Phil "Mr. Timesizing®" Hyde
Good News in March, 1999
[Commentary] © 1999 Phil Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622 Cambridge MA 02140 USA 617-623-8080
Phil "Mr. Timesizing®" Hyde
Good News in March, 1999
[Commentary] © 1999 Phil Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622 Cambridge MA 02140 USA 617-623-8080
[An American hero - ]
3/31/99 On the side of labor - A man of law and letters, Thomas Geoghegan combines idealism and unswerving modesty, by Mark Feeney, Boston Globe, p. F1.
...Thomas Geoghegan [has written] two critically acclaimed works of nonfiction, "Which Side Are You On?" (1991) and "The Secret Lives of Citizens," published last month....["Secret Lives"] celebrates a golden age that grows ever more distant (the New Deal).... [Geoghegan waged] an epic, seven-year battle to get 2,500 former steelworkers the pension benefits they lost when International Harvester pulled an extremely slick deal to divest itself of Wisconsin Steel, where the men worked. In the end, Geoghegan got his clients a $14.8 million settlement. He...regrets having gotten them so little. Others marvel...he got them anything at all. "People wanted to abandon it," [says Ed Sadlowski of the United Steelworkers,] "but Tom was...tenacious...." [Says Geoghegan,] "I'm half German...and half Irish.... There is an element of the German romantic that says how important it is to try, but...of the Irish politician that also says how important it is to win...."
[Hey, a kindred spirit. Now if we could only (pronounce his name and) engage him in a discussion about the New Deal, maybe we can convince him that the real golden age was the few months between Hoover's loss of the 1932 election and FDR's winning passage of the Black-blocking NRA through Congress - a few months when we had the chance to pass the Black Thirty Hour Work Week Bill and as Fra Giovanni said, "take heaven."
[Giovanni's 1503 salutation to a friend, as retold by Robert J. Lurtsema in the Christmas Revels, starts, "There is nothing I can give you that you have not. But there is much that while I cannot give, you can take. No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today. Take heaven. No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present instant. Take peace. The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. Take joy...."]
3/31 More journalists in survey agree with press critics, by Mark Jurkowitz, Bos Globe, F1.
We have met the enemy and it is us. That's the crucial finding in a new survey [released yesterday] of 552 journalists and news executives conducted by The Pew Research Center For the People & the Press. A decade ago...only [1/3] of new media professionals cited a lack of credibility with the public as a major cause of declining news audiences. In the Pew study...that number rose...to about 50%....
[Hey, repentance is the first step to salvation.]
[These three stories demo cases where the future will reverse strictness, dropping distinctions in the first and second cases (now would be regarded as burdening churches or renters, etc.) and imposing them in the third (now would be regarded as censorship) - ]
[Well, good news and bad news again - ]
3/28 The retaliation backlash - More workers are suing, alleging firings, demotions for bias, injury compliants, by Diane Lewis, Bos Globe, F4.
[Notice that this refers to "retaliation" by employers against employees, not v.v., for normal injury reports, normal post-injury leave takings, normal workers' compensation claims, or bringing bias or harassment complaints - in short, all part of the general deterioration of management style and skill in an age of huge (but hotly denied) labor surplus. Why respect what is common and cheap - like labor? And this then leaks over into society - why respect people when they're so common and cheap?]
...According to the Equal Opportunity Commission, retaliation claims have more than doubled over the past eight years. In 1991, workers filed more than 7,900 retaliation complaints. By 1997, the number had risen to more than 18,000.
Last year, the EEOC's retaliation caseload grew to 31,059. At the same time, complaints alleging unequal pay and race and age discrimination declined.
[So it's good that employees are sticking up for themselves once they've started, but it's bad that fewer of them are sticking up for themselves up front, as shown by falling discrimination claims. That means employees are starting to take discrimination for granted again - part of the "cost of doing business," part of "reality," "what can you expect," "you can't do anything anyway," "you'll only bring down retaliation on yourself."
[This is all part of the pre-depression stages of economic and societal deterioration. And it all makes our usual "solution" more and more likely - War - unless we reverse it by doing something intelligent this time and engineering a labor shortage by (1) converting overtime into training and hiring to actually enforce the maximum workweek and (2) lowering the maximum workweek gradually until all our under-employment (unemployment, welfare, disability, homelessness, prisons, forced part-time, forced self-employment without clients...) is reabsorbed and markets are again solid, not just "booming" for the rich in stocks and Porsches.]
[Women are getting to the boiling point of readiness for the shorter hours imperative - ]
3/28 Women carrying commute burden, by Alan Sipress, Washington Post via Bos Globe, A29.
...Jan Stanley's two-hour trajectory from her DC office at the Dept of Veterans Affairs to her suburban Virginia home carries her past the dry cleaner, pharmacy, photo shop, and two pet-food stores..\.. The phenomenon [is] called trip-chaining.... Her husband, who works from home, isn't about to share the burden of these errands. "Either they're going to be accomplished by me, or they're not going to get done until the weekend"..\.. Women...do far more of the errand-running than men....
