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

12/31/2001  glimmer of intelligence -

• Finding a way to say no to spam, letter to editor from Perry Chapman of Garrett Park MD, NYT, A16.
  In "You've Got Mail. Lot's of It, and It's Mostly Junk" (front page, Dec.24), Bob Weintzen, the president of the Direct Marketing Assoc., says if every household was e-mailed a $1 coupon for Tide, people would not be upset. He's wrong. I don't want any unsolicited e-mail. I neither open nor read spam, and deleting it takes up an increasing amount of my valuable time.
  Until spam is illegal, I will not buy anything online. Nor will I sign up for the online services of my bank, mortgage company or other establishment with which I regularly conduct business.
  [Hear, hear! With perhaps one small exception that doesn't send spam - old books from e.g., bookfinder.com]

• Suddenly, it is democracy that is in bloom in Zambia - Instead of strongman rule, now there are 11 presidential candidates, by Henri Cauvin, NYT, A11.
  LUSAKA...- Zambia...is now awash in political pluralism, as shown in its national elections [to be] held Thursday. The field of presidential candidates numbers 11, and remarkably...six are given a chance of winning. Parliament is up for grabs too.
  Just 8 months ago, Pres. Frederick Chiluba was maneuvering to change the Constitution so he [could] run for a 3rd term. First elected in 1991, Mr. Chiluba ended 27 years of rule by Pres. Kenneth Kaunda, the leader of the nation's independence movement against Britain who went on to dominate a one-party state, until allowing the 1991 election.
  But popular opposition to a third term for Mr. Chiluba mounted and in the end many of the president's aides, some presidential aspirants themselves, deserted him. He backed down in May.... Whoever the winner is [on Thursday], he will likely face a more vigorous parliament...now [that] a number of different parties could take a significant number of seats....
  While Zambia is stable by [comparison to] neighbors like Angola, Congo and Zimbabwe, it is locked in poverty and gripped by corruption, with little sign that 10 years of Mr. Chiluba's leadership has made much progress on either front. Income per person is just $231 a year, and 83% of teh 10m population is classified as poor, according to a recent report by the World Food Program. The copper industry is struggling to rebuild after years of state mismanagement.... Agriculture is also faring badly.
  In its annual ranking of countries on the basis of corruption, the organization Transparency International [TI] rates Zambia as among the worst, in the company of Nigeria, Pakistan and Russia. Corruption also pervades the election process, in the sense that small amounts of cash and food are handed out to win votes. Christine Munalula, exec. dir. of TI's Zambia office, said, "It's difficult to go into a village and tell a woman not to accept 10,000 kwacha [$2.50] when they haven't eaten for three days."... On issues like corruption, AIDS, and poverty, the candidates have offered platitudes by little in the way of specific plans....
  [The quickest way for any poor country to pull up is to share what little work there is, and the earnings therefrom. That will optimize monetary circulation, accelerate the velocity of money, and encourage people to enhance their skills and flash on market opportunites faster than any other way. It will also automatically cut corruption by giving everyone a substantial integrating mechanism as a Zambian - worksharing. Timesizing is the most advanced worksharing design available. It's flexible, gradual, market-oriented and it provides an economy at any level of development, or aggregation, with a heart muscle to guarantee maximum healthy circulation of economic "blood" - spending power.]

1. A big year for smaller banks - 'For a community bank like ourselves, the times are very good,' Arthur Meehan, CEO of Medford Bancorp, by Syre & Stein, BG, D1.
   ...Like thrifts across the country, Medford Bancorp boosted its stock dividend recently, thanks to climbing profits. The company, parent of Medford Savings Bank, reported Q3 profits up 38% compared with the same period last year. Medford Bancorp shares are up over 40% in 2001....
   The reason local banks and thrifts are doing so well can be summed up in two words: Yield curve. The difference between very short-term interest rates and comparatively high long-term rates, which forms a curved line when plotted out on a graph, is exceptionally large at the moment. Draw the line today and you will see an extremely steep yield curve.
   Basic banking is most profitable under those circumstances, because institutions borrow money from customers and others at short-term interest rates and lend it out at the much higher longer-term rates. The exceptionally wide gap between the rates...hasn't been wider in the last week of a year since 1992....

2. RV industry stocks riding high - Senior population seen fueling surge, AP via BG, D5.
   Despite a 3-year low in sales stock prices are soaring for recreational vehicle companies [such as] Charlotte-based Spartan Motor Inc., which builds builds motor home chassis [and] industry-leader Winnebago.... Several factors are in [play -]
   • Gas prices and loan rates remain low.
   • Many people are nervous abaout air travel after 9/11 and "feel a lot safer in an RV."
   • As in the car industry, where no-interest financing has fueled strong sales, RV dealers have offered "substantial" discounts of up to 25%....

