Doomwatch^TM vs. Timesizing^®

9/11  7 "oh nooooo's" -

• Atomic power exports [- $50m worth from Korea to USA], by Samuel Len, NYT, B2.

• Canadian unemployment rises [.1% in Aug. from July's 7.7%], Reuters via NYT, B2.

• Auto Workers try to wring DaimlerChrysler concessions [- demand bosses go beyond simple promise to remain neutral in UAW organizing campaigns], Bloomberg via NYT, B4.
  [Geez, they've already offered you lifetime employment (see goodnews 9/6), you morons. Now you want them to do your work for you? This dumb union laziness is just shooting the movement in the foot! Or ... you may just need some smarter spindoctors.]

• Pentagon reluctant to isolate Indonesia, by John Donnelly, Boston Globe, A1.
  {So what worse nightmare than goons murdering democracy are the Pentagon pinheads saving themselves for?]

• Cousteau Society boats harassed endangered whales, Canada says, by Colin Nickerson, Bos Globe, A1.
  [Huh?!? (And a Nickerson should know = grand old fishing family from Cape Cod.)]
  ...Eyewitnesses, including marine biologists, recreational boaters, and operators of whale-watching tours, complained that small outboard-powered craft from the Cousteau research ship Alcyone had repeatedly buzzed and bumped whales...also...slashed by the propellers of the inflatable powerboats. "We've never had a case with such a huge number of complaints...," said...a scientist with Canada's Dept. of Fisheries and Oceans. "That it should be the Cousteau people - it's kind of bizarre"....

• Forbes tax plan courts the poor [- a family of four earning under $36K would pay no taxes], by Michael Kranish, Bos Globe, A1.
  [We don't need any help boosting the rich & poor in an already "dual economy." We need help boosting the middle. And boosting people still in Steve Forbes' picturebook 2-parent 2-child family in an overpopulated world and in a nation of single-parent families - the "poor" saving hundreds while the rich save millions? We don't think so.]

• By court order, [school] busing ends where it began, by Yellin and Firestone, NYT, A1.
  [A trifle premature, since the income-disparity behind all this is still unstaunched and actually much, much worse. And you can't cap income concentration without creating dependency unless you cap work&skill concentration first, ergo Timesizing.]

• The new Russian menace - Corruption may be as big a peril as Communism was, by James Leach, NYT, A27.
  ...Western institutions [e.g., banks, have become vulnerable] to servicing the world's most virulent kleptocracy....

• Smarter than the average cop - Force's rejection of high-IQ applicant upheld, by Ellen Barry, Boston Globe, B1.
  [In the case of applicant Robert Jordan, scoring 33/50 instead of just 27/50 or less on a police test in New London, Conn., no, Connecticut - let's fully name this gradually stupider state.]
  ...This week, US District Court Judge Peter Dorsey [issued] a summary judgment, saying it is reasonable to reject people who score too well on a screening test....
  [Boy, are we in trouble now, duh. Did this dopey judge ever hear of career ladders? If we can't get smart people in at the bottom of copdom, and they can't come in without starting at the bottom, guess what we're dooming ourselves to....] [Reassuring sequel: 4 days later a real police dept. (San Francisco) invited this guy to apply there: "Rejected cop candidate wooed" - blowout pointer, NYT 9/14 p.B1.]

1. Americans' use of credit cards rises steeply, Bloomberg via NYT, C6.
   Shoppers amassed credit card debt at the fastest pace in nearly three years in July, Fed...figures showed [yesterday], indicating that spending is continuing to keep the economic expansion on track toward a record [5 months away].
   [How can the economic "expansion" be anything but a bubble when it's based on the most expensive kind of consumer debt? This is just a rerun of the 1920s when we'd all just discovered installment buying.]

2. Greenspan now positive on prospects for economy, Bloomberg via NYT, C8.
   [Geez, will he make up his mind?!]
   ...suggested [yesterday] that the United States economy's expansion could continue, thanks to advancements in information technology.
   [Oh yeah, the old "technology cure-all" - without applying any of our technological design smarts to the self-splitting jerry-built neanderthal version of blackbox (dba "invisible hand") capitalism that we're still floating along with - on a bigger and bigger bubble ever farther from the ground.  Timesizing uses the design smarts and upgrades our current bug-filled alpha version.]

