"US Jobless Claims Hit 19-Year High" — Financial Times, May 30, 2002
"US Productivity Rate Best in 19 Years" — AP, May 31, 2002

YOU'LL HAVE TO GO
Productivity and Unemployment Both Going Up, So...

With the latest reports showing U.S. business productivity growing at its strongest pace in 19 years, while the number of Americans filing for unemployment has also surged to its highest level in 19 years, economists today concluded that everyone should be fired.

"The numbers clearly show businesses have been getting more and more out of fewer and fewer employees," said Harvard economist Neil Fischer. "So it doesn't take a genius to determine that employees are a drag on productivity, and that were the economy to reach total unemployment, it would therefore reach total productivity."

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Crunching numbers
Shouldn’t Halliburton be blaming Cheney instead of its accountants?

Still, Halliburton is a special case, because its CEO during most of those Accounting-a-Go-Go years that climaxed with the Enron scandal was Dick Cheney. Cheney now runs the country, they say, adopting the role of mild-mannered vice president in order to disguise his superpowers. And on Thursday Halliburton revealed that its accounting practices beginning in the Cheney era are under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
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thanks to Cursor

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Corporate Welfare at its Worst

The United States has a $6 trillion national debt, a growing deficit and is borrowing money from the Social Security Trust Fund in order to fund government services.We can no longer afford to provide more than $125 billion every year in corporate welfare-- tax breaks, subsidies and other wasteful spending--that goes to some of the largest, most profitable corporations in America.

One of the most egregious forms of corporate welfare can be found at a little-known federal agency called the Export-Import Bank, an institution that has a budget of about $1 billion a year and the capability of putting at risk some $15.5 billion in loan guarantees annually.At a time when the government is underfunding veterans' needs, education, healthcare, housing and many other vital services, more than 80 percent of the subsidies distributed by the Export- Import Bank goes to Fortune 500 corporations.Among the companies that receive taxpayer support from the Ex-Im are Enron, Boeing, Halliburton, Mobil, IBM, General Electric, AT&T, Motorola, Lucent Technologies, FedEx, General Motors, Raytheon and United Technologies.
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Why Is Washington Ignoring The Warning Signs Of Economic Devastation?

Hindsight -- it's all the rage in Washington. But though the story of the missed terror warning signals is eating up all the headlines, there is another story of warning signs being ignored by our elected officials that's getting hardly any ink at all, even though these signs are multiplying at an alarming rate.

Here are a few of them: in the last two years, 433 public companies -- including Enron, Global Crossing, and Kmart -- have declared bankruptcy. Two million Americans have lost their jobs. Four trillion dollars in market value has been lost on Wall Street. And each day brings a fresh, stomach-turning revelation of the rampant corruption infecting corporate America. Despite these ominous flashing red lights, it now appears almost certain that no real reform legislation will come out of Congress before the November elections.

Think of that. After the outrage generated by Enron, Arthur Andersen, Merrill Lynch, and all the other corporate scumbags undermining the modern private enterprise system, the end result will be a continuation of the rotten status quo. And that means fresh disasters down the road. Yet we have the information to, as the phrase of the moment goes, "to connect the dots" right now.
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thanks to Cursor

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Rebel With a Cause

Over the past several years, Stiglitz, a celebrated theorist who was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics for his work on asymmetric information, has grown accustomed to being at the center of controversy. From 1997 to 2000, he served as senior vice president and chief economist at the World Bank--a title that did not stop him from publicly criticizing the bank's sister institution, the International Monetary Fund. In a series of speeches and articles that culminated in a scathing April 2000 essay in The New Republic, Stiglitz blasted the IMF for being every bit as secretive, undemocratic and indifferent to the poor as its critics claimed. Stiglitz's outspokenness, unprecedented for a high-ranking insider, infuriated top officials at the IMF and US Treasury Department, and eventually led James Wolfensohn, the World Bank's president, to inform him that he would have to mute his criticism or resign. Stiglitz chose to leave.
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