1. [1 UPsizing]
   Burlington Resources Ltd., NYT, C4.
   ...Houston, the oil and natural gas producer [will] build an $86.5m processing plant at Barrow-in-Furness in northwest England to develop resources in the Irish Sea. The facility, to be built by the British engineering and construction group Costain Group, Maidenhead, Berks., will be completed around the end of 2003 and produce some 120m cu ft a day.
   [Unspecified new jobs.]

2. [1 UNtakeover]
   NCH accepts an improved buyout offer from managers, Reuters via NYT, C4.
   ...A maker of fasteners, welding alloys and plumbing parts...agreed to a revised...management buyout offer 10% higher than an earlier bid. The buyout [is] led by NCH's chairman, Ira Levy, who already owns 57% of the shares....

3. ["good, but..."]
   Canada: Economic output increases, by Bernard Simon, NYT, W1.
   Canada's real GDP grew at an annual rate of 0.3% in Oct., helped by retail sales and home construction, Statistics Canada. The increase [was] the first monthly advance since May [and] compared with a 0.8% decline in Sept....
   [So we didn't even make it back to August's level - even though it's easier to make a bigger percentage increase from a lower number.]
   Retail sales climbed 2.3% in Oct., due mostly to a 3.6% jump in motor vehicle sales. In manufacturing , 10 of 21 sectors advanced, accounting for 62% of production..\..
   [But there's another "but" in this good news -]
   But Statistics Canada cautioned that the underlying weakness in the economy persisted in Oct. Output of computers and electronics slid 2.7%, the 14th monthly decline in a row. Communications equipment output was down 9.3%....
   

• In the midst of stormy weather for the industry, Southwest Airlines finds a path of blue, by Stephanie Stoughton, Boston Globe, E1.
  DALLAS - Southwest Airlines has always been the country's quirkiest carrier, with its chain-smoking founder, corny cabin jokes, and no-frills flights. But amid the recent turbulence, the nation's seventh-largest airline is bucking the prevailing industry trends by resuming growth, planning for a full-year profit, and watching its market value eclipse those of its giant rivals.
  No carrier, including Southwest, can boast that it has escaped the dramatic effects of the industry's global downturn, which was exacerbated by 9/11. Although passengers are starting to return to the air, the slumping economy and staggering security costs continue to hurt the Dallas-based company's bottom line.
  Bt Southwest has emerged as a leader in the industry's recovery, and one now enjoying unusual support from its employees, customers, and investors.
  [Note the order here. That seems to be the order in which Southwest prioritizes these categories, and as we shall see, it is phenomenally successful - even, and especially, with the lowest-priority group, investors/speculators.]
  Workers praise the company for trimming expenses without layoffs and flight reductions, in spite of punishing declines in passenger traffic after 9/11.
  [We believe much of this was done by trimming hours, not jobs, but we have no explicit articles on this as yet. So this story is still on our vague-hope pages, instead of our strategic-hope pages, though we've mentioned them there on 11/27 #1 and 11/23 #3.]
  Wall Street loves Southwest, too: The carrier's shares quickly rebounded following 9/11, while its competitors' stocks continued to languish. By last week, Southwest's market value had soared past $14 billion, topping the combined stock values of American Airlines, United Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Continental Airlines, Northwest Airlines, and US Airways....
  [Chainsaw Dunlap, take note, and smarten up!]

1. [UPsizing #1]
   Etc... Wrentham Village Premium Outlets [mall in Mass.], Globe staff and wire services, BG, C7.
   ...has added 10 new stores including Bebe, Joan & David, Kenneth Cole, and Tommy Hilfiger..\..bringing its store count to 170....
   [Unspecified new jobs.]

2. [UPsizing #2]
   Two ways to defy a recession - Open a big mall like this one in Columbus, then hope - The Polaris mall has it all, including uncertainty on the horizon, by Jodi Wilgoren, NYT, A12.
   COLUMBUS, Ohio -...There are few signs of the troubled economy or any threat of terrorism amid the shopping bags here at..\..a brand-new Polaris Fashion Place indoor mall.... From its Oct. 25 opening through 10 am on Monday, 1,286,935 shoppers had strolled the mall's 1.5m sq. ft., and several of the 150 stores and kiosks say they are leading their national chains in sales this season....
   [Unspecified new jobs.]
   Still, many merchants are worried that Polaris's popularity will not stretch past New Year. They...worry that Columbus, the nation's 15th-largest city, is "overstored" -...there are four additional malls nearby - \and\ fear a fading of the novelty here at the first mall in the nation with seven anchor stores - big department stores that serve as a foundation of a mall's business [such as] Saks Fifth Avenue and Lord & Taylor.
   Even as older malls die, Polaris is among 11 large shopping malls that have opened around the country this year, up from six in 2000, and one of three to have opened since 9/11....
   [Just as the astronomical concentration of money finds few alternatives to the stock market, so the crowd of developers finds few alternatives to build-build-build. The theory, known as "Say's Law" in economics, is reflected in this comment by a store manager and in its source film-quote -]
   "You build it and they'll come," said Vicki Peppard, manager of Teddy Crafters....
   [They'll come ... unless they don't come. And every so often (e.g., 1929...), they actually don't.]