3. With prices up and joblessness down, British raise rates - The move, reversing a series of cuts, is considered surprising largely in its timing, by Andrew Sorkin, NYT, C4.
   ...in a pre-emptive move against inflationary pressure.
   [Wonder what the Brits are calling "low unemployment" these days. Oh well, there are two ways to go. We can either adapt long-term policies that will solidy the stock bubble, or we can implement short-tern policies like this one that will accelerate the sub-surface deterioration and the general realization of a yawning chasm.]

4. The vision behind the CBS-Viacom merger - Linking media outlets in a way that serves shareholders best, editorial, NYT, A24.
   [So, speculators first, and employees and viewers last.]
   Another media marriage - and Viacom has positioned itself well to meet the challenge, editorial, Boston Globe, A18.  ...Viacom and CBS [had] been split apart 30 years ago by rules no longer in effect....
   [Yet another case of relaxing the hard-learned regulations of the past and now having to repeat the hard lessons.]

5. GOP adrift without courage, discipline, by Robert Novak, Boston Herald, 29.
   ...As another session-ending logjam of appropriations bills looms, [Republican congressional "leaders," or should we say, chickens with heads cut off] lack a coherent strategy or real hope of outwitting a lame-duck Bill Clinton. The Republicans have given up on a meaningful tax cut and [are playing] defense against the Democratic minority's agenda. GOP leaders are determined to avoid the kind of summit with Pres. Clinton that usually demolishes the Republicans. Whether or not they formally negotiate, look for another wholesale surrender to the president, duplicating what happened in 1998.
   No plans were laid during the recess to avert what has become an annual Republican disaster. Senate Majority leader Trent Lott and House Speaker Dennis Hastert ["Hasdirt"?] never conferred with each other.... So many Republican lawmakers - including influential members of the appropriations committee - oppose downsizing government that they play in to Clinton's hands....
   [The neat thing about Timesizing is that while offering an alternative to downsizing in the business sector, it facilitates downsizing in the government sector. The GOP today have NO IDEAS (making the rich richer doesn't qualify) and Timesizing is perfect for them because the GOP DID IT from 1862 to 1932, repeatedly cutting the workweek and spreading around the remaining technology-eroded work. From the time when Lincoln abolished the unlimited workweek of slavery to 1932 when Hoover created hundreds of thousands of jobs in the depths of the Depression by cutting the Federal Government's workweek from 44-48 hrs to 40 (though he didn't realize how powerful and central and urgent this was for the whole country), the GOP led the charge on this vital issue.
   [When did the GOP start becoming the stupider party (granted they're both stupid)? Was it Watergate? The Satanic alliance with the Christian Coalition in 1980? The nomination of a movie star & then a CIA agent for President? Overlong tolerance of "Napoleon" Newt as party leader? Somewhere, power became more important to them than principle, or even intelligence.]

6. 2.6M U.S. gunslingers are 11 to 18 years old, according to survey, by J. M. Lawrence, Bos Herald, 14.
   ...as scores of mayors and police chiefs gathered in Washington to lobby Congress for tougher gun laws. [The number] was extrapolated from a Washington-based group's 12th annual PRIDE National Survey of Student Drug Use and Violence.... Using questions posed to 138,079 students ages 11 to 18 in 28 states, the survey found:
   • 10.3% carried a gun outside of school [10.3% of the 25.6m schoolchildren 11-18 nationwide is 2.6M]
   • about half of the gun-owning students admitted to carrying a gun at school on two or more occasions
   • 25% said they have been afraid another student would hurt them at school
   • 33% said another student has hurt them with a gun, knife or club
   • 40% admitted they have bullied another student with threats of hitting, slapping or kicking
   Guns now kill 94 Americans every day, including 13 children, said [John Rosenthal of the Newton, Mass.-based Stop Handgun Violence] who emphasized that he himself is a gun owner. "Instead of arming the youth of America as we have allowed, we should restrict access to guns like we restrict access to cars," he said.
   [Amen to that.]

