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

12/28/2002   headlines from heaven - alias glimmers of intelligence -

  1. [oo here's a luvly scather]
    In Europe, no room for kids [huh?], letter to editor...by Ed Fisher of Scotts Valley CA, NYT, A34.
    Re "Persistent drop in fertility reshapes Europe's future (front page, Dec. 26): The main problem is the woeful inadequacy of the "science" of economics to imagine a way for a society to decrease in population while increasing per capita income (or at least, through technology, providing a better life).
    [Bing-o!]
    The whole thrust of what economists offer is "a rising tide lifts all ships." Well, someone had better find a way to thrive without overall growth all the time.
    [You came to the right place, Ed. We started our economic design project in the Limits to Growth group at MIT in the 70s.]
    The solution to many problems - the environment, urban sprawl and so forth - is population control. But the vested interests, from developers to religious fundamentalists, simply demand more growth, while politicians are helpless.
    [and clueless.]
    One hopes Europe may yet show the way.
    [hear, hear!]
    [The first letter in this section supports Ed's excoriation of economists -]
    ...by Andrea Malaguti of NYC, NYT, A34.
    "Persistent drop in fertility reshapes Europe's future (front page, Dec. 26), which was reported from my hometown of Ferrara, Italy, gave an accurate picture of the situation. But it largely overlooked a critical factor of the last 2 decades: persistent unemployment and job frustration at the upper levels of society. Knowing how hungry young graduates are for professional qualifications, employers can get away with paying little and compensating new hires with "direct experience."
    Why should Italians want to put their offspring through more of the same frustrations? Is it any surprise that people were so desperate as to vote for a prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, who crassly promised 1.5 million new jobs?
    Forget about cellphones and TV: there is much more to worry about in today's Italy.
    [and another letter makes a good point -]
    ...by Jane Roberts of Redlands CA, NYT, A34.
    The flip side of Europe's low fertility rate is the high fertility rate in developing countries....

  2. And at last we're beginning to get some articles that point out that the tax revolt has gone too far, that the so-called "budget crises" of all or cities and states can be traced to it, and that for all our whining we already had some of the lowest taxes in the developed world]
    Making us pay..., op ed by Robert Morgenstern, NYT, A35.
    ...Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said in 1927, "Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society."...
12/24/2002   headlines from heaven - alias glimmers of vaguer-than-timesizing hope -
  1. [1 UPsizing]
    Amgen Inc., WSJ, B2.
    ...won FDA approval of a new manufacturing plant for its rheumatoid-arthritis drug Enbrel, which has been in short supply for more than 2 years. The new plant will more than double the Thousand Oaks CA company's manufacturing capacity for the drug, which Amgen gained as a result of its $11B acquisition of Immunex Corp. earlier this year.
    [At last, after scores of examples of the toxic takeover- downsizing connection, we get a single example of a takeover-upsizing. Unspecified new jobs.]
    Amgen officials said the Rhode Is. facility will be the world's largest site for the manufacture of biologics, which are biotech drugs like Enbrel that are produced by genetically modified cells.
    [And here's hopin' that none of them escape from the lab or we're in for some real-life horror movies.]

  2. [And a few more goodnews-type Christmas presents -]
    Sun wins big round over Microsoft - Temporary distribution of Java software ordered; Speedy appeal is vowed, by Don Clark & Rebecca Buckman & Mark Wigfield, WSJ, A3.
    In a huge victory for Sun Microsystems Inc, a federal judge ordered Microsoft Corp. to distribute Sun's Java programming techology to prevent Sun from being permanently injured in an emerging marketplace....
    [So Java is IN!]

  3. [And hybrids are IN -]
    GM to offer hybrid power in 5 models by 2007, by Danny Hakim, NYT, C1.
    ...some form of hybrid electric power....
    [Further -]
    Hybrid autos quick to pass curiosity stage, by Danny Hakim, 1/28/2003 NYT, front page.

