The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer; December 25, 2000

. . . . . . Good evening and Merry Christmas. I'm Margaret Warner.

Jim Lehrer is off today. On the news hour this Christmas night, Paul Solomon explores why we like to buy so much. Ray Suarez examines an unlikely bestseller. Mike James reports on yet another retailer bowing to globalization, Susan Denser presents an encore report on caring for the elderly, and Ann Taylor Fleming reflects on prosperity. It all follows our summary of the news this Monday. Suppose there was a pill to help prevent heart disease and a premature aging. There already is, natural vitamin E. Who supplies it to the world? This program was also made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by contributions to PBS stations from viewers like you, thank you.

Christians around the world celebrated Christmas today, but weeks of Israeli Palestinian fighting and tight security, mar the occasion in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus. Most pilgrims and tourists stayed away from traditional services there. Bethlehem's mayor reported only 400 visitors down from 10,000 a year ago. Many Christmas trees in the town were adorned with pictures of Palestinians killed in the recent fighting. In Indonesia today, police were investigating a series of church bombings on Christmas Eve in the largely Muslim country. We have this report from Richard Vaughn of Associated Press Television News. Church services went on as normal on Christmas Day in Jakarta, although many people stayed away, fearing a repeat of Sunday night's bomb blasts. But many Christians were determined to celebrate Christmas despite the attacks. The inside at least of Jakarta's Roman Catholic Cathedral was full of worshippers who turned out for Christmas mass.

But the mood amongst them was subdued on this holiest of days. This church was one of 15 across the country to suffer a bomb attack. 15 people are reported to have died in the series of blasts with as many as 100 more injured. The bloody Christmas Eve could not have been far from people's minds as they said their prayers. Afterwards the priest who led the service in Denise's Catholic Cardinal Julius Damat Magia called on his congregation not to forget the spirit of Christmas. He said they should not rush to judge the bombers, but should instead try to forgive and work towards reconciliation. The reaction of Indonesia's President Wahid was less conciliatory. He condemned the killings and said the attackers were trying to stir up religious hatred in this mainly Muslim nation. No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks. Pope John Paul II at his Christmas Day mask lamented the violence in Indonesia in his annual holiday message. The Pope said Catholics in that country face a tragic time of trial and suffering. He also expressed concern about the continuing bloodshed in the Middle East.

Thousands of people gathered in St. Peter's Square to hear the Pope and millions more watched the address as it was televised live in some 40 countries. Also today a partial solar eclipse was visible across much of North America. Everything was best in the Northeast, where at midday the moon blocked out about 60% of the sun. Coverage was even greater in Northern Canada, but much less in the Southwest. This was the first Christmas Day eclipse on this continent in nearly 400 years, and astronomers say we'll have to wait 300 years for another one. In Serbia today, as pro-democracy forces celebrated their landslide victory in Saturday's parliamentary elections, the Prime Minister-elect announced a wide-ranging investigation of Slobanamalosevic. He said the ousted Yugoslav president had to answer as he put it, for all the terrible things he has done, for corruption, crime, election fraud, and ordering murders. The new Prime Minister's 18 party reform coalition won two-thirds of the seats in the Parliament of Serbia, the dominant republic and the Yugoslav Federation.

That's it for the news summary tonight. Now it's on to why we love to buy the Harry Potter craze, a retailer bows to global pressures, caring for the elderly, and anthaler Fleming's thoughts on prosperity. Christmas is a day for giving, receiving, and frequently mixed emotions about the entire exercise. Our Paul Solomon of WGBH Boston offers a scientific take on one of our major holiday preoccupations. The Christmas season, when even in a perhaps slowing economy, Americans flock to the malls to buy toys for the kids, trinkets for the spouse, chachkas for the boss, to splendidly spend as befits the richest people in the history of the planet. And yet traditionally, Christmas is also a time for guilt, about the over-commercialization of it all, the have-nots, and the homeless.

