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Good News, Dec. 11-20, 2000
[Commentary] ©2000 Phil Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080

12/20/2000  glimmers of intelligence -

1. [1 UPsizing, 1100 new Va. jobs]
   Chip maker to expand its operations in Virginia, Dow Jones via NYT, C3.
   Infineon Technologies, a semiconductor manufacturer based in Munich, [will] retool its chip operations in Richmond, Va., and create 1,100 new jobs at the plant, increasing its work force there by about 40%. Infineon [will] install new equipment in the plant, the former White Oak Semiconductor site, to make D-RAM, or dynamic random access memory, integrated circuits on semi-conductor wafers, starting in early 2002....
   [Just like Intel on 12/15 below.]

2. [time awareness returns to a fraction of the American workforce -]
   Allstate agents file suit seeking pay for overtime - Paid by commission but disputing hours, by Joseph Treaster, NYT, C2.
   The battle between Allstate and agents who say they were forced out of their jobs as the company has been streamlining its operations took another turn yesterday.
   [Strange. Allstate used to be such a good company, for insurees anyway. And apparently for some agents -]
   ..."Allstate used to be the best place I ever worked," said Ron Harper, an agent in Thompson, Ga.... "I don't share that same opinion now."
   ..\..In a lawsuit filed in Federal District Court in Tampa, Flal., 49 agents from across the country accused Allstate of requiring them to work overtime but refusing to pay them for it. Aaron Kaufman, a lawyer for the agents, said the lawsuit was seeking court approval to permit hundreds of other agents to join in a collective action similar to a class action.
   Michael Trevino, a spokesman for Allstate, said the insurer regarded the agents as exempt from the federal lay requiring time-and-a-half pay for anyone working more than 40 hours a week and that "they are not due any overtime pay."
   [That would probably be the overtime section of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which was intended to set up a maximum workweek per person, being the gutted version of the Black Thirty Hour Work Week Bill that passed the US Senate in 1933 and that shaped the entire New Deal by serving as a kind of "reverse polestar" for FDR to sail away from - see Benjamin Hunnicutt, Work Without End (Temple, 1988), p. 249 - or at least block from passing the House and becoming the law of the land, despite FDR's 1935 "voiced regret that he did not got behind the Black-Connery Thirty-Hour Week Bill and push it through Congress" - see p. 252 of Our Own Time by David Roediger & Philip Foner (Verso, 1989).]
   The agents, who work on commission, say they should receive overtime pay because Allstate, starting in January 1999, required them to keep their offices open more than 40 hours a week. The agents say they often worked longer hours by choice, but they contend they should have been paid for it once the company required it....
   [Good, maybe now we'll find out if we really have any kind of enforceable legislation on a universal work share per person per time unit, or if we basically have to start again from scratch. In the nature of the case, further human progress is impossible unless this concept can be made as clear and comprehensive as universal suffrage - "one person one vote" mapped over onto "one person one workweek range" - because if we don't go forward, we go back, as Flori-duh demonstrated on the 'universal' suffrage plane this past 1½ months.]

3. Bill to revise bankruptcy law dies as Clinton fails to sign it, AP via NYT, A18.
   [Phew! Like we need to do any further damage to what remains of the centrifuge mechanisms in our "trickle down, POUR up" economy. And the wealthy always act sooo surprised when there's insufficient consumer base left to support them. Sortof like fishermen when another food species vanishes, or lumbermen when there's no more old growth. Or the Paul Samuelson's when we'd be grateful if there was even just a fixed "lump of labor" (i.e., employment) left.]

4. New federal rules on U.S. contracts emphasize 'ethics' - Clinton changes rules on contracts, benefiting labor, by Steven Greenhouse, NYT, A1 & A18.
   ...Labor leaders, who have long lobbied for the regulations, applauded the administration's move, asserting that it was wrong for the government to award contracts to corporations that repeatedly violate labor, environmental or other laws....
   [How pathetic when our enforcement of environmental, civil rights and employee protection laws is so half-assed that we need yet more laws to keep the existing ones from being completely ignored!]

