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Good News, February, 2002
[Commentary] ©2002 Phil Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080

2/23/2002  glimmers of hope -

1. [1 UPsizing, unspecified new jobs]
   Dunkin' Donuts to open stores in Stop & Shop, AP via NYT, B4.
   Dunkin' Donuts will open stores inside 70 Stop & Shop groceries in southern New England.... The in-store doughnut shops have been tested in 3 Massachusetts cities: Quincy, Mansfield and Dedham, and will be expanded throughout Mass., Connecticut and Rhode Island beginning next month. Stop & Shop has 320 stores in New England, NY and NJ.   Dunkin' Donuts, which is based in Randolph, Mass., has more than 3,500 outlets in the U.S. and 1,500 abroad.
   [Note the quality and likely pay level of a lot of these new jobs.]

2. G.A.O. sues Vice President, seeking energy records, pointer digest (to A1), NYT, B1.
   The General Accounting Office, an arm of Congress, sued VP Dick Cheney...to force the White House to reveal the identities of energy executives who helped the administration develop a national energy policy last year. It was the first time in the GAO's 80-year history that the agency had filed suit against a member of the executive branch for failing to turn over records to Congress.... "We take this step reluctantly," David M. Walker, the Comptroller General of the United States and Director of the Accounting Office, said in a statement. "Nevertheless, given the GAO's responsibility to Congress and the American people, we have no other choice."...
   [Hear, hear! This guy is a courageous American. A hero. A sign that some part of our generally money-drowned "democracy" is still working. And here's the main headline, rather less lucid -]
   Agency files suit for Cheney papers on energy policy - Legal showdown is set - White House refuses request from Congress for data on task force meetings, by Don van Natta, NYT, front page.
   [Now we'll see how "in contempt of Court" the Supreme Court itself really is. If they vote for a continued Republican cover-up, we can write them off till the next surprise. (The last surprise was 02/20/2002 #1 when the high court upheld our overtime laws, albeit leaky ones, by refusing to hear the whining of 9 bad-mgmt states who wanted a blank check on their employees' lives.)]

1. [1 UPsizing, with 2,000 jobs reclaimed]
   United Airlines is recalling 1,200 flight attendants, AP via NYT, C4.
   ...of the 2,700...who were laid off last fall, citing a plan to add flights in April in response to stronger customer demand.
   [These 2,700 mentioned flight-attendant layoffs were presumably part of the 20,000 United layoffs we picked up on 9/19/2001 #2.]
   Almost 2/3 of those being recalled are based at United's Chicago and San Francisco airport hubs. The move brings to 2,000 the number of flight attendants recalled in the last 3 weeks.
   [OK, we'll count all 2,000 recalls because this is the first we've seen of this.]
   United, a unit of UAL Corp., announced earlier this month that it would add 127 flights to its daily schedule, currently about 1,700 flights, and recall some flight attendants and furlough fewer pilots.

2. Russia: Fewer people, Agence France-Presse via NYT, A6.
   The population fell 0.6% last year, to 144m, despite a 3.3% rise in births, the state statistics committee estimates. The decline, 943,000, was slightly smaller than that posted in 2000. The committee also said life expectancy in Russia fell by four years over the past decade. Russia is to hold its first post-Soviet census in October; the last count was in 1989.
   [Mother Russia's population may be shrinking because of a economic troubles or environmental pollution, but whatever the reason, the result is an example to all of us in this over-populated biosphere of ours.]

• [1 UPsizing, with 7,500 new "jobs"]
  Interest in Peace Corps rises after Bush plea, NYT, A18.
  WASHINGTON...- Application requests for the Peace Corps have increased 39% since...Bush's State of the Union promise to fight terrorism at home with more volunteers abroad, agency officials said today. Three weeks since [Bush] announced plans to more than double the number of Peace Corps volunteers to about 15,000 in the next five years, nearly 10,500 requests for applications have been made...an increase of about 140 a day from just two months ago....
  [But is a volunteer position a real job? Hey, at least it siphons anxious jobseekers away from the job market and stops depressing wages so much, sort of like what happens during war.]
  For some applicants, poor job prospects in a sluggish economy, coupled with a desire to volunteer since 9/11, have moved them to consider the Peace Corps....