  4. [And busting our most graceful national park is OUT!]
    Utah: Judge blocks oil project near Arches, AP via NYT, A17.
    A federal judge [Jas. Robertson of Fed.Dist.Court in DC] has blocked an oil exploration project near Arches National Park, saying the Bush administration cut corners on environmental analysis in an effort to rush the project forward.... The Bureau of Land Mgmt [another Bush puppetshow] violated the law when it failed to consider alternatives to the exploration company's practice of driving large trucks across the desert, pounding the earth to sense oil deposits below....
    [Honest to God, Bush & Co. haven't the common sense of an anthill.]

12/21-23/2002   headlines from heaven - alias glimmers of vaguer-than-timesizing hope -
  1. 12/21 Jewish professors keep divestment drive alive, by Patrick Healy, Boston Globe, front page.
    The national movement to pressure universities to pull their investments from Israel has been battered this year by critics who call it divisive and anti-Semitic.
    [As if Israel's current belligerent and hopefully evanescent Sharon administration is equivalent to Judaism!]
    But it has shown remarkable staying power in large part because of an unusual group of supporters: Jewish professors.
    [Damn, it's that damn EDUCATION again, waking people up and helping them see through the cynical administration line in the two-guy media. Nice of the Globe to slip this into Saturday's paper though, which fewer people read, but it is on the front page, but it is below the fold....]
    Hundreds of college professors nationwide have signed petitions calling for divestment from Israel, among them several dozen Jewish professors who call their signatures an act of political conscience. As the fall semester draws to a close, many have found themselves - not always purposely - becoming spokesmen for a cause that has deeply split their campuses.
    "I simply couldn't afford to sit back any longer," said Harvard psychology professor Elizabeth Spelke, whose family has roots in Israel, and who signed the petition to protest Israel's military crackdown on Palestinians.
    Modeled on an anti-apartheid campaign that led campuses to divest from South Africa in the 1980s, the petition criticizes Israel's actions in the occupied territories and calls on universities to sell any investments in Israel, and in companies that do business there. It has circulated at more than 50 campuses, including Harvard, MIT, Yale, and UMass/Amherst....
    Sylvain Bromberger, a noted MIT philosopher whose mother once edited a Zionist newspaper in Belgium and whose family narrowly escaped capture by the Nazis, became a hero to some divestment supporters this fall when he defended them in a toughly worded letter to..\..Harvard president Lawrence Summers [who] publicly suggested that the divestment movement has anti-Semitic overtones....
    "As a Jew, it's so personally disturbing to me that this is even happening in Israel," said Charles G. Gross, a psych professor at Princeton University. "I'm a little bit more concerned with social justice in Israel than in some other countries."...
    Sara Roy, a child of Holocaust survivors and a Middle East researcher at Harvard, has not signed the divestment petition but is seen as an ally in the movement because of a Holocaust Remembrance Lecture she gave this year and published last month. In the speech, she said: "For my mother and father, Judaism meant bearing witness, railing against injustice, and forgoing silence.... What sort of meaning do we as Jews derive from the debasement of Palestinians?"... Ken Olum, a member of the Tufts [Univ.] physics dept. who helped organize a divestment petition on campus, said he has wrestled so long with his frustrations with Israel, and with widespread Jewish support for the [Sharon] government there, that he has stopped identifying himself as a Jew when people discuss religion, the Middle East, or other subjects.
    [Here then are the wages of "dropping the A-bomb on Luxembourg" and slurring critics of Sharon as haters of Judaism. Some Jews are disenrolling -]
    "The fact that a lot of people who count themselves as among the Jewish people are doing a great evil, an un-Jewish evil, has been overwhelming," Olum said. "The moral stakes here are too great not to take this stand."
    [And it takes a lot of discipline and cool in an argument to limit it to cases, and not ungirdle it into a much bigger and irrelevant emotional vomit fest. Summers proved his unworthiness of the Harvard presidency by his lack of this discipline and cool. But the courageous Jews who signed the divestment petition and especially the ones named in this article, the only article like it we have seen (nothing in the NYT or WSJ for instance), certainly help us all gain and hold onto this vital discipline in the debate.]

