Timesizing® Associates - Homepage

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Good News, October 1-15, 2001
[Commentary] ©2001 Phil Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080

10/13/2001  the good word today -

1. 4 UPsizings -
   
   1. Ethan Allen forms partnership with MFI Furniture, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
      Ethan Allen Interiors [based in Danbury, Conn.], the furniture maker and retailer, formed a partnership with the MFI Furniture Group [based in London] to open stores in Britain ... as many as five retail stores in the first phase of the partnership...sell[ing] premium-brand furniture and hav[ing] the Ethan Allen name....
      [Unspecified new jobs.]
   2. Company to transform manure to megawatts, AP via Boston Globe, A3.
      Britain's first dung-fired power station is set to begin operation by early next year, producing not only electricity but also hot water and liquid manure. The plant is part of a renewable energy project in Devon County, southwest England. It will generate up to 2 megawatts of electricity from gas given off by liquid waste collected from area farms, plant director Charles Clarke said yesterday. The plant can handle up to 450 tons of slurry a day, reducing the problem of storage, said Clarke.
      [Unspecified new jobs.]
   3. MSNBC starts Arabic site, by Andrew Zipern, NYT, C4.
      MSNBC inaugurated an Arabic-language news Web site yesterday, entering an area that is a hot market for news and media. The Web site, at www.go4msnbc.com, is produced with Good News 4 Me, a media company based in Cairo [to] provide selected news reports as well as streaming audio and video in Arabic. Good News 4 Me will operate and maintain the site. MSNBC already had...French...German \and\ Turkish...versions of the site, but its deal with the Egyptian company is its first Arabic-language content.... CNN is creating CNNarabic.com, an Arabic-language site to be run out of a new CNN bureau being built in Dubai.
      [Unspecified new jobs.]
   4. MSNBC starts Arabic site, by Andrew Zipern, NYT, C4.
      ...CNN is creating CNNarabic.com, an Arabic-language site to be run out of a new CNN bureau being built in Dubai.
      [Unspecified new jobs.]

2. Palestinian offers idea: Get Israelis on our side, by Joel Greenberg, NYT, A5.
   JERUSALEM...- In a speech to an overflow crowd of Israelis at the Hebrew University on Monday night, Sari Nusseibeh, the new political representative of the Palestinians in East Jerusalem, aired views rarely hear here after more than a year of violence.
   He criticized the Palestinian uprising as hopelessly mired in bloodshed...
   [- "the first side that switches to Gandhian tactics will win" -]
   and argued that a peace agreement incorporating a Palestinian state could only be reached if the Palestinians abandoned a longstanding demand for the return of refugees dislocated in war more than 50 years ago to their former homes in Israel.
   "The Palestinians have to realize that if we are to reach an agreement on two states, then those two states will have to be one for the Israelis and one for the Palestinians, not one for the Palestinians and the other also for the Palestinians," he said....

1. [1 'UPsizing' but copied to makework page and counted there in 6- & 12-mon. summaries -]
   Florida: Plan to aid economy, AP via NYT, A8.
   In an effort to help its economy, the state will step up road and school construction and spend more to promote tourism, Gov. Jeb Bush said. The construction will create 30,000 jobs at a time when state unemployment claims are at a 10-year high.... The state's economy suffered as vacationers canceled flights after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

2. Oregon: Teenage pregnancy rate drops, by Matthew Preusch, NYT, A8.
   The pregnancy rate for teenagers fell for the fifth consecutive year last year, following a national trend, state health officials announced. Oregon reported 14 pregnancies per every 1,000 girls ages 10 to 17 in 2000, or a total of 2,653, three years after Gov. John Kitzhaber started a statewide program to combat teenage pregnancy. The state surpassed its goal, set in 1997, of 15 pregnancies for every 1,000 girls for last year.

1. [1 'UPsizing' but copied to makework page and counted there in 6- & 12-mon. summaries -]
   Peru: Jobs for the poor, by Clifford Krauss, NYT, A6.
   President Alejandro Toledo mounted an antipoverty program designed to create 49,000 jobs in the poorest areas of Peru.
   [Good - to have so many new jobs. Bad - that it's makework, instead of sharework. So it's "new jobs" on the rigid, frozen-in-time, 1940(US) basis of 40 hrs/wk.]
   The plan will limit imports of food to encourage domestic grain production, spur new public works and maintenance of roads and step up efforts to develop tourism.
   [Good that they're not obsessed with something so simplistic as free trade. Bad that at least this article is giving us the impression that limiting imports is the centerpiece of the strategy, instead of designing the least-stifling way* of limiting worktime per person per time unit, that is, sharing the overwork and spreading the funneling income to unleash spending and effective demand. *For example, the least-stifling way of not having to stop everybody - just those who keep working longer and longer hours per week for money. If they're just doin' it for love, fine, no problemo. But how to separate the sheep from the goats? A: require reinvestment of overtime earnings (as we do in Timesizing Phase 2 and Phase 3). In what? The helpfullest, healthiest, thing. Which is? Making sure you're not working overtime because of subtle limits (vs. other people) on your skills.]
   Mr. Toledo took office in July promising to make the fight against poverty and corruption the centerpiece of his administration.

2. [1 UNtakeover alias UNmerger]
   Etc. - Thermo Electron Corp., Globe wire services via NYT, C5.
   ...will spin off Viasys Healthcare as a dividend to shareholders to focus on making measurement devices....