[The little questions "what's the matter with leaving things to the weekend" and "why can't women negotiate harder for more sharing of errands (especially with a husband who works from home, for God's sake)" are overshadowed by the big questions "wouldn't a 30-hour fulltime workweek go good" and "with all our 'time-saving' technology, why didn't we have this decades ago"!]
3/27 Reebok CEO Paul Fireman refuses [1998 $562,500] bonus, takes pay cut, Dow Jones via Bos Globe, F1.
...to $1,000,012 from $1,038,474 a year earlier. Fireman received no options in 1998, compared with a grant of 111, 150 options last year. In 1998, Reebok's net income fell to 42 cents a diluted share, compared with $2.32 a year earlier....
[As we said to Norton Reamer of United Asset Mgmt two stories below, our condolences really go out to you, Paul. Still, stock-based incentives are frequently company-destroying even if the stock goes up. Witness what happened to the companies Chainsaw Dunlap "helped" after he left with his zillion-dollar stock incentives.]
3/26 DM Management plans name change, stores, Dow Jones via Bos Globe, E5.
...direct-marketer...will open full-price stores, change its name to J. Jill Group Inc. and...open 5-10 J. Jill stores in 2000 and bring the total to 50 in 2001.
[Out of step with the times - thank God!]
3/26 United Asset trims founder's bonus again, Bloomberg via Bos Globe, E5.
...trimmed the bonus of chief executive Norton Reamer for the second year in 1998 as the company's money-management affiliates continued to shed clients and assets. Reamer...was paid a salary of $850,000 last year, the same as in 1997, [but] a bonus of $621,600...24% lower....
[Our condolences really go out to you, Norton. Still, our hearts are not exactly bleeding for you, 'cause even when you "lose" like this, you're getting more money in one year than most people need for lifetime retirement.]
3/25 Airline pilots form alliance to help protect jobs, AP via Bos Globe, D2.
FORT WORTH - Pilot representatives from 11 airlines formed [ the "Oneworld Cockpit Crew Coalition"] yesterday to help protect their jobs as air carriers around the world forge closer relationships. The...Coalition draws its name from the oneworld alliance o five [airlines] formed earlier this year which groups American, British Airways, ...Cathay Pacific, Canadian Airlines and...Qantas. Finnair will join later this year. In addition...the pilots group also includes crew from Japan Airlines, Aerolineas Argentinas, Iberia, Lan Chile and LOT Polish Airlines.
...Pilots fear their jobs may be outsourced to cheaper carriers. "We have pledged that we will support one another through any legal means in case of a job action," said Rich LaVoy, president of the Allied Pilots Assoc., which represents pilots at American.... The outsourcing of jobs was a primary issue behind a sickout in February by American Airlines pilots, who were [angry] about how parent company AMR Corp. is integrating pilots from Reno Air. Nearly 6,700 flights were cancelled, costing American [up to] an estimated...$225 million.... The coalition also said...that safety is a concern under the globalization of airlines...because a passenger can buy a ticket on one airline but climb onto the plane of another....
3/24 OPEC votes for big cut in production for one year, by Bruce Stanley, AP via Bos Globe, D2.
...a decision that could...drive up the cost of driving, flying, and shipping products in the United States.... OPEC will reduce its own oil output by 1.716 million barrels a day. Non-OPEC producers like Mexico, Norway, Russia, and Oman will reduce production by an additional 388,000 barrels a day [for a total cut of over 2 million bbl/day or about 2.6% of the world supply]....
[Hey, it saves fossil fuel.]
3/23 OPEC plan to drive gas prices up, by Bruce Stanley, AP via Bos Globe, C2.
[Now maybe we can get back to renewable energy.]
3/23 US, Europe in trade war over American beef, AP via Bos Globe, C2.
WASHINGTON - The United States, already in a trade war with Europe over bananas, yesterday targeted $900 million in European products in a separate fight over Europe's ban on American beef treated with growth hormones.... In all, 81 European products were put on a preliminary target list from which...Clinton...will select a final list of goods that will be subject to punitive tariffs of 100% starting as early as June.
[What a relief to see that simplistic, ecology-insensitive notion of free trade weakening!]
3/22 Striking a balance between family and work - The task is even tougher for single parents, by Richard Freeland, President, Northeastern University, op ed in Bos Globe, A19.
...One of the most profound shifts has occurred in the relationship between family life and work. The mix of time devoted to each has altered dramatically.... To make more money in the '90s, parents must work longer hours at jobs that require more years of schooling. ...In the 1950s and 1960s...many mothers who did work were employed in part-time...jobs and...families felt less tension between work and child-rearing. One breadwinner was the norm.... In 1997, nearly eight out of 10 mothers with children under the age of 18 worked an average of 1,600 hours annually. That's 30 hours a week, year round, with no vacations [and if actually part-time, low pay and few or no benefits]....
Today, Northeastern University [will have a] Labor-Management Conference on Building a Family Centered Labor Market Policy.... Families deserve a level playing field if they are to take care of their families and succeed professionally....