  2. [and lest you're still a big Bush fan -]
    12/22 Friendly dollars - Chipping in $34m that Bush kept from UNFPA, by Ellen Goodman, Boston Globe, D11, flagged by colleague Kate.
    At first the letters just trickled in to the UN Population Fund....
    [Ah, Ellen, you need to tell us exactly what UNFPA stands for and this doesn't.]
    It was enough to buy a few birthing kits or cure one 14-year-old mother of...fistula. ...It didn't begin to make up for the $34m that the Bush administration denied the international family planning group.
    But the trickle didn't stop either. It grew all fall until an astonished woman at the UNFPA decided to invest in an electronic letter opener. ...Every day, 500-600 more letters arrive in the NY office from Americans bearing gifts to women overseas. Some include a dollar for every member of the family or for everyone in the office of in the church....
    Two months ago...Jane Roberts, a retired French teacher, and Lois Abraham, a lawyer, were both outraged when Bush renegged on funds for the UNFPA. This was money for contraception and sex education, for maternal healthcare and AIDS education. It would have helped prevent 2 million unwanted pregnancies, 800,000 abortions, 4,700 maternal deaths....
    Independently, two women came up with what Roberts called an "exercise in outraged democracy." What would happen, they asked, if 34 million Americans each gave a dollar to make up for the money? So was born "34 Million Friends."
    Does the campaign have an amateurish quality? Hey kids, we could do the show right here? So be it. Roberts says, "We want 34 million Americans to have their own teeny-tiny foreign policy."...
    If Trent Lott is nostalgic for the wonderful yesteryear before civil rights, this administration is nostalgic for the days before women's rights. Is it any wonder that some Americans have responded to 34 Million Friends? This is an idea that comes with an address, a place where we can offer aid as well as dissent, a dollar as well as a message of connection to the women of the world:
    US Committee for UNFPA
    220 E. 42nd St.
    New York, NY 10017
    USA
     It took months for the campaign to reach its first $100,000. It took just weeks to add in another $50,000. If the goal of $34m sounds elusive, UNFPA's Mari Tikkanen says, "When it hit $1,000, I was thrilled. Now I don't think anything is impossible."...
    [Ellen Goodman's email address is ellengoodman@globe.com - Be sure to make the subject line unlike spam - like us, she gets deluged.]

12/04/2002   headlines from heaven - alias glimmers of vaguer-than-timesizing hope -
  1. [UPsizing #1]
    Scottrade succeeds against the norm, by Gaston Ceron, WSJ, B4D.
    NEW YORK - Where other online brokers zig, Scottrade Inc. zags. The downturn in the stock market has hit the once-hot industry hard, "forcing" [our quotes - ed.] corporations to slash costs by cutting jobs....
    The story is a little different at Scottrade, a brokerage house run by CEO Rodger Riney and mostly owned by his family. Scottrade's payroll has actually grown, and Mr. Riney continues to push ahead with plans to expand.... Today, the company has 861 employees; 644 are full-time, up 38% from 468 at the end of 2000.
    [So, 644-468= 176 new full-time jobs plus unspecified new part-time jobs.]
    Scottrade has 170 US branch offices and plans to add 30 more by next fall....

  2. [UPsizing #2]
    Bank of America plans to expand in major cities, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
    ...15 branches in Chicago next year, followed by branches in NYC, Boston and Philadelphia, as the bank tries to sell more loans and credit cards to wealthy customers, its CEO, Kenneth Lewis, said.
    [Unspecified new jobs.]
    The company, based in Charlotte NC, plans branches in the largest Midwestern and Northeastern cities because private-banking and commercial customers there "are saying they will do more business with us," Mr. Lewis told investors and analysts at a Goldman, Sachs bank conference in NYC.
    [Not if they keep downsizing their workforce dba consumer base.]