3. Greenspan rejects idea of inflation targets, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   [Whoa, RADICAL! Not fixating on inflation during a recession! Brilliant! Of course, he's still not exactly talking about focusing on unemployment, which is the Fed's other (forgotten) target. In fact, in this whole 3x4-column-inch article, there's not even a single mention of unemployment. Does this means that Ol' Greenie is gonna stop being the Blue Meanie who setting unemployment targets too? - in the form of the NAIRU? = the Non Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment; in other words, fostering unemployment to control inflation. So what would be Greenie's excuse (he really NEEDS an excuse for doing something so socialist, so COMMUNIST, as not setting inflation targets!) for dumping inflation targets and its superficial-level silhouette, the NAIRU? The answer is in the article's subtitle: "The Fed chief says data do not allow precise goals." Poor guy. Far be it from him to ever take responsibility for the poor by concerning himself with fighting unemployment. He's blindered himself to the rich, to fighting inflation. God forbid the rich should ever lose any of the spending power in their unspendably bloated hoards. "The Fed chief says data do not allow precise goals." So he'd do the the targets if he had the data? Poor guy. Chairman of the richest central bank in the world and there's still some data he can't get. Phew, what a downer. What a castration. Never mind the article right above this one is "Unemployment claims post a sharp increase - Job losses are the highest since 1991 in figures that reflect 11,000 claims from areas hit on Sept. 11" (but only 11,000 out of 463,000).]

4. [simple formula for happiness in America]
   American Muslims - U.S. patriots from mideast want to join the fray (continued from page B1), NYT, B12.
   Profitable happiness in America is simple, said Walter Mourad, the owner of three dry-cleaning shops, who explained, "You get a lease with an option to buy, you get a loan and you put up a humungous sign. [Photo caption]

1. 2 UPsizings, with 600 +?? new jobs -
   
   1. Airline is hiring, Bloomberg via BG, C2.
      Southwest Airlines Co. said its efforts to hire a total of 500-600 pilots, flight attendants, and airport workers are stymied because potential applicants think all carriers are cutting jobs. US airlines have eliminated 92,000 jobs since the Sept. 11 attacks. Southwest hasn't eliminated any jobs or reduced flights, but did postpone plans to add 11 Boeing 737s by year-end.
   2. Venture to make products for doctors, by Susan Stellin, NYT, C4.
      The drug maker Pfizer Inc. joined IBM and Microsoft yesterday to announce the official start of Amicore, an independent software and services company that aims to provide office automation products to doctors....
      [Unspecified new jobs.]

2. [a political "correction"]
   First woman elected to House leadership, by Susan Milligan, Boston Globe, A2.
   WASHINGTON - House Democrats elected the first woman ever to a leadership position yesterday, making veteran Rep. Nancy Pelosi the chamber's minority whip. Pelosi...is sthe highest ranking female member of Congress in history.
   "It's been what - 215 years? It had to happen sometime," said a beaming Pelosi after the secret 118-95 vote. Pelosi, a San Francisco Democrat, beat Maryland Rep. Steny H. Hoyer after what she called a hard-fought campaign....

3. [a glimmer of long-term thinking]
   California builders must show water is sufficient, by Evelyn Nieves, NYT, A16.
   Illustrating just how precious water has become in parts of California, Gov. Gray Davis has signed into law a bill that forces builders to prove that there will be adequate water to supply their new developments.
   The new law, hailed by its proponents as one of the toughest in the country linking land-use to water supplies, imposes strict requirements for cities and counties in issuing permits for new subdivisions of 500 or more homes. It requires that the local water agency verify that it has enough water to serve the project for at least 20 years, including long periods of drought. The governor signed that bill, written by Senator Sheila Kuehl, Democrat of Santa Monica, and its companion bill, by Senator Jim Costa, Democrat of Fresno, requiring that cities and counties consult their water agencies early in the planning stages of development....

4. [a splat of humor]
   Now on TV: Gulf War II, the sequel, by Alex Beam, Boston Globe, D1.
   ...Who says irony is dead? Any country that drops 70,000 peanut butter and jelly "meals," replete with plastic cutlery and moist towelettes, onto 5 million starving Afghans hasn't lost its sense of humor....

1. 2 UPsizings -
   1. E*Trade will open 22 more outlets in Target stores, Reuters via NYT, C4.
      ...22 E*Trade Zones within SuperTarget stores..\..continuing to move beyond Internet operations...., bringing the total...to 43 in 9 states. The brokerage firm in April laid plans to put 20 shops and more than 1,000 ATM's in Target stores nationwide..\.. The online brokerage...is grappling with declining customer trading volumes as stock markets continue to head south....
      [Unspecified new jobs.]
   2. Fallon Worldwide to expand operations, by Stuart Elliott, NYT, C7.
      ...by opening offices in Hong Kong,...Singapore \and\ Sao Paulo, Brazil.... The agency has its headquarters in Minneapolis and offices in London and New York. The new offices [are] to open by January.... The openings are part of expansion plans for Fallon developed after its acquisition last year by the Publicis Groupe.
      [An unusual case of takeover-upsizing. Unspecified new jobs.]

2. Customs switches priority from drugs to terrorism, by Pear and Shenon, NYT, B11.
   WASHINGTON...- After the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States Customs Service's primary mission has shifted from preventing drug traffic to preventing terrorism. Officials searched luggage at Dulles Airport. [photo caption]
   [Good move. Here's hoping our law enforcement agencies make the same switch. The drug war is a no op that we should have learned to avoid from our 14-year exercise in futility with Prohibition.]

1. [1 UPsizing -]
   Best Buy starts site for music on Web, Bloomberg via NYT, C12.
   [So, unspecified new jobs.]
   ...The largest electronics retailer said [yester]day that its BestBuy.com Internet division has started a Web site that allows users to purchase music online by downloading digital files.... Downloads will cost...$.99-1.99 for a single song and $9.99-15.99 for the equivalent of a full-length CD.... Best Buy, which is based in Eden Prairie MN, is still testing price ranges....