• [1 UPsizing, 4,000 new jobs]
  Southwest Airlines aims to hire about 4,000 [this year] - Airline healthiest among peers, AP via Boston Globe, D2.
  ...The only major US airline still making money..\..bucked the trend of layoffs and flight reductions after 9/11.... Southwest, which has 33,000 employees, says it plans to hire 250 pilots, 1,200 flight attendants and 2,600 other workers..\..
  The help-wanted sign at Southwest contrasts with grim personnel news from other airlines [which] announced about 100,000 [job losses] after 9/11.... Very few of those workers have been recalled, and Southwest believes it can [pick and] choose from experienced applicants.... The largest [US] carriers, American and United, lost $3.8B between them last year, [and all together,] the major US carriers lost more than $6B..\.. Dallas-based Southwest...was not immune to the slowdown...after 9/11 [but it merely] put growth plans on hold and delayed aircraft orders....
  Ron Jackson, a former United Airlines flight attendant and electrician who joined Southwest last year, said the carrier's stability was a factor. "We are always made to feel comfortable that we are going to keep our jobs," said Jackson, of Orlando, Fla....
  Merrill Lynch analyst Michael Linenberg said Southwest's ability to avoid layoffs last fall has probably raised employee loyalty [no kidding!] and improved its productivity - already considered the strongest among major carriers. "They tend to have some of the lowest costs in the industry," Linenburg said. "So in times of depressed business, they can make money while others are losing money."... Linenburg said the industry would finally post a profit of $270m in the third(?) quarter, with Southwest accounting for 70% of the gain.
  [Here's some goodies from a big article in the NYT Magazine this past Sunday -]
  Into thin air -... The traditional carriers are increasingly haunted by Southwest - haunted because they can never match it..., by Roger Lowenstein, 2/17/2002 NYT Magazine, 40,44.
  [Here's what the major airlines do, according to a big cartoon at the beginning of the NYT Magazine article excerpted above -]
  
  • Since 9/11, the major airlines have moth balled entire fleets in the Mojave
  • pilots are paid for 81 hours of flying a month, but average just 50 hours
  • labor costs eat up nearly 40% of expenses
  • with the drop-off in traffic, senior pilots are paid thousands not to fly
  • after the Internet bubble popped, some big companies cut flying by 50%
  • pilots could sometimes delay flights over technicalities like broken coffee pots
  • executives live in fear of a pilots' strike like the one United suffered in 1985
  • airlines boosted profits with yield management - that's why you pay $1,000 to sit next to someone who's paying $200
  • wide-body jets sell for $100m and cannot be easily liquidated
  ...Southwest is in a different business from United [et al.], and its model is infuriatingly simple:
  • it flies a single aircraft type,
  • greatly reducing the cost of training pilots and mechanics,
  • with no frills or first class,
  • mostly on point-to-point routes and
  • usually from secondary, less-congested airports.
  • Its Boeing 737's land and take off in only 20 minutes - unthinkable for planes connecting through hubs -
    [we've always hated hubs - they sometimes want to fly you to frigging Chicago to get you from Boston to Florida!]
  • - and its pilots usually fly more than 70 hours a month, far more than at American, Delta and United.
  [This Sunday article also answers the burning question, how come United, which is supposedly employee-owned via stock ownership, is having so many personnel problems, and Southwest, which isn't, isn't.]
  ...Southwest...has been able to co-opt [touch of envy here? we'd use the word "motivate"] its workers (who are also unionized) into behaving like owners. For sure, relationships with unions are multifaceted, but one difference at Southwest stands out... workers get much of their annual profit sharing in cash....
  [So wages vary with company performance and therefore Southwest's labor costs stay tuned to the business cycle and -]
  ...think differently about their employer. [They're] willing to fly more hours, to let the market determine the schedule for regional jets, to let [the] airline...design [its] networks with profits as the main consideration....
  [But neither of these articles mentions that Southwest practices timesizing - it will cut hours rather than jobs. Let's see. That makes the most profitable American steel company and the most profitable American airline. There's a message in here somewhere, and it ain't deep. But will our self-important captains of industry be capable of listening enough to pick it up. Here's an excerpt from an article last fall -
  Workplace: Experts say layoffs could weaken companies' prospects, by Sherwood Ross (Sherwood@mato.com), Reuters 14:44 11-26-01 via AOLNews.
  Although the airline industry "has been beaten like no other," spokesman Ed Stewart of Southwest Airlines said, "layoffs are absolutely the last thing we would consider."...
  "Too often, layoffs are used as a first resort in troubled times," said sociologist Wayne Baker, director of the Center for Society & Economy at the University of Michigan Business School, in Ann Arbor.... Baker said, for example, managers might ask employees to accept a shorter workweek or 20% pay cut. ...The better a company treats its workers, the harder employees will try to find ways to keep their jobs by making themselves more valuable. ...Baker said that after 9/11, a number of Southwest Airline employees volunteered to work for free. Indeed, the airline's spokesperson said some even offered to contribute money. "You don't get that kind of response from people who work for a company that treats its people shabbily," Baker said.... [He] concluded: "The real cost of layoffs is the ruination of the company's 'social fabric' - the social capital of a company. It takes a long time to build up and a short time to destroy it. Layoffs destroy it."...
  [And Southwest's got it. Another article last fall -]
  Small airlines adapting quicker, by Nick Wadhams, AP-NY-11-22-01 1256EST. ...While the nation's largest airlines posted $2.4B in losses and laid off more than 100,000 employees in Q3 [and whined for gov't bailout], three small airlines - AirTran, Frontier and JetBlue - are going ahead with plans to add more routes and scoop up more customers as larger airlines struggle.... Frontier and jetBlue both reported profits in Q3. AirTran reported a loss of $10.6m, including charges directly related to 9/11, after 11 straight profitable quarters.... They have imitated SouthWest Airlines, a larger carrier that distinguished itself with low fares and a level of customer service that still hasn't caught on among larger airlines....
  [And we have explicit timesizing stories on at least one of these three Southwest imitators, AirTran, which figured in our timesizing news on 12/05/2001 #1, 11/02 #1 and 9/19. AirTran is so solicitous of employees and hip to workweek reduction that it even tries to avoid temporary furloughs!]
  [Followup]
  Earnings and stock price jump at JetBlue, Bloomberg via 7/27/2002 NYT, B14.