3. [UPsizing #3]
   Czech Republic: Car plant planned, by Peter Green, NYT, W1.
   The Toyota Motor Co. of Japan and PSA Peugeot Citroen of France [will] build a $1.4B plant for a new range of subcompact cars in the Czech city of Kolin, about 40 miles east of Prague....
   [Unspecified new jobs.]

4. Violent crime reported declining in workplace, NYT, A13.
   WASHINGTON...- Reflecting the drop in violent crime over the last seven years
   [chiefly because we've locked up the most at-risk age&sex cohort of our population]
   violence in the workplace declined 44% since 1993, a Justice Dept. report said [yester]day. The overall rate of violent crime dropped 40%, according to the National Crime Victimization Survey, a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
   From 1993 to 1999...1.7m people a year were attacked as they worked. Nineteen out of 20 violent incidents were aggravated or simple assaults. Homicides also declined, 39%. There were 651 work-related homicides in 1999, down from 1,074 in 1993.
   Workplace violence accounted for 18% of all violent crime in the seven years, the survey found...
   [In a weird contradictory headline applicable to violence in general and not just in the workplace, the front page today headlines -]
   Killings increase in many big cities - Experts fear reversal of trend after years of falling crime, by Fox Butterfield, NYT, front page.
   [Guess now that we've got all the 'usual suspects' safely tucked into our bloated prison-industrial complex, our downsizing-addicted captains of industry have raised a new crop.]

1. [1 UPsizing]
   Earthlink founder plans new venture, by Glenn Fleishman, NYT, C4.
   Sky Dayton...will unveil a nationwide wireless Internet service today. The venture, Boingo Wireless, will offer users flat-rate access to high-speed wireless networks at more than 750 locations.... "The goal is presenting that connect button to the customer," Mr. Dayton said. "They just click 'connect' and then they're on."
   [Unspecified new jobs.]

2. [1 UNtakeover, à la spinoff -]
   Citigroup to shed part of Travelers unit in stock sale, by Treaster & Atlas, NYT, C9.
   Nearly four years after creating the world's largest financial services company by bringing together huge insurance, banking and brokerage businesses...
   [That would make him the main eminence behind the lobbyists for the repeal of Glass-Steagall and unlearn one of the major hard lessons of 1929 - don't mix insurance, banking and brokerage.]
   Sanford Weill, the CEO of Citigroup, said yesterday that he was jettisoning most of Travelers Insurance.... Mr. Weill plans to sell 20% of...Travelers Property Casualty Corp. through a stock offering early next year [and] plans to give the rest...to Citigroup shareholders..\..
   For Mr. Weill, who took control of Travelers in 1993 and made it his flagship company, the planned split represents a sharp reversal and a rare admission that one of his many acquisitions had not worked out....
   [So how many others are there that he's not admitting?]
   Insurance turned out to have slower growth and lower profits than he had hoped for. There were also fewer opportunities to sell insurance to Citigroup's mutual fund and banking service customers and v.v. "There was really a disconnect," Mr. Weill said in an interview....
   [Great, one disconnect and (above) one connect.]

• [1 UPsizing]
  Pressplay to start today, by Matt Richtel, NYT, C4.
  ...An online music venture backed by Sony Music Entertainment and the Universal Music Group plans to start its service today, although it will be available only to several thousand consumers. The service [is] accessible through three websites - MSN Music, Roxio and Yahoo. [It] will offer users who pay monthly fees of $10-25 the ability to download songs and listen to music streamed live via their computers.
  [Thus tying up phone lines. Efficient - not.]
  Pressplay was to have started last summer.
  [Unspecified new jobs.]