2. [a different outlook for would-be hijackers -]
   Passengers stop man who tried to force his way into cockpit, by John Fountain, NYT, B10.
   ...aboard an American Airlines flight [#1238, Boeing 767 with 153 passengers and 9 crew] to Chicago from Los Angeles [dep. 9:46 am yester]day...and the pilot was forced to make an emergency landing at O'Hare International Airport after being intercepted by two fighter jets. ...The unidentified man was subdued by passengers. The authorities said they had been told by the father of the suspect, who was traveling with him, that the man had a history of mental illness.
   [They've got his father and he's still "unidentified"? Clearly a father incapable of restraining his problem son and irresponsible to take him on a plane.]
   "My understanding is a passenger tried to get into the cockpit and was restrained by other passengers," said Mary Frances Fagan, an American Airlines spokeswoman. "The captain declared an emergency and the aircraft landed safely. The passenger was taken off and arrested. It did not appear to be a terrorist incident."
   Passengers, like JoAnn Rockman...who was traveling with her husband, Howard...and their son, Maxwell...described a dramatic scene in the moments leading up to the plane's safe landing. "The stewardess yelled, 'Get that guy!' And I want to tell you, people reacted just so incredibly quickly," Mrs. Rockman recalled in a telephone interview.... "They had no idea what this guy was going to do. They really acted heroically."
   "You know Americans will never be led to slaughter again on an airplane," Mrs. Rockman added. "They just won't be. Everybody was used to just sitting down and being quiet and doing what people said. And you know what, they're just going to fight to the death now, truly."...

1. Drawing on Gandhi for inspiration, letter to editor by Management Associate Gene Roman of the NY & NJ Port Authority in Newark, Boston Globe, A14.
   As someone who escaped from the recent attack on the World Trade Center, I was happy to hear the name of [Mahatma] Gandhi invoked in public (Mahatma Gandhi's unfinished work," op ed, Oct. 2 [see below]).
   In the days immediately following this tragedy, I immediately thought of one of Martin Luther King's last public statements:
   The choice is no longer between violence and nonviolence. It is between nonviolence and nonexistence.
   We are at an important crossroads. I love my country as much as the next guy, but the blind patriotism of these past few weeks has left me feeling empty. I am not a pacifist by inclination, but the future physical, spiritual and mental health of the nation, I believe, depend on how well we are able to integrate the legacy of King and Gandhi into our individual and collective lives.
   In an atmosphere flooded with the talk of war and violence, it is healing and reassuring to know that others are drawing on the inspiration of men like Gandhi to make sense of current events.
   [Why is the way of nonviolent coercive resistance so powerful? There are a lot of clues across on the next page -]
   Avoiding disaster in Muslim world, op ed by Business Professor Marvin Zonis of the University of Chicago, BG, A15.
   The most important and immediate goal for US foreign policy is to prevent Osama bin Laden and his terrorist supporters from striking again at US targets. The second-most important goal should be to prevent a foreign policy disaster for the United States in the Muslim world.
   In a 1998 statement, bin Laden savaged the United States for stationing troops in Saudi Arabia, for maintaining the sanctions against Iraq, and for supporting Israel at the expense of the Palestinians. That resonated deeply with the 600m Muslims who live across the Middle East, from Morocco to Pakistan.
   [Maybe we should add a few hundred million and extend that to "across the world, from the USA to Indonesia."]
   His claim that these actions justified the killing of Americans and their allies failed to resonate except among a relatively small number of Islamic fundamentalists.
   The danger now is that when the United States visits ruthless punishment on bin Laden and his Afghan hosts, the Taliban [whom the same United States helped to create], the nation will fuel more sympathy for him and create new generations of terrorists.
   That's what happened in India when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi attacked Sikh fundamentalists. Some 19m Sikhs lived in India in the early 1980s with many concentrated in Punjab. ...Bhindranwale headed the Sikh nationalist party, Akhali Dal, and began to demand greater autonomy for Punjab.... As they increased their threats, [Indira] Gandhi sent more and more troops.
   When the Akhali Dal announced they would stop paying taxes to the central government and would block the shipment of grain from Punjab to the rest of the country, [Indira] Gandhi ordered troops into Bhindranwale's headquarters in the Golden Temple in Amritsar. For three bloody days in June 1984, Indian troops attacked. In the end, Bhindranwale was killed [compare Bin Laden].
   One temple was destroyed, and the entire complex was badly damaged. But in the process, Gandhi made even moderate Sikhs more sympathetic with the radicals. In October 1984, she was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards, who sought to avenge the insult to their people....
   ["Ye have heard that it hath been said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil; but whoso shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the left also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that asketh of thee, and from him that would borrow of thee, turn not thou away. Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you. And pray for them that despirefully use you, and persecute you. That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven; for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the [tax extorters] do the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the [tax extorters] do so? Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." Matt. 5:38ff, from the Sermon on the Mount. But a cycle of vengeance is sooo easy to understand. And the way of nonviolent coercion remains hard to understand even though many of our greatest teachers have taught it. And even though we have three or four dramatic success stories from this past century - Mahatma Gandhi vs. the British, the Danes vs. the Nazis, Martin Luther King vs. the segregationists, and Lech Walesa vs. the Communists and the USSR. And the students vs. the Communists in Tianamen Square, though a failure, still resonates loudly around the world. We need to know a lot more about each of the successes. Because we know sooo much about the cycle of violent tit-for-tat -]
   Just as [Indira] Gandhi's use of force against Bhindranwale radicalized the Sikhs and resulted in her assassination, so could US use of military force against bin Laden result in the radicalization of moderate Muslims, with dire consequences for the United States.... The coming military action is bound to increase sympathies for the radicals throughout the region. The failure of American efforts to separate moderate Muslims from radical Islamic fundamentalists will come to haunt the United States long after it disposes of this immediate threat. A hostile Muslim world is bound to bring new torments to the United States and the West..\..
   [Zonis lists four suggestions as to how the U.S. can "seize the initiative now to prevent that radicalization in the future. Here's the fourth -]
   • The United States must bring an immediate and lasting end to the violence between the Palestinians and the Israelis and restart the peace process.
   [We would say only they themselves can do that, but there are hints of how we could evoke that situation, instead of what we're evoking now -]
   Yasser Arafat, perhaps unencumbered by political pressures from the Palestinians, has declared a cease-fire. US interests demand that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon be induced to the table and that both sides in new talks generate meaningful concessions....