• Canadian skaters awarded share of Olympic gold; French judge suspended, her scoring thrown out - Pressure is cited - Russians are upset, by Selena Roberts, NYT, front page.
  [Alas, the Russians have learned the lessons of our short-term capitalism all too well - "don't share with anybody!" If they'd been the Russkis of our dreams, they'd have watched the Canucks skating after them instead of running off to collapse, they'd have realized what happened, and then with cameras running after getting their gold, they'd have gone down a step and swapped with Jamie and David - and given the finger to the judges! Anton clearly stepped out of a turn and Dave didn't. Here's the Globe's version -]
  Golden ruling for Canada - Pairs skaters get top medal as French judge suspended, by John Powers, Boston Globe, front page.
  [Well might French judge, Marie-Reine "The Goon" La Gougne, get hysterical - she slammed a couple of French extraction Canadians - her own people - to favor the Russkis, apparently caving in to pressure from Didier "Diddle the Hack" Gailhaguet, unworthy prez of the "French" Skating Federation. What a coupla traitors. Canadian/canadienne Jamie Salé, we believe, comes from the west coast (British Columbia?) but has a French name and may speak French. David Pelletier has a Quebec accent as well as a French name and definitely speaks French - and if he's from Quebec City he speaks better, more conservative French than either "The Goon" or "The Hack" unless they're from Caen. No wonder the judges took extra long at that meeting Tuesday morning - da Goon was wailing hysterically for a good 20 minutes and that's why they went to the trouble of plugging up the cracks around the door of the room - so reporters wouldn't think they were torturing her - much as she deserved it. The side-by-side videos shown by Scott Hamilton clearly showed Anton Sikarulidze stepping out of one of the Russian pair's figures, while the Canucks executed it parfaitement/"poifeck", and despite the adulation they're getting in Mother Russia, they were both, especially Elena Berezhnaya, giving the audience ulcers straining to hang onto their landings, while the Canucksters were acing them. The original impression given by the media was that the Russkis tried a harder program, but later details on the Canuck program revealed some tougher small-aspects of the Canuck jumps vs. the Russki. Hey, most of the Arctic map is spray-painted with either Russia or Canada, so jumps like these keep them warm. Anyway, it's all over now except for the actual guillotining of da Goon an' da Hack, which we hope La Belle France executes quickly, because at the moment, they're our top example of nationwide timesizing, and we'd hate for a couple of rotten grenouilles (frogs) to stink up the whole étang (pond). The frogsters are getting enough crappy media from ignorant rightwing talkshow hosts in our big dumb land as it is, despite "return to screwup" by the rightwing ignoramus who stole our big microphone in Y2K. (Besides, Dave Pelletier looks like Phil's cousin Gary, and Jamie, who got accidentally? bonked by Anton in practice session, is a pint-sized version of our own Nancy Kerrigan, who got shafted in another of these judging eye-rollers after getting knee-capped by a certain no-class "teammate" with a Russian name. What, us, biassed?)]
  ...Said Pelletier, "Justice was done. It doesn't take away anything from Elena and Anton. This was not something against them. It was something against the system."...
  [It's either this or get figure skating with its half-subjectivity the hell out of the Olympics. And either way, get ice dancing with its total subjectivity OUT. Apparently the misguided "Goon" was trading for favors for the French ice dancers - who likely didn't need cheating but dance judging is sooo subjective.... The Olympics are supposed to be clearcut races, not a feeding frenzy for phony pre-judging, politics, horse-trading and corruption. They're supposed to provide an outlet for competitive energies with unambiguous results, not murky de gustibus non disputandum morasses of mood controversy. Lose ice dancing from the Olympics. It was controversial coming in and those who caved to admit it goofed, and confused and diminished the Olympics. Ice dancing is just fripperized pair skating anyway, and as we've just seen, pair skating itself is barely holding onto the myth of objectivity. Bear in mind the background difficulty here - as one sage once said, "There's no such thing as objectivity, only specifiably extended subjectivity." (See the 'extension series' halfway down our 'sayings' page.)]