[Richard misses a couple of really big points here -
#1 - What's the good of all this miraculous technology that's pouring into our economy if it's not making life easier for all of us?! We should have been working 30 hours a week for 40 hours' pay DECADES AGO. What we call part time today, such as 30 hours a week, should be regarded as full time with good pay and full benefits and vacation. That's the whole point of productivity-raising (time and work saving) technology, as distinct from purely quality-raising technology.
#2 - Richard makes a fatal connection between more money and longer hours. In the historical long view, more money has gone with shorter hours, not longer. And longer hours goes with less money. Think about sweat shops. Think about working conditions in the 3rd world. Think about working conditions here in the early 1800s. But for over a century, American unions demanded shorter hours and higher pay, and tended to get it. In the 1930s when they allowed themselves to be distracted from shorter hours, they signed their own death warrant. Only the war gave them a stay of execution. Now they are down to less than 14% of the workforce, hours are climbing again (as Richard points out) and wages have been stagnant for years. Stagnant wages means a labor glut, no matter how much politicians try to hide it with a "low" but leaking unemployment rate that counts less of the real problem every year.
[We've got to get a grip on the supply and demand for...ourselves, in the aggregate. And in the context of inpouring work-saving technology, that means getting a grip on our anachronistic working hours. We're going backward in time, working long hours today that have not been seen since the 1890s! One developed approach to this project is Timesizing.
[The conference is from 8:30 to 3:15 today at Northeastern's Curry Student Center ballroom. Sen. Teddy Kennedy is speaking 1:15-1:45.]
3/22 Happy talk [or rather "happy sing"], editorial in Bos Globe, A18.
Pop culture is not always trash. Sometimes it's wisdom, as in the lyrics to the hit song "Everybody's free (to wear sunscreen)." This oddball number, adapted from a 1997 column written by Mary Schmich of the Chicago Tribune, is a mock graduation speech delivered by the Australian actor Lee Perry.... The pithy, punchy philosophy for living...is popular with yound listeners and their parents alike.
[Sample (from memory): Live in New York for a while but don't stay long enough to get hard. Live in California for a year but don't stay long enough to get soft.]
["Oh What a Relief" Dept? - ]
3/21/1999 Greenspan says more derivatives rules not needed, AP via Bos Globe, C7.
BOCA RATON, Fla. - Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan says financial institutions should be given more incentives to better assess the risk of derivatives, but he suggested greater government oversight is not necessary.
[Oh yeah? And who should pay for those extra incentives, Alan? The same people (US taxpayers) who ultimately funded your huge bailout (see Collapse news 9/25) of that hedge fund in September? Alan, you've got money. Why not put your money where your mouth is, and leave us out of it for a change?! You're always "doing good with other people's money" as Friedman puts it. In 1776 they called it "taxation without representation." Today it's pain without input.]
Greenspan's remarks Friday were in direct contrast to those of Brooksley Born, the outgoing chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, who argued a day earlier [at the same commodities industry conference] that more regulation is necessary to prevent a systemic collapse that could affect the US and world economies....
[Greenspan is so wealth-insulated that no way is he ever going to feel negative consequences from any of his decisions. This is NOT a feedback system. And any system with cybernetics this bad ain't gonna last.]
3/20 Mass. jobless rate declines to 2.9% in Feb. - Number of unemployed drops to 29-year low, by Diane Lewis, Bos Globe, C1.
...well below the nation's 4.4% rate...
[except that they no longer require part time to add up to full time equivalents any more, and just count each part time employee as simply employed.]
...resulting in the widest disparity between the state and national rates since the two began to diverge four years ago....
3/19 PCs can now be found in over half of US homes, Reuters via Boston Globe, p. C2.
...The La Jolla, CA-based market research firm InfoBeads...said in its annual survey that 50.3% of homes had computers at the end of 1998, compared with just over 40% two years ago.... The survey was based on questionnaires mailed to 50,000 homes in the United States across the economic spectrum.
[But what percentage responded, and from what income brackets?]
3/19 R.I. union protests health care merger, AP via Bos Globe, p. C5.
Rhode Island doesn't want a monopoly of the health care industry, [Stan Israel, VP of the New England Health Care Employees, District 1199] told a crowd of more than 100 during a rally against the proposed merger of the Lifespan and Care New England networks.... The proposed merger would...control...about 58% of all hospital beds..\.. The crowd gathered to support a bill that would prevent...contolling over 50%...in the state....
3/18 Ecologically Perfect Car from Daimler-Chrysler, WBUR-Boston, 91.9 FM, 6:40 am.
[A quarter of a century or more ago, Buckminster Fuller called for a fuel cell car, and pouring the research into fuel cell development to get one. Now at last we're getting one. Fuel cells are better than batteries because they're a lot lighter and have a longer range between refueling/recharging (Daimler's range is 280 miles). And any kind of electric car is better for the environment than gas cars because they run on renewable energy and don't pollute.
