Starr, the Whitewater "independent" [our quotes - ed.] counsel, violated an agreement with Webster L. Hubbell by forcing him to produce thousands of pages of personal financial records under a grant of immunity and then using those records to indict him on charges of tax evasion [in an] 8-to-1 decision....

1. 6/04 Getting out the e-vote (Sooner than you may think), by Jonathan Bloom, Boston Globe, E1.
   ...If the Arizona Democratic primary is any indication...online voting brought a 600% increase in participation compared with 1996.... Increased participation is much needed, considering the United States' lackluster voter participation record. In 1998, our participation ranked 138 out of 170 voting nations. Only 44.9% of the voting age population bothered to vote that year....
   [This, coupled with voting by phone, would be a big help to the spread of issue-oriented referendums.]

2. 6/04 The path to a simpler life finds its way to Web - sites offer tools for voluntary simplicity, by Dolores Kong, Boston Globe, J7.
   ...For Marc Eisenson...a proponent of voluntary simplicity for about 15 years, [this] lifestyle choice is about being able to spend time the way you want.... Said Eisenson, "I feel that work is something you do for money that you wouldn't be doing otherwise...."
   [In short, you work to live - you don't live to work.]
   Here are...some of the voluntary simplicity Web sites....
   • www.newroadmap.org - [lets you link to] Microsoft's MoneyCentral site to figure out how much it really takes out of your life to work that 40-hour work week, [helps] people place a value on the time they spend working solely for a paycheck, taking them away from family and other activities they really care about....
   • www.angelfire.com/ma/fi/main.html - [lists] upcoming meetings and potluck dinners....
   • www.fiassociates.org - [provides information] about finding relatively inexpensive health insurance if you don't want to keep working at a job just for the health coverage....
   • www.awakeningearth.org - [provides] links to other voluntary simplicity sites [such as]
     • www.newdream.org
     • www.investinyourself.com

3. 6/04 A push for women's rights - Five years after Beijing, nations seek to speed progress, by Edith Lederer, AP via Boston Globe, A4.
   ...The ideological divide over a range of issues was likely to keep negotiators working through much of the 5-day conference to try to reach consensus before it ends Friday.... [Oh yes, this is not only the featured divide between the Vatican and Islamic countries, which are still in the 19th century when it comes to population issues, but also the divide between rich and poor nations. Women from rich nations want equal pay with men and other "luxuries" while women from poor nations have much more basic wants. Overall consensus is probably a poor approach here. How about a consensus from each of the three blocs.]
   Organizers estimate that 10,000 delegates and grassroots activists will attend the conference, compared with at least 40,000 in Beijing [= the big women's rights conference in 1995].