• House backs broad change in financing of campaigns; fast Senate action sought - A vote of 240-189 - Milestone in seven-year soft-money fight - Bush undeclared, by Alison Mitchell, NYT, front page.
  ...and Sen. Tom Daschle, the [Dem.] majority leader, swiftly promised to do all he could to speed the bill to the president, putting the nation's political system at the brink of sweeping change. The...vote at 2:43 am...ban[ned] the large unlimited donations to political parties..."soft money" [which] grew to nearly $500m in the 2000 election.
  The bill's sponsors, Reps. Christopher Shays (R, Conn.) and Martin Meehan (D, Mass.) fought back a nearly 17-hour barrage of rival bills and amendments that Republican leaders had hoped would derail the legislation.   41 Republicans broke with their party and joined all but 12 Democrats to back the Shays-Meehan bill in a week in which hearings of the Enron collapse kept the issue of special-interest access to politicians [on] center stage....
  [An op ed writer said that Enron chairman Kenneth Lay was the most effective (unintentional) lobbyist that campaign finance reform ever had.]
  The Senate...passed almost identical legislation last April....
  [Of course, the situation is different today in "democratic" Massachusetts, where voters have voted twice for publicly funded elections and state legislators are sandbagging like crazy -]
  Senate votes to curb fund for elections - Money would go to 2 candidates; Gov. Swift veto likely, by Rick Klein, Boston Globe, front page.
  Highlights - By 19-18, the Mass. Senate voted last night to:
  
  • Allow only two candidates to receive public financing
  • Spend $16m of the $23m [earmarked state campaign fund] elsewhere
  • Put Clean Elections back [for a THIRD time] on the ballot this fall as a nonbinding referendum
  ...The Senate first rejected an outright repeal of Clean Elections, voting 27-10 against it. Senators then approved an amendment that greatly scales back Clean Elections for the 2002 elections, keeping it in effect only for two candidates who have already qualified for public money.
  ..\..Said Ken White, exec. dir. of Common Cause Massachusetts, "...They've accomplished less than nothing, because they've taken real reform and replaced with a sham."...
  [So much for a state that once led the nation in progressiveness. And so much for all the holier-than-thou Democrats in that Democratic-monopoly state.]

