Timesizing® Associates

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Good News, Oct. 21-31, 2000
[Commentary] ©2000 Phil Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080

10/31/2000  glimmers of intelligence -

1. [1 UPsizing]
   Shell to build in China, by Craig Smith, NYT, W1.
   ...The Royal Dutch/Shell Group signed a contract for a 50% stake in a $4B petrochemical complex to be built on China's southeast coast [beginning] in 2003. It will be the biggest foreign investment in China.

2. Downsize pay of corporate CEOs, letter to editor by Christopher Conty of Newburyport MA, Boston Globe, A18.
   The initiatives to increase technical brainpower proposed by Mike Ruettgers in..."Help wanted in Mass. for the new economy" (op ed, Oct. 25) miss the point. He and his fellow CEOs have created a supply of disposable workers who are paid one-600th of what the CEOs make and are then traumatized when they try to get back to work.
   After 20 years of delivering superior results, I've gone through four years of career hell following a downsizing and have been unable to find long-term permanent anything since. My job networking support group is filling with over-45s trained in what is now the "wrong" technology who are confronted with statements like "We have no time to retrain you" and "The chemistry isn't right."
   I'm grateful that I'm "only" older. Among the disabled, unemployment still exceeds 70%.
   Bottom line: Reverse the current trends toward a throw-away culture and ever-increasing income disparity. Go back to the biblical teaching that we are each responsible for our less-fortunate brethren.
   Mr. Ruettgers, you could start by taking every penny of your total compensation that exceeds 10 times that of your lowest-paid worker and put it toward programs to help include all the people we're throwing away.
   [Right on! Put it toward TRAINING or REtraining programs, "Mr." Ruettgers. CEOs have gotten sooo spoiled in these last few years of global technology-vs.-frozen-workweek driven labor glut, that they've raised their job qualifications, narrowed their job descriptions, dropped training programs left and right, and fired 100,000s of older employees so they wouldn't have to mess with paying pensions. And this, we are told, is an "economic boom"? How are they going to behave in a slump?
   [Never mind the "discipline of the workforce" - we need some discipline in the top executive suites, discipline that only a severe labor shortage can provide, not just a bogus shortage of cheap pretrained megahour-working youngsters from India that CEOs have just GOT to get 100,000s of visas from Congress for, not just a bogus shortage of labor that magically flips into a shortage of jobs when CEOs think they can extort tax breaks from state and city legislators for bringing more jobs to the area or 'straining' not to move them away - as in the case of the taxbreaks for Raytheon and Fidelity in recent years here in Massachusetts.
   [There is only one way to get the necessary severe labor shortage = withdraw labor hours from the job market. And there are only two ways to withdraw labor hours from the job market -
   
   1. the stupid way (but our usual way the last 67 years) = war
   2. the smart way (our historic way for the first two-thirds of American economic history) = adjust the workweek downward.
   [We in the Timesizing.com Party are recommending #2. We have damaged all our wealth-centrifuging mechanisms in the past 37 years and now the money may be 'trickling down' but as Chris Conty points out, it is POURING UP. An acute labor shortage raises the the 'price' of labor of all kinds. It harnesses market forces and raises wages and benefits and prevents the kind of astronomical hoarding that we're seeing today. It gets the money back into the hands of the people who actually spend it, and creates a solid economic boom - as during and after World Wars I and II. Plagues also work - the Black Death killed a quarter of Europe and created an unprecedented economic boom by rarifying labor and centrifuging wealth to the laborers, who then spent the continent into a boom, not like today's hollow boom of stock markets inflated because the rich are culling so much of the national income they have nowhere else to put it, but a solid boom with no astronomical pay disparity between ordinary employees and top managers. We have a gentle, gradual, market-oriented program for doing this, starting with a long and voluntary private-sector stage similar to France's under the rightwing Robien Law of 1995-96 - we call it Timesizing. We either do it gently now or we'll either be doing it non-gently later, or we'll have lost so much of our general American quality of life and living standards, we'll be a highly technologized third-world plutocracy that's evolving into different species - workers and drones, Eloi and Morlocks, whatever - and with no common interests, make that warring species.
   [By the way, the Timesizing program is exactly Chris Conty's solution mapped back from the monetary compensation dimension onto the employment dimension. It draws a line on the amount of employment per time unit per person, and spreads the overage around, one way or another. You either stop work at the workweek ceiling, reinvest overtime earnings in training or hiring, or have your overtime earnings taxed away so someone else can facsimilate the reinvestment in training and hiring that you should have done. And we introduce this tax on corporate overtime profits well before we introduce it on individual overwork earnings so that individuals have plenty of corporate on-the-job training programs to choose from if they want to make more money than they can now make in just straight time with their present skills. And then if that level of complete overtime-to-jobs conversion doesn't absorb all our huge underemployment, including unemployment, welfare, disability (we've remembered them, Chris!), homelessness, and record incarceration, we gradually lower the workweek, and get it down to somewhere approaching where it should be for our high levels of labor-saving technology.
   [And by the way, this is exactly the same mishigas that CEOs put us all through on an accelerated, small-economy, zero-safety-net basis in the Roaring 1920s.]

