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Good News, August 16-31, 2001
[Commentary] ©2001 Phil Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080

8/31/2001  glimmers of intelligence -

1. [1 UNtakeover]
   Polaroid to sell unit to managers - Deal for Identification Systems division to close by end of year, by Krasner and Kerber, Boston Globe. C1.
   Polaroid Corp. plans to sell [the] division to a group of its senior managers by the end of this year, according to unit president John A. Munday. Munday said his group plans to close the deal before the end of the year, backed with private funding....
   [Not the kind of employee buyout we'd prefer to see - the kind that involves all employees - but at least a partial employee buyout.]
   Munday declined to say how much he will pay for the unit, or how much of Polaroid's massive debt load it will be required to take on....

2. Electricity deregulation called a failure - Report: States that have revamped paying higher rates for poorer service, by Peter Howe, BG, C1,
   [Enough mealy-mouthed beating around the bush on this. At last we're calling a spade a spade.]
   Elelctric-industry deregulation has been a costly failure in the United States...the Consumer Federation of America..\..charged in a...29-page study..\..yesterday that cites soaring prices in Massachusetts and other states.... Mark N. Cooper, the group's research director, said the 27% jump in average electric bills in Eastern Massachusetts over the past 20 months is one of the leading examples of how electric deregulation has failed to deliver the promised savings. "As states like Massachusetts that moved early to deregulate come out from price caps and start going to market [prices], consumers are getting clobbered." Cooper said. The state's 1998 restructuring law promised an inflation-adjusted 15% rate cut for customers, but last year's soaring energy prices have more than wiped out the initial savings....
   [The big leak in free-market theory is the uncapped nature of executive pay. Put that together with the belligerent masochistic, self-destructive attitude of a lot of America's middle class and poor, reflected in actions like buying more lottery tickets when stake is bigger regardless of drastically lowered odds (e.g., from 1 in 50m to 1 in 70m), and reflected in sentiments like "Oh I don't begrudge Bill Gates his money. He earned every penny of it" - not to mention the willingness of the wealthy to accumulate sums utterly beyond comprehension, let alone spendability, let alone need - and you get a highway to recession and depression. And that highway is based on a well-known doctrine of new-classical economics aka marginalism, namely, the marginal utility of concentrated wealth. The fact is, the more concentration, the less circulation, past a certain point of diminishing returns. Another major problem here is the almost complete failure of mainstream economists to research or talk about this point, or even about the application of marginalism to this phenomenon at all. The next article is a case in point -]