1. [1 UPsizing, 1000 new jobs]
   Michelin announces job creation, AP-NY-02-13-02 0942EST via AOLNews.
   PARIS - French tire manufacturer Micheline announced Wednesday that it plans to create at least 1,000 new jobs this year. Michelin currently employs 3,100 people in France. The new hires will include 200 managers, 300 technicians and supervisors and 500 workers, according to Serge Lafon, the company's HR director.
   The new hires are on top of an additional 1,000 recruits Michelin is planning to hire as a result of the implementation of the new 35-hour workweek in France, Lafon said.
   [See today's entry (2/14/2002) on our TIMEsizing pages.]

2. South Koreans criticize Bush's methods, if not his message, by Howard French, NYT, A14.
   ...Many..\..South Korean[s] will say they are shocked and even insulted \by\ Bush's recent statements including North Korea in a so-called axis of evil....
   [First the French dare to criticize as "simplistic" the black&white Harry Potter world of Bushian foreign policy. Now the South Koreans pipe up. And God knows who all else is just shaking their heads.]
   ...In numerous interviews, people from all walks of life expressed chagrin that Mr. Bush had shown so little delicacy in addressing a government that their own government has struggled to engage, and they said they were worried that Mr. Bush had made things worse....

3. Senate passes $44.9B farm bill limiting subsidies, by Elizabeth Becker, NYT, A25.
   [Anything that cuts welfare for the rich, dba corporate welfare, is a Good Thing.]

4. Judges eye working some days without pay, by Michele Kurtz, Boston Globe, B1.
   Facing mounting pressure from their lower-paid co-workers, an organization of [Massachusetts] state judges yesterday urged its members to work 8 days without pay along with rank-and-file court employees to help stave off large numbers of layoffs and boost morale in the courts.... By yesterday afternoon, 162 judges - or 45% [of the 364 total] - had notified administrators that they would do so....
   [Better if done in conjunction with overtime-into-training reinvestment and hours cuts, but avoiding layoffs is a Good Thing, especially when the wealthy join in in a way that slows the concentration of spending power into unspendable clumps.]

1. [1 UPsizing, 650 new jobs]
   UBS Warburg opens online energy unit, AP via Boston Globe, F2.
   The Swiss investment bank that acquired Enron Corp.'s energy trading operation cranked up its new online platform. UBSWenergy.com, staffed by about 650 former Enron traders and support staff and backed by credit from UBS Warburg parent UBS Ag, saw some action from traders buying and selling natural gas and electricity on its first day....

2. Backers have edge of campaign finance bill, by Johnson & Milligan, BG, front page.
   WASHINGTON - With newspaper ads proclaiming "this time it counts" and corporate executives deriding what they termed shakedowns under the current system, supperters of a bill [the "Shays-Meehan Bill"] to overhaul the nation's campaign finance laws girded yesterday for the start of a floor debate today, and opponents conceded they face an uphill fight....
   [Keep your fingers crossed but don't hold your breath.]

• [1 UPsizing, 500 new jobs]
  Greenbrier Cos., NYT, B3.
  ...Lake Oswego, Ore., the 3rd-largest maker of railroad freight cars, said it had oders for 900 railcars, valued at about $50m, and would decide within a week whether to build them in Portland, Ore. or Trenton, Nova Scotia. The work could add up to 500 jobs.

• British immigration proposal, pointer summary (to A10), NYT, A2.
  The government proposed that future immigrants demonstrate English language skills and knowledge of British values before getting citizenship.
  [But the key thing should still be self-support. No one land mass, especially a small island like Britain, can bear the political, economic and reproductive carelessness of all the rest of the world. The ecological problems everywhere are becoming so acute that open immigration policies are appropriately becoming a thing of the past, despite the druthers of the compassionate. Each nation's best contribution to others today is to model a better socioeconomic design for the future, and the best we know is Timesizing.]