[Daimler-Chrysler's offering was based on Canadian fuel-cell technology (YO Ca-na-da!) from the Ballard? Co. (not sure we heard that right). The car needs hydrogen fuel and there are still no hydrogen filling stations, but with a hydrogen extractor, it could also run on methane. The whole announcement has started a race between the car companies for the best and cheapest fuel cell car, although right now they're way expensive and not yet in the showrooms.]
3/18 House vote sets limit on imports of steel, by Paul Blustein and Juliett Eilperin, Washington Post via Bos Globe, A26.
The House dealt a harsh setback to the Clintonadministration's free-trade policy yesterday by approving, 289 to 141, a bill that would strictly limit the amount of steel imported into the United States. The bill, responding to the torrent of cheap imports that battered the US steel industry over the last year, is one of the most protectionist pieces of legislation to pass either house of Congress in recent memory....
Although the bill appears unlikely to become law, its passage sends a message the administration had wanted to avoid at a time of fragility in the world economy - that the United States may balk at accepting a large volume of products made in countries suffering from recession. Moves toward closing the US market could cause the global financial crisis to flare anew...
[Oh, so it's OK if it smolders but not if it flares?]
...and prompt retaliation against American exports....
[What American exports?! - nobody can afford our stuff! - and our trade deficit was $169b last year and rising.]
The overwhelming and bipartisan support for the measure was all the more striking because the booming US economy and low jobless rate would ordinarily be expected to dampen protectionist sentiment.
[Yeah, they would, wouldn't they. So it looks like a few Congressmen have seen thru the happytalk and know it's fluff. Like the numerous municipal and state legislators who are so desperate to create jobs, they'll bid against one another in offering tax incentives for companies to locate in their jurisdication, or stay located there. And like the flat wages, and lengthening average workweek if you're still "full time" - symptoms not of boom but of depression, not of low unemployment but of labor glut. The first thing Hoover did when the Great Depression started was get rid of the hemorrhaging of jobs involved in free trade - it's just something you do to save jobs. (And later on he cut the government workweek to 40 but it wasn't enough.)]
...Said Rep. [Joe] Moakley, the South Boston Democrat, "While the stock market is flirting with the 10,000 mark, 10,000 steel workers lost their jobs last year."
[This is exactly the behavior of the stock market in 1928 and early 1929 before the Great Crash in October.]
3/17 Dow tops 10,000, but falls back - Milestone reached early, then sellers carry day, by Joyce Rosenberg, AP via Bos Globe, D2.
[NOW can we stop thinking cosmetically and look at the deep structure?!]
[Good news - and bad]
3/17 Women's gains tied to jump in [New England couples'] incomes, by Diane Lewis, Bos Globe, front page.
...Between 1983 and 1997, the real earnings of married couples with college degrees in New England rose 45%, from $70,079 to $101,780, much of that gain because of...the median earnings of married working mothers [which] rose 77%, accounting for almost 2/3 of the real income gains of such dual-earner households...according to a study [by Paul Harrington of Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies and Thomas Kochan of MIT's Work and Employment Institute].... By contrast, men in such households experienced an income gain of just 9.8%. In dollar amounts, however, the median pay for men continued to be twice as much as for women..\..
Married women working [in New England] today are better educated, are higher paid, hold better jobs, and are working more hours than ever before, according to [the study]....
[Notice the strange idea that "working more hours" is a mark of progress on par with better education, higher pay, and better jobs.]
...Mothers are now working an average of 1,600 more hours per year than they did in 1983. Barbara Marx of Wellesley...a vice president at Fidelity Investments...has always worked full time [even] with two children, putting in 12 hours a day at the office each day before factoring in the commute, and relying heavily on a "tremendous support system" [such as service providers (nannies, cleaning people, day care...), friends and family members]....
[This is supposed to be a model for all? Sounds more like child-neglect and slavery. Why bother to have kids? Why bother to have work-saving technology? Why not "get a life"?]
Lisa Wood, 39, a senior partner at the law firm of Nutter, McClennen & Fish [said,] "I would never do what I do, in terms of having a very demanding job, for the money.... You have to have passion for your work."
[Plenty of people have loved their jobs and found that irrelevant at downsizing time. And note the elastic, non-essential type of work we're talking about here so far - mutual funds and lawyering.]
...The percentage of married women entering New England's labor force has increased from just under
70% to nearly 80% over the study period.... New England's labor shortage, and the increased demand for workers in such fields as financial services and high technology, have helped professional women entering the market garner top-paying jobs....
[This is a pretty strange "labor shortage" - because as soon as you turn 50, it vanishes. Lisa Wood better stay 39 forever because the legal profession may well share the fate of high tech, where there's a 17% unemployment rate for over 50-year-olds.]
...Both [men and women] now face the demand of the 50- to 60-hour work week..\..
[Let's see, the 48-hour week (six 8-hr days) was common in the 1920s. The 54-hour week (six 9-hr days) was being won by miners in 1904. The 60-hour week (six 10-hr days) was common in the 1890s. So we in the 1990s have gone from the 40-hour week in 1940 back to the 60-hour week of the 1890s. What progress. And much of it on salary so - no overtime pay and thus, charity for the rich. Why don't we just cut to the chase and repeal the Emancipation Proclamation? What a pathetic, deludedly self-important nation of slaves we have become, apparently devoid of the imagination to devote our lives to our own dreams and donating them to somebody else's dreams instead.]