The fact that this holiday's namesake was the pastor of poverty. In short, it is the season to be ambivalent about self-interest versus selflessness, greed versus love, economics versus morality, age-old conflicts human beings seem incapable of resolving. But here in the 21st century, we may finally have a shot at understanding why, deep down inside, we are ambivalent. Thanks to the theories of a relatively young and controversial science, sociobiology. That is, if you're willing to believe that human behavior evolved biologically. One of the elders of sociobiology, urban divorce, all species have competition, males particularly in many mammal species. So what formed is a take? Well, in this species, one of the major forms it takes is simply the acquisition of wealth, because that then leads to access to so many other things, fame, fortune, jet airplanes, beautiful women, you know, whatever.

Listen simple mindedly to Devora and his colleagues here at the annual International Sociobiology meeting, and you'd think at first that greed is merely a pejorative for a fact of life. I am not a destroyer of companies. In that light, investment banker Gordon Gekko, the slimy villain of the movie Wall Street, is just telling it like it is. Greed, for lack of a better word, is good, greed is right, greed works, greed clarifies cuts through and catches the essence of the evolutionary spirit. According to this view, greed is good because it's natural, and arguably as Gordon Gekko is to Hollywood, so Richard Dawkins, author of the selfish gene has been to evolutionary biology. The prime exponent of what's been understood as the greed is good argument. There is a sense in which, from a Darwinian point of view, you would expect all individuals of all species to be greedy, in the sense of trying to gather for themselves, as many

resources as they can, for the sake of their own survival, the survival of their children, and ultimately for the sake of their genes, whose main motivation as Dawkins has written is to survive forever, if possible, to socio-biologists, that's the whole purpose of self-interest. At the fundamental level, humans are self-interested. If they're not self-interested, they don't tend to leave any offspring, so any of the genes or things that led you to not be self-interested, at least to a large degree, just don't get past the lungs. So we're all the descendants of some degree selfish ancestors. In short, our avaricious ancestors survived, the rest wound up as extinct as this Irish elk. Jay Fielen, a biologist and Terry Burnham, an economist who has also taught behavioral biology, say that in a sense, we humans have been bred for greed. Because evolution is a relative game.

You have seven kids. I have eight kids. This goes on for enough generations. You don't any longer have seven eighths of the population, or seven to fifteen. You have zero, right? So you have to, as we like to say, don't keep up with the Joneses, bury them. Thus, the instinct for self-interest that paid off in the Stone Age when humans stopped evolving influences our behavior today, even if it doesn't fully determine it. You're walking around with a brain inside your head that is optimized for a completely different world. And if you can think about that world and the way the brain would have been designed to work best in that world for maximizing reproductive success, that's what you get. Now as it happens, self-interest is a central tenet of the science I'm more familiar with, economics. Back in 1776, four months before the Declaration of Independence, a Scott named Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, wherein he famously wrote, It's not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

This was the first statement of how free-market capitalism works. But the invisible hand of self-interest have a free hand, and everyone benefits. J. Fielen and Terry Burnham are firm believers in the virtues of self-interest. This is Burnham's new Porsche, bought with proceeds from the sale of the biotech firm he founded. But these guys are as aware as the rest of us of the excesses of unbridled self-interest. For example, the race for status goods that's been so evident in this booming economy. It's so-called luxury fever, that's economist Robert Frank, who coined this contemporary term for conspicuous consumption. Yes, everybody wants to be a millionaire. But we also believe that money isn't everything, a cliche epitomized by the appearance this time of year of Ebenezer Scrooge. It's the failure of money to buy happiness that Fielen and Burnham address in their new book Mean Genes. Let's just take it as a given for now, you're built to be greedy.