4. 6/04 Nader's challenge - His candidacy poses a dilemma for Gore and liberal voters, op ed by Robert Kuttner, Boston Globe, E7.
   Ralph Nader is running [as the Green Party candidate] for president on popular issues that Democrat Al Gore has ducked. These include
   • universal health insurance
   • tougher regulation of corporate abuses
   • reform of money and politics
   • fairer taxation, and
   • regulation of global commerce in the interests of consumers, workers, and the environment
   ...One third party, the Republican Party, has displaced one of the two major parties - the Whig Party in the period of 1856-60.... The Republican Party began as an antislavery party..\..
   Since then, third parties...have had some success in forcing one [or both] of the major parties to take seriously a submerged public issue. [For example] the Populists of the 1880s and 90s [championed] farmers who were being killed by tight credit.... With the nomination of William Jennings Bryan ["the little giant"] in 1896, the Democrats embraced much of the populist program [which in turn made it a lot easier for the progressive branch of the Republican Party to blossom under Teddy Roosevelt five years later - ed.].
   In a few cases, third-party candidates have tipped the election to one of the two major parties.... [For example] in 1912 [Teddy Roosevelt's] Bull Moose Progressive[s] threw the election to a progressive Democrat, Woodrow Wilson.... In 1968, many disgusted antiwar Democrats...voted for a protest candidate [and] their reward was Richard Nixon [who within a few years pulled the U.S. out of the Vietnam War]..\..
   Nader probably has the highest name recognition and general public approval of any third party candidate in nearly a century.... At the moment, Nader is outpolling this year's likely candidate of the Reform Party, Pat Buchanan.... Nader insists that so many voters are disaffected with politics altogether that he will pull votes from Republicans as well as Democrats, not to mention votters inclined to just stay home....
   [Our prediction? In the years ahead, with ever-rising levels of technology matched by historically upside-down ever-rising levels of the workweek, and no time or job security for environmental issues let alone for family, the anti-slavery issue will rise again in new forms = white-collar sweatshops, salary-slavery, and the working poor (= "fully employed" people with multiple part-time jobs, low pay and no benefits). The third party closest to this issue will steal secular votes from the religionized Republicans and progressive-populist votes from the base-betraying Democrats and get this country moving again, instead of just tossing more people into the streets or prisons and chanting "booming economy, booming economy, booming economy...."
   [Right now the Greens are the closest but they have a huge organizational disability. If they can move beyond the consensus method and the Green "gatherings" into the bigtime, they will be backed by farsighted CEOs who realize that with a consumer base this weakened, no investments are secure and the record levels of working poor, disabled, homeless and incarcerated represent huge potential markets that will never be realized unless we engineer a worldwar-level labor shortage and harness market forces to centrifuge wealth out of Wall Street to wages. And the only intelligent method known to man of engineering such a shortage is enforcing a maximum workweek per person and lowering it. (And the only flexible, training-intensive and market-oriented way of doing that is Timesizing.)]

1. [1 UNtakeover]
   FTC moves to halt Kroger's Winn-Dixie deal, Reuters via NYT, B4.
   The Federal Trade Commission announced yesterday that it would sue to halt the Kroger Co.'s proposed purchase of 74 Winn-Dixie Stores Inc. supermarkets in Oklahoma and Texas [saying, for example,] "The transaction as proposed would combine Fort Worth's 2nd- and 3rd-largest supermarket chains to create a dominant firm in Fort Worth"....

2. [In the immortal words o' Rabbie Burrns, "The gift o' God, the gift tay gae us, tay see airrsels as itherrrs see us" -]
   Russian shoot-'em-up pokes holes in an America once revered, by David Filipov, Boston Globe, A2.
   ...The film is called "Brother 2" - yes, it is a sequel.... The good guys are Russian killers who...teach a smarmy American crime boss a lesson. All to the constant beat of Russian rock hits.... Director Alexei Balabanov has...tapped into Russia's growing patriotic, and anti-American sentiment. The film's die-hard hero, Danila...can romance...crack skulls and...one-liners at least no worse that Stallone, Willis or Schwarzenegger.... "So tell me, American. What is the source of power? Money?" Danila asks his suddently cornered and cowed American adversary after wiping out his entire security detail and downing a very large glass of Stolichnaya. "You have a lot of money, but so what? I think that strength is in truth. He who has the truth is stronger."
   ...Danila and his wise-cracking older brother [go on an] overseas quest for justice. On the way [they] break American laws, which is par for the course for our own action films. But the film almost gleefully does battle with modern American notions of cultural etiquette by dredging up every racial or sexual stereotype in the book. "We aren't racists," said director Balabanov in a recent online chat session. "But we hold to a healthy sense of national dignity." Russians in the film never give up, they never leave one of their own behind, and they get all the best one-liners ("Are you all gangsters?" asks one American. "No, we're Russians," deadpans one of Danila's friends)....
   The pro-American euphoria that followed the fall of communism had been fading for years when it finally disappeared for good in differences over Kosovo and Chechnya. The United States is still envied as the world's most powerful and rich country, but most Russians now believe that America intends to bully and ignore them, rather than share its good fortune with them. "Don't expect anything good from Americans," wrote Sergei Leskov in an article detailing Russian stereotypes of Americans in yesterday's...Izvestia. "They always take care of themselves [would we had the sense to really do that - ed.].... Americans think someone is better when they have more money"....
   Whatever the intent [of the film], the larger theme of Russia's lost illusions of America come through in the last scene, when one of Danila's friends makes an obscene gesture at a US border official and gets on a plane home. The popular [Russian] song "Farewell Letter," with its refrain, "Goodbye America," kicks in.... Ten years ago, this was a song about longing for a better, forbidden life, embodied by [an] America the singer "will never see." In "Brother 2," it is an appropriate send-off to a place best left behind.