2. [Meanwhile, the game goes on. Here's a positive -]
   U.S. strongly rebukes Sharon for criticism of Bush, calling it 'unacceptable', by Perlez and Seelye, NYT, B3.
   ...On Thursday..\..Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon...stunned and surprised the Bush administration when he called on the United States not to "repeat the terrible mistake of 1938, when enlightened European democracies decided to sacrifice Czechoslovakia so as to reach a convenient temporary solution." He warned Mr. Bush not to "appease the Arabs at our expense; we cannot accept it"..\..
   [Well, they accept $3½ billion of our taxpayer dollars every year, don't they. Sharon is comparing to the Nazis Palestinians who are mainly only throwing stones to defend their land that Israel is illegally occupying and settling? Sharon is setting back the cause of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League by decades. The Nazis were grabbing land. They grabbed Poland and they grabbed Czechoslovakia. The Palestinians are not the ones who have been doing the land grabs in this ongoing murderous pettiness. And any appeasement in this situation has not been of the Arabs by the Bush administration but of the Israeli occupiers of Palestinian land by the last six US administrations, who never challenged it.]
   The White House reprimanded the Israeli Prime Minister...[yester]day for what it called his "unacceptable" remarks about...Bush, as the administration frantically tried to discourage Mr. Sharon from carrying out threats to take further military action against the Palestinians. The use of the word "unacceptable" constituted unusually strong language for relations between the United States and Israel, a measure of the strains placed by the Bush administration's scrambling to draw Arab countries into a coalition against terrorism....
   [Are the strains placed by this "scrambling" of the Bush administration, or by the acquiescence of the last six administration's in Israel's illegal occupation of Palestinian land? How effective was the Bush administration's rebuke of the Israeli Prime Minister? A front page story today tells the tale -]
   Soon after rebuking U.S., Israel moves into 2 Arab neighborhoods, by James Bennet, NYT, front page.
   HEBRON, West Bank...- Hours after rebuking the United States for its role in the Middle East and declaring that Israelis would "depend only on ourselves," Prime Minister Ariel Sharon began one of the biggest military assaults of the yearlong conflict [yester]day, sending troops, tanks and Apache helicopters against Palestinian gunmen here.
   [And wasn't it Sharon who started this "yearlong conflict" by the provocative act of visiting a certain important mosque in Jerusalem about a year ago?]
   By late this afternoon, 5 Palestinians had been killed and more than 40 wounded. Blue-and-white Israeli flags were fluttering from new Israeli outposts in Palestinian homes in Harat al Sheik, one of two hilltop neighborhoods in Palestinian-controlled [they must mean "owned" but certainly not "controlled"] territory that Israel reoccupied to stop snipers from firing on settlers below.
   ["Settlers," or "squatters" and "land thieves"?]
   Blood-stained sidewalks, shattered windows and four bullet-riddled Palestinian jeeps testified to the ferocity of the fighting.... The Israeli assault came in response to the killing of [3] Israelis by a Palestinian on Thursday....
   [Hmm, three Israelis and five Palestinians. This seems to be the way it has been going. Sharon should print up bumper stickers, "Have you killed a Palestinian today?" We're not sure what the editors of the NYT are trying to do here, but having broken their practice of spelling out numbers of less than ten in the case of the 5 Palestinians, they restore the practice in the case of these "three" Israelis, only to break it again in describing these same three Israelis in the next column - "He killed 3 and wounded 13 before being shot dead." A little confusion perhaps, now that their usual practice of spinning the Israelis as human and righteous and the Palestinians as subhuman and evil is coming in for some modification?]
   The cease-fire urged on Israel and the Palestinians by the Bush administration has collapsed in all but name here.... Since the terrorist attacks on America on Sept. 11, the administration has promoted the cease-fire in hopes of coaxing Arab nations into an antiterror coalition.
   After enthusiastically endorsing the coalition, Mr. Sharon has grown alarmed at the way...Bush has gone about assembling it.... Mr. Sharon was blindsided by Mr. Bush's endorsement this week of the eventual creation of a Palestinian state
   [oh, so the state of Israel wants to deny the Palestinians its own status?]
   and offended, like many Israelis, by the decision to send Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to consult with Arab nations, bypassing Israel.
   What was once a tight relationship with the Bush administration has so deteriorated that in the last 24 hours, Mr. Sharon and the White House exchanged public slaps. Mr. Sharon warned that Mr. Bush risked acting like Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who appeased Hitler before World War II.
   [Except the land grab here is by the Israelis, not the Palestinians, and the appeasement has been by the last six U.S. administrations of the Israelis - by ignoring the land grab - not by the Palestinians.]
   The White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, today rejected Mr. Sharon's remarks as "unacceptable."
   [See above.]
   In a statement released [last] night, the prime minister's office did not respond directly to Mr. Fleischer [but] reported that...Mr. Sharon sent to Mr. Bush his "appreciation of the bold and courageous decision of the president to fight terrorism...." Under the terms of the cease-fire, which officially remains in effect, Israel was to stop all invasions of Palestinian-controlled territory and to begin withdrawing its forces....
   [Again, the NYT's hard spin on the Palestinians, because they don't say just Palestinian territory, which it is by treaty, let alone Palestinian-owned territory, but "Palestinian-controlled territory," which makes it sound like the Palestinians have no more right to it than the Israelis have to "Israeli-occupied territory." At least here the NYT is hardening up its spin on the Israelis, talking about they're to "stop all invasions." Israel's and America's self-interests are diverging rapidly - or rather, it's finally becoming obvious that they have been antithetical for some time. If Sharon wants to go it alone, we should be only to quick to agree with him - and quit muddying the waters with our $3.5 billion in "foreign aid" - most of which comes right back to our arms manufacturers. If we don't have the sense, guts or imagination to apply Mahatma Gandhi's nonviolent coercion in the Middle East, let us at least practice Lao Tzu's good advice - "Who can, by stirring, clear muddy water. But leave it alone, and it will come clear of itself." Let's get our $3.5B/yr gun money out of Israel, and the "equalizing" $2B out of Egypt at the same time. We can use all this money a lot better for our shattered commercial city and our shattered economy - all industries - rather than just for our terrorism-evoking arms industry via violent Israelis. And to Sharon, we give the advice of one of his own prophets, "Hear ye now what the Lord saith, ...O my people, what have I done unto thee? and wherein have I wearied thee? testify against me. For I brought thee up out of the land of Egypt, and redeemed thee out of the house of servants.... Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil?... He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" Micah 6.]

