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Good News, April 17-30, 2001
[Commentary] ©2001 Phil Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080

4/30/2001  glimmers of hope -

1. [1 UPsizing story, totaling 5 new US jobs]
   New posts created in agency expansions, by Courtney Kane, NYT, C14.
   Euro RSCG Worldwide in New York, a unit of Havas Advertising, is hiring two well-known specialists in trend forecasting and brand consulting, Ira Matathia and Marian Salzman, to help generate creative ideas based on insights into consumer behavior and market trends....
   Edward C. Irons is being named president and managing director at New Perspectives Media....
   Alec Gerster...becomes media chief executive at MediaCom Worldwide...and Alexander Schmidt-Vogel...becomes COO...

2. [good, but...key timesizing strategy not emphasized -]
   Keeping the ax from falling - Pay cuts, stock plan save jobs, by Bruce Butterfield, Boston Globe, J1.
   ...As more and more US companies turn to layoffs to solve even short-term revenue and earnings problems...embracing employees as critical resources rather than treating them as expendable costs..\..has become the exception rather than the rule.... But some economists and job specialists warn...the speed with which many companies are announcing layoffs this year \in\ the current "layoff mania"...may well come back to haunt them when the economy picks up and they have to compete again for skilled and talented employees.
   "When a company starts laying people off, a lot of good folks start looking elsewhere," said Andy Zaleta, a managing director for Kern/Perry International, an executive search firm. "You don't want to lose what could be your core management team 10 years from now." Zaleta said it may become an especially thorny problem for firms in the technology field, where the talent and dedication of employees can easily be the difference between success and failure. Despite the current slowdown, Zaleta insisted that technology and the need for skilled workers [hovers] "over everything. We still have a difficult time finding topnotch talent."...
   Yet...job cuts nationwide reached 162,867 in March, according to Challenger Gray & Christmas, a Chicago outplacement firm. Darrell Rigby, a director at Bain & Co. in Boston...said another disturbing sign is that many companies are doing wholesale "across the board" job cuts, often pegged at 10%. Past research shows such actions have resulted in some companies underperforming by 3 to 4% for several years, he said. "It really destroys the productivity of remaining workers."
   Despite such warnings, it's hard to find companies that have seriously embraced alternatives to layoffs [but here are a couple -]
   • Charles Schwab [sought] to avert major layoffs by
     • sharply cutting management salaries.... [For example] the cochief executives of the company, Charles Schwab and David Pottruck took 50% salary cuts..\..
     • reducing bonuses
     • eliminating nonessential travel and purchases
     • encouraging employees who could afford it to take a series of unpaid Fridays off
       [So they practiced "timesizing," but in too inflexible and limited a form to avoid downsizing -]
     By the end of last month, however, it proved too little to stave off layoffs [see 3/23/2001, 3rd item]..\..
   • ...Rather than lay off a single worker...Acxiom..\..a leading provider of customer service software...based in Little Rock, Ark., but with offices throughout the country...introduced a mandatory 5% reduction in pay for most of its 5,500 employees, in exchange for company stock of comparable value.
     [Should have been in exchange for free time of comparable value. What good is stock in today's climate?]
     Employees who made $25,000 or less were exempt from the pay reduction. [Craig] Heathscott, an associate developer in human resources [said] "People are valued.... I feel lucky to be here."...
     The company said...its experience with layoffs during the last recession, in 1991, had a negative impact on the company for years afterward. "...It created a lot of fear among people, and they remembered it," said Cindy K. Childers, head of organizational development for the company. "It became difficult to hire...." ...After determining the business was fundamentally sound and would rebound, Childers said the company came up with the plan for mandatory 5% paycuts across the board and voluntary two-for-one givebacks of pay for stock options worth up to 15% of an individual's salary.... She said 2,000 employees opted to go beyond the mandatory pay-for-swap and invest more of their salary in the company. As a result, the company achieved an additional $8.2m in salary cuts above what it expected. The stock is fully redeemable by employees in April 2002....
     [Keep your fingers crossed.]
   ...Mark Frederickson, chief spokesman for Hopkinton MA-based EMC Corp...agreed [that] companies are not doing themselves or their workers any favors when they move too quickly to layoffs before taking other steps.
   [It's always too quickly unless you're looking at liquidation. You always have a hugely less traumatic and more flexible alternative in manipulating work hours for everyone, not jobs for a few, then a few more, then....]
   "To be the best, you need to have the best," he said. "Those companies that overreact [with layoffs], they pay the price."

