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

12/30/2000  glimmers of intelligence -

1. 2 UPsizings - unspecified new jobs -
   1. Procter & Gamble to open a cooking school, AP via NYT, B3.
      P&G [will] put a toe back into the cooking-school business by opening a school and retail store to help promote and distribute its new Culinary Sol line of cooking oils, sauces and spices. The [facility will] open in late Jan. in suburban Cincinnati [and] if...successful...may be replicated.... P&G has sponsored cooking schools twice before, in 1911 when it introduced Crisco cooking oil and in 1956 after it bought the Duncan Hines line of cake mixes.
   2. Brazil gets no-frills airline, Bloomberg via NYT, B2.
      A new airline offering discount no-frills service on domestic routes, Gol Transportes Aereos, [will] begin flying six leased Boeing 737-700 jets to seven Brazilian cities including Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia, challenging the country's four full-service airlines.... Gol...hoped its newer planes and computerized tocketing system [sic - tocketing is so much more fun than ticketing] would keep costs low enough to let it compete successfully on prices.
      [Without a "tocketing system" we're sure those other guys just can't compete.]

2. Another Prohibition, another failure - America's war on drugs is generating crime and inequality, op ed by Gov. Gary Johnson of New Mexico, NYT, A31.
   [How many times do we have to repeat the same mistakes before we learn the lessons? We should have learned from the failure of our criminalization of alcohol during Prohibition and the success of our more recent battle against smoking - without criminalizing nicotine - that criminalization of substances does not work. Let's just tax things for their costs, as we have been doing in various ways with smoking. [As Gov. Johnson points out, our criminalization of a highly arbitrary list of substances including everything from marijuana to cocaine - but excluding nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, model-airplane glue and a huge list of weird stuff sold over-the-counter at the corner pharmacy, is costing us $25-30,000/year per inmate for a goodly portion of our record 2,000,000 prison population who are in for drug "offenses" - and we're not making a dint. Time to switch strategies and drop the huge makework campaign for our police departments all over the land, not to mention the FBI, the CIA and the new prison-industrial complex that has supplanted the Pentagon as the gigantic but completely unacknowledged socialist makework campaign so favored by self-deluded Republicans - with the exception of Gov. Johnson.]

3. [Misnomer dept.]
   Socialism triumphs on the gridiron, editorial, NYT, A30.
   [The NY Times tends to throw around the word 'socialism' almost as carelessly as the Wall Street Journal, with little understanding of how much that would backlash and brand our own economy as 'socialist.' We restrict the term to 'any/many controls' in contrast to the hypocritical capitalist goal of 'no controls' (hypocritical because capitalists never perceive controls in their own favor as 'controls'). Realistic capitalists have always recognized the need for minimal controls, so central and general that they have more the character of ground rules for market players. Such is the requirement that all teams in every sports league start each season with "zero games won," instead of cumulating scores across seasons, which would soon remove all suspense and fragment the league. However, we are finding there are more ways than that to kill off suspense -]
   ...Baseball...represents the triumph of raw, laissez-faire capitalism, with rich, successful teams getting richer and more successful by the year..\..
   [And the Times conveniently omits the developing of more and more fans turning away from the mounting ticket prices and foregone conclusions of professional baseball "contests" (much like the one-party lockup in Massachusetts politics and many other states) to the original spirit and suspense of the game as demonstrated in amateur games and 'little league.']
   The National Football League [NFL], in stark contrast, is a socialist society that incessantly strives for parity according to the tenets espoused by the league's departed visionary, Pete Rozelle.
   [Let's see if their further description can support their characterization of the NFL as "socialist" and soon, "utopian."]
   As NFL commissioner, Mr. Rozelle was haunted in the 1970's by the prospect of a league forever dominated by such dynasties as the Miami Dolphins, the Dallas Cowboys and the Pittsburgh Steelers. He determined to pursue his Utopian vision of a league founded on parity, one where all teams could compete as equals.
   1. Failing teams had already been drafting first, but
   2. in 1978 he imposed the revolutionary concept of "parity scheduling," giving them the added benefit of playing weaker teams.
   3. And the commissioner insisted that all NFL teams, regardless of where they play or how unsuccessful they may be, share equally in the league's television revenues.
   4. But it took the imposition of a team salary cap and free agency in the 1990's to make equality more of a reality.
   As teams contend with the full implications of these developments, it will be increasingly difficult for winning teams to replicate the Denver Broncos' feat in repeating as SuperBowl champions as recently as the 1998 season. This season, none of the six division champions are repeating from last year.
   [And the braindead Times editors seem to think that's just a total disaster.]
   In the past three seasons, only two teams have won their division twice and only one of those, the Jacksonville Jaguars, has done so in consecutive years. A decade earlier, in the three-season period of 1988-90, the 49ers and Bills won their divisions three consecutive times.
   [It gets bizarre to see a newspaper, whose bread and butter depends on interesting stories, arguing in favor of boredom.]
   Not only is it getting harder to remain dominant from one season to the next, this year it was hard for teams to remain dominant within a single season. The jets, who were 6-1 at one point in the season, did not even make it to the playoffs. The defending SuperBowl champions, the Rams, started off strong but barely made it in. The Giants are being mocked as one of the weakest No. 1 conference seeds ever.
   Parity gives fans everywhere hope...
   ["parity" being another term for "equal opportunity"]
   and the quality of the game remains high despite the absence of dominating dynasties.
   [Damn, the Times so wants the quality of the game to deteriorate into a tiny group of 800-pound gorillas and a field of weaklings.]
   That makes the NFL an exception to Winston Churchill's observation that while capitalism unevenly distributes riches, socialism unevenly distributes miseries.
   [Post-Soviet Russia is another exception, but in the opposite direction.]
   Still, as they settle in this cold winter weekend to watch some football, many Americans may have trouble remembering whether it is the New Orleans Saints or the Atlanta Falcons who made it into the playoffs this season.
   [Now, there's a great reason for making a game into a boring foregone conclusion - the winners are easier to remember! God Almighty, the Times editorial board is deep into demonstrating the Dumbing of America!]
   Old Believers are likely to decry parity and yearn for the epic dynastic clashes of yore....
   [So let them resort to the boring, foregone conclusions of baseball, or for that matter, American politics. The only reason we didn't have record low voter turnout this year was Nader and R-D parity in the polls. The debate commission torpedoed one and the Supreme Court the other.]