Joan K. Peters, author of "When Mothers Work: Loving our Children without Sacrificing Ourselves"...calls this situation a hidden fault-line, and she said it has led to increased stress and anxiety among working women with children. In releasing their report yesterday, both Harrington and Kochan said they are hoping to generate dialogue and solutions for working parents whose job responsibilities are preventing them from meeting their families' needs. Their paper, titled "Building a Family Centered Labor Market Policy," will be presented Monday at a Northeastern University conference [$65, the student center ballroom, 8:30-3].... Nationally...federal statistics show [that among] dual-earner families, 22% of wives now earn more than their husbands, up from 18% in 1987 and 4.4% in 1970....
[Oxymoron Dept. - An 'executive paycut'?!]
3/17 Gifford took 19% pay cut, by Daniel Dunaief, Bloomberg via Bos Globe, D6.
BankBoston Corp. cut the 1998 compensation of chairman and chief executive Charles Gifford 19% to $2.96 million after losses in trading cut into profits.
[On the other hand, at those levels, "life is tough." And check out how it happened. He actually got an 8.6% salary raise - roughly 8.6% more than most people in this "robust" economy - ]
...The 15-th largest US bank, which agreed to be acquired by Fleet...paid Gifford $869,231 in salary, up 8.6% from 1997. His bonus fell 24% to $1.9 million.... Gifford received no long-term incentive pay in 1998, compared with $271,181 in 1997.
["Long-term incentive" in corporate America in 1999!? What's that!?
[Note that Gifford's $690,000 paycut would fund 3 of the programs below and still have $15,000 left over.]
3/17 Program gives boost to low-income women, by Brian O'Neill, Bos Globe, D4.
...As director of the Center for Women & Enterprise's Community Entrepreneurs Program, [Jennifer] Bennet has lalunched an initiative focusing exclusively on creating women-owned businesses in low-income communities in the Greater Boston area. The nonprofit organization's program is backed by $225,000 from BankBoston's Mabel A. Horne Trust. "We're trying to make a model for a national program."... Of the 30 women participating in the program, which just started, the majority are former or current recipients of public assistance.... Restaurants, day care, and retail businesses are among the more popular start-up ideas.... For more information on CWE's program, call Bennet at (617) 423-3001, ext. 229, or e-mail her at jbennet@cweboston.org
3/17 State St. Global starts union-oriented fund, Dow Jones via Bos Globe, D9.
...aiming...at IAM members who want to support the union with their retirement dollars..\..will invest at least 2/3 of its assets in companies where the International Association of Machinists represents employees.
[More "coals to Newcastle" dept. - ]
3/16 Motorola to donate $5m to MIT's Media Lab, AP via Bos Globe, C9.
[Hey, we had $10 from the D'Arbeloffs on 3/06 and $20 from Merrill Lynch on 3/09 (see below) so this should have been $40m from Motorola at the established doubling pace! Cheapskates!
[Seriously, you can't solidify a bubble economy on the basis of charity, especially charity for the rich.] But where there's charity, maybe there's the chance of reinvestment in one's customers' customers via one's own employees' wages and training.
3/14 Growth of advertising blockers highlights Web surfers' frustrations, by Ashley Dunn, LA Times via Bos Globe, G3.
...Going under such names as WebWasher, interMute and AtGuard, the programs [poised to become the mute button of the computer age] automatically eliminate all advertising from Web pages, fulfilling the consumer dream of entertainment unfettered by the intrusions of...pulsating, candy-colored...advertising that has spread across the Internet, slowing the surfing...to a dog-paddle at times. "They are a symbol of people saying, 'I'm not going to take it any more,'" said Jakob Nielsen, cofounder of [Nielsen Norman consulting] and one of the leading evangelists for a leaner, faster Internet.
3/13 CMGI can block Lycos deal - Chief says major investors feel price too low, by Ross Kerber, Bos Globe, A9.
The largest shareholder in Lycos Inc...has rallied enough dissident investors to block the...firm's proposed merger with elements of USA Networks Inc....
[We may not have this exactly (from T.S. Eliot?) but -
The greatest good is the greatest treason -
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.]
[Yes, "eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die."]
3/12 Consumers opened wallets in Feb. - US says retail sales jump as Americans go on spending tear despite weak global economy, Reuters via Bos Globe, C2.
[Is that cash...or credit?]
3/11 Bid to create largest bank facing series of hurdles - Mgmt clashes, potential layoffs cited, AP via Boston Globe, p. D3.
PARIS - Banque Nationale de Paris' surprise $37.2 billion bid for two rival French banks faces serious hurdles including the politically sensitive issue of layoffs in a country with high unemployment....