• [An example of timesizing, not downsizing -]
  In Canada's Northwest Territories, bureaucracy chills out - Officials cherish 2-week furlough as offices are shut, by Colin Nickerson, Boston Globe, A29.
  ...The year's final message to the media \from the\ press secretary \of the\ government [in Yellowknife, NWT -] "Please be advised that the Government of the Northwest Territories will be closed from December 21 - January 3, 2001." ... The entire government is shutting down - lock, stock and switchboard operator.
  The winter closing of the territorial government has become a tradition called Donny Days...after Donald Morin, territorial premier in the mid-1990s when budget shortfalls created a financial crisis. He took a look at the bottom line, swallowed hard, and told everyone to go home for two week. Without pay.
  [Hey, this is timesizing, not downsizing - with the workyear varying directly with revenues. Too little money for the full year? No problemo. Drop a couple of weeks off the workyear. Everyone sacrifices together. No one is laid off. And no skills are lost.]
  That was an especially shocking holiday...for the western Arctic territory of 42,000 [people]. Government is the biggest single employer, with some 4,200 people [10% of the population!] on the payroll.
  
  • Oh, did the public employees union howl!
  • Oh, did the civil servants moan!
  • Oh, did the citizenry gnash its teeth at the prospect of going two weeks without a bureau of vital statistics or deputy assistant director for policy coordination.
  But the tightfisted premier was adamant. And life without government, it turned out, somehow carried on.
  The Donny Days are still technically "enforced leave" for austerity reasons, not a proper holiday. But the pain is now thinned across a year of slightly reduced paychecks, so it feels like a boon more than the cruel kick in the wallet of that original Donny notice.
  "People honestly love it," said..\..Susan Fleck, the executive assistant for the Minister of Resources, Wildlife and Economic Development.... "Some head for the sun. Some hang out at home. It's a great time for socializing and for family."
  The break also means no more squabbling at the office over who has to workover Christmas. No more employees saddled with triple-work while luckier colleagues jet off to the "11th province" as Canadian-crammed Florida is known.
  "We're like France in August, except of course for the temperature," Fleck said. "It's wonderful. Every government should do it. No one's so important that they can't take a break." ...

1. Clinton touts drop in welfare rolls; GOP says it led way, Reuters via Boston Globe, A23.
   WASHINGTON - President Clinton said yesterday that the number of people on welfare has dropped by more than 8m during his presidency, a decline of almost 60% over 8 years that has brought welfare rolls to their lowest level in 30 years....
   [That's just dandy, Bill and your fellow Republicrats. But before we break out the cigars, tell us how much homelessness and the prison population has dropped during your presidency.]

2. Reich labors no more - Ex-labor Secretary speaks on economy, work-life balance, by Diane Lewis, Boston Globe, J1.
   [Photo caption -]
   Former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich, now a professor of social and economic policy at Brandeis University, recently completed a book on the new economy's impact on the lives of Americans.
   [Well, Bob is on the right issue -]
   "...I had been working 18 hours a day for much of the four years [as Labor Secy]. I had two young teenage boys, and it was bothering me..\.. I cannot fool myself into thinking that I can balance work and family," he said. "Forget balancing. I had to choose, and I chose my family."
   [But his response to the nationwide problem is passive pessimism -]
   "...What we will see is that there will be less predictable hours and less predictable income streams. For many, there will be less steady work."
   [Ah Bob, don't you want to extrapolate less predictable consumer markets from that and less predictable, more unstable b2b and financial markets as well, and possibly tie it into business-cycle theory? Apparently not. Bob just wants to undermine his own market as a college professor and lament a general decline in quality of life -]
   "Also, the more education you have, the harder you must now work. This is a big change, and it comes as something of a surprise.... The predictions years ago were that once you reached a certain level of income you could work less and use some of that income for leisure.... We are on our way to becoming a more fragmented and isolated people. We are losing our way to the increasing demands of work.... Unintentionally, we are also becoming a more segregated society. Communities are becoming commodities that are bought and sold like any other commodity. As consumers, professionals are buying into...gated communities.... As a result, there is far more economic segregation between rich and poor.... We should not want our children to live in a two-tiered society. It is unhealthy as a political community, and it makes it harder to come to agreement on policy issues. There can be a backlash. There certainly has been a backlash against globalization..\.. [Already] there are fewer public [swimming] pools and instead, more private health club memberships.... The irony is that the poorer women who are doing the eldercare, childcare and housekeeping, and the men who are doing the transportation, must leave their own children in substandard care and they are left with substandard services."
   [He does say -]
   But that is not inevitable. There are commonsensical changes that can be made - not just by individuals, but by employers and through public policies that can make our lives saner without sacrificing the dynamism of the new economy.
   [This is the second time he's mentioned the "new economy" - a concept which he seems to have swallowed rather uncritically, and unhistorically, - since he doesn't point out the many aspects of today's "New" economy that are old, very old - not just as old as the 1920s but as old as Dickens' dark Satanic mills and Sismondi's first recommendation of shorter hours (1819 - see our Bibliography page). [So he's jumping all over the lot outlining the deterioration. The problem is that his solution ideas are 'from hunger' - conventional, tried&failed, and tame, very tame. Whatever happened to that iconoclastic Bob Reich of the 1980s? Here's all we're gettin' today -]
   