1. Economic scene - The president wants Americans to volunteer to pick up the slack in social services - But will that be enough? - A fat tax payment may do more good than time that is given away, by Alan Krueger (akrueger@princeton.edu), NYT, C2.
   ["Oh now dearie, isn't that just lovely. Our brave President Bush wants us all to take some time off from shopping in Bloomingdale's and Neiman Marcus and all those darling little shoppes in the Ritz, and contribute some time to Pine Street Inn if they can guarantee our personal safety." Didn't we get fed this line by Bush Sr. and his "thousand points of light"? Voluntarism in America is yet another job killer. You can hardly get a paying gig as a musician or actor in Boston because there are so many colleges giving it away. Our Timesizing.com Party line on this, once again, is - Any economy that relies on charity or voluntarism for vital functions is lethally flawed. Charity/voluntarism has one big problem. It's capricious and unreliable. Some of the best regulatory attempts of the Great Depression standardized and mandated best practices from the past, like the voluntary avoidance of conflict of interest that the best professionals had exercised, for example in separating the brokerage, insurance and banking businesses (ie: the Glass-Steagall Bill, recently undone). 'Tis ever thus. Good regulations standardize and automate the best practice of the past when bad practices have overwhelmed them and caused an outcry. But in this Enron world of breathtakingly nearsighted CEOs, we're going backwards as fast as we can and thet liddle locker-room towel-snapper, Baby Bush, is leading us lemmings back to the cliffs, just like his dad and Unca Ronnie. Maybe he'll cut the suspense and really get us there this time. Then we can rerun 1933 and try to get it right for a change.]

2. The allies - French minister calls U.S. policy 'simplistic' - After the State of the Union [speech], Europe sees America going it alone, by Suzanne Daley, NYT, A10.
   [Thank God for the French. They've got more chutzpa to sock-it-to-the-Yanks than anybody, including us Canucks (shape-shifting into Canadianity for a nanosec) who are too goddam nice by a country mile (dba world's longest undefended border) - at the moment anyway.]
   PARIS... - Frustration with...Bush's worldview burst into the open here today, as Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine openly criticized Washington's approach to terrorism as "simplistic [in terms of reducing] all the problems in the world to the struggle against terrorism."...
   [No kidding. When movie stars and locker-room towel-flickers usurp leadership of the land-with-the-most-bombs by unseparating church and state and start talking about "evil empires" and "axes of evil," things are getting pretty black&white, and we can only hope that some of the more primitive minds on the planet can relate to it, where they might have missed the subtleties in the usual diplomatic pillow fight. So who are we to squawk when we've got "headlines from heaven" and "headlines from hell"? Yeah but we've also got "Good, but..." and "Bad, but..." to keep things from getting distortingly neat.]

3. Market expanding for geriatric services, by David Bushnell, Boston Globe, G1.
   [Oh great. This just goes to show that no matter how bad things get, SOMEbody is still making money!]

4. Wall Street is calling it..., pointer digest (to C7), NYT, C1.
   ...the Enron effect. The business of mergers and acquisitions has fallen off a cliff.
   [Thank God. " M&As" are merely appetizers for downsizing. Sometimes it takes a disaster to get people to do their job - in this case, managing, not merging. Seems pretty effective considering 2 other stories on the frontpage of today's biz section - "Tyco backs away from a deal" and "Bristol-Myers is backtracking on ImClone deal."]