1. Why voting for a candidate who can't win is the smartest thing you'll ever do, fullpage ad paid for by Citizens for Strategic Voting, Boston Globe, A23.
   [Now is this the outfit that has Greg MacArthur's $300,000 behind it? - see below 10/25.]
   Vote for Ralph Nader. And don't worry, you're not giving Massachusetts to Bush.
   • Al Gore is going to win Massachusetts [anyway, because] the electoral college, not the popular vote, elects the president [and] the electoral college works on a "winner take all" basis within each state..\.. So don't waste your vote [voting for the guy who is going to win anyway]. Make your vote count. Vote for Nader.... It's really a vote for change.... A vote for Nader will send a loud and clear message from disgruntled Democrats, [Republicans!], Independents and McCain supporters that issues such as true campaign finance reform cannot be left out of the national discussion.
   • This time, your vote can actually make...a multimillion dollar difference. Ralph Nader isn't going to win the presidency...but if he gets 5% of the national popular vote - even without winning a single electoral vote - he and the Green Party will qualify for about $7m in federal funds. And each percentage point over 5% [will qualify for] $1.4m more.
   On Nov. 7, for once you have real power to affect change in this country. Use it wisely. Vote for Nader.
   [This ad answers the following two halfway-intelligent items in the Sunday Globe -]

2. Still undecided, letter to editor from George Watson of Milton MA, Boston Globe, E6.
   ...I can't decide which hand to use to pull the [voting] lever: the one holding my nose or the one holding my wallet!
   [A sparky dilemma in a nutshell, George, but wake up - Nader offers a third alternative that will let you pull the lever with both hands.]