• Cambridge eyes income, not race, for desegregation, by Scott Greenberger, Boston Globe, front page.
  [At last!]
  CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Education leaders in this famously liberal city, where "equality" is a mantra [but 99% rhetoric - ed.], want to help poor students perform better with a dramatic strategy: desegregating elementary schools by income instead of race....
  [Race is an irrelevant distraction in today's world. Income is of the essence. Looks like some people in the "Athens of America" are finally figuring this out.]
  Only a handful of American communities have attempted the cutting-edge approach, putting Cambridge in the vanguard of what could become a new national desegration movement.
  [Here's hopin'! But to really do it, you need to desegregate jobs and skills, and to do that, you need to centrifuge the vanishing work, including overtime-to-training conversion.]
  As courts nationwide have dismantled policies that assign students to public schools or admit them to college based on race, Cambridge is betting its plan will blunt legal challenges to the district's 20-year-old racial diversity plan.
  [Well, this begins to sound like less-than-colorblind, but hopefully it will 'work too well' and centrifuge some of the intense wealth of the Shady Hill blue stockings and Brattle St. brahmins before they realize it.]
  But the proposal also reflects a growing recognition, backed by reams of research, that family income is a primary predictor of academic success - and having too many poor children in a school can doom it to failure. "I think we need to stop the disparity, and we need to begin immediately," said Cambridge Superintendent Bobbie D'Alessandro, who hopes the School Committee will approve the plan Tuesday.
  [It's not really the children who are poor, though. It's the parents. And the School Committee isn't really in a position to do much about that root disparity. The Timesizing.com program, however, is.]
  This being Cambridge, few well-to-do parents are openly opposing the plan, saying that mixing their children with poorer students will drag them down.
  ["Openly" is the operative term here.]
  Instead, foes say they don't want curbs on the freedom to pick schools. [And] some middle-class parents admit the plan is straining their liberal principles as they worry about the impact to their children's school....
  [Much of Cantabrigian liberalism is only skin deep. But hey, at least the idea is on the table - and its truth is blindingly obvious - meaning there are still a lot of people "innocently" figuring out how to turn a blind eye to it, while maintaining or reinforcing the classist status quo - even in "liberal" Cambridge. Doncha love it when the big-L liberals get their bluff called?! They've been distracting everyone for sooo long on the unsolvable Race Issue from the real problems, the unlimited concentration of employment and income and wealth in this "advanced" economy. And when the top 1% of the population can "own" 99% of the goodies, it doesn't matter how many goodies there are or how often you paint that population as "rich," it's a miserable, poverty-stricken third-world rat's nest. And that's what America is turning itself into with its fatuous mantra, "Oh I don't begrudge Bill Gates a single penny of his hard-earned money." Meanwhile, "the more concentration, the less circulation" and the whole country, including Bill Gates, goes into recession and gets poorer and poorer, because the concentration is sooo massive that it's suctioning the markets away from its own huge investment targets. And the essential error? Downsizing, instead of Timesizing and keeping everyone employed.]

1. [UPsizing #1]
   Albertson's plans northern California expansion, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   ...The nation's 2nd-largest food and drug retailer [after Wal-Mart??] plans to spend $185m in northern Calif. next fiscal year building stores and remodeling others to try to recover market share in the region. [It] will renovate 23 stores and open several supermarkets and gas stations....
   [Unspecified new jobs.]

2. [UPsizing #2]
   Trump plans 78-storey skyscraper in Chicago, AO via NYT, C4.
   [Some people never learn - but at least it'll be jobs for construction workers for awhile. Unspecified new jobs.]
   ...on Chicago's riverfront site [& they don't mean "lakefront"!] now occupied by the Chicago Sun-Times Building. The 1,073-foot glass-covered building, called Trump Tower Chicago, would be the city's 4th-tallest skyscraper....
   [At least he's not trying for tallest.]
   The building, along the Chicago River [there's a "Chicago River"?] is a scaled-back version from Trump's original plans announced in July that indicated it would be the world's tallest building....

3. [and for you railfans -]
   Amtrak reopening line, Boston to Portland, Me., AP via NYT, A22.
   ...to start running on Saturday [12/15]....
   [Hey, now you can jump on a train in Boston, get off in Portland, stay at the old armory hotel in the old port and ride on a narrow-gauge short-line steam train on the eve of Xmas eve.]

1. [1 UNtakeover]
   Chain of used car dealers is bought by its chairman, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   The Ugly Duckling Corp., [used cars for] people with bad credit, has agreed to be sold to its chairman and largest stockholder, Ernest C. Garcia, for about $15.5m....

2. [glimmer of intelligence, an informative comparison -]
   Laissez not fair - The past that didn't work, op ed by Paul Krugman, NYT, A27.
   Last week the website *SatireWire.com ran a mock news story: "Enron Admits It's Really Argentina." ...The satire was more on point than its authors realized.
   