1. 2 UPsizings, with 70 new jobs + unspecified -
   1. Borgwarner Inc., NYT, C3.
      ...Chicago, the world's largest maker of automatic transmission parts [will] add 70 jobs at the Cortland NY plant, which now employs 120.

   2. Starbucks in joint venture with German retailer, Bloomberg via NYT, C3.
      ...The specialty coffee chain said yesterday that it had formed a joint venture with KarstadtQuelle, Germany's biggest department store company to expand into Germany. The first Starbucks store in Germany...is expected to open in Berlin in early spring....Starbucks...sees potential for as many as 1,400 stores in Germany. Starbucks, which is based in Seattle, has six shops in Switzerland and plans to open in Vienna in December, as part of a plan to open at least 650 outlets in continental Europe by the end of 2003.
      [Unspecified new jobs. Soon there'll only be three boring stores in the world - Walmart, McDonald's and Starbucks. Aaaaaagggghh.]

2. For many, a day to appreciate, by David Arnold, Boston Globe, B1.
   QUINCY, Mass. - ..."If the last three weeks has taught me anything, it's the importance of the time we have and the gift of a day like this," said..\..Joan Cavagnaro of Holbrook, a part-time employee at the CVS on Wollaston Boulevard. And so, Cavargno seized the day [yesterday] and skipped work, unaware that she was part of a quiet movement that likely had more than a few employers wondering: Why is everyone sick?
   Call it a post-terrorism mental health day. Or a day dedicated to those who could sense the cooler, damper weekend coming. Of this, be certain: Yesterday was something of a celebration. Normally empty golf courses [Thursday] resembled high noon on Saturday.... At 1 pm yesterday, 25 people too shy [or guilty] to give their names were lined up at the first tee at Franklin Park Golf Course. Normally at midday on a Thursday in early October, the tee would be empty..\..
   The chit-chat on marine two-way radio was a study in guilty conscience: ..."Hey Charlie! You out on the water? What's your excuse!"... At 3 pm in Charlestown, nine sailboats from the Courageous Sailing Center were plying the harbor waves in the 20-knot south-westerly breeze. Normally? "Maybe one boat," said Brian Peugh, the Center's executive director..\..
   Parents were showing up for their children's after-school soccer games as if attendance were being taken....
   If there was one common reason given for playing hooky, it was that the Sept. 11 attacks were a stark, terrifying reminder how precious a beautiful, balmy day can be. "I usually don't sneak away from work. Suddenly I've become acutely aware of how quickly life can be pulled out from under us," said John Favaloro...owner of a 26-foot-long motorboat named, appropriately, "Playing Hookey." Favaloro owns John's Auto Place in South Boston. Yesterday, he said, was one of only a handful in 23 years that he has slipped out of work to join his wife, Maureen, on their Weymouth-based boat....

3. [a glimmer of insight -]
   You must be the change you wish to see in the world, Mahatma Gandhi, NYT, B14.
   [This is the epigram introducing a full-page display of 16 book covers representing hope. There is no specific sponsor. The last line simply says, "available wherever books are sold." The advice calls to mind the less all-embracing recommendation, "Model the behavior you want from others."]

• [Well here, at least one of the root sources of downturn is drying up -]
  Adams Harkness to cut 20 workers, by Beth Healy, BG, C5.
  ...Thomson Financial, a Newark-based research firm, reported yesterday that
  September saw 327 deals, the lowest volume of merger-and-acquisition ["M&A"]activity since November 1988.
  [Thank God.  Let our 'captains of industry' stop merging and start managing!]
  Total US deals in the quarter were valued at $260B, down from $488B in the same quarter a year ago.
  Globally, the pace of merger deals hit a six-year low in the quarter, Thomson reported, with total deals valued at $434B, down from $803B a year ago.