3. [And how did we get so many settle-for-less cowards in the media, who don't seem to realize that this is how a population gets the mediocre government it deserves - by media people of mediocre courage recommending mediocre voting. Atop the op ed page, we find occasionally courageous Ellen Goodman writing a gutless article called "We can't flirt with Nader anymore" for the usual everso sophisticated reasons, and below we get this copout from Kuttner -]
   The two-party system is letting us down, op ed by Robert Kuttner, Boston Globe, E7.
   This year voting turnout could fall to a record presidential low. The decline partly reflects two dreadful candidates but also the long-term impoverishment of politics.... Given how the presidential campaign is deadening political choice, there are two possible outcomes. Either more and more voters will just get turned off to politics...or ordinary people will find more ways to practice politics by state ballot initiatives [that's why Timesizing.com plumps for electronic referendums!]...and third parties.
   ...When mainstream politics is reduced to mechanical posturing, real democracy tends to leak out elsewhere. But..\..the recent round of Nader-bashing is unseemly.... don't blame Nader. His candidacy is a healthy response to the impoverishment of bipartisan politics. Nader is actually introducing into debate issues that both major candidates have left out.
   [So far so good, but then our liberal poster-boy delivers his copout.]
   I will probably hold my nose [better hold your wallet too, Bob!] and vote for Gore, but if the Democrats don't want the Ralph Naders tipping the election to Republicans, they owe voters something better than this dismal campaign.
   [Bob, we believe you live in Massachusetts, so maybe you should raise your standards and read the above-featured Nader ad. Even if you live in a teetering state -
   • The bad things you think you'll get from Bush are nothing compared to the violence and horror that awaits your children and grandchildren if you allow this country to go on slipsliding downward with ever the "lesser of two evils."
   • There are plenty of PO'ed Republicans who'll vote for Nader. Check out this article in tomorrow's Times -
     "The protest vote - Right-wingers for Nader, too?" op ed by William Safire, 10/30 NYT, A27 -
     "...Nowhere is Democratic desperation more evident than in the liberals' savaging of Ralph Nader. The same crowd that stood on principle for Pat Buchanan's right to draw votes from Bush now frantically accuses Nader of hypocrisy, egomania [& what prez candidate doesn't have a lot of self-confidence? -ed.] and unforgivable spoilerism for daring to offer voters a chance to voice their protest.... But let's take a closer look at the conventional wisdom [that a vote for Nader takes a vote from Gore].... I suspect that at least one in three of those now leaning toward Nader would otherwise be voting for Bush [such as]
     1. "hard-hat union types, frustrated at the support of NAFTA by both Bush and Gore and the fecklessness of the AFL-CIO [who] have gravitated to Nader \with\ the Reform Party split and the collapse of Buchanan's campaign [and who like Nader more] the more the liberals attack him....
     2. "small-business owners and employees [who] see both Republican and Democratic leaders acquiescing in the most competition-crushing mergers of corporate giants [whereas] years ago, the GOP was the champion of trust-busting and the protector of diversity in the marketplace.... Nader is their way of sending fat cats a message.
     3. "others on the right [who] feel that their personal privacy is under attack and neither major party gives a hoot. They...don't like being crowded by ever-increasing government surveillance or stalked by a growing army of Internet commercial snoops.... Nader declares 'the use and sale of Social Security numbers by private firms and most government agencies should be banned'.... Bush's Senate ally, NH's Judd Gregg, is pushing a bill to exempt commercial snooping firms from state laws that would protect citizens from the sale of SSN's. Privacy advocates, long disillusioned by the Democratic White House, were stunned at how easily Republican leaders were manipulated by credit-agency lobbyists....
     "Nader offers a healthy outlet for outrage.... Where [Bush and Gore] fail to compete, the consumer advocate offers millions a way out of apathy.... The votes he gets are not any party's votes. Each one is a voter's protest vote that says to major-party pols: don't take me for granted."]

4. [And a couple more sparky letters -]
   
   • [G.W. and W.G. =] George W. [Bush] and Warren G. [Harding]: Will history repeat itself?, letter to editor by Michael Hellerstein of Salem MA, Boston Globe, E8.
   • The benefits of multiparty system, letter to editor by Adam Finelli of Andover MA, Boston Globe, E8.
     In response to Yvonne Abraham's Oct. 23 front-page news story ("Bush, Gore fail to win attention of the young"):
     What Abraham and most of the media fail to mention is that there are more options than just [Bush and Gore]. If more people voted for third party candidates such as Harry Browne (Libertarian) and Ralph Nader (Green), elections would once again have meaning. Rather than not vote in protest, people should vote their consciences and not be so concerned with voting for the winner [or tipping the election to a nightmare - ed.]....
     [It's sooo easy to get too sophisticated for democracy.]
     Although Ralph Nader has no chance in this election, it would have been nice to see him in the debate simply to force the other two..\..to address the issues that matter to people, rather than feeding us bland rhetoric....

1. [1 UPsizing - but we're not sure how intelligent this is...]
   IBM plans $300m plant in China, Reuters via NYT, B3.
   ...computer chip packaging plant in Shanghai in expectation of heavy demand in China.... The plant is scheduled to begin production in early 2002 with a workforce of 1,800....