1. Browsing the Web for the ideal utopia site, by Michael Pollak, NYT, E8.
   ...Utopia is a major subject all over the Web, as indicated on a *site by Jon Will, a[n] accountant in Baltimore [whose] vision of Utopia is [a place where each person can] "live...their own" [Utopian vision]. Unfortunately, he added, literature's utopias seem to be based on the authors' conditions rather than on a [variety] of environments to suit each individual. ...Mr. Will's site [is] useful for its enormous index of sites with the Utopia theme, future-related sites, "better world" organizations and...online books....
   [Jon may have identified another pan-utopian flaw besides G. K. Chesterton's - the homogeneity of most utopian visions rather than their tolerance and maximization of variability. This may be related to what we've called Hauser's pan-utopian flaw near the bottom of our Chesterton flaw page - the inability of most utopias to accommodate rising expectations. Our Timesizing program, and its series of successors, avoid every known utopian flaw. They make no assumptions about no one wanting more than his/her share, they do not presume that there is only one big step required to some permanent perfection, and they do maximize variability (and therefore accommodate rising expectations) rather than projecting the fixed conditions of the designer's lifestyle.]

2. Breaking the race ceiling - Once-jailed apartheid foe enters executive suite, by Henri Cauvin, NYT, W1.
   [photo caption -] Tokyo Sexwale, one of the few high-level black executives in South Africa, left the world of politics to work for economic equality.
   ...by starting his own [mining] investment fund, determined to play a principal role in bringing about black economic empowerment.... "We had the political power in our hands without economic democracy," Mr. Sexwale...said.... "It became very very clear that if we did not have our act together, the successes of the political achievements would be undermined."...
   [But Sexwale, however well-intentioned, is still falling into the Chesterton trap. He's assuming that blacks won't concentrate skills, employment, income and wealth just as much as whites if they get the chance, and thereby just shift the economic inequality slightly. The only way to start down the road toward economic democracy in any meaningful sense is Timesizing, because it automates sharing at the top ( overtime is automatically converted into training&hiring) and it ties the top to the bottom (the definition of "full time" varies inversely with the definition and rate of under-employment).]