   • We can begin to close the wage gap.
     [Oh thanks, Bob. And would we continue our too-little too-late & too-double-edged practice of jacking up the minimum wage every 2 years to accomplish that???]
     
   • We could give each child at the age of 18 a grub stake of $60,000 to be used for education or to launch a career. This would be paid for by a small tax that would be assessed [on] the wealthy.
     [We could also just go big for the makework solution and provide free college education, Bob - as we did with the GI Bill for 'the boys' who managed to survive World War II. If your opinion of teenagers involves "a clam shell theory of teenage boys" in which "once they get to be 16 or 17, they are like clam shells. They open up sometimes, but rarely," we can't quite understand why you think they'd suddenly be ready to handle a lumpsum of 60 'grand' when they're 18.]
   • We can take steps to ensure that, in the event of job loss, anyone who needs a job can get one.
     [Now you're talkin', but you go from the right direction to the wrong approach in the next sentence -]
   • When private jobs are not available, public service jobs could help cushion the blow.
     [Here we go again - government makework. The very same "solution" that didn't half work during the Depression - until the War withdrew excess labor hours from the job market at the prodigious levels required by our then-current technology levels. This kind of failure to learn from past failure is a startling characteristic of liberals. We first noticed it when Jimmy Carter came up empty despite everyone's high hopes that maybe he had the 'vision thing.' Liberals only 'vision' is a tired rehash of the ineffectual New Deal, whose only redeeming value is that it kept public officials running around in futile activity so much, compared to Hoover's relative inactivity, that it provided a 'feel-good' effect even if the unemployment rate only went down from 24.9% ( 1933) to 14.3% ('37) before slipping back (to 19% in '38) - until primitive timesizing in late '38 took it down to 9.9% in '41 and then the War (POPULATIONsizing?) took it all the way down below 2% (1.9% in '43).]
     