3. Greenspan stands alone - The paralysis of economic policy, by Paul Krugman, NYT, A23.
   [We believe the word Krugman wants is, the "impotence" or "superficiality" of economic policy, but the fact he has applied such a negative word as "paralysis" to the received wisdom of all our econopundits places this article into the small group of articles and books that, as we say, "pop The Big Question." The most dramatic example of this group - indeed for us, the founding example - was a magazine cover in 1974 (was it Time mag?) that showed a group of famous economists - Adam Smith, Marx, Keynes... - standing around an empty chair, left empty for the next great economist who, at the time, could explain the phenomenon of simultaneously rising unemployment and inflation, which mainstream economists of the time (and still, to a large extent) deemed impossible. (In our view, that seat had already been filled by Jane Jacobs when she pointed out that stagflation was standard procedure in third-world countries where there is no effective aggregate sharing - in short, no caps, under the scarcity and want of the have-nots such as for the unemployed, or over the excess and surplus of the haves such as on work-income-wealth.) Back to Krugman -]
   ...In principle [he means "in theory"], each of..\..three great economic powers in today's world - USA, Europe and Japan...has two...recession-fighting tools at its disposal.
   1. ...monetary policy: the central bank can print money and drive down interest rates.
      [That's why we take that arbitrary power away from the central bank and put it to regular referendum of the affected population in Phase One of Timesizing.]
   2. ...fiscal policy: the government can try to support a flagging economy by cutting taxes and increasing spending.
      [Historically, Krugman has the first element backwards. Historically, fiscal policy has been a matter of raising taxes and increasing spending - in effect, doing the spending that is not being done by the rich though they sometimes say they are and a few actually do. The stupidity of cutting taxes and increasing government spending is, of course, exactly how Reagan multiplied the national debt and interest, and guaranteed that sooner or later, American taxpayers would have to pay more taxes.]
   In practice, however...
   [In practice, throughout economic history, the real recession or depression curing, not just fighting, tool has been withdrawing the vast surplus of labor hours from the job market and allowing market forces to raise wages and benefits and centrifuge the income and wealth of the nation, out to the vast numbers of ordinary people who actually spend it. Our dramatic way of doing this is war, such as World Wars I and II, both of which had remarkable positive effects on the economy. We occasionally have the dramatic "benefit" of plague to do it, as when the Black Death killed a quarter of Europe in 1348. But our quiet inconspicuous way of withdrawing excess labor hours from the job market has been shorter working hours and workweek reduction. A few companies are still doing it, as shown on our working models and glimmers of timesizing pages. The workweek came down from over 80 hours a week to just over 40 in the 100-150 years prior to 1940 all over the developed world. Only when labor loses sight of this power lever does labor languish and fade, as in the U.S. since 1940. We need an automatic way of passing along to the general public the worksavings of waves of new technology in the form of more and more financially secure free time. Timesizing, not downsizing, is the answer to The Big Question, in whatever form it surfaces. Krugman, however, goes on to dish out a whole platter of silly American megalomania -]
   In practice, however, almost the entire burden of fighting what has become a global slowdown is being borne by U.S. monetary policy. And you have to wonder whether the Federal Reserve [= the American central bank], acting on its own, can really do the job....
   [He goes on to claim that Europe can't do it via monetary policy because all its economic institutions are designed and limited to fighting inflation, as if the Fed in the U.S. has done a damn thing but that for the last twenty years. Doesn't he remember how the Fed used to foster 6% unemployment because that was supposedly the Non Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU)?! Now we're suddenly supposed to believe that the Fed has seen the light and realized that growth is a function of labor shortage aka rising wages dba rising consumer spending? Or even if it has, that it will be remotely effective in reversing disaster in this other area that it has so long neglected and ignored? We'll have an illustration tomorrow of just how clueless the Fed is in this area.]
   What about fiscal policy? European countries don't have much room for maneuver, given large public debts and the looming burdens of an aging population....
   [Like the U.S. has room to maneuver with its $5.5 trillion public debt and the looming burdens of retiring babyboomers? Krugman goes on to dismiss Japan because, surprise surprise, it too has a huge public debt of 130% of GDP and an aging population, and as for monetary policy, it has already declared its impotence and superficiality in Japan because -]
   ...Short-term intereste rates are already zero....
   [Even as Japan has swallowed the rate-lowering sugar pills to the max and slipping into a deflationary spiral, its idiotic power elite are still raving inflation-phobiacs. "Lord, what fools these mortals be."]
   And then there's us. What are we doing to fight the slowdown?
   [And then this supposed American "guru" has the unmitigated gall to mention the ridiculous taxcut -]
   America does, of course, have its tax cut.
   [But this whole "taxcut your way out of a downturn" aka supply-side economics was discredited in the 1980s. Why is it still here? Why is our boy Krugman still even mentioning it? At least he dismisses the taxcut "solution" pronto -]
   The rebate checks are not much more than pocket change....
   [So -]
   Can we pump up the economy with additional tax cuts or temporary public spending? Not safely; those huge future tax cuts have created a grim long-term financial outlook, and any further tax cuts would make the outlook even grimmer. Of course, the administration might do the responsible thing...by canceling some of those big tax cuts.... And pigs might fly.
   It's a dismal picture: a combination of intellectual confusion, narrow-minded officials and sheer fiscal folly...
   The only institution that isn't paralyzed is the Fed, which keeps on cutting rates, hoping that it will finally accomplish something.
   [We don't know what definition of "paralyzed" he's using, but seems to us that any outfit that keeps on doing what has been proven useless elsewhere, as cutting interest rates has been proved impotent in Japan, is functionally paralyzed. Krugman's final utterance (if only!) hints at this conclusion -]
   But what if the task is beyond [Greenspan's] powers?
   [Bottom line - he should have titled this "Greenspan sits alone," or even "Greenspan lies alone," because with no tools or ideas that can possibly work at the deep-structure level of the downturn where we simply have to centrifuge income and reactivate its spending power into actual consumer spending, Greenspan has nothing. Though of course it would expedite a real solution if he suddenly realized the true historic function of worktime reduction and talked it up.]