3. Perfect post for Katherine Harris, letter to editor by Sidney Lauren, Boston Globe, A14.
   ...Informed observers have been predicting that for her outstanding services above and beyond the call of duty, Katherine Harris, cochair of the Bush campaign in Florida and Florida's secretary of state, is likely to be nominated for an ambassadorship.
   What better venue could the new president pick for Harris that the Republic of Chad? Chad's population of about 6 million happens to be just about equal to the number of ballots cast (but under the stewardship of Harris, skillfully not recounted) in Florida in the recent election.

1. [1 UPsizing]
   Railtrack to add jobs, Dow Jones via NYT, W1.
   The company that operates most of Britain's railway infrastructure [will] add 1,000 workers in 2001 as it invests heavily in construction and maintenance. Railtrack has drawn fire for the condition of the rail system and a rash of delays associated with maintenance problems.

2. Local editor donates mountain, Boston Globe, B3.
   GEORGETOWN, Maine - Town chronicler Carolyn "Billie" Todd says she never really felt that the 42-acre mountain she inherited from her late husband, William, belonged to her. So [she] donated Higgins Mountain to the Lower Kennebec Regional Land Trust, ensuring that its summit and northern portion will be protected forever from development. For the past 20 years, Todd has edited the Georgetown Tide, a journal of local news.
   [Compare this story -]
   Groups paying more for less wilderness, by Colleen Valles, AP via Boston Globe, A16.
   ...The dense forest is a mass of 300-foot-tall redwoods \towering\ over the Waterman Gap property in the Santa Cruz Mountains...the result of seedlings growing together for a century, restoring the land that logging had left barren. Trying to keep such deforestation from happening again, a non-profit land preservation group [Nature Conservancy?] bought the land for $10.9m in October, despite timber companies' efforts to pay nearly twice as much for it. It was a rare bargain for preservation groups. Skyrocketing land prices these days are forcing them to pay more for less, and some wildland has proved too expensive to save....
   [And a bit more good green news -]
   Legislation to protect sharks, AP via NYT, A2.
   Pres. Clinton signed a measure banning the practice of removing the fin from live sharks [in U.S. waters] and dumping the fish back into the water to die.... Shark fins are considered a delicacy in many Asian countries....

• Demands for privacy curb telemarketers, by Fred Kaplan, Boston Globe, front page.
  Last spring, Charles Fuschillo...state senator from Long Is, held townhall hearings across New York for victims of [Internet] theft of Social Security numbers.... However, everywhere he went, many more people showed up to complain about...telemarketing.... They have become the scourge of American life, these calls - a rare object of loathing that cuts across gender, class, and culture..\.. You sit down for dinner, the phone rings, and it's someone...selling insurance,...mortgages, long-distance, magazine[s], carpet cleanings, or time-share[s]....
  In response, [Fuschillo] wrote and [got] passed a bill that
  • allows residents to register their phone numbers of an official "do not call" list;
  • requires all telemarketing firms that call New York to buy a copy of this list; and
  • fines them $2,000 for each time they call a number on the list.
  Since October, more than 300,000 New Yorkers have signed on to this registry, most of them via e-mail to the state's consumer protection agency. The number is expected to double by April, when the law goes into effect. Eleven other states have similar...laws: Alab, Alask, Ark, Conn, Flor, Geor, Id, Ken, Mo, Oreg, and Tenn.
  [Sounds great. How do we get one?]
  Massachusetts will consider at least two do-not-call bills next session....

1. 12/25 The estate tax: help the farmers, letter to editor by Lisa Bellsey of White Plains NY, NYT, A20.
   "President-elect courts Congress and urges tax cut" (front page, Dec. 19) mentions George W. Bush's proposed repeal of the estate tax, which has been described as benefiting only the wealthy. Since the threshold for the estate tax will soon exceed $1m, by definition only millionaires will [benefit from] this proposed tax cut. However, the intention of the repeal is to bring relief to property owners, specifically farmers who own acres of property that man have vastly increased in value over time.
   Why, then, not make the repeal specific to farmlands and other highly appreciated real estate like the family home? Carve out an exemption to the estate tax for these types of property; then at least one could claim that the relief is provided to someone who actually might need it.

