Time: Sun Aug 10 08:56:30 1997
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Date: Sun, 10 Aug 1997 08:55:42 -0700
To: (Recipient list suppressed)
From: Paul Andrew Mitchell [address in tool bar]
Subject: SLS: buzz words: "Happy days are here again." 8-)
For those who don't know the song,
this is the opening line to a
sing-song which was popularized
on the TV program "Sing Along with Mitch"
(Mitch Miller, that is:)
/s/ Paul Mitchell
http://www.supremelaw.com
<snip>
>
>I guess globalization has become the new buzzword these days. The
>coincidence between when the word first began appearing and shortly after
>the passage of many free trade agreements is uncanny. Nobody seems willing
>to blame it on free trade, though. I guess that's taboo in the media.
>
>What it does mean is that North America is slowly becoming another
>third-world region.
>Tom
>
>Taken from the Ottawa Citizen, August 9, 1997
>
>Apparently prosperity has come. It's in all the newspapers and we're all
>grateful. There is nothing like picking up the newspaper in the morning and
>finding out that prosperity has come.
>
>All those years of reading about inflation and recession and stagnation and
>all the bad things happening to the leading economic indicators - it was
>damaging to the soul to read all that stuff.
>
>Now prosperity has come. How great to be able to read it. For many people
>it must take the sting out of not having a job.
>
>Prosperity and unemployment together: The people running the economy must
>have so many mixed emotions about that. When the takeover of National
>Trustco by the Bank of Nova Scotia was approved, by Jim Peterson, Secretary
>of State for International Financial Institutions, a takeover that will
>result in the loss of 500 to 700 head office and support jobs over the next
>three years, in addition to the 500 to 1,000 staff reductions already
>planned by National Trustco.
>
>"We were looking at international competitivenes. We were looking at
>benefits to consumers; we were looking at employment; we were looking at the
>adoption of new technologies."
>
>He would be so happy about competitiveness and benefits to consumers from
>the takeover that it might be easy not to worry too much about the area of
>employment, which was third on his list. Too bad about employment, in other
>words, but it could have been worse.
>
>This, in fact, has been the general attitude of the corporate sector and its
>friends in government ever since the era of rationalization, downsizing,
>contracting out and globalization began. Too bad about jobs, but everything
>else seems to be working fine. Maybe someday they'll come around. In the
>meantime, we have work to do rationalizing and globalizing.
>
>Given that attitude, it is not much of a shock to see financial stories such
>as the following:
>
>"Reports of growing unemployment in the United States prompted gleeful
>traders to push the Toronto and New York stock markets into record territory
>yesterday."
>
>That was a real business page story, written last month by a Canadian wire
>service. The glee of the traders had to do with the fact that higher
>unemployment meant slower income growth, which meant less consumer spending
>and therefore less economic growth and less inflation. There is a peculiar
>logic to it, and the fact that it is logic is probably what prevents
>Canadians from rising up and doing something, if they only knew what it was
>they should do.
>
>At least prosperity is here. The unemployment rate last month was 9.1%.
>Yesterday it was 9.0%. Think how bad it would have been in prosperity were
>not here.
>
>Although actually, the unemployment numbers were not much worse in the years
>when prosperity was eluding us. The number of unemployed in 1993, 1.5
>million, was the same as today, when prosperity has arrived.
>
>Which leads to the question, who is enjoying all this prosperity? Well, the
>banks. Their profits are high and may rise further, given all the merging
>and taking over they are being allowed to do. And maybe the people in the
>housing industries will prosper, now that houses are starting to move again.
>
>How can these folks do so well while 1.5 million Canadians are out of work
>and the number of part-time workers is 25% higher, at 2.5 million, than it
>was 10 years ago.
>
>One answer is that you can have, in our advanced technological age,
>prosperity and poverty at the same time. It used to be that one was a drag
>on the other, that large-scale unemployment would have to be reduced before
>an economy could boom. Maybe not so now, as witness the glee of the traders.
>
>Some of the experts will tell you its not so bad. The high unemployment
>rate, they say, only indicates that people who had given up trying to find a
>job are now back looking, driving up the rate. Discouraged workers, they
>are called, in the jargon of the new prosperity. The ungrateful wretches
>[they're probably all socialists, as well -- TC]. If only they had remained
>content to be unemployed, the unemployment rate would drop.
>
>Of course, that would be bad for the stock market.
>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------
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Paul Andrew Mitchell : Counselor at Law, federal witness
B.A., Political Science, UCLA; M.S., Public Administration, U.C. Irvine
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