   • We can make sure that all children receive good schooling by shifting financing away from local property taxes.
     [Good idea, but schooling is meaningless without jobs awaiting at graduation. So back to the two points above.]
     One option would be to develop a national education trust fund that would be financed by a small tax on the net worth of all US citizens.
     [Would that be a flat or graduated tax, Bob? And would it finance college or just up to the end of high school? One gets the distinct impression that you have not faced Chesterton's pan-utopian flaw, and you're still trying to fix the whole system by focusing only at the bottom, when balance is a matter of two ends, not just one, and in the case of an income or wealth disparity, the two ends are a bottom and a top.
   [And Bob, you don't seem to have faced the implications of technology either, or asked why professionals are "working longer and longer hours," and nonprofessionals more overtime. You say the "greater pressure" is "not due to job insecurity but to income insecurity," but what's the difference? Aren't you ignoring the continuing culture of downsizing = job insecurity, leading to income insecurity? Is competition between companies really "so much more intense now" (and ifso, what are your measures?) or are we just trying to rationalize to ourselves the stupid mistake we in general and Saint FDR in particular made in 1933 when we snubbed the route of sharing the changing workload, whether it went up or down, and decided to try to maintain the fiction that efficient technology wasn't really efficient, that is, "technology creates more jobs than it destroys" - and froze the workweek at a rigid level (40 hrs/wk) or rather in practice, ratcheted it so that it could go up above 40 but not come down below 40, except for several eccentric industries such as academe and insurance.
   [Bob Reich, the economic wonderkind of the 1980s, seems to have come up empty in 2000. He has only entered the foothills of worktime economics and not really taken it beyond his personal case. He seems unaware of the critical work of Benjamin Hunnicutt on the issue ("Work Without End" 1988 and "Kellogg's Six-Hour Day" 1996) and to be still dwelling in the Goetterdaemmerung of the New Deal, like most liberals, democrats and lefties. Sundowning, you might call it. Questions like, how do we incentivate the private sector to clean up its own mess and sustain its own markets, never occur to these people. They always want to pull in the government on an ad hoc basis to correct a burgeoning myriad of mini-dislocations, all caused by the government's failure to face the skew right in the middle of the body economic - waves of worksaving technology pounding against a rigid or upwardly ratcheted workweek. Bob Reich and Ted Kennedy and their fellow liberals flop around like beached flounders between the ineffectual makework approach on hand and the dependency-generating giveaway approach on the other, never quite able to focus on the center - sharing the work, whether it increases or decreases. At one point, Diane Lewis asks a good question but then blows it by pushing it to extremes -]
   ..\..Q| Some economic observers fear that, with the rapid expansion of machines, jobs are disappearing.
   [She should have stopped there, but no, she goes on to invalidate the question and give Reich an easy out -]
   They say we are heading toward the end of work [a reference to Jeremy Rifkin's book, The End of Work - Jeremy did the whole topic a massive disservice by reducing it to absurdity in his title and making constructive discussion much more difficult] as we knew it. Do you believe that?
   [And Reich of course, takes the easy out -]
   A| I do not take the view that work will disappear because of technology....
   [OK, Bob, let us ask the question that Diane should have stuck with - do you believe that work is reducing because of technology? And if not, then what is the purpose of technology?? And if you're going to exclude quantity-enhancing "efficiency" technology and limit the discussion to the quality-enhancing technology of, e.g., the medical world, what's the point of a medically lengthened life if we've set things up to work harder and harder as we get more and more technology?
   [Bob is just in the foothills of this central discussion unfortunately - he's absorbed too much of the economics profession's doubletalk about technology that really got going with Rexford Tugwell's The Industrial Discipline in 1933, so don't look to Bob's new book for anything insightful - he has become marginal.]

1. 2 UNtakeovers -
   1. AT&T to shed Liberty Mutual, Bloomberg via NYT, B14.
      Confirming an earlier announcement, the AT&T Corp. said [yesterday] it would spin off Liberty Media and other television programming units to satisfy regulatory conditions from its $44B purchase of MediaOne Group....
   2. Big chemical companies reshuffling units, by Edmund Andrews, NYT, B2.
      ...The pharmaceutical companies Novartis and what is now Astra-Zeneca have spun off their crop-science businesses into a new company called Syngenta A.G., which has sales of more than $7 billion....

2. Thinkers wanted, letter to editor by Paul London of Washington DC, NYT, A30.
   Paul Krugman (column, Dec. 13) attacks conservative think tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute [AEI]. Academic apparently needs no "alternative set of institutions." I'm a Democrat who served in the Commerce Dept. of the Clinton administration. I have been welcomed at AEI to write a book on the new economy.... That's the way AEI works and why it has been successful. The Institute believes in the competition of ideas, big ideas, and so should academics..\..
   Democrats should be building AEI's.... Democrats need vision that goes beyond better programs....
   [Certainly true, since the Democrats' programs have been purely on the basis of the obsolete left-right paradigm. They spent most of the last 67 years on the left proliferating costly feel-good bandaids. When it became obvious to everyone that they really had not graduated to a simplified and strategically effective central cure during Jimmy Carter's well-meaning administration, they got whupped and started caving in to rightist ideas of "no programs" and further unleashing the centripetal forces on income and wealth via free trade and more corporate welfare like the huge cost over-runs of Boston's Big Dig. If either of the major parties is going to have a long-run future, it will need to be looking at the growing gap between Americans with time and no money and Americans with money and no time. That is the first big step in balancing the uncontrolled centripetal forces on income and wealth that are driving America down into the Third World and forcing us into massive unacknowledged depression. How long will it take to get the wealthy media to acknowledge it? It took a deep stock-market cascade in the last long wave (1929 and the early 1930s). We may have made that impossible now with our automatic market circuit-breakers and central-bank props, but if our central bank is "forced" to lower interest rates down to zero as Japan's was this past decade, perhaps that will wake up the top brackets to the need for an explicitly designed and automatic centrifuge mechanism to reinvest technological profits at the necessary colossal levels (relative to today's) at their grassroot sources in employee wages (and active spending!). First complete core design along these lines? Timesizing.]