2. Election 2000 - The Nader factor, by Laura Meckler, AP via New Bedford [Ma.] Standard Times, front page.
   [Hey, on this local newspaper's frontpage and probbly plenty of others, the Nadester has got top billing with a big foto 8 times the size of either Bush-or-Gore's and looking a helluva lot more presidential. The machiavellian subtitle, fortunately below the fold, is "GOP backers hope Nader ads tip scale," and the article focuses on the Republicans' backfirable pro-Nader TV commercials where polls indicate Nader might tip the state to Bush - another reason to outlaw polls and just "Let the public decide!" without manipulation. The ads selectively quote Nader's criticism of Gore though he's been equally critical of Bush.]
   ...Advertising experts say they can't recall another time when a major party organization has run ads helpful to a minor party candidate....
   [Hopefully this is something that will turn an army of Republican regulars off their morally bankrupt party leadership and by redounding to the benefit of third parties like the Nader and the Reform-ers, reveal how "the Lord works in mysterious ways."]

1. Settle Indian trusts, Congress urges, by Matt Kelley, Boston Globe, A20.
   ...settle a lawsuit over mismanagement of trust accounts for about 500,000 American Indians, a move that could cost taxpayers $billions....
   The government plans to spend $27.6m this on the lawsuit [anyway] and $80m to try to straighten out the accounts....

2. W.T.O. rules against U.S., Dow Jones via NYT, W1.
   The World Trade Organization has ruled in favor of Australia and New Zealand in their dispute with the United States over its restricitions on lamb imports, Radio New Zealand said....
   [Seems the great US of A is in favor of free trade for its exports only.]

3. [Here's a standup comic who's singin' our song -]
   Crimmins relishes chance to pillory politicians, by Michael Blowen, Boston Globe, E4.
   *Barry Crimmins...tomorrow night...will perform his pre-election rant at the Comedy Studio in Harvard Square [Cambridge, Ma.] and, for anyone who's sick of sex and dating jokes, Crimmins is a must. This guy is funny and smart - a combination that seems in short supply in both comedy and politics. "Why wait until after Election Day to bum out?" he asks.
   "What's with Al Gore? I've seen AstroTurf that's more natural than that guy. And how do you lose a debate to George W. Bush if it isn't fixed? Gore must have taken a dive."
   So how have things changed since Crimmins was the booker at the late but legendary Cambridge comedy club, the Ding Ho, in 1979? "It's worse," he says. "Everything is worse.
   • The Chinese have 500,000 people in jail and we've got 2 million, and they're a lot bigger.
   • Conservatives are conservatives unless it comes to conservation [or pregnant women - ed.]. Burn fossil fuel.
   • Where's Gore when it comes to stockpiling nuclear waste? Where's the environmentalist? It's a total nightmare.
   • Big business gives money to everyone. They bet on every number on the wheel. They can't lose. Make them pick a horse. Bet on one or the other. It's fixed.
   • Who's talking about abortion or civil rights? No one. They're talking about how much it's going to cost to drug granny so she doesn't bother anybody.
   • Family values? What are they talking about? They force workers into mandatory overtime so steelworkers can't spend time with their families, and no one can make a decent wage working decent hours; [they're] working 60-hour weeks, so they have no time to spend with their families. It's crazy. And getting crazier."