11/30/2002   headlines from heaven - alias glimmers of vaguer-than-timesizing hope - 11/27/2002   headlines from heaven - alias glimmers of vaguer-than-timesizing hope - 11/22/2002   headlines from heaven - alias glimmers of vaguer-than-timesizing hope - 11/13/2002   headlines from heaven - alias glimmers of vaguer-than-timesizing hope - 11/07/2002   headlines from heaven - alias glimmers of vaguer-than-timesizing hope - 10/31/2002   headlines from heaven - alias glimmers of vaguer-than-timesizing hope -
  1. We'll do the cruddy jobs - Just raise the pay a bit, letter to editor by Don Hoffman of Las Vegas NV, WSJ, A19.
    Daniel Griswold claims in his Oct. 22 editorial-page [column] that illegal aliens help the U.S. meet a rising demand for low-skilled labor that American workers are increasingly unwilling to fill. He blames this unwillingness on an aging workforce and rising education levels.
    [This is the standard party-line of our plutocratic masters to justify virtually uncontrolled admission of unskilled immigrants.]
    Here's a different theory: It's the extremely low pay that illegal aliens are willing to receive that separates American workers from many low-skilled jobs.
    If the flow of illegal aliens were greatly reduced, would business owners simply throw up their hands and allow crops to rot in fields or trash not to be picked up? No, they would pay the wages necessary to draw American workers into those jobs.
    [This is exactly what happened during and after the two World Wars in the last century, both of which resulted in tremendous prosperity because of the market-driven centrifugation of the income of the nation, despite the frequent squealing of the rich, who have successfully quashed research and information on this vital large-scale real-life experiment.]
    Anyone who believes that Americans aren't willing to take low-skilled, low-paying jobs need only to look at the service industry - such as fast food - to know the fallacy of that view.
    Although the cost of some goods and services would increase because of the rise in labor costs, the U.S. economy would actually benefit from the increased employment of American workers. The money they earned would not flow directly to Mexico, but would stay in the U.S., where it would turn over and over, benefiting other Americans.
    [We suggest turning the question of immigration controls over to public referendum, because ordinary people are going to make the tough decisions in secret ballots against American shibboleths like "Miss Liberty" that incumbent politicians, bought and paid for by the insulated and isolated minority in the very top income brackets, will never make on open votes in Congress.]
    Increased control of our border with Mexico would have the effect of forcing Mexicans to stop looking north to the U.S. for their economic salvation, but instead to the south and Mexico City where their national government resides.
    [And where they, like every other nation in the world of massive continuous infusions of work-saving technologies in all fields, should be implementing work-sharing systems such as Timesizing as fast as they can.]

  2. Arguing against a low-tax theory, pointer digest (to C2), NYT, C1.
    Many Americans believe a low-tax economy grows faster than a high-tax economy, and they often attribute rapid growth in America to lower taxes. What may surprise them is that there is no evidence to support that.
    [Here's the target article -]
    Economic scene - If taxes were lower, the economy would grow faster, right? Economists say not necessarily - When both parties toe the same [anti tax] line, policy discussions can be hampered, by Jeff Madrick, NYT, C2.
    [Here's another blocked-out area of research, thanks to the near-sighted creeping grabbiness of those with already more spending power than they can possibly spend, grabbiness that ultimately suctions the spending power away from the markets that once sustained the productivity that maintain the value of their own investments. Real representation by politicians of both major U.S. parties has been blocked by the huge campaign contributions of the self-insulated and self-isolated top income brackets, and the USA has entered the "decline" period in the "rise and fall of empires" because there's NO FEEDBACK. Part of the huge solid and widespread prosperity of wartime is the steeply graduated income taxes that characterize those periods. As Will Rogers said when asked, "Where are we going to get the money for government programs?" - "Wal, I guess we're gonna git it from the rich, cuz they're the only folks that's got any!" (But of course, when you implement economywide work-sharing - as we finally did too late at too high a level 1938-40 to make much difference until the war gained traction - you don't need government job programs because the private sector resorbs its own disposable employees.)]

  3. [Canada's PM may have quashed a proposed bank merger - see 10/31/2002! But even laws against mergers and downsizings are unnecessary once a vibrant and responsive work sharing system is implemented, because the workweek responds immediately to the new comprehensively defined unemployment (UE) rate, getting shorter if the UE rate is too high or rising, and getting longer if the UE rate falls below a referendum-set UE target, and enforced by automatic overtime- and overwork-to-training&hiring conversion.]