3. Seeking ways to fight poverty, pointer summary (to A6), NYT, A2.
   Sec. Gen. Kofi Annan of the U.N. named a high-level advisory panel of financial experts and gave them five months to come up with concrete ideas to help poor countries that are falling behind [in] the global economic boom.
   [Three problems -
   • It's not a boom, it's a bubble, and with the exposure of the superficiality of the dot-com mania, it's already started fragmenting.
   • Financial experts are not going to be helpful. It's not a matter of financing, particularly outside financing. It's a matter of plugging the huge internal leakage in poor countries that is represented by the unbridled centripetal forces on income and wealth. Money may indeed be trickling down, but it is absolutely rushing-gushing-pouring-flooding upward. Even in soon-to-be-Third-World USA, the top 1% of the population now owns as much as the "bottom" 95% and that top 1% couldn't possibly spend it in hundreds of lifetimes - it long ago had everything it could possibly need.
   • A high-level advisory panel is not going to be helpful. Real creativity comes from the juxtaposition of opposites, the further apart, the more the creativity. Top-down won't cut it. "High-level" people all share too many of the same conventional ideas, even if they package them up in new-sounding jargon like the fashionable "Natural Step" or RMI's "Natural Capitalism." They all fall into the Chesterton pan-utopian trap.]

1. [1 UPsizing, totaling 1600 new jobs]
   Intel to put $1B into Mass. plant - Upgrade to keep pace with chip-making gains, by Hiawatha Bray, Boston Globe, D1.
   ...[and already] over the past year...the world's largest chip maker..\..spent $800m to upgrade its microchip factory in Hudson [Mass.].... The Hudson operation has hired 1,000 new workers this year, bringing its payroll to 2,300, and it plans to hire another 600 in 2001....

2. [1UNtakeover]
   Workers halt Korean bank merger, Bloomberg via NYT, W1.
   Bowing to protests by union workers over threatened job cuts, Kookmin Bank suspended its merger talks with the Housing & Commercial Bank. Kookmin's president, Kim Sang Hoon, who had been trapped in his office for 36 hours by hundreds of protesters, agreed to call off the talks minutes after seeing one worker douse himself withw linseed oil and threaten to set himself on fire.
   [Here's one group of employees who are really bringing their need for a livelihood home to the insulated isolated management class in their economy. They do not seem to have the government on their side -]
   The South Korean government, which has been pressuring its troubled banking industry to merge...
   [as if that's a solution for anything]
   ...cut costs and restructure, said it expected the talks to resume eventually.
   [What they need is a better balance of centripetal and centrifugal forces on income and wealth, and that means - sharing the vanishing work, spreading the income and activating the spending power, which as long as it is highly concentrated in few hands, is relatively inactive, very inactive. "The more concentration, the less circulation."]