   • Not long ago Argentina, like Enron, was a darling of the financial community.
   • And like Enron, Argentina was held up as a role model...Argentina's monetary system, in particular..\..
   • to a large extent, by the same people...Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and...libertarian think tanks.
   Why...the same people...? Because in their different ways, both...tried to turn the clock back to 1913. Both were testing the libertarian credo that the great expansion in government's role between the two world wars was unwarranted. Both were supposed to demonstrate that government activism was unnecessary, and that radical laissez-faire works.
   [Well, under worktime economics where government focuses on one thing, full employment via worksharing via fluctuating adjustment of the workweek against unemployment, "the great expansion in government's role" is unwarranted, although government has to be active enough to set up the automatically adjusting and progressively finetuning relationships between overtime and training&hiring, and between the workweek length and rising levels of technological efficiency (via the un[der]employment rate). Radical laissez-faire just leaves the door open to private-sector self-stifling, as Krugman points out below. But worktime economics, of the sort that humans may be smart enough to implement in another couple of centuries, certainly weighs in on the laissez-faire side compared to the burgeoning regulations, programs and controls we have now.]
   The Enron experiment was...about doing away with regulation[s on] prices [and] financial trading, most of [which originated] in the fear that consumers, workers and investors would be exploited by those whom Theodore Roosvelt [TR] called "malefactors of great wealth." Enron...create[d] a "regulatory black hole" in which it could operate freely. Just last December, Sen. Phil Gramm pushed through...legislation that...exempted Enron (whose board of directors and audit committee included one Wendy Gramm) from the rules that govern other commodity traders. ...Sen. Gramm [had] also helped the banking industry block measures to curb money laundering. ...Enron's admirers believed [that] fears about unregulated markets [would] be unjustified.
   Unfortunately, what disappeared into that black hole was not [red tape] but billions of...dollars, including those of Enron's own employees. ...Maybe it wasn't a black hole, but rather a wormhole [through which] those billions of dollars emerged in some other universe - say, overseas bank accounts. For it turns out that malefactors of great wealth do exist, and some of them were running Enron.
   If Enron was an experiment in doing away with regulatory activism,...
   [Simple rules are hardly "activism." More "active" were the shenanigans of Enron's top executives and directors.]
   ...Argentina was an experiment in doing away with monetary activism.
   [Again, rules are hardly "activism."]
   After generations of mismanagement, Argentina returned to a colonial-era monetary system, a "currency board," which took government out of the loop. No more lurching from crisis to crisis, no more disruptive government interventions: Argentina would provide sound money, and leave the rest up to the free market. [This provided the appearance of a brief success story, but then,] alas...like Enron's employees, Argentina's citizens are bewildered by their reversal of fortune, wondering what happened to their economic success story. ...The bitter irony [is that] the country's monetary system was introduced in the name of laissez-faire [aka economic freedom, but] now, in its desperate efforts to save that system from imminent collapse, the Argentine government has imposed drastic restrictions on economic freedom. ...Residents are now limited to withdrawing $250 per week from their bank accounts....
   [And senior citizens are starving.]
   ...Don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those...who think that markets are evil [and] profit [is] wrong.... But the great economic lesson of the 20th century was that to work, a market system needs a little help from...government:...
   [Unfortunately Krugman is oblivious to where and how the major bit of playing-field leveling by the government is needed. Here are his examples -]
   regulations to prevent abuses, active monetary policy to fight recession.
   [Typical of our primitive age, Krugman misses the central market-shrinking area of abuse, jobcuts instead of hourscuts. And places unsustainable importance on interest-rate fiddling, whose superficiality, having been demonstrated by Japan for the past ten years, is now being demonstrated by our own dear Federal Reserve.]
   The twin debacles in Houston [Enron] and Buenos Aires [Argentina] demonstrate that this great lesson has not lost its relevance.

• [1 UPsizing]
  IDG appoints president of new business unit, BG, G15.
  International Data Group has [started] a new business unit based in Framingham MA focusing on the IT needs of the biosciences and bioinformatics markets....
  [Unspecified new jobs.]

1. [UPsizing #1]
   2 new agencies are opening up, by Stuart Elliott, NYT, C6.
   Thunder Factory in San Mateo, Calif., specializing in integrated marketing and strategy communications, is opening with 10 employees and revenue estimated at $1m from clients like Prudential Financial and Visa International....

2. [UPsizing #2]
   2 new agencies are opening up, by Stuart Elliott, NYT, C6.
   ...Fast Horse in Minneapolis, a consumer marketing agency, is...opening with five employees. It works with clients like Coca-Cola....

3. Washington State: Rise in salmon population, by Matthew Preusch, NYT, A23.
   Officials at the Seattle Aquarium are recording the largest return of chum salmon to the facility's fish ladder on Elliot Bay in 24 years of operation. Roger Ogren, a staff biologist,...counted more than 600 chum, well beyond the 1993 record of 50. Mr. Ogren said favorable ocean conditions, including large populations of herring and krill, which salmon feed on, contributed to the large run.... Puget Sound is also seeing large runs of coho and pink salmon this fall.