• Third party, mainstream hopes - Nader speaks to an army of the alienated, op ed by Barbara Ehrenreich who authored forthcoming "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in Boom-Time America," Boston Globe, A31.
  As Election Day approaches with the major candidates in a dead heat, Democratic denunciations of Ralph Nader supporters grow louder and more bitter. We are accused of disloyalty and irresponsibility, of ignoring the differences between the candidates and of being willing to throw the decision to George W. Bush so that we can indulge in a meaningless gesture....
  [Case in point. Right on the editorial page opposite the Op Eds (coincidentally enuf), we find some junior Machiavelli on the Globe's editorial staff penning "Mr. Nader's electoral mischief," which starts, "Back in June, we criticized Ralph Nader's presidential bid as a self-indulgent crusade that could gull some voters into thinking that there were no clear policy choices between Al Gore and George Bush. As the election nears, what once seemed a speculative threat has become a very real danger...." Wal' don't thet jes' beat all. Ralph has the fat cats so nervous they're running for the restrooms. And dahlings, consider what wonderful vision the liberals at the Globe have when they refer to a real third choice in the money-drowned American "democracy" as a "very real danger." Pathetic! Takes a Ralph Nader to show us how thin our illusion of voter power is, when our major media get so hysterical about a real alternative. Check out their lingo-slinging at the Nadester -
  • "Nader's meager share of the vote,"
  • "Mr. Nader's willful prankishness,"
  • "A disservice to the electorate" (God forbid we should EVER get a meaningful choice!),
  • "The country deserves a clear up-or-down vote between Mr. Bush and Mr. Gore." (As if we can't handle any reality that isn't black-or-white! What an arrogantly insulting pack of polecats asweatin' in the Globe editorial suites. Time they realized that shades of black don't cut it anymore. The Globe is on the melting iceberg this time. They've chosen the Past. They're vulnerable to replacement by a Boston daily that's at least the Present, if not the Future.)
  • [Then they try snide patronization -] "Of course, voters who want to cast an ideological protest vote for Mr. Nader have a perfect right to do so." [No thanks to the Globe's meager coverage of Nader and his substantial issues, compared with their relentless massive trivial coverage of Gore and Bush.]
  • "Mr. Nader has the luxury of taking free throws." [That's because he's not bought and paid for by Big Money - like Gore the Bore and Bush the Wh*re - or vice versa.]
  • "wrecking ball candidacy"
  • "ego run amok"
  [Give it a rest! This is supposed to be 'glimmers of intelligence,' so let's get back to the Op Ed (opposite the editorials) - in more ways than one -]
  But support for Mr. Nader is only one small sign of a much larger growing alienation from the electoral process and the two parties that benefit from it.... A majority of eligible voters are unlikely to vote - more than 50% stayed home in the 1996 election.
  [The 1996 49% turnout was the lowest voter turnout in American history since 1924.]
  The working poor, who supposedly have the most at stake in this or any election, are especially well represented among those who now abstain from voting....
  Among Naderites, only about a quarter are normally Democratic voters, according to a recent Reuters/MSNBC poll; the rest are independents and Republicans.
  [This hilites the pathetic stupidity and weak defensiveness of Democratic leadership - they think they're ENTITLED to 100% of Nader's support, and they're taking his campaign as a personal insult! Time they realized they've abandoned their base and they're not entitled to anything on the basis of guilt manipulation.]
  Among those of us who have voted Democratic for most of our lives, the mood is less of spiteful defiance than of sorrow. We didn't choose to abandon the Democratic Party in its hour of need; the party chose to abandon us. Our parents or grandparents...would barely recognize the party of Bill Clinton and Al Gore as their own.
  • They failed to lift the minimum wage even up to the poverty level, although executive pay soared to more than 400 times that of the average working person.
    [And anyway, Democrats would have been more effective if they'd gone with sharing the vanishing work via a maximum workweek than going with minimum wage and massive makework.]
  • They pursued a trade policy rejected by unions and a majority of Americans.
  • They blew their chance to create a national health insurance program....
  • [They] presided over
    • a stunning expansion of the prison system [and]
    • an increasingly senseless, and a thoroughly bipartisan, war on drugs [and]
    • the so-called "reform" of welfare [that left] food pantries all over the country...unable to meet the "torrent of need."
  I see the Nader campaign as a chance to...re-energize American democracy.... Only Mr. Nader addresses the alienation of the American majority.... A vote for Mr. Nader is...a statement of affirmation and hope.
  [Nader also got a good photo on the front page of the NY Times today, and a great caption, "Under fire, Nader strikes back."]

1. [1 UNtakeover]
   AT&T to divide into 4 companies, AP via Boston Globe, D2.
   ...The icon of American business..\..is preparing to break itself into smaller pieces for the third time since 1984, abruptly abandoning its grand plan of bundling together all kinds of telephone, TV, and Internet services on a single bill from a single company.... Bowing to Wall Street's sudden disdain for that plan...these [4 distinct entities] will include [wireless, broadband, business & consumer (from 10/26 NYT, C1), plus] a new tracking stock to represent the performance of its consumer long-distance unit - the dominant name in a dying industry, whose shrinking profits have dogged the whole company's financial outlook....
   [What an emblem of the floundering of American management in these last few years before the Great Depression II.]