3. Devising a system voters can count on, by David Abel, Boston Globe, A56.
   [The Times version of this article is "2 university presidents will try to improve voting - Seeking to avoid a repetition of a ridiculed election," by Carey Goldberg, NYT, A25.]
   CAMBRIDGE - We can send men to the moon, build vessels to remain underwater for months, and...peer into our genes to find the blueprints that make us human. [But we have] yet to extend [our] technological prowess to the machinery of democracy.
   If anything's clear from the post-election purgatory, it is that we haven't developed a voting system to ensure that we know the victor in the closest of elections. Taking their cues from [these] irregularities...the presidents of the nation's top two technical universities joined forces yesterday and promised to revolutionize the way Americans vote for their leaders. In a video conference, the presidents of MIT [Charles Vest] and CalTech [David Baltimore] announced that the Carnegie Corp. will provide them at least $250,000 to develop "a reliable, affordable, and easy-to-use voting system" that could be distributed throughout the country....
   [Well, considering that there've been jokes on the Internet from Jugoslavia that they're willing to send us over some help with our election chaos, maybe this isn't such a bad idea. But here's hoping they don't just plunge ahead and reinvent the wheel. There are plenty of good systems all tested by experience around the world, and even, believe it or not, in some parts of this country. Let's just hope the whole project doesn't get bogged down because the entrenched political PTB (powers that be) don't really want reform. Recall that Thomas Edison's first invention back in the nineteenth century was an improved voting machine, and it wouldn't sell, because the prevailing sleaze didn't want it. It takes more than a couple of hi-profile techschool presidents....
   [Check out "The Thomas A. Edison Album," by Lawrence A. Frost (Superior Publishing: Seattle, 1969). On page 37 we see a photo of a machine that looks like the insides of a big musicbox, with the caption, "Edison's first invention was a vote recorder no one wanted. This model was demonstrated before a Congressional committee whose chairman advised young Edison [that] congressmen had no wish to hurry up their voting by the accurate and speedy electronic device since it would interfere with their filibustering. This was invented by Edison in Boston in 1868 when he was 21 years old. Edison National Historic Site."]

4. Many health plans should cover the pill to avoid bias, [EEOC] says, by Tamar Lewin, NYT, front page.
   ...after many of the same employers that exclude women's contraception from their health plans moved quickly to provide coverage for Viagra, which is used to combat impotence....

5. Chernobyl reactor shut down, by Dmitri Solovyov, Boston Globe, A14.
   ...shut down its last working reactor yesterday....

1. [1 UNtakeover]
   Utilicorp [United]'s plans to spin off trading unit are detailed, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   ...A utility company...based in Kansas City, Mo..\..announced details of a two-stage plan to spin off its natural gas and electricity trading unit, Aquila Energy....

2. Europe move on hostile takeovers is faulted, by Paul Meller, NYT, W1.
   BRUSSELS...- ...The European Parliament [yesterday] approved a measure that would permit the managers of a European company to fend off a hostile takeover bid without the permission of the shareholders [aka speculators -ed.]. The Parliament also passed an amendment that would force companies to consult with unions or with their workforces before responding to a hostile bid and one that would oblige a target company to safeguard jobs when negotiating with an acquirer.
   [The European Parliament is clearly concerned about the very real possibility that Europe will "compete" itself into a Third-World country like India or China. The USA has no such concerns about its own future, and many parts of it, notably inner cities and non-casino Indian reservations, are already deep into Third-World conditions.]
   MPs...have argued that empowering managers to [do this] is simply providing them with defensive measures similar to so-called poison pills that U.S. companies are allowed to use. They also argued that the measure would deter speculators from bidding up or down the price of the target company.
   [And who could possibly be against this, you ask. Why, speculators, of course. But we mustn't call them that, oh no. We must refer to them respectfully as "investors" (as if they have the slightest interest in the long term) -]
   ...Those arguments were challenged by representatives of the investment industry [and, in their thrall,] the European Commission [= the geniuses that brought us the euro two centuries too early] and the British takeover watchdog, the Takeover Panel [which has apparently itself been taken over by speculators and turned into the poverbial "fox guarding the henhouse"]....
   [All over the world, the unbalanced centripetal forces on money have resulted in the "tail wagging the dog" = the secondary financial markets exerting destructive short-term oriented control over the primary markets in jobs and consumer goods and services. We need to design a simple, automatic centrifugal mechanism powerful enough to balance these Protean centripetal forces, and as the prototype of a complete core design, we offer Timesizing. Any questions? Email us at timesizing@aol.com.]

1. Temp workers at Microsoft win lawsuit - Benefits were denied to more than 8,000, by Steven Greenhouse, NYT, C1.
   Microsoft agreed to pay $97m yesterday to settle an eight-year-old class-action lawsuit in which thousands of temporary employees accused the company of improperly denying them benefits....
   [Bill Gates is the richest man in the world, with $60B-100B, and the sonofabitch is nickle&diming his own employees??? Bill, you moron, give some of those $millions that you're forking over to the richest universities in the world to where they can really use it and spend it to enhance your own markets - YOUR OWN EMPLOYEES!]