2. 12/24 Vermont city goes for Bread and barter - Burlington residents use the alternative local paper currency to trade their goods and services, by Lisa Rathke, AP via Maine Telegram (Portland), B7.
   BURLINGTON, Vt. - ...Burlington Bread [is] an alternative paper currency that allows people to barter their goods and services - from yoga and violin classes to catering and graphic design. Organizers say it boosts the local economy and promotes connections within the community. [Plus] "...It values all of our skills more on an egalitarian level."...
   [And thereby presumably helps slow the widening of the income gap.]
   About 130 individuals and a handful of businesses participate in the alternative currency. The idea is based on a local currency in Ithaca, NY. Burlington Bread is available in $1, $5, and $10 "slices" and new members pay a sliding-scale fee from $1 to $25 to receive 30 slices and three listings in a directory. The first "slices" hit the market in 1998. About $6,000 worth is in circulation. And keeping it circulating is daunting..\.. Laura Markowitz, a member of Burlington Bread and its steering committee...hopes [Healthy Living,] the first grocery store to accept Bread, will get more of it moving..\.. Local currencies became popular after the Depression when it was hard to get cash, she says. But many of the 400 currencies died after the arrival of centralized banking. \She\ says Burlington Bread is part of a renaissance of local currencies around the country that surfaced in the '90s. Now 30 communities around the country have alternative currencies....

3. [And speaking of the widening income gap, here's a real "good, but" -]
   12/24   Bill Gates, caregiver - The Microsoft founder is spending billions to provide health services to the world's poor, Boston Globe, front page.
   [But does this have any effect on New York's (and elsewhere's) shortage of healthcare workers and the low pay of nurse's aids etc. that we mention on our 'omens' page this weekend (12/25)?]
   ...Bill Gates has become the single most influential force attempting to reverse the growing health crisis afflicting the world's poor [in terms of] health threats such as AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis.... The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation made 60 separate grants in the last year \totaling\ $1.44B...compared with about [$1.14B from the US government and] $5B from industrialized nations [as a group]. It's a stunning figure and, Gates believes, a shameful one. It's time, he says, for the rich nations to act less like Scrooge.
   [Easy for him to say, but he's got $65-100B and he's talking about our tax money against a background where government has been dismantling our progressive, graduated taxation over the last 37 years under intense lobbying from super-rich people like him. Funny how the focus is always on the ineffective tearjerker targets like "The Children," or now, "The Sick." Isn't it time one of these rich boys smartened up and got behind the implementation of a minimal system modification that would prevent the concentration of so much wealth in the first place and would instead get it reinvested at the necessary collossal levels, relative to today, in its grassroots sources - the wages of the employees who are actually producing it? This would be empowering of everyone. This would enable people to heal themselves, without dramatic unreliable deus-ex-machina gestures coming out of the blue of the splendidly insulated isolation of the super-rich. Their kind of charity so far, however big and flashy, just perpetuates the lopsided status quo. And what's the big diff between having sick poor and healthy poor? - Bill Gates himself runs less risk of falling victim to a runaway epidemic, that's what. The poor are still poor and it's that poverty which is the real sickness. The sicknesses that the health services focus on are just symptoms of that deeper sickness. We still have the poor, and we're going to continue to have the poor until we share the wealth. But we can't share the wealth without creating dependency unless we first share the work - and the skills. And that's where Timesizing comes in. Bill Gates presumably doesn't want to share the wealth in that system-rebalancing way - he's quite content for the billions to continue funnelling in to him, so he has the decision-making power - and he can just hang onto the dough if he wishes. Charity is discretionary and therefore unreliable. Any economic design that relies on it for vital functions, as apparently ours does as the income and wealth gaps widen daily, is lethally flawed. This article also mentions Ted Turner's recent big donation to the U.N., but let's go back to yesterday and get it from the source -]
   12/23 Turner's gift lets US cut its UN dues - $34m bridges gap as burden is shifted, by Nicole Winfield, AP via Boston Globe, front page.
   Billionaire Ted Turner helped the United States win a near-impossible battle yesterday to cut its payments to the United Nations with a $34m donation that sealed the deal. Turner's donation was believed to be the first time an individual had essentially offered to pay a government's dues....
   [Yeah but is this going to go on, or is it going to get dropped after it shifts the burden onto the rest of the world, as so much charity gets dropped - like the guy who promised to pay for a whole classroom of kids' college and then supposedly went bust. We've got to quit oohing and aahing over this kind of very mixed blessing and start asking - where's the long-term, reliable system fix that does not prop up the flawed status quo or generate vulnerable dependencies. Bill and Ted, how about getting beyond the crisis-management stage and automating the whole process of global economy QA and debugging?!! Let's move on to the next generation of economic designs and quit working harder as the better technology pours in. Let's reinvest overtime advantage into our own markets by converting OT automatically into training&hiring, and if that isn't enough to absorb all the poor (including unemployed, underemployed, disabled, homeless, incarcerated...) let's cut the workweek and make it easier and easier for people to support and take care of themselves instead of harder and harder. People 100 years ago expected, with good reason, that we would all be able by now to earn a good living from 16-20 hours a week. The fact that many of us are still working the same hours as they did, with all our worksaving technology, is ridiculous - and an insult to our intelligence. And don't try to tell us that "it's their choice." In an atmosphere of downsizing, nobody wants to be the first to leave the office at the end of the day - so the workday has no end. This isn't "their choice." This is backsliding into slavery. We might as well repeal the Emancipation Proclamation while you guys theatrically battle the symptoms or jimmy us out of long-term commitments by one-time largesse.]