4. Click here for today's TIMEsizing stories - 8/31/2001.

1. Responsibility at Groton School, letter to editor by Laura Smith of Swampscott MA, Boston Globe, A18.
   [Groton School is an expensive, private, boys-only? school west of Boston MA, presumably attended by many of our soon-to-be captains of industry. The letter writer is not a master of word selection, so we suggest a few improvements, but her overall point is worth the trouble -]
   At first I was [only piqued] by the allegations against Groton ("Suit alleges sex assaults at Groton School," Page A1, Aug. 29). Then I became enraged. This [involves systemic] abuse. The behavior described by former Groton student Cannon E. Hawkins doesn't just "violate personal limits"; it teaches teaches the students how to be ruthless and violent.
   [Her version says, "At first I was intrigued by the allegations.... This concerns systematic abuse." Maybe she wrote this in a hurry.]
   These are the future business leaders of America. If they don't respect each other - or themselves - how will they treat women, minorities, the planet?...
   [Good question. So that's why these guys are so sociopathic.]

2. The rights of the born, editorial, BG, A18.
   Even as the world summit on racism gets underway this week in South Africa with uncertain representation from the USA, the Bush administration is rattling its saber over...another international conference - this one on the rights of the child. Administration officials...object to language in the...draft declaration that refers to minors' rights to reproductive health care - if that includes abortion....
   The administration's stance gives new meaning to Barney Frank's famous jibe about abortion opponents believing that life begins at conception and ends at birth....

3. MIT physicist faults Bush missile defense, Reuters via BG, A24.
   President Bush's defense shield may protect large US cities from attack, but the intercepted missiles could fall on Canada and European countries, according to New Scientist magazine [of London?]. Ted Postol, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says a system to intercept intercontinental ballistic missiles minutes after launch when they are easier to target, could leave the warheads flying in the sky. "Even if we knew all the details, you couldn't be sure of what would happen in any given engagement," Postal was quoted as saying in the magazine.
   [But then, what does Bush care about Canada or Europe? He doesn't even care about most Americans - just his buds in the top $$ brackets.]

4. Click here for today's TIMEsizing stories - 8/30/2001.

1. [At last! -]
   U.S. says killings by Israel inflame Mideast conflict - Death sets off protests - American tone is sterner after rocket attack on the office of a Palestinian leader, by Jane Perlez, NYT, front page.
   [That's a start. Now how about telling them to obey the treaty and stop occupying the occupied lands.]

2. [1 UPsizing, or rather, UNdownsizing, with 10 new jobs -]
   Ten employees of [the 55 laid off by] the defunct New York agency Warwick Baker O'Neill, including three top executives, are joining Earle Palmer Brown in New York, part of Panoramic Communications....
   [The downsizing was 7/26/2001, #6.]