2. Navy sets referendum for 2001 on Puerto Rican test range, Reuters via NYT, A20.
   Residents of the Puerto Rican island of Vieques will vote on Nov. 6, 2001, on whether to oust the US Navy from their island, which has been used for decades as a bombing range and base for war games....
   [Good, referendums are the future. Let's just hope the election is less of a travesty than the recent one in Flori-duh.]

1. [1 UPsizing]
   RiverDelta [Networks] opens production plant, by Peter Howe, Boston Globe, C9.
   ...A Tewksbury [Mass.] start-up that makes systems for caable television and fixed-wireless broadband providers to deliver phone and Internet access...opened a site that could produce $500m worth of products annually. ...It will use the 30,000-sq-ft site at Ames Pond Industrial Park to ramp up production of its broadband...and new optical services router[s].

2. [1 UNtakeover]
   Pitney Bowes [known for postage meters,] to spin off copy and fax machines [business], Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   ...which has...slow growth and shrinking profit margins,..\..to shareholders. ...The new company will continue using the Pitney Bowes trademark and will be based in Trumbull, Conn.; the parent is based in Stamford....
   [It apparently took eleven months for this project to "get legs" -]
   Pitney Bowes Inc., 11/13/2001 NYT, C4.
   ...Stamford, Conn., the world's largest maker of postage meters, said that on Dec. 3 [2001?!] it would spin off its copier and fax machine unit, which will be called Imagistics International Inc. and will be based in Trumbull, Conn.
   [Yukky name. Why not just call one part Pitney and the other part Bowes?! Or perhaps it took almost twelve months for this project to "take" -]
   Pitney Bowes is casting off copier and fax units today, by Claudia Deutsch, 12/03/2001 NYT, C9.
   It has promised to do so for a year, and today it finally will....

3. Dam-busting efforts gain momentum among Americans, by William Booth, Boston Globe, A14.
   VENTURA, Calif. - It was not too long ago that the call to dismantle 1000s of the nation's dams, and thereby return rivers to their natural ways, was considered radical, unrealistic, or downright un-American.
   [Same as the call to change the current fashion for working "24/7" and reduce the nation's legislatively 40-hour, actually often much higher, workweek.]
   Yet today, the dam-removal movement has entered the mainstream of public opinion, gaining enough support that policy-makers are considering pulling down hundreds of dams.
   [So may it go for the workweek-reduction movement.]
   States such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are already far along in dam-removal efforts. In the past 8 years, more than 200 dams have been dismantled, and the pace appears to be accelerating since the deconstruction of the Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River in Maine last year and the amazing return of millions of alewife [fish] to their ancestral waters.
   "Even I have been surprised with the speed with which the cultural perception of dams has been turned," said Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, who has made removing environmentally harmful and marginally useful dams a centerpiece of his legacy.... Babbitt recalls being called on the carpet by Pres. Clinton in the summer of 1993 when Babbitt started advocating dam-busting....
   [Maybe this whole cultural shift was expedited by the top-down advocacy aka leadership of Sec. Babbitt, who is indeed somehow related to Babbitt's outfitting store on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. And speaking of dam-busting, the next story deals with "busting" the "dam" of dot-coms' rough treatment of employees -]