And what you want to do, one of the things you want to do is amass wealth. But it's one of the paradoxes of human nature that by pursuing that you may not become happy. We are much richer than we used to be, and yet there's no evidence that we're already happier than we were 40 years ago or 100 years ago, and almost no difference between different income groups within the country. Now you ask, well, what percentage of people are clinically sick that they're depressed and highest ever in the history of the world, right here? So what's going on? Well, say Burnham and Fielen, Stone Age urges our stoking luxury fever, but the natural drives that gave our ancestors a leg up in the paleolithic past are also tripping us up in the present. I think from a genetic perspective, it would be disastrous if we had a brain that could achieve happiness and be there because when we're happy, what are we going to do? We're not going to do anything. And so the solution that appears to have arrived is always want more, right? You could think of a better, maybe you could think of a better way to build an organism,

but this is a great way. No matter where it is, it always tries to get more. In other words, you can never have enough, thus you can never be happy. That insight alone would explain why people are ambivalent about self-interested consumer culture, but socio-biologists take it a step further. They point to studies of current hunter-gatherer societies like Southern Africa's Kung Bushman. What is it that makes a hunter-gatherer feel wealthy? Lead at cosmades. Some people have suggested that one of the cues that since hunter-gatherers don't have wealth in the same sense, that one of the cues that our minds use to feel wealthy and secure and protected and sated and like everything's okay are things like, well, how many can do I have around me? By that measure, lonely scrooge, toting up his wealth, is poorer than the apparently destitute cratchit family. God blesses everyone. But, according to socio-biologists, even the warm and fuzzy feelings of love and kinship are not as selfless as they seem.

The self-interests of genes can be accomplished by programming non-selfish behavior at higher levels of, say, the organism. Cooperation. Yes. Love. Love, if love leads to the survival of selfish genes, which it often does. No wonder then that we're ambivalent about consumer culture. It persuades us to buy in order to satisfy our perceived need for wealth. But not only does it fail to satisfy, it also undermines another arguably deeper need. For fellow humans to serve our ultimate self-interest, the survival of our genes via our family. In other words, says lead to cosmades. We may be over-consuming, certain commercial goods and consumer goods. Thinking that that's going to give us what's missing, when what's missing is the presence of an extended kin group, the presence of social support of friends that you know you that you can rely on, think about market exchanges. When I give you money for something, that means we're not friends.

If we're friends, and you need something from me, I just give it to you, right? And the more we have these distanced market exchanges, the more we have a sense of alienation from other people, because it's exactly a sign of our social distance. Every time I pay money for something, it's a sign of social distance. So at the end of the day, here's what we're left with. To the extent that it's true, evolutionary biology suggests why we're greedy and self-interested, because selfish genes reproduce more, why we're loving to reproduce in the first place and to stick together, to raise a family, and therefore, why we're stuck with ambivalence. But to some who view the world in religious terms, the way out of our ambivalence is simple. Define self-interest broadly enough to include the entire human family. As Christianity and other faiths by some accounts have long insisted us. We leave the last word to Episcopal priest Peter Gomes. It is perfectly possible to admire the system which has enriched so many people, and

that has built a vibrant economy, that would mire that on the one hand, and then urge it to find ways for that system to be more equitably shared by the rest of the culture, for the sake of the culture, for the sake of the rich, as well as for the sake of the poor. The saying is greed is good, the better saying is it is good to give, and in so doing the giver is blessed, and the person who receives is blessed, and in some sense we stand on a much firmer foundation than the temporary excitement of great wealth. And with that thought, Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night. Now another holiday report, a look at the leading children's book series topping the best seller list this season.

As racewire has reported earlier this year, the books feature an unlikely young wizard in training named Harry Potter. Kids on both sides of the Atlantic swarmed bookstores in search of the summer book, the latest Harry Potter. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is the fourth book in British author J.K. Rowling's projected seven-part children's series. The exploits of the young wizard with lightning and blazoned on his forehead have enchanted kids and adults alike, Harry Potter attends the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and shares desperately dangerous adventures. We start flipping the pages so tensely like I've got to read it, I've got to read it, and then when you're telling me the first, it's like, find me the second, I'm the third, so I can't wait to read the fourth. The pre-release hype was carefully built into a marketing explosion. And really happy that when your book is out. And unprecedented 3.8 million copies were released in this country on Saturday at one minute past midnight.