• The right stimulus, editorial, Boston Globe, A18.
  [Now here's a BGO (blinding glimpse of the obvious) -]
  In perilous times Americans are understandably more likely to place financial windfalls in savings accounts rather than spend freely on luxuries. If Congress wants a stimulus package that will be effective in circulating more money through the economy, it should be directed toward people who have little choice but to spend it:
  • struggling families,
  • lower-income workers,
  • the suddenly unemployed....
  [Here the Globe editors come close to the realization that "the less concentration of money, the more circulation, and vice versa." But the argument they are up against, and this is credible only because its proponents own the media, is that we need more "investment" and therefore we need to send more money to the rich. But the media spin the economy as "prosperous" as long as centripetal forces on income are strong and the the top brackets are getting more and more unspendable money - "to invest" - in productivity. But then eventually a funny thing happens. The top brackets get so much unspendable money to invest that it becomes uninvestable. There's no productivity big enough and sustainable enough to support their investing in it. The markets just aren't there. What a surprise! - to them. And when that seachange happens, not even their media can continue to spin the economy as "prosperous." They all gabble away, totally mystified at this unaccountable Act of God - which they had absolutely nothing to do with, of course - and they start talking about the "business cycle" as if there's a God-given guarantee that this situation is temporary - it's only going to last 11 months or so, and then we can get back to the familiar mindless status-quo "prosperity" - at least for those of us in the top brackets. But then every 50-70 years or so there comes a non-cyclical downturn, one that a few primps and prods won't goose back onto what can be spun as an upswing. We missed the chance in 1933 to get "tinkering in the right garage" on this last time. Let's not miss it again. We need a new work-based market-based technology of income centrifugation to counter the overwhelming centripetal forces of income concentration. It's not a matter of acts of God. It's a matter of economic design. The editorial's "wrap" -]
  What the country does not need are accelerated tax cuts for the wealthy, as some have proposed. Immediate relief targeted to lower and middle class workers would be...more effective.
  [That's a "big 10-4" on 10/04!]

1. [1 UNtakeover]
   G.E. and Honeywell officially end merger agreement, AP via NYT, C4.
   ...three months after European regulators rejected the $41B [nee 45] deal.
   [Thank God for European antitrust. It's the only effective antitrust agency in the world now that USA's has been corrupted. This is the second deal for Honeywell that has caved in little over 2 years:
   1. 6/08/1999  AlliedSignal to buy Honeywell - Companies to slash 4,500 jobs in $16.3b stock and debt deal
   2. 10/23/2000  General Electric buying Honeywell in $45B deal
   Maybe Honeywell execs and board will smarten up and stand on their own two feet again for a change.]
   GE agreed to reimburse Honeywell for merger-related expenses and to extend two financing arrangements.
   [Now, may the moron management of both companies quit merging and start managing! And that means prioritizing employees and schedules - timesizing, not downsizing - to maintain national and world consumer markets.]

2. ["good, but" -]
   Fed cuts benchmark rate ½ point, to a 39-year low - Both parties work toward a stimulus package, by Richard Stevenson, NYT, front page.
   WASHINGTON...- The Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate by half a percentage point [yester]day to...its lowest level since 1962..\., continuing its effort to pump some vigor back into an economy that shows all the signs of having lapsed into recession....
   [Well, that's good - get ready to refi - but even the NY Times editors are now realizing -]
   The dwindling power of rate cuts, editorial, NYT, A22.
   [But that's good too, because the sooner we all realize how superficial ratecuts are, the sooner we'll all be looking for the real area for "structural" recovery. And of course, our candidate is share of work per person per time unit, alias the workweek. We're flooding an automation-eroded market with labor hours, depressing wages, concentrating income (as well as skills and employment), and suctioning the spending power away from our own now-necessarily huge investment targets - and all simply because despite all our "modern technology," we still have a pre-war-era workweek. We think we're so damn smart, but we're so economically anxious that we're actually working longer hours - often for no more money - than we did in 1940. Boy, ain't we clever.]
   Yesterday, the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates for the ninth time this year. The federal funds rate, the key tool of monetary policy, is now 2.5% - below the level of inflation. The Fed was hoping it would buoy investor and consumer confidence...
   [Here's another way of looking at this whole situation. We are more dependent on one another today in the advanced economies than at any other time in the entire evolution of our species, but one bunch of us, called "Americans," gets it into our head that we're actually tough and independent. If I "earn" a billion dollars, it's MINE, and no goddam other SOB should be able to touch a goddam penny of it! So we go on concentrating spending power into a few pockets that are not surprizingly unwilling to spend it because they just don't need that much stuff, they're not THAT interested in super-excess-overflow luxury, and besides, they just don't have the TIME. So we go on and on with our "tough independence" loading these few pockets with more and more and more unspendable spending power until - could it POSSIBLY be true?! - not only do they not want to spend it but they don't even want to INVEST it. Why? Because almost nothing they look into is big enough and has big enough sustainable markets to guarantee them a return on their huge megamacro humungo gargantuo investment. And once we turn that corner, from loading up the rich with evermore unspendable money to loading up the rich with evermore uninvestable money, kaboomski, we'uns got airsels a nice little recession or even depression (chronic recession) on our hands. Our usual naive solution is government spending. Where does government get the money? Well, as *Will Rogers used to say, "I guess they're gonna git it from the rich, cuz they're the only ones that's got any." When the situation is still mild is government borrow and spend. That still basically leaves it all with the rich where it started. When the situation gets serious we switch to government tax and spend. Usually takes a big war to get the rich to go along with that idea. So this whole government spending approach never worked and never works without a big war. We kidded ourselves in the 1930s that the New Deal was working because we so desperately needed to believe that something was working. But FDR turned up his nose at the approach that had been working roughly over the previous 150 years - regretted it two years later - an approach that teased the money away from the rich in the same way they got it, by market forces. That other approach was shortening the workweek to remove the gross surplus of labor hours flooding the job market and depressing wages and income centrifugation. We need to do it today more flexibly than we thought in 1933 - we need "flexible adjustment of the workweek against unemployment" as Reuther called it, and we need to hitch it up to market-determined training and hiring - but we need it fast to avoid big war because with all our nuclear and biological toys, war ain't too healthy for us anymore, not even the rich can count on digging a deep enough bunker to survive or being close enough to it to dive-in in time. We've stripped this other updated approach down to its essentials here at worstcaseplan.com. We call it Timesizing.]
   ...and given the markets' current psychology, [the Fed] probably had little choice. The stock market did respond well to the move.
   [Momentarily anyway.]
   Still, it is becoming clear that the nation's economic woes are not going to be fixed simply by continual rate-cutting....
   ["Brilliant deduction, my dear Holmes." Not "simply" by rate-cutting or even primarily by rate-cutting.]