3. Click here for today's timesizing stories - 4/30/2001.

1. [strange but hopeful -]
   Executives 'looting' company, suit says - Judge caps amount RNK Telecom owners can pay themselves, by Peter Howe, Boston Globe, E1.
   [So a judge has actually addressed, in a remarkable case of evolutionary anticipation but on a flukey "ogle-me-now" basis, the biggest source of inefficiency and uncompetitiveness in current primitive capitalism - the totally unlimited nature of individual income concentration.]
   DEDHAM, Mass. - A former top executive [Joseph M. Golemme of Norwell, Mass., former CFO and one-third owner of privately held RNK ousted in June] of RNK Telecom, a local phone service provider, is accusing the company's president of "looting" over $4m from the Stoughton-based company in a bitterly contested lawsuit. Earlier this week, in a ruling made public yesterday, Norfolk Superior Court Judge John S. McCann issued a preliminary injunction blocking the defendants, RNK president Richard N. Koch and VP Joy Tessier, from paying themselves more than $250,000 a year while the suit plays out.
   Besides being an unusually high-stakes lawsuit for a company with just 42 employees, the legal action raises questions about whether RNK's financial problems are so serious that it could become the latest of several competitive local phone companies and Net services providers to fail, inconveniencing hundreds of customers. Court papers indicate the company is down to under $300,000 in cash and needs $600,000 in "loans" [our quotes - ed.] from Koch and Tessier....
   Golemme changes that Koch...and Tessier...paid themselves over $2m in bonuses last December.... Koch and Tessier "have looted RNK Inc...by paying themselves unauthorized bonuses of over $4m," Golemme said in an affidavit earlier this month..\.. Those payouts, Golemme said, raise questions about whether RNK has enough cash to remain viable and pay him the money due for his share of the company and for tax bills..\.. Golemme was ousted...under police escort after Koch and Tessier claimed he was "deceitfully" doing work for other companies on RNK's time....
   [Probably just gathering data on Koch and Tessier's company-gutting curve.]
   Judge McCann also ordered Koch and Tessier not to use more than $50,000 of RNK money for "personal expenses of any nature," including legal bills, while the suit is pending....
   [Ultimately, Clashing Executives are America's only hope of reversing its slide into the Third World via infinite concentration of income (all perfectly legal, you understand). The unions are too weak to do it, the consumer movement is too weak to do it, the government is too corrupt (oops) plutocratic to do it.... If somebody like George Soros, for example, ever gets beyond his nice-sounding "open society" phrase to something actionable, or if Bill Gates ever gets beyond massive gifts to the world's richest charities (e.g., Harvard and MIT). Our prescription? Point the wealthy toward safer venues for competitive display - safer for us and for them than infinite income and wealth concentration - something like credit or credibility or reputation (e.g., historical, a la Andrew Carnegie) - and by applying the kind of centrifuge to their unimaginable hoards that historically has only been seen during plagues (e.g., the Black Death of 1348) and wars (e.g., World Wars I and II), get their megacaches back in high-velocity circulation. Getting the money out into the hands of people who actually spend it always generates a rising tide that really does "raise all ships," including those of the wealthy, ironically enough. Arthur Dahlberg has the figures on the WWI version of this phenomenon in a chart on p. 89 of his Jobs, Machines and Capitalism (1932). On p. 90 he observes, "When income was redistributed [by the war] to flow more to the big mass of consumers, manufacturing and trading picked up and both managers and small businessmen increased their net incomes tremendously." From this viewpoint, we have been living in a deepening depression since the labor shortage of WWII wore off around 1970, caused by the waste of increasing numbers of consumers whom we have consigned, by uncapped income concentration elsewhere, to underemployment, welfare, disability, homelessness, and prison. With this much technology, we should all be living in heaven instead of exploring layer after layer of deprivation and degradation.]