[All we have to say is "Good! - the more obstacles the better." We especially like the astonishing concern over potential layoffs, but then, this is Europe where they're not doing a complete cover-up of their unemployment problem as we are, and where frankly, people seem to have more respect for themselves and their quality of life than we have here. Their CEOs, willynilly, are a bit farther-sighted than ours, and have more concern about maintaining their domestic spending and markets - along with the requisite high-quality employment. However, they're still hanging onto a lot of unnecessary unemployment because of they still don't "get" the power of work sharing and the need to pursue it much more thoroughly (along lines such as those outlined in Timesizing).]
3/11 Judge rules in favor of credit unions, Bloomberg via Bos Globe, D2.
WASHINGTON - A US judge [Colleen Kollar-Kotelly] left intact rules designed to let federal credit unions take on new members, rejecting arguments from a bank trade group seeking to thwart expansion by the largest of those tax-exempt financial institutions.... The decision is a setback to US banks in their bid to reduce competition....
[We don't like tax exemptions or any other complications in the tax code, but as long as they're there, they might as well increase competition, not reduce it, especially for banks which are gungho on reducing competition among themselves these days and have laid off some 95,000 people per year from 1995 to 2000, thus bashing their own markets. Why make it easier for the suicidal?]
3/11 House passes nursing home law, Bloomberg via Bos Globe, D2.
Vencor Inc. and other nursing home companies would be barred from evicting Medicaid patients under legislation approved by the House of Representatives, 398 to 12.... Medicaid accounts for nearly 50% of nursing home industry revenue. Vencor shares fell 1/16....
3/11 Clinton cites Guatemala errors - Admits US backed repressive units, by Richard Chacón, Bos Globe, front page.
[Shades of the US trying to get Japan to apologize for World War II.
[Does this mean that Clinton is now going to admit US errors in Panama, Grenada, Vietnam, Chile, and all the other places cited by Chomsky? Could this be the turning point in our drift toward taking on the Evil Empire status of our former enemies? Will we now start reversing the growth of our world-record prison population?]
3/11 Mass[achusetts] seen lagging on electric cars, by Scott Allen, Bos Globe, front page.
[Hey, at least we're talking about them at last.]
3/10 Sony won't slash US operations, Reuters via Bos Globe, C2.
Sony Corp.'s US operations will be spared the brunt of...17,000 job cuts over four years [announced yesterday, 3/09]....
3/10 Greenspan says lender bias bad for economy, AP via Bos Globe, C3.
WASHINGTON - Discrimination by lenders against minority-owned small businesses is bad for the economy, Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan said yesterday.... "To the extent that market participants discriminate - consciously or, more likely unconsciously - credit does not flow to its most profitable uses and the distribution of output is distorted. In the end, costs are higher, less real output is produced, and national wealth accumulation is slowed," he said.
[Greenspan has not mentioned either of the two major reasons.
3/09 Merrill Lynch to give MIT $20m over 5 years, by Ross Kerber, Bos Globe, C7.
[Very lovely but this is "coals to Newcastle" and not very original - the D'Arbeloffs just coughed up $10m 3 days ago - see the 3/06 item on our Collapse page. Is this developing into a poker gam? - "I'll match you and double!" Then the next ones have to be 40, 80, 160, 320m etc. We reiterate our basic judgement on our current make-do form of "Skimming and Charity" capitalism - any economic design that relies for vital functions (like centrifuging wealth) on charity is to that extent lethally flawed."]
3/07 [Nuclear] Reactors: Healthy but Dying, by Matthew Wald, NYT, 4-16.
[Good! Because nuclear reactions anywhere but the surface of a star can never really be "healthy."]
3/06 Shareholder sues Concentra [Managed Care], Bloomberg News via Bos Globe, F1.
...largest manager of workers' compensation costs for employers, was sued [in Delaware Chancery Court in Wilmington] by a shareholder [William Steiner] who says he will be shortchanged in a $1.1 billion buyout by an investment firm....[see 3/04 item on Mergers page]
[Hey, guess you could call this suing to force a workers' compensation company to expand into idlers' compensation! Whatever, - at least it may slow down corporate and monetary concentration - our BIGGEST current problem. And the more concentrated wealth compacts into the top income brackets, the farther the draw of the bow that will shoot us down into Depression. We are an inverted pyramid putting more and more weight on productive people at the bottom and treating them worse and worse - exactly like the 1920s. How long can this go on? Even the know-it-alls (financial analysts) are stumped.]
[Some secret! -]
3/05 Group endorses Microsoft breakup, by Ted Bridis, AP via Bos Globe, E2.
WASHINGTON - A prominent trade group [the Software and Information Industry Association] in the technology industry, traditionally loath to involve the government in its business, is secretly endorsing the breakup of Microsoft if the company loses its landmark antitrust case.... Outside the bitter courtroom fight, there is genuine apprehension in Washington about tinkering with...a company that employs 27,000 people, recorded $14.4 billion in sales last year, and whose Windows software runs most of the world's personal computers....