9/07  4 "mini" zingers:  1 in the editorials & 3 in the World Business Briefing -

1. Mr. DeLay's new 'killer' tactic, editorial, NYT, A22.
   With the House scheduled to vote on campaign finance reform this month, defenders of the corrupt status quo are up to some old tricks.  The most pernicious is an attempt by Rep. Tom DeLay, the Republican whip, to amend the Shays-Meehan soft-money ban by exempting certain political activities on the Internet from Federal election fund-raising laws....
   [Guess that's why they call him "DeLay" - anything he can do to delay solutions, he does.  Yet another reason to get moving toward referendum-oriented electronic democracy.  Enough of these money-blinded "representatives."  Enough of this increasingly sick "representative democracy."]

2. Overcapacity in Japanese steel, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   Japan's steelmakers said rising exports to Asia were doing little to offset slower sales at home, where Government spending remains the only engine of growth....
   [Ah "overcapacity" - that hallmark of depression.  And how much of its home markets have Japan's steelmakers "costcut" via mass layoffs of their own employees??]

3. New estimate for Mexican bailout [- $105B for the country's banks], by Rick Wills, NYT, C4.

4. Venezuela's economy shrinks [- GDP down 9%], Bloomberg via NYT, C4.

1. Gap between rich and poor found substantially wider - The wealthiest 2.7 million have as much to spend as the poorest 100 million [- far more than they can actually spend - so consumer base & domestic markets strangled], by David Johnston, NYT, §.1, p.15.
   The gap between the rich and poor [in the USA] has grown into an economic chasm so wide that....
   [...blah blah blah. Let's see if this article (1) ever gets down to identifying the problem by its actionable name "income/wealth concentration" instead of just its unactionable name "income gap" and (2) if it ever gets around to disclosing the real problem with such concentration, namely that it gets so intense it strangles its own base of support (the rate of transactions in the consumer base = economic dynamism dba domestic markets) because so few people have so much money they couldn't possibly spend it in a thousand lifetimes, and (3) if this article ever actually suggests a solution more invulnerable and sustainable than the graduated income tax which the rich, via Congress, have been dismantling since (according to this article) 1977, but actually since 1963 under JFK. In short, if this article ever gets around to holding up a mirror to the wealthy to dramatize how stupid and self-damaging they have been acting.]
   ...that the richest 2.7 million Americans, the top 1%, will have as many after-tax dollars to spend as the bottom 100 million [the bottom 37%]. That ratio has more than doubled since 1977...according to new data from the Congressional Budget Office.
   In dollars, the richest 2.7 million people and the [poorest] 100 million will each have about $620 billion to spend, according to an analysis of the Budget Office figures. The analysis was done by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonprofit organization in Washington that advocates Federal tax and spending policies that it says would benefit the poor....
   [No breakthrough there. Note the confusing shifting from population to percentages and back in this article, the lack of symmetrical data, the soothing transition from "richest" to "most prosperous" like it's an Act of God which is not susceptible to redesign and amelioration....]
   The data from the Budget Office show that income disparity has grown so much that four out of five households...are taking home a thinner slice of the economic pie today than in 1977....
   ...[note that] among the more prosperous one-fifth of American households...[their] fatter slice of the pie was not [even] sliced evenly. More than 90% of [their] increase is going to the richest 1% of households, which this year will average [over half a million dollars] in after-tax income, up [nearly a quarter million since] 1977.... The incomes of the richest Americans are rising twice as fast as those of the middle class....
   [This means an inevitable gap between production actuality and consumption potential - the classic condition for depression. And there's a HUGE flaw in the Budget Office figures - ]
