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about as good as it can get

``` [Here are three excerpts from this week's papers, two on the economy from the Wall Street Journal and one on the views on the Oklahoma bombing of a local conservative spokesman. I don't make this stuff up, folks.]

During the 1990-91 recession, when layoffs were announced almost every day, workers around the nation were angry and anxious. Their employers talked about a tough new world in which global competition and technological change required constant leanness, but most employees assumed that the layoffs would stop when the good times returned.

They were wrong.

While corporate profits were surging to record levels last year, the number of job cuts approached those seen at the height of the recession. Corporate profits rose 11% in 1994, after a 13% rise in 1993, according to DRI/McGraw Hill, a Lexington, Mass., economic consultant. Meanwhile, corporate America cut 516,069 jobs in 1994, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas in Chicago. That is far more than in the recession year of 1990, when 316,047 jobs were eliminated, and close to the 1991 total of 555,292 jobs.

(Matt Murray, Amid record profits, companies continue to lay off employees, Wall Street Journal, 4 May 1995, pages A1, A5.)

Once upon a time -- say, the year before last -- a company making a 20% return on equity was among the elite. A Wal-Mart Stores or a Coca-Cola could obtain the mark, but precious few others.

Now, it seems, the club is open to all. In the first quarter, the average ROE of the Standard & Poor's 500 companies hit 20.12%. This figure (hot off the calculator from Salomon Brothers) represents the highest level of corporate profitability in the postwar era, and probably since the latter stages of the Bronze Age.

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According to Jack Ciesielski, who writes the Analyst's Accounting Observer in Baltimore, the ROE signal is "muddy," or inexact -- but it has always been muddy. It might not measure true corporate profitability. It does suggest that life in corporate America is about as good as it can get.

(Roger Lowenstein, Intrinsic Value: The "20% Club" no longer is exclusive, Wall Street Journal, 4 May 1995, page C1.)

Lawrence Ludlow, public relations director for the San Diego-based Citizens' Government Watch Committee, disagrees with the media's sensationalism of militias as well.

According to Ludlow, the Oklahoma bombing seems to be another example of government employees who commit seemingly random violent acts.

"This Oklahoma thing is just another example of another government employee going berserk," Ludlow said. "But instead of taking out civilians, as they usually do, he took out some of his fellow federal employees."

According to Ludlow, federal employees have the easiest jobs in the country. They have work-free environments, gold-plated benefit plans and salaries and retirement plans that are paid for by taxpayers, Ludlow said.

"For example, what is this day care doing in this federal center?" Ludlow said. "Why are these employees having these gold-plated jobs? Perhaps if they hadn't negotiated for such gold-plated working engagements there wouldn't be such a casualty list of innocent noncombatants in these things."

The people connected with the bombing are all people that live off the government, Ludlow said.

"James Nichols, who is charged as a conspirator with McVeigh, received federal farm assistance from the USDA from 1986 to 1994," Ludlow said. "Then we have McVeigh himself, a former government employee and Gulf War veteran."

(Diane Tottori, Local militia condemns bombing, The Daily Aztec (SDSU), 4 May 1995, pages 1, 3.) ```

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