Potter devotees lined up late Friday night to get their hands on the 734 page tone. It's been, it's been wonderful, it's just nice to see people so fired up about a book. And not just kids, but you know adults. And the media attention, things like that, it's just, it's unusual for a book, it's like a movie, it's like a movie release. It was the largest first printing of a book ever. Advanced orders flooded bookshop. An internet retail giant Amazon.com pre-sold more than 300,000 copies. The plot of the fantasy novel was strategically shrouded in mystery prior to its release. Even the title was secret, until the British press leaked it. Booksellers signed affidavits, promising to keep the books under wraps until the July 8th release date. You lucky fans snagged copies in advance, when Walmart stores in Virginia and New Jersey inadvertently broke the publisher's embargo. Since the first Harry Potter was published by Scholastic in 1998, the series has sold nearly 21 million copies in America.

Potter books have spent nearly 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and they've even simultaneously held all three top slots, the tales of the orphaned wizard have been translated into 35 languages, even the author is at a loss to explain Harry's universal appeal. That's the question I most often get asked and I honestly don't have a, you think I would have come up with something intelligence to say about it by now and I really haven't because the truth is, I wrote them for me, I don't know. When Britain's rolling launched her book tour on a special steam train called the Hogwarts Express, after the train Harry Potter takes to his wizardry school, rolling has already sold Warner Bros. the right to put Harry on the silver screen next year. For more about the Harry Potter phenomenon we're joined by Valerie Lewis, co-owner of Hickelby's, a children's bookstore in San Jose, California. She's also author of Valerie and Walter's Best Books for Children, a lively and opinionated

guide. In San Robach, children's book editor at Publish's Weekly, the trade journal that covers the book publishing industry, and Leonard Marcus, a children's book historian, author and critic, his biography titled Margaret Wise Brown, Awakened by the Moon, was published last year. Diane Robach did people in the book trade recognize that there was something different, that they had a winner in these books when they started to come over from Britain. I think it actually grew, it grew little by little. The books were somewhat of success at the beginning, but by the third book, they were really enormously best sellers. And this fourth one is really beyond what anyone could ever have expected. Is it unusual to see a children's book, or what's being marketed as a children's book, weighing in at 734 pages, is there anything like it? I can't think of anything like it, either in size or the amount that it's been selling. It's really unprecedented.

And Valerie Lewis, what are your young customers telling you about what it is that they like about these books? Well, I just had a fabulous one, a young boy come in the other day, and he said, I like Harry Potter, you know, he's a regular guy and he doesn't rag on his friends. I thought that was kind of nice. He's a decent character, and he manages to handle that whole business of good over evil. And there's no gender gap when it comes to the Potter phenomenon. There doesn't appear to be any, and by the way, in reference to what you said a moment ago, when we got the first reading copy of Harry Potter in our store, we got so excited we called the publisher and said, if this person ever comes to California Center out, she was unknown to us, but the book from the word go was just incredible. Do you have to read the other books to be able to get into this? Can you pick up book number three and kind of get into it the way you would an old movie cereal? Oh, I think you should start from the beginning. Now the other two people might feel differently, but I think there's so much to lose because

it's just such a finely written journal, and every year the character gets another year older, and it makes sense to start from the beginning. Well Leonard Marcus, for people who have never really heard of Harry Potter, I think they'd find a lot that's familiar in the children's genre, he's an orphan, he is put in the care of people who adults who don't really take very good care of him, and then has to fall back on his own wits, isn't that a 500 year old story? Well it's one of the classic themes of children's literature, and I think one of the reasons the books are so compelling is that Rowling has managed to synthesize a number of the classic themes. Harry is one of the outsiders of children's literature, just as the ugly duckling is, or Tom Sawyer, or Huckleberry Finn. He's also living in a magic world in our midst, and that's one of the fascinating premises of fantasy, the thought that you don't have to go to Mars to find a different world, it's really just next door to us