   In addition, the Budget Office figures understate the economic power of the richest 1% because they exclude deferred forms of income like restricted stock, which have grown rapidly in recent years....
   Though the economic pie has grown over the last 22 years, the...data show that the poorest one-fifth of households have not shared in this bounty....
   [Actually, if this reporter would either wake up or quit trying to cushion the news, the data actually show that the poorest three-fifths have not shared in this bounty, but far be it from our "two-guy" media to reveal that there's a majority constitutency against our continuing careen toward economic suicide.]
   The Budget and Policy Center's report [when the hey did the sniffy editors of the NYT stop capitalizing direct references to organization names?!] says that one reason the rich are doing so well [this is not "well" - this is mounting instability & slow suicide] is the cumulative effect of tax cuts since 1977, when the top Federal income tax bracket was 50%, compared with the current 39.6%....
   [Yes, "tax reform" was actually "tax deform".]
   IRS data...show that two-thirds of Americans earned less than $40K in 1997. "Many Americans who make $80-100-120K think of themselves as middle class," [said Robert Greenstein, exec. dir. of the Center], "but the fact is that these people...are not in or even near the middle, which is only about $32,000 in after-tax income."
   Mr. Greenstein said that under the Republican tax cut plan, the richest 1% of households would save and average of $32K annually....
   [Greenstein should be pointing out that the effective consumer base would be losing that amount per person and that therefore domestic spending - and markets - would shrink accordingly.]
   The...Center has been sharply critical of the Republican...plan [when did the NYT get so wordy?!] and the idea that those who pay the most in taxes should get the biggest cuts. Isaac Shapiro [Greenstein's coauthor on the Center's report] called the proposed tax cut plan "wrongheaded" and unfair to both the poor and the middle class....
   [The Center should get off the moralizing wavelengths and start "transmitting" on the much more powerful self-interest wavelengths. What the GOP is suggesting is worsening an already stupid and economy-destroying trend - the uncontrolled concentration of income and wealth (and "incidentally," of skills and work). The GOP used to have some intelligence. They lost all semblance of smarts in 1980 when they got in bed with the religious right and rewound us way back for a boring replay of the Separation of Church and State, instead of marching ahead with the Separation of State and Market.]
   Other data, not cited in the Budget and Policy Center report, also show that the growth in incomes is mostly at the top of the income ladder.... Frank Levy, an economist at MIT...said that the concentration of income growth at the top [aha, finally the actionable "concentration" form of the problem in the second-last paragraph!] resulted largely from rules set by Congress. "Markets are obviously very important in the economy," Prof. Levy said, "but they are surrounded by a lot of rules [we skip his two irrelevant or even damaging examples] and those rules are determined by the political process and [the political process is] shaped by money" donated to political candidates.
   [Finally in the last paragraph, we have an allusion to "markets" - but it's out of the blue and completely unexplained by the article. Unless we get smarter writers than this in the NYT, our supposedly best paper, and better editors, we go the way of the dodo.
   [Basically this last paragraph is an unmade argument for expanded inititiatives and referendums to circumvent the money-drowned representative system, and the whole article is an argument for direct automatic reinvestment.
   [So this article's score is 1-1/2 out of 3: (1) It finally mentioned concentration in a more or less introduced way. (2) It finally alluded to the negative impact on markets without ever introducing it, saying it outright, or explaining it. (3) And it never came up with any alternative to restoring the more highly graduated income tax.]