3. Click here for today's TIMEsizing stories - 8/28/2001.

1. The Fed's rate cut, letter to editor by Stanley Block of the Bronx, NYT, A20.
   Re "Federal Reserve cuts its key rate by quarter point" (front page, Aug. 22):
   The Fed continues to cut the prime rate, making it easier for companies to borrow from banks [and] grow, thereby creating a vast increase in American employment, thus spurring the economy. So the theory goes!
   What in fact has been happening is that even with all this easy money, companies have not been expanding as anticipated. Instead, they are using this windfall to merge with other companies, resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands of American jobs, further weakening the economy.
   And all the while, the little guy watches the interest on his modest bank savings dwindle to nothing.
   [That's why we say, if interest rates are going to be arbitrary and set by "throwing darts" anyway, let everyone affected in on the game. Set rates by regular public referendum. As a cure for either inflation or a weak economy, rate changes are superficial anyway, and merely distract from the structural changes we should be making in capping and transforming overtime, and making it respond to underemployment.]

2. Free-market dangers, letter to editor by Leo Montagna of Northport NY, NYT, A20.
   Re "Defending free markets" (letter, Aug. 22):
   The chairman of Enron Corp. in his response to Paul Krugman's Aug. 17 column, misses a vital point. The success of free markets and a capitalistic economy in a democratic society depends on the support of the people.
   Even Adam Smith realized that a capitalistic free-market economy would run amok if left to its own devices.
   [We need a much more specific doom than 'run amok' here. How about "enter a depression" caused by the marginal efficiency of concentrated capital, i.e., so much concentration of income that it actually suctioned the markets away from its own necessarily huge investments? Indeed, not "even" Adam Smith at all, because he believed strongly in regulated markets. His one little mention of the "invisible hand" was grabbed by industrialists and blown out of all proportion so they could feel justified in making any stupid shortsighted mistake they wanted. Hence the first industrial depressions in the early 1800s. Actually, the "invisible hand" of economics is simply the visible hand of politics, in terms of the balancing effect of the spread of the right to vote, spilling over into the economic sphere. And the right to vote represented a capping of the concentration of power. Of course, occasionally it received welcome support from some extremely concentrated power, such as a progressive king, as when William IV threatened to create enough new Lords to pass the Great Reform Bill in 1832 over the insulated, selfish and backward objections of the existing incumbents in the House of Lords. Unfortunately this technique backfired in Canada when it was used more recently by jackass PM Mulroney to force passage of the North American Free Trade Act - a piece of hand-tying stupidity that prevents Canada from quarantining itself from US downturn, second in simple-mindedness only to the disaster-brewing NAFTA which followed it.]
   With all its faults, regulation and oversight by a democratically elected government are a much more sensible way to control and ensure the long-term success of our system....
   [The keyword is long-term. The major failures of free-market forces focus in their short-term bias.]
   The suggestion that we should rely on the self-interest of corporations, whose charters are primarily focused only on making profit [and short-term profit at that - ed.], is a recipe for disaster....
   [And we are slowly descending the sides of that disastrous maelstrom as we speak.]

3. Economic jump-start, letter to editor by Assoc. Dir. Paul R. Epstein of Ctr for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Med School, NYT, A20.
   Re "World's economy slows to a walk in rare lock step (front page, Aug. 20):
   Yes, we now have a faltering world economy and a busted global "bubble." What will be the next enterprise [after the Internet?] to drive development?
   First, we must solve the triple "E" problem: providing energy for the economy within environmental constraints....
   [We like where he's going with this but no one industry or enterprise is going to drive sufficient development to generate sufficient 40-plus-hr/wk jobs in a context of constant new worksaving technology. We've got to move from an unlimited concentration model to a capped concentration model, from a same-skewed-shares-but-you've-got-more-than-last-year-so-shaddap model that compulsively needs growth, to a share-more-evenly-what's-there-whether-grows-or-shrinks model that is independent of growth. And the easiest dimension to cap the concentration is employment, aka worktime, dba overtime.]