• Clinton finds Germans critical of US missile defense plan - Schroeder expresses worry about igniting a new arms race, by Elaine Sciolino, NYT, A10.
  BERLIN - ...Chancellor Schroeder added his voice to the chorus of European allies criticizing the administration's plan....
  [But don't they realize that we need this to reduplicate the Reagan miracle and centrifuge wealth through the Pentagon?! A renewed arms race would be GREAT for our primitive level of understanding on the necessity of centrifuging wealth. Then we wouldn't have to share the work (and earnings) by lowering the workweek! We could just go on and on raising it! GROOVY. We could turn America into a huge sweatshop cum prisoncamp and then repeal the Emancipation Proclamation! Ah, but ultimately we'd just have to go to war and kill a LOT of people, or maybe we could rationalize our way into doing it in a more orderly fashion like the Nazis. After all, we've already rationalized two million Americans in prisons, mail-order machineguns, and constant TV courses on highschool murder like the film "Scream" on commercial TV on Thursday eve in the Boston area (Channel 4).]

1. [1 UNtakeover]
   Car rental spinoff by AutoNation is set, Bloomberg via NYT, C25.
   ...The nation's largest automobile retailer today set June 30 as the date it will spin off its unprofitable car rental unit.... ANC Rental includes Alamo Rent-A-Car, National Car Rental and CarTemps USA.... ANC Rental will be the 3rd-largest publicly traded car rental company after the Hertz Corp. and Avis Group Holdings Inc.

2. French unemployment drops, AP via NYT, C4.
   France's unemployment rate fell below 10% in April for the first time in 9 years, in a victory for the Socialist-led government that made fighting joblessness its No. 1 priority on taking power in 1997.
   [Socialism, shmoeshalism. It was cutting the workweek and sharing the vanishing market-demanded human work, and spreading the earnings therefrom that maintain and build the French consumer base. All the rest of the government regulation of socialism isn't worth a tinker's damn. And the worksharing is having success even though the current French way of doing it is among the most arbitrary, rigid and primitive ways of doing it that exists. Much better is the 5-phase Timesizing approach. But the NYT and the English-language media will never mention the key role of workweek reduction in this healing process because it is a violation of the mainstream economics dogma of "the lump of labor fallacy" - the constantly repeated attribution to shorter-hours advocates, regardless of reality, of the idée fixe that the amount of employment is finite in the long term. Actually the urgently demanded amount of human employment is constantly contracting
   • as robotization and automation takes it over
   • as technology is used to replace employees instead of facilitate them
   • as more and more of the human workforce is being marginalized and in need of ever more desperate marketing and advertising efforts (junk mail, spam, phone solicitation, etc.) to generate demand, however artificial
   • as a larger and larger proportion of the surviving urgently demanded employment is focused on creating worksaving technology.]
   The April unemployment figure was 9.8%. December 1991 was the previous time the unemployment rate was a single-digit figure.

3. The issues take center stage in Nader campaign, by Yvonne Abraham, Boston Globe, front page.
   ..."Every four years [the 2 major parties] get more and more alike...." Nader derides Gore and Pres. Bill Clinton for their campaign fund-raising practices, for not fighting hard enough for universal health care.... Nader calls Bush the "corporate welfare king," making huge profits from his share of the Texas Rangers after government money helped build a new stadium for the baseball team. He scoffs at Bush for staging photo opps with children when Texas has the 2nd-highest hunger rate in the country....