if we know how to look for it. Is that part of the explanation for the book's success among children that it creates a world that's kind of ratifying, that's comfortable for them, and a parallel world to the world of adults? Well that's part of it, but it's not just comfortable because the world that Harry lives in is full of real and palpable danger. I think it's that it's a heightened reality, it's a good part of what makes it exciting, it's like our world's squared or cubed. So there's more to it, and I think that's another reason that that's one of the reasons that adults find it appealing to. It's an intensified reality. Rowling is also a satirist, and there are a lot of ways in which he's talking about the world that we know in an indirect way. Diane Rollback, a lot of attention was paid over the weekend to the hype, lavished on this book, one wonders whether they even had to go through all of this since the books,

and there was so much buzz about them to begin with. But is there a point at which we can assume that it's actually the quality of the book that's propping this up, that really you could take some less worthy book and hype it to death and maybe nobody would read it? Well I would say this about what's being called the hype about the book, that part of the children anyway, the hype is really following the story rather than creating the demand for the books. The kids really love these books, and they have nothing to do with the hype. They're not listening to what the media is saying, they're not seeing ads for the book or that kind of thing. They're really just going for the book. I think what the hype is doing, as far as the media, is it's informing a lot of adults about the books who would never have been exposed to them. Maybe they don't have children, they don't have grandchildren. I think Harry Potter has really become a household world word now, thanks to this publication. In the series Harry Potter is getting older just as the readers are getting older. Will this mean, will this have to mean, a real change in the story when J.K. Rowling is writing

about a teenager? Well it'll be interesting to see, you're right, the teenagers, the readers will be getting older with Harry. But for the kids who are younger than the age range of the Harry is, they can pick up the books in a year or two. I think that, well, this isn't exactly on the point, but there's something to the fact that the books, there's seven of the books. It's a finite series. The kids can grow up with the books. I think that adds a lot to the appeal. Valerie Lewis, as a bookseller, I'm sure you're just overjoyed at the idea that once there's seven, that a new generation, every generation of eighth graders and eight year olds and nine year olds might want to pick up and start at the beginning. Right, I mean, it's very exciting. This isn't about a rock concert. It's about a book and it's thrilling for those of us who have been pushing to get books into the hands of children. Do you feel constrained by the way that this book was marketed or did this help you as a bookseller to handle the demand for the book?

It's been fun. It's been fun. I kind of like the challenge of having to figure out the next way to have this book come. This morning when I went to work after this wild weekend of Harry Potter, I walked to the front door and there was an origami owl and I pulled it out of the door and inside its beak was a little note, a tiny little red note and I opened it up and it said, simply, thank you for all you do. And each one of us on the staff thought, that's what it's all about. We got the community so excited that they're thanking us because we managed to hand them this book that they want so much to read and that is very exciting. And it wasn't bad for you either, since human beings, human beings aren't supposed to be able to get those messages from the owls. That's for wizards, right? That's right. But you know, adults have been reading adult children's books. Harry Potter isn't the first one because I've been hearing a lot about that, about Harry Potter appealing to adults. We've had adults for years coming in and reading people like David

Almond or Philip Pullman, other people who write basically for young adults have quite a lot of fans in adult readers. Leonard Marcus, can you sort of place this in the vast pool of things being written for children these days or is it just in a class by itself? Well, every book is a little bit different. And as I said before, this book really represents a kind of convergence of different genres. They're mystery stories. They're buddy stories. There's the aspect of Quidditch, the super soccer game that they play, so there's sorts of novels too. There's a very long tradition of novels for adults as well as for children about students. Students who are learning about life and getting ready for life. And I think one of the ways that this series is bound to evolve is that we're going to learn more and more about the uses of the magic that these kids are training for. What will be used for, for good or for bad?