4. [Lotsa bad econonews from Japan, but at least they're starting to laugh about it all -]
   Tokyo journal - Not samurai kicks, but jabs at today's politicians, by Howard French, NYT, A4.
   With his shock of permed gray hair, his eloquence and a lady-killing look that seems to marry inner strength and outright seduction, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has transformed the political zeitgeist in Japan. Now, the changes are spilling over into primetime TV.
   Week after week this fall, a new political drama [called] "Let's Go, Nagatacho" [meaning "Let's Go, Capitol Hill]..\..has turned murky realities into compelling entertainment, a vivid and blunt illustration of Japanese politicians in ways they have almost never been shown before.
   [Terrific! Sounds like a Japanese version of Britain's hilarious sendups, "Yes, Minister" and "Yes, Prime Minister," which received their pale American imitation in "West Wing."]
   On one recent...episode...a construction company president...berated a congressman's aide for steering recent contracts his rival's way. The dialogue, smoky and growling, clearly implied that the construction executive was buying influence and complaining about the poor result. In many democracies, depictions of the corruption and personal foibles of politicians scarcely raise an eyebrow.... But in Japan...controversy is traditionally shunned [and] even news coverage is nonconfrontational....
   Mr. Koizumi has changed all that. "This drama was largely inspired by the arrival of PM Koizumi," said Nobuo Mizuta, the show's producer.... "I think they have made history in the sense that they dramatized real politics, which was kind of a challenge," said Masahiro Kitagawa, an independent TV critic.... The handsome veteran actor, Koichi Iwaki...plays the role of prime minister under the barely disguised name Izumi. [He] luxuriates in his own charm and silver-tongued skills - and in so doing manages to whisper what many here are beginning to [suspect]: that Mr. Koizumi may be more style than substance....
   The show's biggest star [is] the legislator's aide played by the highly popular comedian Takaaki Ishibashi. A critic writing in the Japan Times...called him the "perfect combination of obsequiousness and cunning."...
   [Sounds very much like the PM's civil-service counterpart in Britain's "Yes, Prime Minister."]

5. [And there is another "at least..." from Japan as well -]
   Japanese consumers revel in deflation's silver lining, by James Brooke, NYT, C1.
   [So if they too are officially in recession (the 4th in a decade), at least they can enjoy lower prices.]

1. [1 UPsizing]
   Mirant, power concern, to buy Hyundai energy, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   ...An independent power producer based in Atlanta...plans to buy the Hyundai Energy Co. and build a power plant in South Korea for about $300m to expand in Asia's deregulating markets.... Mirant...plan[s] to build a 520-megawatt power plant in southern Cholla province. The plant is part of Mirant's plan to increase its power-generating capacity in Asia to 10,000 megawatts, or enough to power NYC, by 2005.
   [Unspecified new jobs. We've heard of Mirant before, building near Chicago - see 2/03 #1.]
   [Followup - we did not catch any Mirant story in Nov. reporting on a plant they were starting to build in Washington State, but work on it has been suspended anyway, according to -]
   Work on power plant is suspended, Shaw Group says, AP via 8/09/2002 NYT, C3, which states, "One of [Shaw Gp's] clients, the Mirant Corp., is suspending construction on a plant in Longview, Wash. Shaw has been hit by a sharp downturn in the demand for independently generated electricity.... Construction began in October 2001 and was scheduled for completion in June 2003, Shaw said.

2. Industry makes strides in developing alternative fuel autos, by Michelle Krebs, BG, G7.
   During this second century of the automobile, we will surely see the beginning of the end of the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine.... So where are we in the developoment of alternative fuel vehicles? The Michelin Challenge Bibendum 2001, [a] real-world demonstration of environmentally innovative vehicles..\..held in October for the first time in the U.S. [275-mile trip from Los Angeles to Las Vegas], provided an industry progress report and a glimpse into the future....
   • GM showcased its cylinder deactivation vehicle [which] cuts half of the vehicle's 8 cylinders at steady highway speeds to boost fuel economy....
   • Virtually every major automaker entered at least one [hybrid] vehicle, pair[ing] either a small gas or diesel engine with an electric motor....
   • Electric vehicles...rejected for their limited range and charging requirements, have reemerged [for] specific situations. Ford showed the Think City, a small electric subcompact with a plastic body. Designed for city use, it has to be recharged every 100 miles. It goes on sale next summer.
   • Diesel engines, long confined to mostly commercial applications...have won over consumers...in Europe, where diesels are approaching half of the car market.
     [What about diesel pollution?]
   • Most automakers are devoting significant time and resources to hydrogen fuel cells as the most viable solution to pollution and fuel economy problems....
     [Remember the old, and hopefully obsolete, rhyme - "the solution to pollution is dilution"?]
     