2. Donor helps Nader, guards Gore's [& Bush's!] hopes, by Michael Kranish, Boston Globe, front page.
   WASHINGTON - Greg MacArthur, grandson of the billionaire John D. MacArthur, seems a most unlikely player in the effort to win votes for Ralph Nader's presidential campaign....
   [Oh, we wouldn't say that. Young (and young-at-heart) people love Nader. He's the only thing they've got to believe in at the dawn of the Third Millennium.]
   But starting today, MacArthur, whose late grandfather was one of the nation's three richest men, is pouring some of his own money into an unprecedented and independent pro-Nader advertising campaign.... MacArthur is spending more than $300,000 on ads that urge people to vote for the Green Party nominee - but only in states where either Gore or George W. Bush is far ahead. Massachusetts, which has been mostly ignored by both major campaigns, is one of the states being targeted.
   In other words, MacArthur wants voters to back Nader, but not if it means helping to elect Bush by draining votes from Gore.
   [And not if it means helping to elect Gore by draining votes from Bush. Kranish needs to read his own stuff - he just wrote "only in states where either Gore or George W. Bush is far ahead." There are plenty of ecological Republicans, as the *Green Elephants (Republicans for Environmental Protection) led by Martha Marks in the midwest can testify.]
   ..\..Greg MacArthur [is] the producer of a[n environmentally conscious] children's video called, "Where does my garbage go"....
   Asked why he is spending some of his fortune to back Nader instead of helping elect someone [like Bush] who would cut his tax bill by millions over several years, MacArthur responded: "My feeling is that money is somewhat absurd. People are much too obsessed by it."
   [Now there's a rich guy with some perspective! - they do exist.]
   ...MacArthur's effort to help Nader...underscores the motive of some supporters of the consumer advocate [which] is to garner 5% of the national vote. That is the threshold set by the Federal Election Commission for the Green [or any other] Party to be [able] to receive federal matching funds worth at least $7m in 2004. If that happens...the Green Party will be in position to run a major presidential campaign in 2004....
   [And wouldn't it be great to have something good to vote for, instead of always "the lesser of two evils"?!]

1. 2 UPsizings (unspecified new jobs) -
   1. Intel to build plant in China, by Craig Smith, NYT, W1.
      ...a new semiconductor assembly plant in Shanghai \worth\ about $400m...tripling its investment there. The new plant, which will produce computer chips for personal computers and servers, is expected to be finished by the end of the year.
   2. Staples opens center in Belgium, by Chris Reidy, Boston Globe, C3.
      Hoping to launch a dot-com business in Europe late next year, Framingham's Staples Inc. announced yesterday the opening of a Belgian call center and a distribution center that will partly serve as the e-commerce infrastructure for the office supply retailer's European operations.... About 150 of the chain's nearly 1,300 stores are in Europe.... [For] a "pan-European" approach...Staples has decided to relocate its European HQ and much of its operations from Britain to Belgium....

2. [1 UNtakeover]
   Constellation Energy plans to form 2 companies, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   The Constellation Energy Group [plans] to split itself into a wholesale power-generating business and a retail-services company that would include its Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. utility. ...The generation business...will keep the Constellation name while the retail business will be called the BGE Corp. Constellation is following other energy companies in splitting its regulated utilities from faster-growing units, like power generation, that can fetch the higher prices investors are willing to pay for less-regulated generators....