1. Nader had it right all along, op ed by Robert Kuttner, Boston Globe, A17.
   If one political figure looks prophetic these days, it is Ralph Nader.
   • ...Enron...
   • ...Bush's budget cuts for...training...hospitals...regulatory agencies...
   • ...education spending lags inflation...
   The Democrats, meanwhile, have little to offer....
   [So much for the "opposition." However -]
   Nader's trademark was to mount a fairly radical critique of unregulated capitalism in an idiom that did not seem radical at all. [He advocated safety measures like] seat belts! He was no socialist. His ideal was more that of his hero, Louis Brandeis, a genuinely competitive market economy that lived up to its promises.
   Nader applauded corporations as creators of wealth and of jobs. But he understood they had to be leashed in their other [short-term expedience] role - as poisoners of the air, the water, the workplace, the innocent consumer, and the political commons. The worst menace of concentrated corporate power...
   [Kind of a slippery concept unless we translate it as "concentrated personal income and wealth" -]
   ...was not economic but political. The years have proven [Nader] right..\..
   Nader's latest book..."Crashing the Party,"...documents how big money has come to dominate both parties and how the Democrats since 1980 - with some notable exceptions - have ceased to play an effective opposition role to the corporate agenda. In short, how democracy has withered. The quest for corporate sovereignty over the sovereignty of the people is an affront to our Constitution and our democracy, he writes. Indeed, in their largest and most transnational form, the global corporations reject allegiance to nation or community.
   I didn't vote for Ralph Nader. I feared his candidacy would just elect Bush...
   [Bob you moron, how could your vote have done any such thing in Dem-dipped Massachusetts???]
   ...and it may well have.
   [Bob you jerk, you still don't understand the flaccidity of the Democrats even though you're writing about it. The Dems have even ceded the working class to the worker-shafting Republicans by trying to mimic Republican $$ fixation instead of switching to more-efficient-than-liberal progressive ideas like Timesizing. In fact, everyone is so tired of the Democrats' old liberalism (including the Democrats themselves except for thick-headed Ted Kennedy) that Gore couldn't even win his home state!]
   But as Nader points out, the election was Gore's to lose.
   [Whatever that fashionable but roundabout phrase means.]
   And future elections will be the Democrats' to lose...
   [Translation: the Dems will lose future elections - Bob is getting as jargony as a mortgage agreement.]
   ...as long as they run tepid campaigns with stiff, poll-tested candidates captive to the same corporate agenda.
   ...In some quarters [Nader] is dismissed as a scold. But he is far more alert to the true public issues than most politicians. And when [and if - no guarantees!] American democracy revives, with or without the Democrats, it will owe much to America's most valuable and uncorrupted public citizen.
   [Then VOTE for him, you blockhead! American democracy will never revive if you and all the people you influence don't! (And yes, Phil Hyde ran Republican vs. Joe Kennedy et al. in 1998 and voted for Nader, ran Timesizing.com Party vs. Ted Kennedy in Y2000 and voted for Nader - simple question for true conservatives - who's the most Lincolnesque? who's most like Teddy Roosevelt? Gore, Bush or Nader?) Always vote for your first choice or s/he will never creep up in the media. And if anything can wake up Americans, the rapid devastation that Bush is wreaking will have to do it. Certainly the gradual deterioration under Clinton and Gore didn't.]

2. A lesson for the morally righteous, letter to editor by Margaret Moore of Bedford NH, BG, A16.
   Strange how some members of the medical profession and those of the John Ashcroft ilk persist in thinking that there is something glorious about keeping people alive.
   After my beloved aunt lost her sight, her hearing, and her husband, she frequently expressed her wish to die. Her words to me in one of her last letters (which she wrote blind) were, "This is 24 hours daily of exquisite and demonic torture. If you had sat down to think of the cruelest thing you could - you could never have devised this." She finally starved herself to death.
   It would be far more compassionate for the morally righteous to think of the person suffering instead of wanting to [impose] their own beliefs....
   [Yeah the "religious right" or "moral" majority has some pretty whacky priorities. Look at the so visibly righteous Roman Catholic professionals lately - so pure and holier-than-thou in their celibacy, yet so devastating in their systemic sexual abuse of the children of their congregations. Look at the meltdown of Jimmy and Tammy Fay Baker, Jimmy Jones and other Protestant "leaders." And of course, look at Osama "Mr. Pure Islam" bin Laden. And like the so-very-pure who will do anything, including murder, to block abortions, they all seem to be unclear on the concept of Quality of Life. It seems that for all of them, in Rep. Barney Frank's inspired phrase, they care about life only from the moment of conception to the moment of birth (quoted again tomorrow in Ellen Goodman's op ed, "Inconceivable cynicism," 2/07/2002 Boston Globe, A19). Bottom line - let's hear it for Jack "Dr. Quality of Life" Kevorkian. The way this economy is going, the only "pension" most of us are going to get is...dying at work or dialing 800-KEVORKIAN.]