• Scuttle ABM Treaty?, letter to editor by William S. Aronstein of Glendale OHIO, NYT, A22.
  Re "Bush flatly states U.S. will pull out of missile treaty" (new article, Aug. 24).
  Time was, we were taught that the Russians could never be trusted, because Communists didn't abide by the treaties they made. Sticking to solemnly ratified treaties...
  [except those made with native Americans]
  ...was once considered essential to our nation's honor and trustworthiness.
  [...and sometimes our survival.]
  It is disappointing that...Bush proposes that America dishonor itself by unilaterally breaking the Antiballistic Missile Treaty.
  [Especially when he lost the popular vote and won only via a coup d'etat by the contemptible 'Supreme Court.']

• Last silo destroyed under arms treaty - Schoolchildren, farmers see blast that closed an era, by Dani Marchand, Reuters via Boston Globe, A4.
  PETERSBURG, ND - The US military blew up a Minuteman III missile silo yesterday, the last such silo to be destroyed under a Cold War-era...treaty [STrategic ARms Reduction Treaty aka START I] between the United States and the former Soviet Union.... Negotiated in the 1980s between Pres. Reagan and...Mikhail Gorbachev, the treaty committed each side to reducing the number of nuclear warheads in their intercontinental ballistic missile [ICBM] forces to no more than 6,000 each.
  [Yeah, six thousand ICBMs is probably enough to finish off "intelligent" life on Earth.]
  The deal was signed in 1991 by Gorbachev and Pres. Geo.H.W.Bush [Sr.] and took effect in Dec/94. Under the treaty's successor, START II, each side would further cut its warheads to about 3,500.
  Pres. Vladimir Putin of Russia is pressing for further cuts, to about 1,500 warheads each.
  [But -]
  But...Geo.W.Bush [Jr.] has authorized groundbreaking for new missile silos in Alaska as part of his controversial proposal to build a US missile defense system. On Thursday, Bush made his most emphatic statement yet that the United States would withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile [ABM] treaty to clear the way for the missile defense system....
  [This complete idiot is determined to clearly turn the USA into what some of us have long suspected it's been for decades anyway - the most dangerous dumb bully in the world. Hey, this moron is clever enough to know that our only historic escape from economic troubles has been a military buildup, so damn the danger, damn Reagan's boasted ending of the Cold War, damn Bush Sr's signing of START I, let's restart the Cold War -]
  Russian officials have warned that such a move could be destabilizing, possibly leading Russia to build a new generation of missiles with multiple warheads....
  The US military still maintains several hundred Minuteman III missiles...in Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota [soon to be just "Dakota"?]. But the 150 silos that were part of the Grand Forks Air Force Base command have now all been dismantled, with the exception of one that the Air Force hopes to turn into a memorial....
  [Why bother?]
  A...peace activist, Larry Lange, who lives nearby, applauded the destruction of the silo. "Nuclear weapons are not needed," Lange said. "The only way to peace is nonviolent. I think the time has come to put away all the nuclear stuff."
  [Bizarre to realize that while all us billions of little ants are going on with our little lives day after night after day, a few hundred thousand of us have been building and maintaining over 6,000 tickets to vaporization and sending millions of us the $bill. Well as long as we don't share the vanishing work and spread the funnelling income, they've got to do something, right? And if they can enhance the illusion of the top 5% that all us excess ants can be exterminated in an emergency without harming them....]