There are some people who have said these books are kind of dark, and they have especially in mind the sort of younger edge of the reading pool there. There's incidental murder. There's frequent death. Should parents know this going in? Well, yeah, they should also realize that children from a very early age know about death and other dark matters. And what books have to offer is a way of framing those experiences and putting them in the context of life. A story has the unique power of putting the most uncomfortable matters within the framework of a beginning, a middle, and an end. And on some level, that's comforting at the same time that it offers a very valuable kind of understanding. You know, I'd love to jump in with this one because I think those of us who have survived Hansel and Gretel have to talk about abuse. I mean, we've got a father who sends their children out to the woods. The clever children who work their way back, they are not exactly warmly received. They've got the father carries them farther out into the woods. There,

it's dark. They work their way, not that back home the second time, but they make their way to a gingerbread house that they soon discover is owned by a witch who happens to be a cannibal. It's just in, she puts the older brother in a cage and tries to fatten him up and then the sister has to murder the witch through incineration in order to save the brother and then they work their way back home. That is an terrible story. And you can't help but wonder how in the world did we survive that? And I think it's because the children who hear that story are not concentrating on the witch and they're not concentrating on the abuse of father. They're thinking, wow, those two kids survived. And every year when parents come to me and say, I've got a toddler having nightmares who wants to read where the wild things are. What do you recommend? And I always say, you know, we're looking at the monsters. There's a good chance that child's looking at that little boy who says wild

things and absolutely tames them. So who knows, maybe people, I mean, this is the perfect solution for youngsters reading a book where this, this kid is able to outsmart all those villains. Well, panel, thank you all very much for being with us. Still to come on the news hour tonight, a retailer gives in to global pressures, caring for our aging parents and antiller flemming's reflections on prosperity. Now global economics generates local fallout yet again. Mike James of KCTS Seattle reports. Seattle based outfitter REI, recreation equipment incorporated an icon of the Northwest lifestyle, is shutting down its last clothing plan to the United States and moving the work to Mexico. The decision puts 125 employees out of work. REI is the nation's largest consumer cooperative customers by memberships vote for a board of directors and collect

dividends at the end of the year. One of the founders is Jim Whitaker, the first American to climb Mount Everest. And while Seattle is hardly synonymous with the American apparel industry, the city did maintain a strong niche in the sports wear market for more than half a century without fitters like REI, Eddie Bauer and several ski clothing companies. REI's flagship store and his headquarters are still here, but as the labels inside show, most manufacturing is overseas now drawn there by cheap labor. The REI decision to close this fleece garment plant south of the city upsets some customers and left others simply resigned. I'm all for free trade and but I hate to see jobs go somewhere else, cheap labor. I don't I don't know what Mexican labor laws are like. It's sad that they're taking business away from Americans, but we're in international. It's an international company, we're in international marketplace. So I can see both sides of it. REI executives refused comment for this story and would not allow cameras inside the

store or at this clothing plant. In a brief statement, the company blames the closure on global competition, saying an effect it is no longer cost effective to produce clothing in the United States. A glance at a global production map quickly shows what's happened to the world garment industry over the last two decades. A pair of production in Malaysia is up 597% in Bangladesh, 416% Sri Lanka, 385% Indonesia, 334% international trade consultant Deborah Glassman believes the REI decision reflects this globalization of the clothing industry. What REI has done is just one more step in a really long process that has been taking place over a couple of decades and will continue and that process involves the industry that we call textiles in a peril, basically leaving this country. Hundreds of thousands of jobs in that industry have left. I mean, this is an industry that the United States no

longer has a comparative advantage in because it's very labor intensive. Comparative advantage is all about labor costs and in the apparel business, the United States is no longer competitive. The average hourly labor costs for clothing and footwear workers in the United States is $10. In China, $4.20 in Mexico, $1.70. And by the year 2005, international trade agreements administered by the World Trade Organization will eliminate textile quota systems that still protect manufacturers in the United States. Over the next five years, the protection, the remaining protection will be progressively dismantled and you're going to see a lot more factories shutting in that particular industry. You go to these closings and people have worked there 30, 35 years. Union executive Rick Wilson knows all about clothing plants shutting down. He's district manager for Unite, the union of needle trades industrial and textile employees. Wilson