1. Medical marijuana in Canada, Reuters via NYT, A6.
   ...The Health Ministry has awarded a $3.8m [5-year] contract to a [Saskatoon-based] company that will grow [marijuana] for medicinal purposes in its laboratory in [a deep old copper and zinc] mine, hundreds of feet below a lake near Flin Flon \to provide\ the country's first supply of legal marijuana.... "The idea here...," Brett Zettl, president of the winning bidder, Prairie Plant Systems, said [yester]day, "[is] genetic containment, and...security."
   ...Health Canada [wants] to gain a steady supply of standardized marijuana for research and therapy. Research indicates that the drug can be effective in easing symptoms of debilitating diseases like cancer and multiple sclerosis, and Canadians have recently been able to apply to the health minister for exemptions from laws against possession.... [Compare on the previous page -]
   Uruguay: Backing drug legalization, by Clifford Krauss, NYT, A5.
   President Jorge Batlle, who is known for speaking his mind on contentious subjects, spoke out in favor of the decriminalization of drugs in a TV interview. He said he was only trying to provoke debate, but it was the first time a Latin American president had suggested that partial legalization of drugs could help fight addiction.

2. A 'voting machine' we already own, letter to editor by Bill Seaver of Bedford MA, Boston Globe, A14.
   I propose we adopt a new voting machine to be used in all national elections. These voting machines are low cost, are already in place across our nation, and are well understood by everyone. The machine I am suggesting is the telephone.
   [Good thinking, Bill.   Futurist *Buckminster Fuller predicted 24-hour telephone referendums all his life. And there is a track record of actual experience to draw on, especially in Boulder, Colorado. The Voting By Phone group, now *Vote.org, are the experts on this.]
   Voter fraud would be virtually eliminated, voting accuracy virtually perfect, absentee ballots virtually eliminated. Voting would become a whole lot easier. Lots more people would vote.
   [This might also help the spread of referendums. The *Initiative and Referendum Institute in Washington DC is tracking the progress of this whole movement. (An asterisk * means "outside this website.")]
   On Election Day, the voter calls a local number or an 800 number to vote, keys in his zip code and a voter ID number, and is asked to speak his or her name. The computer verifies the voice print and starts the voting process. If the voice print matches, voting is automated. If it does not match, a polling place operator is needed.
   The voter enters a vote from a menu by pushing telephone keys. After each vote there is a voice playback of the vote. The voter confirms each selection and could change his or her mind and correct any machine or human errors before confirming each vote.
   Ballots could be counted and recounted without any deterioration and without any human bias. Manual counting would also be possible.
   [When so many people are independently reinventing this "wheel," it is definitely time to quit the foot-dragging and implement it.
   [(The very next letter in the Globe is irrelevant but amusing - from Alan Martin of Methuen MA, it says, "I hope Democrats everywhere will extend to George W. Bush the same level of respect and cooperation that Republicans so graciously bestowed upon Bill Clinton.")]

1. The Fed's challenge: How to cope with a burst bubble, Bloomberg via NYT, C1.
   [This story is remarkable only for the following admission in the New York Times -]
   ...History, the Federal Reserve chairman said in January, may conclude that "at the turn of the millennium, the American economy was experiencing [a boom -] a once-in-a-century acceleration of innovation, which propelled forward productivity, output, corporate profits and stock prices.... [Or] just one of the many euphoric speculative bubbles that have dotted human history."
   The stock market's verdict is in. It was a bubble.   ...
   [And as for how to cope with it, the Fed essentially has only one superficial and cosmetic tool - lowering interest rates. And when they've lowered them all they can and it still doesn't help - which will happen sooner or later to us just as it's happened to the Japanese all this past decade, then there's only one solution - Timesizing, to get the spending power centrifuged out to the people who are actually going to spend it.]