• [And speaking of excess ants, here's another 'good, but' -]
  Texas arrests show gains against immigrant smugglers, by David McLemore, Boston Globe, A6.
  SN ANTONIO - When Border Patrol agents apprehended 51 undocumented immigrants packed into a tractor-trailer rig near Corpus Christi this week, it only underscored the dramatic jump in the arrests of human smugglers.... The 51st, a young girl, was found hiding underneath the sleeper compartment in the cab.
  • 19...were from Mexico
  • 14...Ecuador
  • 13...El Salvador
  • 3...Honduras
  • 1...Guatemala
  • 1...Pakistan [huh?]
  ...paid smugglers about $2,700 each to get to Houston and were loaded into the trailer in Brownsville.... The Mexican citizens were voluntarily returned to Mexico, while the others are being held at the INS detention center near Pt. Isabel for deportation hearings..\.. Agents arrested the driver and another man, both US citizens from Harlingen, Tex....
  [Another article today on this issue is "Bleak harvest - Drought, ill health of migrant workers makes this summer tougher than ever," by Stan Grossfeld, Boston Globe, B1. The caption on the first photo says, "Abraham Ayala of Honduras is one of about 9,000 migrant workers who work in Maine. He said he has made only $1,100 in three weeks of picking." The text says he "jounreyed to Maine for the 4-week blueberry season from Honduras.... His trip north cost $600." Shame on Maine for engaging in the same kind of migrant-worker stupidity as California. State that allow any of their industries to get dependent on this kind of spot foreign labor in 2001 are no better than Confederate states dependent on slavery in 1863. And "somehow" Honduran TV got (and gave out) the misleading impression that it was going to be a "very good harvest."]
  Last year, there were 123,000 undocumented immigrants apprehended and about 500 smugglers arrested..\..
  [But those are only the ones they caught. Five years ago, people told Phil and Kate on a visit to Arizona that 30,000 illegals a month were coming up Mex. I-15 - US I-19 into Arizona alone, and that's not counting Texas, New Mexico and California. But back to the good news -]
  "This year, while the overall apprehensions of illegal immigrants has decreased 20%, we've seen arrests of smugglers increase 160%," said Jesse Jimenez, spokesman for the Border Patrol's McAllen sector, which includes Corpus Christi....
  ["Which includes the Body of Christ" (Corpus Christi). The USA as "heaven"? Yeah, right. Think of the louzy conditions in these six countries - Mexico, Ecuador, Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Pakistan - to induce poor people to waste $2700 and risk their lives to come to a country where, Europeans believe, the poor are dying in the streets (and, guess they are). All for lack of a sharing technology that is anywhere near as flexible, intuitive and useful as our computer technology. If we expended a fraction of our design smarts on sharing the vanishing human employment that we expend on the technology to make it vanish, let alone the smarts to convince ourselves it's "really not vanishing, it's growing!", we'd have licked this 65 years ago and seen some real human progress since then. As it is, we've just got more double-edged technological whizbang like cellphones and palmtops. Well, one guy expended the design smarts on the sharing technology and the result is the timesizing program. It ain't perfect but it stakes out the territory and challenges others to focus and compete.]

• Click here for today's TIMEsizing stories - 8/25/2001.

1. [1 UPsizing]
   Austrian drug company wins approval for factory, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   Sanochemia Pharmazeutika...based in Vienna..\..Austria has won American regulatory approval for a factory that produces galantamine, a chemical used in Reminyl, a treatment for Alzheimer's disease.
   [Unspecified new jobs.]
   ...Shares rose....

2. Utah: G.O.P. allows guns at its gathering, AP via NYT, A12.
   A year after Republicans fought back an effort in the Legislature to ban guns in churches and schools, party leaders have ruled that guns will be allowed at the Republican state convention except when VP Dick Cheney delivers his keynote address.... The Secret Service had expressed concern about the presence of guns, but an earlier decision to ban them from the convention entirely had angered many party members.
   [With so many guns and so much anger, we can only hope these violence-ready morons will explode and wipe themselves out, so the meek (defn: humble and teachable) can get on with inheriting the world.]

1. [1 UPsizing]
   In cost-cutting move, Maytag will open plant in Mexico, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   ...next year to provide components for appliances like washers and dryers, reducing manufacturing expenses. Maytag is spending about $2m for the plant, which will employ about 230...to open in 1Q02....
   [Sounds lovely, but how many jobs is it gonna lose us here in the States? This just builds pressure for regulations that say, "You don't contribute to our markets so you don't have access to them."]