2. [1 more UNtakeover]
   U.S. Appeals Court blocks merger of 2 baby food makers, by Stephen Labaton, NYT, B1.
   ...Soon after..\..a federal appeals panel...announced its decision to issue an injunction against the deal..\..in a challenge filed by the FTC during the Clinton administration..., H. J. Heinz announced it would abandon its [2/29/2000] plans to buy the Milnot Holding Corp., maker of Beech-Nut, for $185m.... Robert Pitofsky, the departing chairman of the FTTC, said...that had the decision gone the other way it would have encouraged other deals in highly concentrated industries. The Bush nominee to lead the FTC, Timothy Muris, a law professor at George Mason University, worked on behalf of the two companies....
   [Ergo, conflict of interest when he's confirmed if Heinz brings this back.]
   In a speech late last year, Mr. Muris said that the case had presented the most powerful efficiencies he had ever seen....
   [Yes, indeed, the most efficient situation is one gigantic corporation, fully automated and staffed by robots, tended by one employee at the most, pumping out massive productivity for...who? With 99.999999999999% unemployment, there would be no markets. Sismondi described this situation at the beginning of the industrial revolution in 1819 when CEOs were just starting their stupid use of technology to cut jobs instead of cutting workhours, maintaining employment and continuing the market-maximizing centrifugation of income - "In truth then, there is nothing more to wish for than that the king, remaining alone on the island, by constantly turning a crank, might produce, through automata, all the output of England." See near the bottom of our bibliography page. Efficiency is not the goal. Balance is the goal. Sustainability is the goal. Survivability is the goal. Variability and adaptibility are the goals. Efficiency may be the temporary goal for individual parts of a large biosystem at certain times, but the overall permanent goal of the system is the critical all-time variable = variability itself. As Ernst Mayr says in his Populations, Species and Evolution (1970), "Variability is inherent in any natural population and is favored by natural selection on account of the frequent superiority of heterozygotes {note creativity of bridging gaps between differences - ed.} and the diversity of the environment."]
   He has told friends that several grounds even more compelling than the efficiency argument formed his conclusion thta he would not have challenged the deal had he been at the FTC.
   [Grounds like he personally would get rich, perhaps? Hey, who cares about conflict of interest, who cares about the longer term, as long as Bush and his buddies get rich, right? This is the old Republican short-sightedness, pilloried by Will Rogers during the Great Depression - "Wal folks, what's a Republican president like? Wal he just says, "Now my head's turned, boys. C'mon in and grab all you can!" (Will had equally "complimentary" things to say about Democratic presidents.)]

3. Click here for today's timesizing stories - 4/28/2001.

1. [1 UNtakeover]
   NEC woes likely to continue, despite good results for year, by Miki Tanikawa, NYT, W1.
   ...NEC will...spin off its personal computer business....

2. Click here for today's timesizing stories - 4/27/2001.

1. [1 UNtakeover]
   USX will spin off steel unit in restructuring, AP via NYT, C4.
   The USX Corp. plans a reorganization that will separate its energy and steel businesses, spinning off its steel operations into a freestanding publicly traded company. USX is parent to two divisions, the USX-U.S. Steel Group and the USX-Marathon Group. Each division has stock that is traded separately on the NYSE although they share the same corporate parent. The planned spinoff would completely separate U.S. Steel, which has headquarters in Pittsburgh, from Marathon, based in Houston.
   [Good so far, but look at this dark explanation -]
   USX said splitting its business will give the companies more flexibility to expand through acquisitions.
   [Hmm, an UNtakeover explained as facilitating more takeovers. Acquisitions are not expansions. They are just acquisitions. And at least half of them then proceed to contract - violently, in the sense of throwing people indiscriminately out of their livelihoods regardless of their performance. Downsizings are not individual case-by-case firings for cause. They are indiscriminate acts of self-destruction for executives and their employees and their companies and their consumer base and their markets and their economy. So what should they do? They should cut hours, not jobs, and keep everyone employed. They should include themselves in any sacrifice required, because only then does our system have any kind of feedback mechanism in effect. Who has pioneered this approach? Lincoln Electric of East Cleveland, for one company. Lincoln's principle? "Everyone sacrifices together, starting at the top."
   [N.B. "USX board approves plan to split into 2 businesses," Bloomberg via 8/04/2001 NYT, C4.]