4. New economy meets old labor - Etown.com workers ask panel to OK union election,
   by Diane Lewis, Boston Globe, C1.
   ...Tomorrow...some two dozen customer service employees - in what labor specialists are [hailing as] the first union petition by dot-com workers -
   [What about Amazon.com on 11/23? Or didn't they get to the petition stage?]
   - will ask the National Labor Relations Board to [accede to] their request for a union election at etown.com, a subsidiary of Collaborative Media Inc. ...The move to unionize at etown grew out of worker anger over the $12-13 hourly pay and the mandatory overtime, which rose as consumer demand for the company's services increased with the approach of the holiday season..\..
   [Shades of Amazon.com. Dot-coms were supposed to be so wonderful that you were supposed to commit your life to them on a 24/7 schedule and never mention pay. As we quoted in our Amazon.com article on 11/23/2000 item 4 - "Several workers said that after working so much overtime they had tired of [CEO Jeff] Bezos's mantra that it is Day 1 and Amazon is a start-up in which workers need to work hard."]
   Founded in 1995, etown.com has offices in New York as well as San Francisco. It produces content and research information for the consumer electronics industry and employs a total of 90 people in the two locations.... "It's insane," [Chase Rummonds, a $31k/yr etown customer service manager] said. "A lot of people at etown were living at home with their parents. They made so little they couldn't move out"..\..
   [We were going to say - this is the wonderful world of dot-coms?! A louzy $31k a year for managers in San Francisco with its high rents and prices? How do they hang onto any employees at all for so little money when they're so close to Silicon Valley? What a contrast with law firms in NYC about which we read today, "Higher pay found to erode law firms' profit growth - Associates are being paid more to keep them from defecting to other fields," by Jonathan Glater, NYT, C4 - "Salaries...went from roughly $100,000 to $125,000 for first-years \plus\ hefty year-end bonuses of as much as $40,000 for first-year lawyers - more for senior lawyers...."]
   ..."What we are seeing is that market forces are beginning to affect dot-coms," said Thomas Juravich, director of the labor center at UMass Amherst. "And workers, particularly those who are on the front lines, such as customer service employees who answer the phones and take orders, are feeling that they are getting the short end of the stick." Juravich and others believe more cases will pop up at dot-coms as the economy slows down and the front-line service workers who support the new economy seek to counteract the financial uncertainty with a push for unions and job security....
   [Sure, if there are any dot-coms left after the shake-out.]

1. How is death penalty prolife? letter to editor by Bill Long of Stoughton MA, Boston Globe, A14.
   Texas has the highest number of executions in the nation, yet George W. Bush is "prolife" [our italics - ed.]. Am I missing something here?
   [The furthest we should go in the societally-sponsored-killing direction is a Kevorkian kit in a little niche under glass in each cell on Lifers' Row in a separate wall from the fire extinguisher. The latter says, "in case of fire, break glass and use efficient chemical fire extinguisher." The former says, "in case of ire or mire, terminal boredom or depression, break glass and use painless life extinguisher."]

2. [At last, a glimmer of intelligence out of Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, after days/weeks of drought -]
   Against the tax cut? Give it back - Opponents of Question 4 can show how sincere they really are, op ed by Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe, A15.
   [Amen to that. Opponents never suggested any mechanism to guarantee the money would be spent on their worthy projects anyway. It might more easily have gone into another midnight no-discussion legislators' payraise or just disappeared down the ridiculous Big Dig.]

3. Ireland likely to lose priority in US, by Cullen & Milligan, Boston Globe, A10.
   [The sooner the better, say we.
   Key figures in the Northern Ireland peace process expect that Pres. Clinton's visit to Norther Ireland this week will mark the end of active White House involvement in resolving the conflict, one that has no geopolitical importance to US interests....
   'We're concerned that Ireland might drop off the radar screen.' Senior Irish diplomat.
   [And what is the matter with that? Isn't it time Ireland "got over it"?! This everlasting tit-for-tat is in danger of becoming Ireland's way of getting attention. Long past that point, actually. We are keeping this childish ruckus alive with all our fussing over it. Remember Lao Tzu's wise words, "Who can, by stirring, clear muddy water? But leave it alone, and it will come clear of itself." Ireland is having a high-tech boomlet - a stream of good news for a change. Let's shift to that. In fact, there's a resonant story in tomorrow's Times, "After violence, possibilities of renewal - As conflict recedes in Northern Ireland, economy tries to wean itself from Britain," by Alan Cowell, 12/12/00 NYT C1.
   [And while we're at it, it's high time we gave the same treatment to the Middle East. Five billion dollars a year of our taxpayer money to Israel and three billion to Egypt? Call us isolationists or whatever you want, but that is ridiculous, and - come to think of it - obsolete. After all, Egypt is no longer the victim of Zionist zeal but the Palestinians. Shift the $3B in stages from Egypt to Palestine, reduce Israel's $5B to $3B same as the Palestinians, and then phase them both down to zero, and quit "stirring muddy water"! They don't need our money. They need our example. And with our catfight in Florida, God knows we have a hard enough time setting one worth following.]