2. [USA works hardest in the world (2000 hrs/yr, even beating Japan despite its karoshi = death by overwork), but not smartest.  Japan and many European economies beat the US in productivity growth....]
   Americans labor longer than workers in any industrial nation, [ILO] study says, by Joe Lauria, Bos Globe, E1 (& thanks to Boston City Council candidate Tony Schinella for calling our attention back to this article!).
   UNITED NATIONS - ...American workers...work longer hours than anyone in the industrialized world, a full two weeks more per year than the Japanese [i.e., 2 wks of 40 hrs per, = 80??]...according to a study by the UN's International Labor Organization [ILO]. Americans worked 45 hours a week when factoring out weekends, two weeks of vacation, and federal holidays.
   [So they're basically only counting the work we do on the five weekdays?? - with so many working weekends, holidays and vacation with their cellphones and laptops?? Ifso, their figures are low.]
   They work 222 days per year, or 44.4 weeks.
   "The...overwhelming reason for it is that Americans have added to their work week in response to a couple of decades of stagnant wages and declining social protections, like health insurance and pensions," said David Smith, director of public policy at the AFL-CIO.
   [No thanks to you guys in our stupid labor movement, who sold your (and our) birthright for a mess of pottage in the 1930s, by giving up on shorter hours that would have kept the supply of us under control - in return for FDR's box of lame and vanishing bonbons, like welfare, social security, workman's comp, unemployment insurance, minimum wage, and on and on with inadequate government job creation that gradually devolved into corporate subsidies and welfare for the rich. All because you let the workweek sit at 40 for sixty years, making us now a grossly surplus commodity that can't get a raise to save our lives.]
   ...While Americans have been increasing the number of hours they work per year, that number has been decreasing in almost every other industrialized country....
   Though the Japanese and Europeans work less than Americans [and Americans are still the most productive, producing $9 more per hour in goods and services than the Japanese], their productivity rate is growing faster. In the case of Western Europe, it's 22% faster....
   [Well, productivity is no good without markets, and if we keep going toward 1% of the population with 99% of the income and wealth, - no markets.]
   British workers clocked 1731 hours in 1997, about as much as Germans did nearly 20 years ago.... In 1980, Britons worked 1775 hours. Irish employees worked 77 fewer hours per year than the British. But Ireland has shown the greatest growth in productivity in Europe - an increase of 82% between 1980 and 1997....
   "The number of hours worked is one important indicator of a country's overall quality of life," said ILO's Director-General Juan Somavia, but "while the benefits of hard work are clear, working more is not the same as working better [i.e., smarter]"..\..
   Norwegians and Swedes spend the least time on the job, 1399 hours in 1997 in Norway and 1552 in Sweden. In France, where recent legislation capped the work week at 35 hours, workers logged 1656 hours in 1997, down from 1810 in the 1980s. Germans worked 1560 hours in 1996 as opposed to 1742 in 1980. Six-week vacations are typical in Germany, with some workers receiving up to nine weeks paid holiday. In the rest of Europe, four weeks is the norm....
   [Review: dumb Yankees work 1966 hours/year and have a begrudged two weeks vacation.]
   There is indeed a human cost to all this work. Besides spending more time at the workplace and less time with their families, American workers have been showing greater signs of physical exhaustion. According to the Washington-based National Sleep Foundation, 40% of American adults say they are so sleepy during the day that it interferes with their activities.... The National Commission on Sleep Disorders says 5 million American workers fall asleep on the job every year.  32% of Americans say they sleep less than 6 hours per night.
   "The pressure on American families to balance raising kids and adding more to their work week is enormous," said AFL-CIO's Smith.
   [How significant that the article right above the inside continuation of this one is "Fear & Loathing Inc. - Too many bosses still rely on meanness and distrust, authors contend." We're common, cheap as dirt. Why should anyone respect us when we've allowed ourselves to become common. The only thing we need nationalized is the workweek. The only thing. And reverse-indexed to unemployment. And unemployment redefined to count welfare, disability, homelessness and prisons. Timesizing.]