2. Click here for today's timesizing stories - 4/25/2001.

1. [1 UPsizing, with 8 new jobs -]
   4/23  Asylum will open a New York office, by Stuart Elliott, NYT, C11.
   Asylum, an [ad] agency based in San Francisco, specializing in strategic creative content, is opening a New York office with eight employees working for clients like American Express Publishing....
   [You thought we were making up that name "Asylum"? As our next writer would say, "We are not making this up." And what an apt name as a lead-in to Dave's topic this week -]

2. [the way of the future = employee-owned companies, to cut the slow suicide of downsizing]
   4/22  Employees stake claim, save jobs - Printing plant that once faced shutdown to be partly owned, run by workers, by Diane Lewis, Boston Globe, J1.
   When workers at Inner City Inc. learned last year that corporate parent Polaroid Corp. planned to sell or close the printing plant as part of a cost-sutting strategy, some of them panicked....
   Today the mood at Inner City's Roxbury [Mass.] office is decidedly upbeat as its 10 employees await the finalizing next month of an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, or ESOP, that will permit the plant's printing division to become an independent company, partly owned and wholly run by workers.... Workers at Inner City credit an alliance between Polaroid and two nonprofits with helping to create the ESOP, which will help them preserve jobs at the plant and give them an opportunity to run the business themselves.
   Inner City is not the first Massachusetts division or plant to be spun off into an ESOP. [Here are two more,] both [of which] were developed by the *ICA Group of Brookline, a nonprofit that specializes in ESOP and small-business development..\..
   • In 1993, an ESOP at Market Forge, an Everett [Mass.] manufacturer of industrial ovens, helped save 150 jobs.
   • In Pittsfield [Mass.], 55 employees avoided layoffs at Marland Mold after the factor was spun off into an ESOP nine years ago [1992]....
   [So ESOPs have saved 10+150+55= 215 jobs that we know of in Mass. alone in the last 10 years.] There are also ESOPs involving thousands of employees...including United Airlines, Avis Rent-A-Car, and U.S. Sugar.... The concept has grown [especially] among small and midsize firms \says\ J. Michael Keeling, president of the ESOP Assoc. in Washington DC.... He notes that since 1991, membership in his group has grown to 1,300 from 790 [and now] there are 11,500 ESOPs nationwide, with 8.5m employees. When ESOPs first became legal in 1974, there were [only] 200....

3. 4/23  Voodoo economics, by Dave Barry, Boston Globe Magazine, 9.
   Let's take a look at your investment portfolio. In the current market, you should have most of your money in something fairly conservative, such as a coffee can buried under the house.... Whatever you do, do not put money in the stock market [because] - to put it in technical terms - nobody knows anything.... No matter what the stock market does, the TV news always boils down to this:
   TOM BROKAW: "The stock market today went either down or up, and nobody on this earth knows why. For more, here's our financial expert."
   FINANCIAL EXPERT: ..."Tom, it's too soon to tell. ...We're in the same situation as members of a primitive tribe seeing their first solar eclipse. ...Fortunately we have witch doctors. They explain that the sun is being swallowed by a giant worm and that they can scare it away by...waving a magic feather and wearing a hat made from the skull of a weasel. We believe them, because, hey, they must know something, right? How else could they become professional witch doctors?"
   It's the same with the stock market, except that instead of a giant worm, we have a recession; and instead of witch doctors, we have expert financial analysts; and instead of a weasel skull, we have Alan Greenspan.
   [Oo. Beautiful! The impious are taking more and more shots at Saint Alan - see our second item below on 4/20.]
   What we don't have is any kind of clue as to what the stock market is going to do. ...Large investment companies...all have the same message..."Give us your money. You can trust us, because we have a large building."
   Sure. We can trust these institutions...because 18 months ago, they all ran commercials that said, "Sell your stocks right now! The market is going to go into the toilet!" Remember those ads?
   [Actually we said this not 18, but 26 months ago, almost to the day - 2/23/1999 - when Levi's had their big layoff.]
   Of course not. ...Eighteen months ago, the experts sincerely believed that we were in a New Economy, and the way to get rich was to invest in a new business model based on a revolutionary principle: stupidity.
   This was the principle behind the dot-com boom.... [For example,] Boo.com was conceived as an Internet site that would sell, at full price, "urban chic clothing...that was so cool it wasn't even cool yet." In other words...clothes that people were not wearing! This idea was so obviously stupid that it was irresistable to the financial experts. Big investors, including the...firm J.P. Morgan, hurled millions of dollars at Boo.com; Fortune magazine named it one of the "Cool Companies of 1999." Using modern, New Economy business practices, Boo.com managed to go through $185m in 18 months. ...The original company went bankrupt, along with the rest of the New Economy. But J. P. Morgan is still here, and so is Fortune magazine, and so are all the other financial experts, waving their magic feathers. They no longer believe in the New Economy. I don't know what they believe in at the moment, but I'm sure they believe in it very deeply....
   [Thank God for Dave Barry!]