[Question - How many would it employ if it didn't work people so hard - i.e., long hours, mostly unpaid because of the prevalence of salaried employees? A Compaq-Digital employee recently back from skiing in Whistler reported that a gondola load of software engineers out there was badmouthing Microsoft, yet one guy was quiet. Upon investigation, he turned out to be a Microsoft employee who was taking a year to "get back his life." Keep this up, Mr. Gates, and you won't have enough customers with the scratch to buy your yearly upgrades!]
The group proposes...splitting [Microsoft] up [A] into companies selling separate products, such as Windows software and Internet content, or...[B] into three or four "Mini-Microsofts," each with identical products.
[We'd go with Plan A. Plan B sounds stupid. But whichever, corporate culture, freed from Supergeek, would have a chance to diversify and maybe some of those spinoffs would get a little balance in their employees' lives - which could only mean more jobs - and a bigger software market downstream.]
[Private property makes a comeback between nations - ]
3/04 Water-rich Canada shuts the spigot, by Colin Nickerson, Bos Globe, front page.
...Parliament last month voted unanimously for a moratorium on bulk exports of water [to e.g. USA or China]..\\.. Canada holds a fifth of the world's fresh water supply...the first "water-rich" nation to [control] a resource that some specialists predict will become the most valuable commodity of the 21st century..\..with an eye toward one day becoming the OPEC of H2O....
[The principle of private property evolved as a way to stick someone with the benefits and the costs of specified resources, so the buck doesn't keep passing on and on until a really serious situation develops, as is now developing in global financial markets.
[Just because we in the US northeast are stupid enough to subsidize the fountains of desert-dwelling Las Vegans and their casinos, not to mention the lawn watering in other desert communities like Phoenix, Tucson, "Green Valley" (we're not making this up!) and Los Angeles, why should our worsening ecological unsustainability spread to our sovereign neighbors just because our CEOs have declared that private property holds only between individuals and not between nations? Between nations, our CEOs suddenly espouse communism ("globalization") so they can go in, skim and concentrate (in their own few hands) as much as they can, thus continuing to undermine their own consumer markets. Oy, vut a buncha dummies! "You can't run the whole world on (short-term) speculation." (See also 3/3 entry on Collapse page re day trading.)]
[Yankees going bananas! For all you terminally jingo Gringos, we omitted a lot of "gee why wouldn't those nasty Canucks share with us" lingo from the above story and here's why - when youse Yankees are hurtin', it's jess fine to impose trade controls, as this story shows - ]
3/04 US targets EU products in escalating trade war - Peel back the charges, countercharges and a deeper problem is found: doubts on WTO, by Aaron Zitner, Bos Globe, p. D1.
[Yeah sure - blame the World Trade Organization for the unintended consequences of your own simplistic "free trade" fixation!]
WASHINGTON -...Yesterday, a trade dispute over [bananas! - we are not making this up!] prompted the Clinton administration to level heavy penalties on a range of imported European products....
[Whoa, trade controls are bad when somebody else (Canada) does it but OK when we (USA) do it, at least in retaliation - hypocrisie, nous avons trop d'hypocrisie. Hey, anything to sideline the true believers in the "free trade" religion which has cost so many jobs - Perot's "giant sucking sound" - and that includes NAFTA. Ecologically, free trade is a fast ticket to biosphere collapse, as the dean of ecological economics, *Herman Daly, has so often pointed out.]
[And speaking of the effects of having speculators run the world (2 stories above) - ]
3/04 Liberty [Financial] cancels Societe Generale deal, by Lynnley Browning, Bos Globe, D5.
...citing a precipitous drop in the [US-based Asset Management arm of the French bank] since the $216 million deal was announced in August.... Since August, that firm has seen its assets plunge around 40% to $2.8 billion, the victim of volatile world markets and panicky investors who have bailed out of the firm's So-Gen mutual funds.
[So what we're seeing here is, these guys are eventually gonna hurt one another SO BAD that they themselves start calling for a few groundrules in this "free"-for-all.]
[Another brief reprieve? Or another pollyanna-reversed interpretation? - ]
3/3 Indicators point to hearty economy, by Donna Weston, AP via Bos Globe, C2.
NEW YORK - ...The Conference Board, a private research group, reported yesterday that its Index of Leading Economic Indicators rose 0.5% to 106.9 in January from a revised level of 106.4 in December and 106.2 in November.... Said Michel Boldin, senior economist with the Conference Board, "Over the past six months, the index has increased 1.2%, which is far above its historical average...."
[Is it remotely possible that the CEO-financed Conference Board has unwittingly set up its index in a way that does not reflect new types of problems developing in the economic deep structure, or that does not sound appropriate alarms when it's "far above its historical average," or that even perceives some component indicators in reverse? Let's look into this a bit more...]
Nine of the 10 leading indicators that make up the Conference Board's index rose in January. Leading the way were increases in prices of 500 common stocks....
[Suppose over and above a certain point (which we are working on determining), the inflation of stock prices is a bad thing, reflecting a concentration of wealth that signals a decrease in spending activity and the velocity of currency circulation? This would mean that the Board's leading "leading indicator" is actually a negative, not positive, signal. Now let's look at their one "negative" indicator.]