3. House panel calls for 'cultural revolution' in FBI and CIA, by Alison Mitchell, NYT, B2.
   [Hallelujah. Maybe there's hope.]
   WASHINGTON...- Reflecting the mood since Sept. 11, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, in a report accompanying a classified intelligence bill expected to be taken up by the House [of Representatives] this week, says it is a matter of urgency, "like no other time in our nation's history," to address the "many crticial problems" facing the intelligence agencies....

1. Mahatma Gandhi's unfinished work, op ed by James Carroll, Boston Globe, A11.
   ...Today is Gandhi's birthday. What is to be learned from a consideration of the present crisis in the light of the Indian national leader's life and teaching?... Gandhi invented a new notion of a nonviolent but coercive resistance.... Gandhi's lifelong strategy was to bring about moments of epiphany when wide populations might come to decisive political and moral recognitions. Acts of resistance that lay bare the real character of evil, Gandhi taught, will lead to broad rejection of that evil. The history of the [successful!] movements [inspired by Gandhi - in pre-independence India, Nazi-occupied Denmark, racially segregated USA, Soviet-occupied Poland...] suggests that this is anything but the platitudinous meekness derided by those who prefer war....
   [It's also the thing that Jesus of Nazareth seems to have been driving at - "turn the other cheek," "forgive 70 times 7 times,"... (though his violence in "purging" the temple triggered his arrest and execution), and also what the prophets in the Hebrew Bible/"Old Testament" were driving at with their dramatic signs, such as the branch ("before this sprouts..."), the baby ("before he grows up..."), the young woman ("behold, a 'virgin' shall conceive...").... Gandhi may well have been one of the people Jesus was referring to when he said, "You think I've done great things?! There will be those who come after me who will do even greater things."]

2. A look at America's other war, op ed by Ronald Brownstein, Boston Globe, A11.
   While most eyes were focused on America's New War (as CNN likes to call it), the Census Bureau last week disgorged its annual progress report on an older American conflict: The war on poverty....
   [We'll skip the self-congratulation about "gains" in the war on poverty during the Clinton years - which we regard as due entirely to an outdatedly low and irrelevantly narrow definition of "poverty" and a grim trade-off between poverty and prisons - and cut to the chase -]
   Critics who say these poverty levels are still too high for such a rich society have a point.
   [A very flawed point, because #1, they've naively "bought" the obsolete definition of poverty and #2, they've "bought" the myth that this is a rich society, when no society with uncapped income and wealth can ever be rich, since 1% of the population constantly moving toward concentrating in their own hands 99% of the income and wealth and giving us the kind of situation we see in every Third World economy - on a larger scale.]
   But...the past 8 years offer several clear guideposts....
   [We omit his ridiculous reference to "guideposts for squeezing poverty further." Poverty is self-squeezing. It's not poverty that needs squeezing. It's the equal and opposite problem, namely, totally uncapped "unsqueezed" wealth.]
   
   1. A job really is the best social policy.
      [We agree whole-heartedly with his guidepost but disagree with most of his "reasons" -]
      Perhaps the critical reason poverty dropped so much more in the 1990s than it did in the 1980s was that unemployment was even lower under Clinton than it was under Ronald Reagan.
      [But #1 - the despicable Fed was practicing the NAIRU in the 80s - fostering a minimum of 6% unemployment because they regarded it as the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment, and but #2 - we went throught a definition-narrowing exercise in the early 1990s that incommensurately and artificially lowered "unemployment." Anyway, let his flawed reasoning bumble along to another strangely agreeable conclusion -]
      Even when unemployment drops as low as 6% (as it did in Reagan's second term), low-skill workers have little bargaining power. But when unemployment dropped below 5% in Clinton's second term, more low-skill workers were able to find work...
      [If you call multiple low-wage jobs, many of them part time, "work."]
      ...and increase their hours.
      [Gong. Increasing their working hours without limit in an age of automation and robotization is a negative indicator, not a positive one, signalling an accelerating descent into sweatshop conditions typical of the Third World.]
      That spread the benefits of the 1990's expansion [an oblique reference to the uncapped concentration of those benefits] more widely than the fruits of the 1980s' growth. One measure of that trend: The Census numbers showed that under Clinton, the median family income for blacks and Latinos increased faster than it did for whites.
      [Again, a double flaw - #1, it's easier to get a high percentage-increase from lower numbers than higher numbers (going from $1 to $2 an hour is a "fast" 100% increase) and #2, family income is irrelevant - how many members of each family is it taking to produce the faster increase and beyond that, how many working hours from each member? Still, a good conclusion -]
      The lesson: "For folks at the bottom to get anywhere...you don't just need low uenmployment, you need full employment," says Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute.
      