2. Click here for today's TIMEsizing stories - 8/23/2001.

1. 2 UPsizings, 200 new Chinese jobs/mon. + unspecified US
   
   1. A messenger to China business - U.S.-trained telecom chief builds a new, hybrid model, by Mark Landler, NYT, C1.
      [photo caption inside on C4 -]
      As CEO of Netcom, Edward Tian has almost 3,000 employees, adding 200 a month. For top executives, he recruits Western-educated Chinese from Microsoft, Oracle and McKinsey, the consulting firm.
   2. Spartan Motors Inc.,, NYT, C4.
      ...Charlotte, Mich., a maker of chassis for ambulances, fire trucks and other specialty vehicles, said its Road Rescue ambulance unit would build a $4m plant in Marion, SC.

2. Click here for today's TIMEsizing stories - 8/21/2001.

• Inquiring acutely into the vegetative state, by Robin Dougherty, Boston Globe, D4 via Kate Jurow.
  ...Michael Pollan's "The Botany of Desire" is...four interconnected essays, each on a different plant....
  Q In your search for Johnny Appleseed, you discovered that he wasn't spreading apple seeds so that people could eat apples, but so that they could eventually make liquor - applejack - something that was quite welcome on the frontier...?
  A In the 20th century, the apple was repositioned as a wholesome food. During Prohibition, we got slogans like "An apple a day keeps the doctor away." When we see the word "cider" in an old source, a 19th-century book, for example, we assume they are talking about sweet cider, but they didn't have refrigeration. It was always hard cider....
  Q Why has it been so easy for us to disregard the role plants play in our lives?
  A ...We compartmentalize nature. As civilization became industrial, our relationships with nature became [weakened]. Food is the most important and powerful way we interact with nature. The most environmentally influential thing we've done is grow crops and tend animals, but only 2% of Americans are farmers. We have more people in prison in this country than farmers....
  The other big reason is that so much of the Judeo-Christian tradition has been about repressing our pagan past, in which nature appeared to us as magic, as full of spiritual meaning. By paganism, I mean everything from Native American [cults] to the ancient Greeks and Romans. You couldn't kill an animal without making a prayer to that animal. They understood their debt to nature. Judeo-Christianity comes along and tries to get people to stop looking around them and to look at something above them.

1. [1 UPsizing, 100 new Ma. jobs]
   IntelCore lands $25m to build fiber-optic plant, by Peter Howe, BG, C3.
   Against the backdrop of a market meltdown for fiber-optic component companies,...
   [Ohoh, how smart is this?!]
   ...a local start-up called InterCore Technologies...has landed $25m in venture capital...to build a 100-person specialty optical cable factory in Grafton MA, opening this winter....

2. Click here for today's TIMEsizing stories - 8/17/2001.

1. [1 UPsizing, 12 new UK & US jobs]
   Man Group to hire brokers, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   LONDON - ...A British broker and hedge fund manager plans to hire a dozen brokers to bolster its financial futures business. Man, based in London, has about 50 financial brokers here and about 40 in the United States. About two thirds of the brokers will be hired for the London office and the rest for the U.S....
   The Man Group is expanding on optimism that the volume of financial futures...will rise as more exchanges switch to electronic trading from open-pit trading.
   [Good luck.]

2. Politics today, letter to editor by Barbara J. Fields of NYC, NYT, A22.
   The writer of an Aug. 14 letter resorts to a form of postmodern astrology ("theirs is...a clever generation") to account for the small-mindedness of our current president and his immediate predecessor.
   A better explanation is the nature of our political system, in which plutocracy has prevailed over democracy, the free market over the free citizen. Successful candidates for high office today must belong to one (or both) of two groups: the aggressive rich or consummate panderers to the aggressive rich. From either group, mediocrity is the best we can expect.

3. Click here for today's TIMEsizing stories - 8/16/2001.