The sole area of decline was in the average factory work week.
[Now any Martian visiting Earth would look at that and say, "Congratulations! Your work-saving technology has given you more free time!" But so twisted has our perception become - since the New Deal when we made our delayed-fuse time-bomb decision to freeze the workweek and go with job creation, instead of continuing to adjust the workweek downward and stay with work sharing - that we now see less work as evil, and not good. As the Bible says, Cursed be they that call good evil, and evil good. Not only is our societal feedback system neutralized by the concentration of enough money by our decision-makers to completely insulate themselves from any negative consequences of their decisions, but it has become a potent mechanism of our own deterioration by our reversed-polarity interpretation of its readings.]
3/3 Mass. Senate votes [36-1] to hike minimum wage to $6.75 [from $5.25 in 3 steps over 3 years], AP via Bos Globe, C3.
..."We in the Senate felt strongly the lowest paid workers in the Commonwealth deserve a raise," said Senate President Thomas Birmingham (D-Chelsea).
[This a self-defeating means to a worthy end. It is no government's place to give raises to employees of private-sector businesses regardless of their job level, skill and productivity. It is every government's place to balance its own economy, in the sense of making sure that the velocity of spending activity dba monetary circulation, a function of decentralized spending power, is sufficient to absorb its own productivity. There is a constant tendency in any population for the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer. Every society has instituted ways to redress this creeping instability - the Hebrew great and small jubilees, the Tlingit potlatch, the Hopi katsina distributions.... In past decades, Americans have been dismantling these "centrifuge mechanisms," starting with the degraduation of the income tax by JFK in 1963. The problem cannot be solved at the bottom. It must be solved at the top. Try to raise the bottom and the whole market frame will just shift up to compensate - it's called "inflation."
[Specific problems with the minimum wage approach? It fights market forces instead of working through them or harnessing them. It creates a bigger gap at the bottom of the wage ladder for would-be entrants into the job market. In other words, it makes hiring harder, in the same way Europe has made hiring harder. We need to make hiring easier.
[It motivates employers to compensate by trying to get more out of their employees per hour, and trim breaks, and benefits (e.g., directly and by increasing conversion from benefit-burdened full time to benefit-free part time), and install surveillance, etc. Rightly did much of the labor movement in the 1930s avoid the minimum wage concept, fearing that it would become a maximum wage - which is exactly what it has become for the unskilled.
[When it becomes necessary to institute government controls in the money area (in about 100 years, say), this will be done not by a system to balance wages (money per job) but one to balance incomes (money per person). Wages over the centuries will continue to spread in range and volatilize in level. Incomes, however, will narrow in range and stabilize in level. But what about the instigating problem - ]
A 40-hour employee who earns minimum wage now makes $10,920 annually - $3,730 below the federal poverty rate for a family of three.
[The near-term solution to this problem involves a way to work through market forces instead of fighting them and scrunching them all into an assumed standard form. This solution raises wages in an unimaginably flexible way by creating an overall shortage of labor. This gives the economy only one artificiality to absorb - an artificial labor shortage (fair and just because impartially overall) - instead of the two artificialities we are now trying to get it to absorb - (1) artificial jobs resulting from our misguided but pervasive job creation efforts and (2) artificial wages resulting from our minimum wage legislation.
[And how do you go about "creating an artificial labor shortage"? The same way we did from 1776 to 1940 when we adjusted the workweek from 80-84 hours a week down to 40 hours a week - we adjust the workweek gradually downwards. How do we do this gradually, non-traumatically, step by step, only as much as necessary at each step, and as much as possible, win-win and market-oriented? We call it Timesizing.]
3/02 Protesting wage inequities, campuses lead the way, by James Carroll, Bos Globe, A15.
[Hey, Mom, the kids are waking up.]
I read [about] an American's recent visit to a clothing factory in Haiti. He [showed the workers a shirt] from their own looms, and told them what he had paid for it at Wal-Mart. "When I translated the $10.97 into the local currency - 178.26 gourdes ... in unison, the workers screamed their shock, disbelief, anger: ... the sales price of just one shirt in the US amounted to nearly five days of their wages."
What is to be done about such injustice?
[James, we'll tell you what is to be done about such injustice in just one word - Timesizing. Any questions? - phone 617-623-8080.
[And in the meantime, consider the building problem for CEOs, including "100 billion dollar Bill" Gates - their astronomical wealth concentration and failure to reinvest massively is vacuuming the spending power away from the markets for their own investments (and we don't mean "reinvestments"). Once again (last time was the 1920s), we are living in the lag time between when we technologically jump our productivity without jumping our wages and spending, and when we find out that productivity without markets is meaningless.]
[The democratization of information proceeds apace - ]
3/01 Web resources: Librarians are on cutting edge, Leslie Stebbins, Letter to Editor, Bos Globe, A16.
...Librarians...are developing search engines, creating selective gateways to scholarly Web resources, and negotiating complex licensing agreements so more people can access our resources.... Students at Brandeis and at many colleges...still visit the library frequently. But some do so...from their dorm room...through the library's home page....