1. 2 UPsizings -
   1. Thayer Hotel Investors, NYT, B3.
      ...Annapolis, Md., a real estate investment company and owner of 21 hotels [will] spend $547m to build a 450-acre resort in Orlando, Fla. that w[ill] include a J. W. Marriott Hotel and Ritz-Carlton Hotel, its largest investment ever.
   2. Krispy Kreme Doughnuts Inc., NYT, B3.
      ...Winston-Salem, NC [plans] to open two stores one in Sioux Falls, SD and the other in Fargo, ND, as it tests smaller markets.

2. [1 UNtakeover]
   Aon, insurance broker, is planning a spinoff, Reuters via NYT, B3.
   ...The world's No. 2 insurance broker...behind the Marsh & McLennan Cos. \will\ spin off its insurance underwriting operations in a move to build up that business and remove potential conflicts with its brokerage operations. Aon...based in Chicago...said the new company, to be spun off to existing shareholders, would combine Aon's five underwriting units, which specialize in accident, health and warranty insurance.

3. The bright side: Spending still strong - But amid layoffs, nation's consumers may soon begin to tighten up, too - [Chart] Consumer spending...outpacing income growth, by Kimberly Blanton, Boston Globe, C1.
   As is typical in a slowdown, the consumer, the source of about two-thirds of tthe nation's economic activity [the other third presumably being business - ed.], is spending less this year that the record amounts shelled out last year.... From January through March, consumption surged at a 3.2% annualized rate, while incomes grew by 1.3%, according to UBS Warburg's estimates of US Commerce Dept. data due next Fri. ... Evidence to date of consumers' endurance contradicts the dire predictions that the "wealth effect" - the boost to consumer spending from rising values of stock portfolios - would reverse itself and plunge the economy into recession....
   [That's because the "wealth effect" makes a negligible contribution to consumer spending. It was basically just an attempt on the part of the top-income brackets to view their own situation as normal by claiming that a rising stock-market tide raises all boats. But despite the hype, only a minority of Americans benefited from the stock bubble while it lasted, and most of that benefit was locked in 401ks anyway (see 4/20 article below, "Emphasizing jobs, not stocks"). Moreover, a stock market rising far beyond historical P/E ratios merely indicates an inefficient over-concentration of income in the top brackets that has nowhere else to go. The tide that really raises all boats is a rising job market supported by plentiful on-the-job training, à la World War II (and I). But in the absence of serious war, plague, or emigration, that will only happen if we adjust the workweek downward the way France has done, preferably with better flexibility and training.]
   Some economists believe that blockbuster rates of spending during the late 1990s and last year were fueled by consumers taking on more debt to support their lifestyles [or in response to massive advertising - ed.] - and that the rising stock market had little to do with it.
   [Count us in on this "belief." Think about it. Banks are THROWING credit cards at people, especially young people.]
   Federal Reserve data show revolving debt held by US households, such as on credit cards, rose by nearly 12% over the past year to $680.9B in February, the latest data available. John Makin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank [the conservative counterpart to the liberal Brookings Institute - ed.], argues that consumers are running out of steam. "If people are spending more than their incomes, which they're doing," he said, "and if they're running up debt, which they're doing, and if their balance sheets are down by $5 trillion [he may be refering to the $2.5T lost in Nasdaq last year, plus the amounts lost in NYSE and AMEX], it's pretty hard to expect strong consumption."