2. Opel chief said to be leaving, Bloomberg via NYT, W1.
   [This story is remarkable only for one sentence at the end, which reveals much about how far ahead of us Europe really is in economic evolution - and why Europe will never damage its consumer base at anything like the rate we are damaging ours with downsizing employees and concentrating income&wealth beyond the ability or need to actually spend it -]
   ...The supervisory boards of German companies are equally divided between company management and workers, and have the power to replace top executives.

1. [1 UNtakeover]
   A congressional investigative office report released yesterday said that the proposed $11.6B US Airways-United Airlines merger would hurt competition in nearly 300 markets in the United States....
   [Oh that must have been why they didn't block the Fleet-BankBoston merger - it would only hurt competition in nearly 200 markets in the United States.]

2. [a real glimmer of intelligence over here, but a lame primary headline -]
   The little guy is on his mind - An author savagely indicts notions of a new economy, by John Schwartz, NYT, C1.
   ...In a sweeping, savage and witty indictment of American business..\..Thomas Frank...slams the notion that the 1990's lived up to the promise of the new economy....
   [Wait a minute, the subheadline promised us that he'd be questioning the existence of the new economy, not accepting its existence and questioning if it lived up to its promise!]
   Behind the go-go stock market and the feel-good atmosphere, he says, the American economy that bloomed in the 1990's is sick:
   • the divide between the rich and poor has widened, he insists, and
   • mechanisms like government regulation and unions that traditionally protected underdogs have been hobbled.
     [Sounds like he's groping toward our kind of analysis, without yet telling us why it ain't just compassion that makes these trends problems that need correcting.]
   • Mergers and globalization, meanwhile, are homogenizing the world into one big Wal-Mart....
   • Yet, he says, Americans have been sold the notion that the pixiie-dust prosperity has touched almost everyone.
     [So true. Were we not just told by Ben Wattenberg on public TV in the 3-hour "Measured Century" last night that 52% of Americans own stock?]
   [But let's cut to the chase - this guy has a book out, One Market Under God, about how market populism hijacks the language of 'power to the people' to rationalize and push further the concentration of wealth, he's got a magazine The Baffler and he's got a website thebaffler.com. We're gonna check it out and maybe give this guy a hotlink.]

3. Europeans maintain confidence, pointer digest (to C2), NYT, C1.
   The euro's decline has lulled Americans into thinking the European Union has lost some credibility as an economic power. But Europeans exhibit little loss of confidence. They point out that Europe is growing at an annual rate of 4% and unemployment is falling.
   [It's not surprising that their unemployment is falling, considering that Europe leads the world is sharing the vanishing work and snubbing The Economist's and Paul Samuelson's phobia about the Lump of Labor bogeyman - "We NEVER have to share the work because somewhere, sometime, there's an infinite amount of it." So Europeans are a lot less ambivalent about new worksaving technology than American workers, and they're a lot better rested with their longer vacations and shorter workweeks (France is down to 35 hours a week nationally). Being alert and well-rested makes for higher creativity, as does the exercise of translating your ideas into other languages so your fellow Europeans can understand them. The combination of higher creativity and less ambivalence about technology will eventually turn Europe into the world's leading technological innovator and patent mill, even as obsolete "work hard to get ahead" Americans sink into the Third World with their frantic two-week vacations and their 60-90 hr/wk high-tech sweatshops (if they're still employably under age 50 - "efficient" U.S. CEOs don't want to risk wasting money on pensions, you know!). And oh yeah, there's one other little thing about Europe, this from the article proper, which is -]
   America, don't smirk - The European Union is no joke in any language, by Jeff Madrick, NYT, C2.
   ...Europeans have a longer time frame than Americans. "The history of Europe is one of slow and steady improvements...," \said\ Vincenzo Visco, head of Italy's treasury....
   [In short, they're more aligned with the ecological long term. America's domination by 4-year oriented political economists and this-quarter oriented stock analysts does not make for staying power.]