3. [Misnaming of skills shortage as "labor shortage" picks up steam - ]
   Firms get creative over labor shortage, by Matthew Brelis, Boston Globe, front page.
   After seven years of a robust economy [judged by the flawed GDP measure which gives points for all kinds of bad stuff, like medical services for crime victims] and unemployment at record lows [judged by our flawed unemployment rate, 2nd only to South Korea's in undercounting], the labor market in Massachusetts and around the nation is drying up in virtually every sector, from unskilled laborers to information technology professionals.
   [Then where are the ubiquitous corporate training programs we saw during and after World War II when we had a real labor shortage? Where is the wage-push narrowing of the income gap, which as we saw in the first "badnews zinger" today, is widening, not narrowing? This is not a labor shortage but a skills shortage caused by unwillingness to raise wages and invest in training.]
   The shortage is so profound that local employers of every size are going to extraordinary lengths to find workers.
   [No, they're going to extraordinary rhetoric to spindoctor a gross and growing global labor glut into a shortage. They're doing anything cheap for show, and nothing effective like raising pay and training, and lowering inflated qualifications.]
   Raytheon Co...
   [RAYTHEON, this reporter has the nerve to cite RAYTHEON as an example?! Give us a break! They're laying off people right and left, in violation of their agreement with Mass. legislators in 1995 in return for taxbreaks, apparently totally unwilling to retrain these presumably older experienced workers who are "in danger" of coming up for retirement. The only shortage Raytheon has is highly trained, low-wage, 20-something job candidates from Bombay and top executives with real management skills.]
   ...is relaxing its button-down culture [meaningless rhetoric] and deploying a squad of executives, including its chief executive officer, to attract employees....
   [Then why are they laying off so many highly qualified and technical older employees, with no thought of retraining them? This is pure rubbish.]
   ...while Internet startups offer bounties and prizes for referrals that lead to hires.
   [Coffee mugs and T-shirts. Big deal. Get 'em in, burn 'em out, and get rid of 'em before they get near retirement age.]
   Some Massachusetts restaurants routinely bring in temporary workers form overseas to fill hiring gaps.
   [Oh, now they want to argue in a circle! "We have such a bad labor shortage that we need to bring in cheap labor from overseas!" and then, "The fact that we've brought in so much labor from overseas proves that we have a really bad labor shortage!"]
   The worker drought has hit every region of the country.
   [The why hasn't it hit Massachusetts outside the 495 beltway? This reporter's own newspaper carried the following 7/01/99 story by Heather Kamins, "Beyond [beltway/rim route] 495, economic boom fades - Study: State made up of two economies", Boston Globe, C1. Would it be too much to ask them to look beyond 495 and hire some of the many unemployed people from that depressed area?]
   In Nebraska, there is a shortage of meat packers.
   [There are always going to be spot shortages of specific skills until we modernize our economy so that the incidence of overtime automatically triggers and funds training in scarce skills, à la Timesizing's automatic overtime alleviation feature.]
   In Ohio, consumer products giant Procter & Gamble has resorted to using a recruiting firm to scour retirement homes in search of workers, some of whom have been hired for entry-level jobs even though they are in their 70s and 80s.
   [Great, that's the first instance we're heard of hiring seniors, but compared to the pervasive practice of subtly going after people over fifty and nearing retirement with pink slips, it's a drop in the bucket. What are the figures here? Bet there's no comparison.]
   In Silicon Valley, the epicenter of the high-tech revolution...
   [Doesn't count. It's the the most spoiled and overhyped job market in the nation, much worse than Boston within the beltway.]
   The labor market is to tight that some economists say a recent small decline in labor demand from a peak in 1998 may not signal a slowing of the economy, but rather a surrender of sorts by employers who have given up trying to fill jobs because qualified applicants are too few and far between.
   [Again, where are the corporate on-the-job training, cross-training, retraining and outsider training programs, where are the rising wages and benefits, where is the respect for employees of all ages, where is the tidal wave of distaste for downsizing, instead of timesizing and retraining, where is the realism about job qualifications which have risen and re-risen in the last few decades? Where are the interviews with employees and jobs seekers? Why are just employers being interviewed for this article??? What is this reporter afraid of?!]
   Consider the case of Dellaria Salons. With about 20 hair salons in New England, the chain has the business and the credit to open as many as 10 more stores, but is going ahead with just two because staffing more than that is impossible....
   [No credibility. Sure they may have the credit to open 10 more stores because credit is so over-available in a pre-depression period, especially for investing in the stock market, but let's face it, people are so desperate to make a living that there are 3 hair salons on every block. Davis Sq., Somerville, is full of them. This is just employers whining without training again. Only a gigantic depression followed by a world war can discipline employers back to reality from a viewpoint this distorted by this long and gradual and huge a labor surplus. Finally this gullible reporter asks, in a contorted way, one of the big questions - ]
   With jobs so plentiful and labor in such short supply, there is concern in Washington and on Wall Street that wages will rise and spark inflation, since price increases tend to follow payroll increases.