4. Click here for today's timesizing stories - 4/21/2001.

1. Emphasizing jobs, not stocks, op ed by E. J. Dionne Jr., Boston Globe, A23.
   For anyone with an interest in the Great Depression, certain phrases set off chills. So when Anthony M. Santomero, president of the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank, declared this week that economic recoverey was "just around the corner," he must have been unaware that he was paraphasing Herbert Hoover. The Fed['s] rate cut this week [is] a sign of how worried the economic masters of the universe are about our nation's slowdown....
   For all the media [and Fed! -ed.] focus on stock prices, it's unemployment that has real human and social impact. With all those cable stations running the market ticker at the bottom of their screens all day long, it's hard to remember that in the economic lives of most people, stocks play a limited role. As David Leonhardt of The New York Times put it this week, "relatively few Americans rely on them for a significant portion of their income." It's an antique notion, I know, but jobs really matter.
   During the 1990s, we discovered the virtuous circle created when unemployment drops sharply.
   [A much clearer example would be the 1940s (1943: 1.9% unemployment). We watered down the unemployment rate in the early 1990s so it would count less of the problem.]
   It's not just that people have work to do. Low unemployment also increases the bargaining power of employees. They can command higher wages and better benefits.
   [And they can and do spend more to purchase more - of their own technology-gigantized output, for example - and that monetary circulation at higher velocity is what constitutes a real, (ie: solid) economic boom. The 1990s were not a solid boom because of the "irrational exuberance" in the stock markets caused by a funnelling of income so intensely into the top brackets that they literally had nowhere else to put it. But it was the weak bargaining power of employees that allowed this to happen, and the pervasive surplus and under-employment of employees that caused that weak leverage, and the continuing rigidification of our 1940-level workweek that caused that surplus in the face of continuing waves of labor-saving technology.]
   As a result, the 1990s saw a halt in the growth of income inequality that had been a rule in our country for two decades.
   [Good God, what planet is this guy suddenly talking about? The bottom was still losing ground in the 1990s and the top was going completely out of sight. Last we heard, the top 1% of the nation owned as much as the "bottom" 95%!]
   It turns out that rising incomes for people in the middle and at the bottom of the economy have all sorts of positive social spin-offs. During the 1990s, crime dropped sharply...
   [but mainly because we were incarcerating for looong periods and small "crimes" the most crime-liable age and sex and race cohort]
   and so did welfare dependency...
   [but mainly because we threw people out on the streets after two years, and didn't bother getting much data on our homelessness. This guy is straining to glorify the 1990s, and we sympathize, because Americans have such short memories, but he's prettying up the facts.]
   The latest figures released this week show a continued drop in teen pregnancy rates.
   [Well, that's good news, but it may just mean that AIDS fears and precautions, not money, have finally penetrated to the poor. Be that as it may, we do agree with his general conclusion, though we would not base it on the economic bubble (ie: hollow boom) of the 1990s -]
   By most measures, we Americans behave better when we can share widely in economic opportunities.
   [This statement pulls its punch. We ALWAYS theoretically share in the "opportunities," however tough they are to access. Let's cut to the chase. We behave better when we share widely in the good jobs and pay. And behind this truism, there's another about the integrating and civilizing value of greater equality. You see it among the French today because of their history of liberty, equality and fraternity and their present-day sharing of the vanishing work via a shorter statutory workweek. They're always complaining but they do it in such beautiful language. You see it in smaller linguistic populations like the Dutch and the Icelanders. Every age has an integrating principle, such as "one person, one vote." But in America today that has been severely weakened (see on the same page today, "A sorry lesson in how the [Mass.] Legislature handles ballot questions," by Scot Lehigh, BG, A23) and now that the long-incarcerated are starting to be released, there'll be hell to pay. And the wealthy still don't get it. They're in love with simple "solutions" like free trade, as if a combination of person-to-person private property (where I can, e.g., exclude Frankenfoods) and nation-to-nation communism (ie: where we cannot, e.g., exclude Frankenfoods) will automatically bring the poor nations up to developed nation levels rather than bringing developed nations down to theirs as the wealthy go on to funnel up even more meaningless, useless, unspendable infinities of income. This is the kind of thing that makes people stifle their quiet envy and insult and anger with vaunted approbation ("Oh I don't begrudge Bill Gates his money!") and the loud apathy of "I don't care about anything but GETTING MY SHARE - with NO LIMITS" because that's exactly what they see in the behavior of the rich, who have fallen further and further behind in charitable endeavors and noblesse oblige. And all that kind of sour aggressiveness introduces what we call "Hyksos Periods" - the original one was a time of deterioration in ancient Egypt when natural family ties dissolved and the nation was scourged by the wild and cruel Sea Peoples. There was also the chaos covered by the last entries in the Domesday Book when "all the demons in hell were loose in the land" - England, that is.]
   By contrast, unemployment was higher during the boom of the 1980s....
   [Or was it just more fully counted? And people with higher expectations held over from the 60s were holding out longer and more bravely for good jobs. By the 90s they were worn down and accepting jobs as managers at McDonalds and baggers at supermarkets.]
   ...and economic growth was distributed more unequally, tilting toward the top.
   [Again, what planet is he observing. What data can he possibly be looking at? Again, the wealthy may have adjusted the definitions of some of the measures, as they did with unemployment in the early 90s, so that more of the "problem" (in this case, the concentration of income) was hidden in the 1990s. There are mind-boggling myriads of ways this has been and is being done.]
   Only an extreme determinist would assert that low unemployment drives all social improvement.
   [He's trying to sound centrist here, for the benefit of people who are arguing against a connection between low unemployment and social improvement, by setting up an unrealistic 100% perfect "Aunt Sally" (driving "ALL social improvement") and then badmouthing anyone who would take that 100% perfectionistic position. However, we believe that since "earning your own living" and "supporting yourself" constitute the most fundamental principle in human society and in nature (except for parasites), the statement is infinitely truer than its extreme opposite, "low unemployment drives no social improvement" and that the denegativized deperfectionized version ("full employment drives social improvement") is an accurate, though much ignored, policy guide. His muffled version follows -]
   ...But only someone determined to ignore evidence would overlook the link between low unemployment, more progressive tax policies, and general social improvement....