1. [1 UPsizing, 874 new jobs net]
   Staples makes job cuts but will hire for new stores, AP via NYT, B3.
   The office supply chain...cut 326 jobs this week, including 115 at its HQ [and is] planning to close 30 stores [see yesterday's downsizings, 2/01/2002 #2], but says it still plans to hire 1,200 people this year for 120 new stores.
   [1200up-326down= 874 new jobs net. And also potentially cushioning the blow -]
   ...The company hopes to offer at least some of the laid-off workers new positions in the company [and] some of the [jobcuts] were seasonal.... Aside from the cuts at the HQ in Framingham, Mass., and 44 jobs in Lincolnshire, Ill., most cuts were at distribution and fulfillment centers.
   [So, even less service at another bigbox store.]

2. [glimmer of intelligence in Israel -]
   Protesting tactics in West Bank, Israeli reservists refuse to serve, by Joel Greenberg, NYT, frontpage.
   JERUSALEM...- More than 100 Israeli Army reservists signed a statement [yester]day saying they would refuse to continue serving in the West Bank and Gaza Strip because Israel's policies there involved "dominating, expelling, starving and humiliating an entire people."
   The statement, by combat officers and soldiers, amounted to the largest organized refusal by reservists to serve in the West Bank and Gaza in the last 16 months of violence.
   A week ago, 52 reservists began the campaign of defiance with the statement in the newspaper HaAretz. But their number has now almost doubled, to 102, and a national debate about their stand is in full swing.... The declaration [yester]day in HaAretz by the dissenting reservists said: "The price of occupation is the loss of the Israel Defense Force's semblance of humanity adn the corruption of all of Israeli society."
   [Hear, hear! Berahkoath 'al pahnayhem! Blessings on their heads - and on their cause. Who knows? Maybe they can yet reverse Israel's self-transformation into the Fourth Reich.]
   ..\..Protests by army reservists after Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which Mr. Sharon, as defense minister, [pushed] all the way to Beirut, are widely considered to have contributed to a subsequent military pullback to southern Lebanon, from which Israel withdrew 2 years ago.
   [But it won't be easy this time. There are more violent Israelis today than there were in 1982, because they've experienced a big immigration of uneducated and primitive Sephardim who have diluted the educated and cultured Askenazis. And there's not only paranoid Sharon, but violent Lt. Gen. Shaul Mofaz -]
   ..\..The campaign has so unsettled the military command that the army's chief of staff [Mofaz] suggested today that the objecters were inciting rebellion.
   [But with luck, this non-violent resistance will snowball and reach critical mass -]
   ...Their goal [is] collecting 500 signatures and forming a critical mass of resisters that could force a change in government policy..\.. The declaration...continued: "We will no longer fight beyond the Green Line with the aim of dominating, expelling, starving and humiliating an entire people." The Green Line is the pre-1967 boundary between Israel and the West Bank and Gaza Strip....
   [Israel's 1967 invasion of these territories originally looked like a reasonable defensive step, but in the light of their subsequent continuous 35-years-and-counting occupation of these territories, it looks more like an Anschluss against the Palestinians. Three wrongs don't make a right.]

3. Ireland: Abortion referendum next month, by Brain Lavery, NYT, A10.
   The government set March 6 as the date for a referendum on whether to tighten the nearly total ban on abortion, already the most restrictive in Europe....
   [Referendums are good. Referendums are direct democracy. And maybe the recent disgrace of the Roman Catholic church ["Ireland, Catholic church agree on {$110m} fund for {sexual} abuse victims," AP via 2/01/2002 Boston Globe, A3] will help the Irish to switch focus from quantity to quality of human life.]

4. Ban proposed on 'living' patents, by Andrew Pollack, NYT, A10.
   Biotechnology critics from more than 50 countries have proposed a ban on patents on living things and on parts of living things like genes and cells....

1. [1 UPsizing, 450 new jobs]
   Sepracor to increase sales force, Dow Jones via BG, F2.
   Marlborough MA-based...pharmaceutical company..\..plans to increase its sales force by 250-450 by the end of February and to possibly double it again by fall....

2. An evolving vision in black and white, by Julie Salamon, NYT, B1.
   The three corporate moguls staring out from the cover of Newsweek last week were sternly conventional: dark suits, light shirts, conservative ties, close-cropped hair. Clearly Masters of the Universe, these newly appointed CEOs of Merrill Lynch, AOL Time Warner and American Express are remarkable-looking in only one way: they're all African-American....
   [The NYT article, for all its supposed anti-racism, does not give the names of the three black CEOs.]