10/29/2002   headlines from heaven - alias glimmers of vaguer-than-timesizing hope - 10/24/2002   headlines from heaven - alias glimmers of vaguer-than-timesizing hope -
  1. [UPsizing #1]
    G.E. to build lab in Germany for $52m, by Barnaby Feder, NYT, C4.
    ...over the next 5 years...in Garching, on the outskirts of Munich. The laboratory is expected to employ 150 scientists by 2005.   G.E...is building another, in Shanghai.
    [150 + unspecified new jobs.]

  2. [UPsizing #2]
    Bank One to hire up to 100 people in Capital Markets, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
    The Bank One Corp., which has been laying off bankers who make loans to large companies, will hire as many as 100 employees in capital markets trading, sales and research starting next year to increase its market share in areas like bond underwriting. "As other institutions are cutting, we have an opportunity to pick up some really great people," David Schabes, chairman of Banc One Capital Markets, said. Bank One will start hiring in January, he said. Bank One's corporate banking unit, including Capital Markets, had 2,306 employees at the end of the 3rd quarter, a 17% decline from a year earlier. Bank One is based in Chicago.

  3. [UPsizing #3]
    Pentagon sets up intelligence unit - Team is seeking data on Iraq overlooked by spy agencies, by Eric Schmitt & Thom Shanker, NYT, front page.
    WASHINGTON...- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his senior advisers have assigned a small intelligence unit to search for information on Iraq's hostile intentions or links to terrorists that the nation's spy agencies may have overlooked, Pentagon officials said today. Some officials say the creation of the team reflects frustration on the part of Mr. Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secy Paul Wolfowitz and other senior officials that they are not receiving undiluted information on the capacities of Pres. Saddam Hussein of Iraq and his suspected ties to terrorist organizations....
    [Unspecified new patronage jobs for Dubya's good friends.]

  4. Curbing capital flight, pointer blurb (to A14), WSJ, front page.
    Trader stampedes in and out of emerging markets have often left them moribund. Wall Street is reconsidering the long-taboo idea of capital controls.
    [pointing to -]
    Some warm to use of capital controls, by Pamela Druckerman, WSJ, A14.

10/23/2002   headlines from heaven - alias glimmers of vaguer-than-timesizing hope - 10/20/2002   headlines from heaven - alias glimmers of vaguer-than-timesizing hope - 10/16/2002   headlines from heaven - alias glimmers of vaguer-than-timesizing hope - 10/15/2002   headlines from heaven - alias glimmers of vaguer-than-timesizing hope - 10/05/2002   headlines from heaven - alias glimmers of vaguer-than-timesizing hope - 3 old-fashioned private-sector UPsizings, with 2,100 new jobs + unspecified, reported in NY Times &/or Wall St Journal -
  1. Judge approves Rent-A-Center sex-bias settlement, Bloomberg via NYT, B4.
    ...a $47m settlement...against Rent-A-Center Inc...based in Plano, Tex..\..the EEOC said yesterday.... About 4,600 women who made...claims will receive payment.... The settlement also calls for Rent-A-Center to offer jobs to more than 1,100 women who claimed sex discrimination....

  2. Chrysler to add workers at pickup truck plant, Reuters via NYT, B4.
    The Chrysler division of DaimlerChrysler [is] adding a 3rd shift of workers at its Warren Truck Assembly Plant outside Detroit to help meet strong demand for its Ram full-size pickup truck. The expansion will result in the addition of 1,000 jobs at the plant in July....

  3. Four indian tribes to build hotel in Washington, Bloomberg via NYT, B4.
    A partnership of tribes [unnamed!] from California and Wisconsin is investing gambling proceeds in a new Washington hotel as part of an effort to diversify sources of income for American Indians. Four Fires LLC, made up of representatives from 4 tribes [will] build a Marriott International hotel ["Marriott Residence Inn Capitol"] near the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, which is under construction...a $14m hotel with 13 stories and 233 suites...
    [and unspecified new jobs]
    due to open in 2004.

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