2. A foreseeable end to the Fed's magic - Greenspan's price fixing invites more unwise risk-taking, op ed by James Grant, NYT, A21.
   [Good point. Encouraging to see the assault mounting against "Saint" Greenspan. We hold that interest rates should be set by all those affected; that is, by regular public referendum, with acceptable entries defined by trend-adjusted bracketing, and the results averaged. It can't go on with one unaccountable "Delphic oracle" calling all the shots.]

3. Stopping NAFTA's expansion, op ed by Mike Prokosch of *United for a Fair Economy, Boston Globe, A23.
   [A good article. Here's a sample -]
   ...Under NAFTA, a Canadian company is challenging California's decision to phase out a gasoline additive that has already contaminated Lake Tahoe and several cities' drinking water supplies. According to the NY Times, Methanex Corp. is seeking $970m in "anticipated lost profits" - money the company says it could make if California didn't ban MTBE, a suspected carcinogen....
   [Master ecological economist Herman Daly slams away at the environmental madness of the simplicitudes of "free trade" in his For the Common Good with John Cobb (1988). Phase 5 of the Timesizing program settles "population" issues such as imports, immigrants and births by clearly presenting them to the public in terms of a living-standard tradeoff and then deciding them by referendum.]

4. [and another overpopulation letter (see also 4/17 below) -]
   Overpopulation: A growing concern, letter to editor by Jeff Herman of Jamaica Plain MA, Boston Globe, A22.
   ...Overpopulation is the most underreported issue of our times.
   [Hear, hear.]