   [The simpler way to ask this question is, if jobs are so plentiful and labor is in such short supply, why aren't there wage increases? - we know there are payroll increases because top executive pay is right off the charts. And the whole concern "on Wall Street" (and among their fully-paid-for representatives in Washington) "that wages will rise" is short-sighted because if wages don't rise, markets don't rise, and you get the pre-depression syndrome of companies trying to increase market share by merging and taking over other companies' share instead of expanding the overall market for the industry, whatever it may be. Wall Street doesn't want to share, and that is eventually self-destructive, because Wall Street is ultimately based on wages (via investment and productivity and consumer markets), not vice versa. Wall Street discourages ordinary commodity inflation and therefore the E of the P/E ratio stays low, while encouraging runaway asset inflation and therefore the P of the P/E ratio. Result? A stock bubble. Outcome? A huge pop, and The Great Depression Revisited.]
   But a surprising benefit to the prolonged economic prosperity [for the wealthy], economists say [and they certainly love rubbing shoulders with wealth], is that productivity gains have offset much of the need to raise prices dramatically.
   ["More likely" the fostering of fear in the workplace, fear of takeover and layoff, has offset much of the need to raise wages (or prices) dramatically, in violation of Ed Deming's 8th Point for Management, "Banish fear from the workplace." The productivity gains of wave after wave of labor-saving technology are therefore accruing to top executives and shareholders at the expense of employees, consumers and consumer markets. The catch is, that this leaves top executives looking for growth that they can only achieve by takeovers, and of course, takeovers just concentrate the skills and employment and wealth even more - and grow markets even less.
   [Put another way, "more likely" the lack of wage raises and the resulting stagnation of consumer markets have offset much of the ability to raise prices dramatically and still be able to sell anything, except on the luxury markets of course.]
   Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, a Brandeis University professor of social and economic policy, said there is also another reason wage inflation has been held in check. "Workers in the 1990s are aware of how easily they can be replaced, either by technology, by lower-wage workers elsewhere in the country [note THAT means there's a labor surplus], or by workers in other nations eager to offer their services for a fraction of the prevailing wage in America," he said.
   [So here we have the big double message in the same article - there's a labor shortage and there's a labor surplus. Clearly this reporter hasn't figured it out. We have. There's a labor surplus and that has caused a skill shortage, because spoiled employers are getting so many resumes that they have been able to pass along training costs to jobseekers and taxpayers for decades. The reporter, however, resorts to anecdotal evidence - again from the spoiled employers' viewpoint - ]
   Even so, anecdotal evidence suggests that many workers at all levels of the economy are reaping the benefits of a tight labor market - demanding and receiving signing bonuses, stock options, more time off [ha, check out the article above this one about Americans now working longer hours than employees in any other industrialized nation], and better work schedules.
   [We believe that a minority of employees at all levels of the economy are reaping the benefits of spot shortages in the skills markets across the land, but the vast majority of American employees are reaping the costs of a loose labor market and a tight job market, where employers are spoiled and arrogant and very much in a position of overpowering leverage at the bargaining table, if any. And the last figure we heard was that unionized labor was down to less than 14% of the overall national workforce.]
   Meanwhile, businesses seem locked in a struggle to find and keep workers.
   ["Seem" is the operative term here, and only when you restrict your interviews to employers and include no employees or jobseekers. If businesses are "locked in a struggle to keep workers," it's only because they're listening to Wall Street who wants them to goose stock prices by announcing another layoff. And here's some "anecdotal evidence" that'll make you mad.]
   The Dan'l Webster Hearth 'n Kettle Management Group, with two inns and eight restaurants from Weymouth to Cape Cod, has increasingly relied on workers from Jamaica to help it through its peak season. This year the number reached 30 workers. "Each year we have to bring more and more," said Frank Catania, vice president of the company. "We bring them here in May and they stay until November. They work as cooks, dishwashers, chambermaids; a couple are bakers." Their prevailing wage is set by the Dept. of Labor, with dishwashers earning about $8.50 an hour and cooks $11 an hour.
   [Note the passivity of contemporary management. They're used to everything being handed to them from desperate workers from 3rd-world countries to prevailing wage levels. They can no longer think for themselves to solve their problems. They're just going to follow the prevailing management fads, no matter how unsustainable. A pathetic, self-destructive crew in a pathetic, self-destructive time.]

9/02 Wasserman's view [editorial cartoon], LA Times via Boston Globe, A26.
2 guys sitting in a diner, guy A reading newspaper - 4 frames:

1. Guy A: "Top corporate execs made 42 times what a factory worker did in 1980"
2. Guy A again: "Today they make 419 times as much"
3. Guy B: "That should be widely discussed on Labor Day!"
4. Guy A: "That's changed too - it's now 'Labor Hour'"

9/01 Though Japanese save diligently, the nation sinks deeper in debt - The Japanese are thrifty, but their government is not, by WuDunn and Kristoff, NYT, frontpage.
TOKYO - One of the striking paradoxes of Japan is that this is a country with the greatest savers in the industrialized world, and yet everywhere one looks there is debt.... [Japan's] debt trajectory looks like that of a third world country like Tanzania....
[Simple - just raise taxes on what people aren't spending and pay down the debt.]

9/01/99 U.S. dollar is sliding against yen and euro, NYT, frontpage.
...The dollar fell below 110 yen, the second time it has done so since the fall of 1996....
[So whatever trouble Japan is in, currency traders think we're in worse? Maybe that's because Japan is admitting it and we're still going "economic boom, lala".]

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