says trade agreements like NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, are killing the industry in the Northwest. 27% of the apparel and textile jobs have left Oregon. We've seen 15,000 jobs leave the Pacific Northwest since NAFTA has been passed. We've seen 100,000 jobs leave the country nationwide. So where does it stop? Does it start with these entry-level jobs into America's society like the clothing and textile workers? Is that the only industry we're going to dispose of or is it going to start climbing into the others? Those are questions heard in Seattle last year during the disruptions at the World Trade Organization meeting. Labor unions marched at that meeting, demanding protection of worker rights abroad, the right to organize and negotiate better working conditions. Labor expert Margaret Levy, a researcher at the University of Washington Center for Labor Studies, argues that those demands are important now for all American workers.

Without some kind of governmental regulation and some kind of rules in place that regulate the international system, that the whole movement of jobs will be to push down the pay, push down the conditions. And that will then have an effect of doing that here as well. So that working families here who are already under pressure will feel more pressure. They'll be told if they don't toe the line, if they don't accept these conditions that their jobs will move. It becomes a threat. And this is our most popular world jacket and we've been making this since the turn of the century, but it's all 100% virgin wall. The clothing manufacturer does survive in the United States, stand colds and believe it will happen only in very specialized markets. He's CEO of C.C. Filsen, the Seattle-based outfitter of durable and expensive working clothes. The Filsen shop is full of special oil soaked and water resistant pants, rugged leather jackets, the last decades, the kind of clothing that's more like equipment, where price is not the issue. Filsen is also the last union

clothing shop in the city. Because we have a specific niche in the market, our prices are not as much as a factor because we don't have a tremendous amount of competition at that small niche we have. So we're not as concerned about what the finished garment price is out at. Cole says places like REI and Eddie Bauer are in a very different market where prices everything were consumers compare. So they must manufacture it a price that keeps their products competitive. The marketplace dictates that. I mean, they're in a marketplace where the consumer knows what a comparable garment would cost because they sell a lot of high-tech items that are also available by lots of other manufacturers that have wonderful brand names and wonderful wall teeth. But still, there are, they are limitless to what somebody will pray for those goods because they know that garment should retail for X amount of dollars. Stan Cole sees no end of the flow of clothing jobs overseas and he is want about the work that will remain even in specialized markets like his own. It pays at

best 11 to $12 an hour. The work is hard and it is performed almost exclusively by recent immigrants. The vanishing jobs are not lucrative or high profile, but economists believe the whole debate about the migration of clothing work overseas leaves many Americans uneasy about the benefits of open trade. People are starting to say maybe we should be concerned about these things or, gee, I haven't thought about them so much, but yeah, now I wonder about environmental management practices in Mexico or in other countries. I wonder about labor standards and factories making athletic footwear. I wonder about the quality of products that are coming in from overseas. I wonder about health issues. You can go right down the list, things which people worry about can be linked to global trends and again trade is the channel. For economists like Deborah Glassman, this unease about trade is a part of globalization, but so she argues is job growth. As jobs leave because of the changing

international trade rules or changing international trade climate, there are also jobs being gained. The studies that have come out looking at job losses and job gains have shown that the job gains roughly in terms of numbers counterbalance the job losses. These are different people in different kinds of jobs, but there may even be net gains in terms of jobs. The REI closure will take away 125 jobs, but the state estimates the booming local economy will generate 30,000 new jobs in Seattle by the end of this year. Next, holiday joy and sadness. Though holidays are family times for many families, they're particularly difficult reminders of the wrenching dilemmas in caring for aging parents. Last Christmas time, health correspondent Susan Denser told this story of friends who've