     • DaimlerChrysler, so far the leader in fuel cell development, plans to spend $1.4B on fuel cell development in the next few years. It has many versions of fuel cell vehicles in testing..\..
     • ...GM is spending 90% of its R&D dollars on fuel cells. Next year GM plans to test the world's first fuel cell vehicle which produces hydrogen through an onboard reformer [ah, meaning "transformer"?]. ...The powertrain should be ready for mass production by 2010....
     • Ford also is betting fuel cells ultimately will end the 100-year reign of [oil]....
     • ...European automakers also are focusing on fuel cells.
     • ...Honda showed its hydrogen-powered FCX-V3; the next version of it, the FCX-V4, can go 187 miles on a single tank of hydrogen.
       [So if Honda's entry is already here, why'd she call GM's planned test vehicle the world's first??]

3. Slump in the service sector was reversed in November, Bloomberg via NYT, C2.
   WASHINGTON - ...The National Assoc. of Purchasing Mgmt's nonmanufacturing index increased to 51.3 last month after a record low of 40.6 in October....
   [So which would you rather have? France's positive run all the way through September and then 48.7 and 48.4 (announced today, 12/06), or the US's run that turned negative through the summer, plunged to 40.6 in October and then flew back up to 51.3 in Nov.? Looks kinda flaky, no? We'll take France. The US economy was ground zero for 9/11 and reacted most extremely to that event. Things went down so far that it's easy now to break records for percentage improvements -]
   Consumer spending rose a record 2.9% in October.... The nonmanufacturing report's index of new orders rose to 48.3 in November from 40.4 in October..\.. Orders to factories for durable goods jumped...more than at any time in nine years....
   [Not surprising after 9/11 tanked these indexes. There is a "but" to all this compared-to-9/12 good news, and it's a big "but" -]
   Still, announcements of jobcuts in Nov. reached the 4th-highest level of the year.... Companies last month said they would trim payrolls by 181,412 positions, according to Challenger, Gray and Christmas Inc. While 25% less than October's total, the figure is four times as great as the 44,152 announced in November last year....
   [And the flation index, which they also try to spin positive, is an ambiguous indicator, since deflation was one of the big hallmarks of the Great Depression -]
   The Assoc.'s index of prices paid, a measure of costs for purchased materials and services ["inputs"] fell to 38.5 in November from 41.5....

4. $25B for jobless is backed by leaders of House Republicans, by Joseph Kahn, NYT, A24.
   WASHINGTON...- House Republican leaders offered to spend about $25B to aid the unemployed [yester]day as the two main economic issues before Congress - trade powers for the president and stimulating the domestic economy - merged in furious end-of-session horse trading....
   [But...it's still only just an offer, and - no amount of borrow&spend, even from Republicans, can match what worksharing does for economies, and does in a much healthier way.]

1. [UPsizing #1]
   Honda opens a U.S. factory and a front against the Big 3, by Danny Hakim, NYT, C3.
   [Bizarre article. Absolutely nothing in 18½ column inches about the factory featured in the headline, where is it, how big is it, etc. And the Big 3 is here assumed to include DaimlerChrysler whereas Daimler has been replaced by Toyota. There is something in the 2nd-last (of 17) paragraph about increased production at an already existing factory somewhere in Alabama -]
   ...Sales at Honda have remained strong.... That has been a boon to Alabama. Today, Honda said that it would increase its projected annual pace of production for the Lincoln plant [is there a place called Lincoln in Ala. or is Honda subcontracting to make Lincolns for GM?] to 150,000 Odyssey minivans next year, from 120,000. It also intends to hire 2,300 workers, up from 1,500. And, it was cheered by its new workers at a time when unemployment is rising and the Big 3 are talking about closing plants....

2. [UPsizing #2]
   New cancer lab, Bloomberg via BG, F8.
   Zeltia SA, a Spanish company that's developing a cancer treatment, has opened a research lab in Boston MA. Zeltia...will spend an additional $16m on the building and on another office in Madrid....
   [Unspecified new jobs.]

3. [UPsizing #3]
   Chinese venture, Bloomberg via BG, F8.
   South Portland, Maine-based Fairchild Semiconductor International Inc., which makes chips used in mobile phones and personal computers, will spend $200m during the next 5 years to build a manufacturing plant in China.
   [Unspecified new jobs.]

1. [1 UNtakeover (mgmt buyout)]
   Elec Communications sells airline business unit, Bloomberg via NYT, C10.
   ...A provider of local and long-distance phone service sold its Airline Ventures subsidiary to the unit's management for $500,000 in cash....