3. Bush economics, letter to editor from Reagan's Under-Secretary of Commerce Robert Ortner of Short Hills NJ, NYT, A30.
   George W. Bush's "compassionate conservativism" is the same basic philosophy that Republicans previously called "supply side" or "trickle down" economics (news article, Oct. 20). Putting a happy face on the package does not improve it.
   The combination of cutting income taxes and eliminating estate taxes would benefit the rich almost exclusively. At a time of full employment [pretty loosely defined - ed.], this kind of fiscal stimulation is also bad economic policy, and would lead to higher interest rates.
   Mr. Bush's proposal to privatize part of Social Security would undermine the system while handing a windfall to Wall Street. Similarly, the Bush plan for prescription drugs would subsidize or bribe insurance companies to induce them to offer coverage to the public - still another layer of corporate welfare. A Bush administration would be a large step [further] in the direction of government of, by and for the rich.
   [Wealth may be "trickling down," but in a pre-depression period like this, with stocks gyrating in record P/E ranges, unions weak and one wealth centrifuge after another crippled and dismantled, wealth is pouring, gushing, welling, flooding UP, and it's the Black Hole Effect of astronomically compacted wealth that gradually suctions the spending power away from its own investments that finally crashes stocks and awakens the wealthy to their grotesque self-destabilizing obsessiveness. "The more concentration, the less circulation." The best way to start reinvesting in our own markets is to target and size the reinvestment by the incidence of overtime, and to adjustibly size the overtime and its targeted reinvestment by the incidence of under-employment. These constitute the essential one-two punch of the Timesizing program.]

1. [1 UNtakeover]
   ZymoGenetics will become independent of Novo Nordisk, by Andrew Pollack, NYT, C12.
   One of [the US's] oldest biotechnology companies...founded in June, 1981 \and based in Seattle, has\ arranged for $150m in private financing that [will] allow it to...spinout \from\ its parent company [in] Denmark [which] has...wholly owned [it since] 1988....

2. [Man, does this gent capture our dilemma! -]
   Thoughts from one of the undecided, letter to editor by Marshall Keys of Boston, Boston Globe, A18.
   Leonard Rubin of Marlborough asks with some exasperation how any voter can still be undecided so close to the election (letter, Oct. 19).
   Well, I'm still undecided. I still have to choose
   • between a candidate who can't remember the facts and a candidate who can't remember the truth;
   • between having my wallet emptied by Big Business and having my wallet emptied by Big Labor [which ain't so big any more - ed.]
   • between having my behavior controlled by the Christian Right and having my behavior controlled by the PC Left, and
   • between two men who both behaved contemptibly in the Elian Gonzalez affair and who now want to be the person to define our foreign policy.
   Yes, it is a tough choice.
   But my big decision between now and Election Day is whether to vote at all. If I vote you can be certain that I will split my vote in the hope that neither party controls both the Congress and the White House.
   The only hope of the people for the next four years is limiting the damage either of our parties can do by maintaining a true balance of power between the legislative and executive branches.
   [Or raising a third party, as we did in the 1850s, to break the duopoly. We recommend the Greens, because though they have been portrayed as positioned on the left, the age of ecology now adawning obsoletes the left-right distinction and gives us all an extended self-interest in shfting from fighting each other to fighting our joint destructive, and long-term self-destructive, impact on nature.]

3. Nader not heeding activists' advice, AP via Boston Globe, A12.
   OAKLAND, Calif. - Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader rejected calls from a dozen of his longtime fellow activists that he rethink his campaign because he could cost Democrat Al Gore the election....
   [Here we have 12 imagination-impaired people with zip longterm view, and no sense whatever of the symbolic value of the millennium year 2000, and the importance of unleashing our idealism and vision this year of all years. As Phil Hyde said to many cynics on the campaign trail, "What better year for a quixotic gesture?!" and "If not now, then WHEN???" As long as we keep choosing the lesser of two evils, 'evil' will keep gaining, inch by inch, we will getting negative progress and keep losing ground. Sometimes, as Paul wrote to the Corinthians in their idolatrous social context, ya gotta just "Come out from among them and be ye separate, saith the Lord." (II Cor. 6:17.)]
   Some of the dozen have gone into corporate employment or work for the government, and don't understand that time have changed for consumer activists, [Nader] said. [He] made it clear that he intends to press on with his campaign nationwide, if only to build a viable third party.
   [And more power to 'im, sez we!]