5. Click here for today's timesizing stories - 4/20/2001.

1. ["good, but..."]
   Trade deficit shrinks as US cuts imports, Bloomberg via NYT, C6.
   ...shrank to its lowest level in more than a year in February...the Commerce Dept. reported [yester]day, indicating that the cooling economy has reduced demand for consumer products, oil and goods from abroad. The trade deficit declined to $27B from $33.3B in January, the largest drop since monthly record-keeping started in 1992....
   [A reminder that we're still back "in the caves" when it comes to record-keeping. And this without even considering "Are we monitoring trivia and ignoring the vital?" such as our monthly comprehensive rate of dependency (never mind our diluted feel-good unemployment rate) or our monthly foregone economic growth and dynamism sacrificed on the altar of unlimited concentration of work, income and wealth.]
   The decline in imports, of 4.4%, [was] also the largest drop on record....
   [So maybe the whole naive drive toward globalized free trade will be castrated by homegrown stupidity anyway - persistent M&As and downsizing.]
   A separate report suggested that growth would be restrained for most of 2001. The index of leading economic indicators, released today by the Conference Board, fell 0.3% in March after a drop of 0.2% in Feb. and has risen only once in six months.
   [So this could be the Big One, folks. However -]
   ...The index...measures economic activity over the next three to six months....
   [Measures it before it happens? Sounds like voodoo economics to us (sorry for the slur on the Vodoun, ye Haitians!) - this is "counting your chickens before they hatch," something the Vodoun never does. It just decapitates fullgrown chickens and bloodies everything in sight. Yeee-haw. But productive of relatively limited bloodbaths compared to those wrought by negative economic predictions.]

2. Click here for today's timesizing stories - 4/19/2001.

1. [1 UPsizing]
   Domain Home Fashions to expand, by Chris Reidy, Boston Globe, F7.
   ...The Norwood [Mass.]-based home-furnishings chain founded by CEO Judy George in 1985 announced plans to roughly double its number of stores over the next three years. The privately owned chain currently operates 22 stores from the Boston suburbs to Northern Virginia. Now, thanks partly to a new warehouse in New Jersey, the plan is to add another 20 stores in Northeast communities. So far, a slowing economy hasn't dampened enthusiasm for Domain's proprietary furnishings with "affordable decorator looks."
   [Still, expanding into a downturn doesn't sound too smart.]

2. [another company cuts executive salaries -]
   Provant warns about profits, Reuters via Boston Globe, F7.
   ...expect[ing] Q3 earnings to come in at least 80% below the consensus estimate due to a slowing economy....
   [Foolishly, training is always the first thing to get cut in a crunch.]
   The Boston-based..\..corporate training...company's cost-reduction plan, which includes the elimination of about $2.3m in executive salaries, is expected to trim about $7m in operating expenses on an annualized basis by the end of fiscal 2002. Provant's shares rose....

1. [finally somebody fingers the real problem -]
   Mexico's water problem, letter to editor by Sy Weiss of Nokomis FL, NYT, A24.
   Re: "Mexico grows parched, with pollution and politics" (news article, April 14):
   The Mexican water problem will shortly become ours when we are flooded with people who are dying of thirst. Your article paints a very dismal future and does not mention a key factor: overpopulation.
   Until countries like Mexico [and the USA!] seek ways to balance their population with their natural resources, we can look to wars over water rather than oil....

2. Alternative medicine for ailing institution - Strong medicine helps to bring a small institution back to life, by Milt Freudenheim, NYT, front page, C8.
   ...But the nursing staff, the essential heart of any hospital, is still feeling stress, according to several physicians and a union of registered nurses.... The nurses held a one-day strike March 22, forcing the hospital [Armstrong County Memorial Hospital in Kittanning, Pa.] to temporarily shut down almost two-thirds of its beds. Most employees who were dismissed in 1995 were rehired, and revenue from patients climbed back to $53.8m last year from $45m [in 1995]. Cuts in pay and vacations were gradually restored and nurses have had two further raises. Earlier this month, the nurses ratified an agreement with the hospital that called for 3% raises for each of two years, some higher increases for more senior nurses, and limits on mandatory overtime in return for reduced family health coverage....
   [The whole point of the maximum workweek concept legislated into the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act was that there would be no such thing as "mandatory overtime."]
   The agreement will add $380,000 to operating costs.
   But keeping nurses is still a problem. Armstrong recently hired a nurse recruiter, but offers of signing bonuses and retention bonuses "were not effective," said Joyce A. Shanty, a registered nurse who is the hospital's VP for patient services....
   [These morons will do anything but give the nurses what they ask without the "gun" of a one-day strike at their heads. Save the recruiter's salary and benefits and divide it among the nurses. Save the bonus budget and divide it among the nurses. There's no trick to keeping nurses. Quit fiddling around, listen to them and give them what they ask, as we do with doctors.]