2. GOP bid to open [Alaska] refuge to oil drilling fails, by Tom Doggett, BG, A14.
   [Phew, but for how long?]
   ...Labor groups have joined Republicans in backing drilling in the refuge, saying it would create more than 700,000 jobs....
   [It always comes back to jobs - the mounting worldwide desperation for jobs as we cling to a pre-technology workweek while injecting faster and faster work-taking technology. Damn the environment, we need 40-hr/wk jobs NOW! And all the overtime we can GET! Half of labor has always been totally braindead on their key power lever of shorter hours. The AFL in the 1930s wanted shorter hours; the CIO didn't. How can you count on labor when half of them are morons?]

3. [Mass. gov.] Swift declares patronage must end at Massport, by Phillips and Lewis, BG, front page.
   [But how much is such a declaration worth, really? - even though Massport is the agency that 'oversees' Boston's Logan Airport where both aircraft that took out the World Trade Center originated. The only thing that's going to end patronage and makework is a huge war-scale surplus of jobs and shortage of labor, and the only phenomenon known to man ever to have accomplished that without war is workweek reduction.]

1. [UPsizing #1]
   Midway Airlines to receive about $10m in bailout, AP via NYT, C4.
   ...Midway laid off 2,400 workers when it ceased flying Sept. 12, the day after 9/11..\.. The CEO, Robert Ferguson...said 250 would be rehired, including 75 who remain on staff....
   [Ah, how can you "rehire" people who remain on staff?? This makes it appear either that only 250-75= 175 will really be rehired, or that 75 of the 2400 who were slated for layoff were never actually laid off. Pending further information, we're going to go with option A and say that this is an UPsizing of only 175 restored jobs.]

2. [UPsizing #2]
   A fire truck maker in overdrive, pointer digest (to B1), NYT, C1.
   The citizens of Clintonville, Wis., the four-stop-light town known as Truck City, are scrambling to build fire trucks faster than they ever have. New York City has placed a $25m emergency order for 54 trucks, each of which would normally take nearly a year to build. Seagrave Fire Apparatus, which has made New York's trucks since 1917, has hired extra workers and added an overnight shift to meet the company's promise of delivering the first truck by January.
   [Unspecified new jobs = Good Thing. But the target article "Bond with New York is felt in firetruck-building town" by Judi Wilgoren, B1, adds -]
   ...as employees clock double-time to meet the company's promise....
   [This grotesque overtime represents an immediate loss of opportunity to double the 'boomlet' from this increased demand in and around this town in Wisconsin.]

3. [UPsizing #3]
   Carrefour expects global rebound, pointer digest (to C3), NYT, C1.
   The retailer Carrefour plans to invest $2.7B next year to open new stores, refurbish others and expand in Asia and Europe in expectation of a global rebound.
   [Unspecified new jobs = Good Thing. This is how expectations determine outcomes. The problem in 2001-2002, however, as mentioned in our general bankruptcy article yesterday, is that there's been so much cumulative damage to world economies, especially over the last 10 years, that the industries doing most of the investing, like retail, offer low-pay jobs that don't restore previous levels of active spending power. Like, is the pay of retail clerks at current levels really going to underwrite a global rebound? And this damage can be traced back to our self-destructive response to worksaving technology - we have downsized and reduced our own consumer base and effective demand instead of timesizing (cutting the workweek) and maintaining them, or even timesizing faster and increasing them. The target article "France: Carrefour plans expansion," Bloomberg via NYT, C3, adds -]
   Carrefour plans more than 400 store openings a year, including about 40 hypermarkets, 100 supermarkets and 300 discount stores..\.. Daniel Bernard...the chairman, said..."I don't see too many problems with consumption in Europe. People will continue to eat."...
   [As hinted, the comforting nostrum "People will always need to eat" ignores the low pay levels our insensitivity to labor surplus has ascribed to food-industry jobs - can't count on them to lead an economic recovery unless we cut the surplus by cutting the workweek.]

4. Switzerland: Referendum on abolishing the army, by Elizabeth Olson, NYT, A6.
   The Swiss vote tomorrow on whether to abolish the army which critics say is useless for a small, neutral country.
   [We have no opinion about the army question - it could be part of a delicate balance in the Swiss psyche which they must modify themselves - but we pay homage once again to their frequent national referendums. It is essential for any nation that wants to escape the great backwater of progress - in which all are now eddying on Bucky Fuller's naive assumption that technological progress is all there is - to update its political structure and move quickly to electronic democracy with plentiful goal-setting citizen initiatives and regular course-adjustment referendums. They are the essence of Timesizing's First Phase.]
   After one-third of the voters backed a similar proposal in 1989, the army's size has been reduced and another plan is under way to trim the force by half....