1. [1 UNtakeover -]
   ICN Pharmaceuticals agrees to split into 3 companies, Bloomberg via NYT, B3.
   ["Don't panic!"]
   The chairman of ICN... Milan Panic, bowing to investor pressure, agreed to split the drug maker into 3 companies and give up the control of the unit [in which the investors had invested, the one] that owns the rights to its only blockbuster drug. Mr. Panic [doncha love this name?!], who founded ICN four decades ago, had resisted demands by shareholders to relinquish control of Ribapharm, the unit that makes the hepatitis C drug ribavirin.... Facing a potential proxy fight...Mr. Panic said today [prob. means yesterday] that he would separate Ribapharm, ICN's international operation, and its North and South American businesses to create three independent public companies....
   [Sounds like four to us - bad writing!]
   Mr. Panic [is] a former prime minister of Yugoslavia....
   [Well that explains everything.]

2. Measure to help save great apes is sent to Clinton - Bill allots $5m yearly for grants, AP via Boston Globe, A10.
   [And they don't mean Republicans - remember, they're elephants.]
   ...Gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos, and gibbons [hey, gibbons are lesser apes, not great apes!] are listed as endangered...and are at risk of extinction in some areas....
   [Make that all areas. These are our closest relatives, especially the bonobos, erstwhile known as pygmy chimps. If we're going to "teach the animals", these are the guys we gotta start with - and we already have started teaching them sign language.]

3. [And speaking of gibbons -]
   Carter cuts ties to Southern Baptists, by Michael Paulson, Boston Globe, front page.
   [What took him so long?]
   ...In recent years, the 16m-member convention has declared that
   • women should not serve as senior pastors
   • wives should submit to their husbands
   • Southern Baptists should boycott Disney over its decision to provide employee benefits to the partners of gay and lesbian employees
   Carter, who has expressed unhappiness with the Southern Baptist Convention for at least seven years, yesterday said he is finally fed up....
   [Hey what do you expect from the "Christians" who supported slavery -]
   The Southern Baptist Convention is undergoing its most serious fragmentation since it split from the American Baptist Convention over the issue of slavery 150 years ago....

4. [And speaking of "teaching the animals" -]
   Turning techies into humanists - Schools shaping the whole engineer, by David Abel, Boston Globe, front page.
   ...Whitney Boesel [meaning 'little evil one' in German?]...wanted to study something more intimate \than her\ two years [of] brain and cognitive sciences...at MIT...
   ["intimate"???]
   ...[so she] began taking classes in poetry, fiction and...finally...decided to switch her major. [She] enrolled last week in MIT's School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.... "People here...," she said, "...don't believe you can major in writing at MIT."
   But, as the quickening pace of technological change sparks a surge in social questions, administrators at technical colleges are increasingly recognizing that they need...students as comfortable in the humanities as in science....
   [Well we suspect the definition of 'need' here has the scent of money. But seeing that our gadget (e.g, computer) technology has far outstripped our social technology - as indicated in the Chesterton pan-utopian flaw - we're all in favor of the social sciences. We just don't think that academic courses in the "humanities" and the "arts" are going to contribute much to the catching up process.] -
   
   • MIT this month dedicated $75m of a $100m gift to bolster its humanities department.
   • At Caltech, students are flocking to the new Science, Ethics and Society Program
   • Georgia Tech, which saw a 17% jump in freshmen registering to study at the school's liberal arts college, is offering students new classes in everything from public policy to international relations....
   [This could be a great makework program for all our artists and humanitarians - and highly qualified for government grants - at taxpayers' expense. Hey, got a better idea. Why don't we just share the vanishing work and make it easier for people to earn a good honest living, instead of pretending that advanced education is anything more than an elaborate hazing ceremony to postpone the entry of inexpensive, easily-suckerable-into-megahours youngsters into the market for jobs at the obsolete 40-hour level - and above?! So much of our society, both government and business, has become makework since we decided not to share the vanishing work. Why, there are now whole industries devoted to not sharing (eg: tax advisors) and arguing that work isn't vanishing (eg: Tugwellian and Keynesian economists of the 'lump of labor' sneer). See our bibliography page.]