   2. [Work is our most useful and basic social integrator, so -]
      Government must encourage and honor work.
      [Instead of reinforcing (negatively, but still reinforcing) crime with the minimum sentencing disaster and record prison-building.]
      Through the 1990s, the federal government used "carrots" and "sticks" to move more low-income families into the workplace....
      [Again, the relevant focus at this primitive stage in economic evolution is the individual's wage, not the family's income.]
      The "stick" was the welfare reform bill of 1996, which established time limits on aid...
      [We don't need limits on the bottom on the problem, we need limits on the top. It is unlimited concentration of skills and work and income and wealth that is the problem. The bottom always has its own inherent natural limit = ZERO! Further limits on the bottom are like bombing Afghanistan = "just moving around the rubble" or in another metaphor, "just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic." The smug wealthy will try any and every squirm before they do the obvious and discipline themselves. We have seldom needed more of the "discipline of the workforce." We constantly need more, much more of the "discipline of management."]
      ...and set the expectation that able-bodied mothers would find work....
      [Doesn't he mean "set the requirement for non-starvation that parents of any number of children of whatever ages MUST find work"?! What a formula for future social disaster. Never mind the root of the problem = preventing a small percentage of the nation's population from concentrating far more than they can possibly spend in many lifetimes and thus depriving others by comparison (and fight it as much as you like, at bottom it's all comparative, all relative). Never mind the second logical point of control = preventing deprived people from becoming parents - that's not fashionable or "PC" at the moment. Never mind the disaster that you're creating = preventing parents from ignoring and spending little or no time with their children, however young.]
      Just as important, government rewarded work [the "carrot"] in the 1990s. Both Clinton and his predecessor, the first Pres. Bush, signed increases in the minimum wage (whose value fell in the 1980s)...
      [Oh yes, the minimum wage. These increases were so successful and adequate that "living wage" campaigns sprang up all over the nation, though why anyone would think a second, higher minimum wage approach would work when a lower one didn't has always mystified us. Labor's traditional goals were shorter hours and higher pay, and the only thing that made possible the achievement of the second was the incremental achievement of the first, because it controlled the wage-depressing surplus of labor hours on offer in the job market. Again, the problem of deprivation at the bottom systemically translates to the problem of concentration at the top. You can't solve deprivation at the bottom with minimums. It must be solved at the top with maximums. And if you're not even willing to set a maximum on work for heaven's sake = the easiest variable to cap, you're going to be "whistlin' Dixie" and doing cosmetics and bandaids the rest of your life.]
      Clinton also pushed through big increases in government aid for working-poor families, centered on a major expansion of the earned income tax credit. The result was to encourage more work by making work more attractive.
      [No, the result was government micromanagement and forced charity, further skewing the job market and depressing wages, by making work more necessary and desperately needed. You can't "encourage more work" - you can only referee the sharing of the natural market-determined work or OK, "encourage" more sharing, but the simple macromanaging tried&true (from 1790 to 1940) way to do that is shorter working hours.]
      ..\..The result was steady increase in the share of working-age Americans seeking and holding jobs.
      [No, the result was a limited increase... and many of them seeking in vain for jobs, and many others getting and losing jobs because of lack of transportation, child care, health insurance, sufficient pay....]
      
   3. Culture counts.
      [Again we agree with his guideline - the length of the workweek, as a market-framing or market-defining variable, has never been a laissez-faire free-market call but always a redesignable cultural or institutional call, e.g., religion: from the days of the 4th commandment "six days shalt thou labor," not all seven - but we disagree with his commentary. For example -]
      Declining crime rates and the ebbing of the crack epidemic put more young men on track for a job....
      [No, it reflected more young men in prison, one in ten black adult males. And trying to base anything positive on our Prohibition Revisited alias War on Drugs is ridiculous.]
      The share of households headed by women fell after 1993 as the teen pregnancy rate declined....
      [Did the invasion of the hetero world by AIDS have nothing to do with it?]
      
   Last month's spike in unemployment underscores the fragility of these gains....
   [No kidding.]
   But the formula that's worked over the past eight years - both rewarding and demanding work - still offers the best long-term strategy for the war against the domestic scourge of poverty.
   [The formula hasn't worked in the long term because it's left more and more of the nation's future - it's children - neglected, and as for rewarding work by government action, that's just charity and all charity is capricious and unreliable, as the too-little too-late too-gap-at-the-bottom-widening minimum wage approach proves, and as for demanding work without squeezing the overworked to make sure work is available for the underworked, that's just market-distorting sadism, plain and simple. The only formula that can work against poverty in the long run is a skills&employment balancing program that imposes a threshold on the number of hours a week from which any individual can earn freely spendable income from any source, and at which every individual must start reinvesting earnings in training and hiring, or stop working for the rest of that week. We have a five-phase program that does that, especially the middle three phases, called Timesizing. And then we'll have to focus on low-income poverty (flowing money) by mapping these five phases from the employment dimension onto the income dimension. And then we'll have to focus on low-wealth poverty (standing money) by mapping the five phases from the income dimension onto the wealth dimension. This could take 100 years per dimension/program, say, 50 years to introduce each program on a voluntary, private-sector basis and 50 years to implement the program on an automatic systemic basis, by government action. Each of the five phases may take a decade per phase. It may take twice as long. The later programs could go faster than the earlier ones as more human beings wake up to the way these types of value imbalances cannot be solved by charity or micromanagement but only by systemic "peelings of the onion." The "peelings" probably go on forever - skills&employment, skills&income, skills&wealth, skills&credit, skills&credibility, skills&celebrity.... Skills are apparently packaged in with the balancing mechanisms at each level = in each program. But then, homo sapiens cromagnonensis is the most versatile of the Planet Earth species....]