helped each other through that struggle. Our health unit is a partnership with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. So you have to drink all the water you can. That's good. Just a few days before Thanksgiving, Carol Warner's 84-year-old mother, a stroke victim, landed back in the hospital with severe dehydration. It is. That's the best thing you can do is drink water. For several days, Carol and her siblings thought their mother was near death, but then Augusta Cummings recovered. The minute you heard us dividing up the furniture the other day, you woke up. Now Cummings has moved to a place where she's likely to live out the rest of her life, a northern Virginia nursing home. Her daughter says she's improving. The main crisis issue we had to deal with was severe dehydration. Her skin was so dry that she was scratching at her arms and her legs herself. And now we're trying to get those wounds healed. And when she was in the hospital, she was having little mini seizures and would throw herself against the bed rails, which exasperated that problem.

Even with her mother getting excellent care from the home's professional staff, Carol Warner finds looking after her needs to be an all-consuming job. In that, she's much like the other 25 million family caregivers in the United States. See, they're the fish over there? Sometimes those families are in effect extended ones like Carol Warner's 13 long-time friends. All work graduates of the class of 1962 at Yorktown High School in Arlington, Virginia. Back then, they were all members of the same school service organization. After graduation, they stayed in close touch, making sure to get together at least once a year says group member Joan Loftus. We talked about other things getting married, having children, but then more recently, we began to discuss our elderly parents and other relatives that we were supporting. As grandparents and then parents grew disabled or died, the 14 friends found themselves

facing similar struggles. Linda Rogers' mother had Alzheimer's. Brenda Veregg's mother died a protracted death from cancer. More and more, they talked about the common problems they faced, including dealing with their own sense of loss, says group member Linda Veach. When we would get together, and different people were talking about their parents so much, and someone, and it may have been Linda at some point said, you know, this is what we talk about all the time now, maybe we ought to write a book about it. So they did. In numerous sessions around Linda Rogers' dining room table, and through a frenzy of emails sent back and forth across the country, the 14 friends' guide to elder caring was published by capital books. It amazes a lot of people. They say, how in the world did 14 women agree on anything, much less a whole book. But they did agree on fundamental issues like the need to preserve the dignity of elderly parents or to share the caregiving role. And in so doing, they waited into what is likely

to become a major national issue in years to come, says Dr. Ezekiel, a manual of the National Institutes of Health. Yeah, as the baby boom generation ages by 2030, one out of every five Americans is going to be over 65, and a significant portion of them are going to need assistance. Secondly, each family, as we know, the birth rate is declined. So each family has fewer children. So they have a responsibility for the elder that is going to fall on fewer people. And according to a major new survey of caregivers of the dying that a manual oversaw, the preponderance of them are likely to be women. Three-quarters of the spouses who did provide a care of women, three-quarters of the children. It was the daughter, not the son. If you look at siblings, it was the sister, not the brother. Even among friends, it tended to be women, not men, friends. The 14 friends know these statistics because they live them. The friends intimate experience with caregiving allowed them to settle quickly on topics for their book. One of the

most important was the frustration that caregiving brings. Linda Rogers learned that in dealing with her mother's gradual mental deterioration before she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. There is no way you're going to avoid frustration, and you just have to find ways of dealing with it. We had, my mother would call me on the phone and say, Linda, you've taken my keys. She would repeat this every 10 seconds. The phone would ring again. There she would be telling me I had taken her keys. What's often required in situations like this, the friends agreed, was a technique that they called breaking the code. They say this, but what are they really saying? So everything that's a problem, let's take this and say beneath it all. What are they really saying? The phrase is shorthand for trying to understand the loved ones' worries and then look for simple solutions. That's just what Linda Rogers and her siblings did.

We just got all kinds of keys and we put the keys all over the house. So when she would call, I would say, go look in the drawer. They're right there. So she could find the keys and deal with that in an instant. Another subject the friends emphasized was the need for sharing the caring of a disabled or dying loved one. While her mother was dying of pancreatic cancer, Judy McLeod commuted for several hours each weekend to help her father and dad provide care. Each family has to figure out a different scheme of how it can happen because there's usually one person who seems like they get it all. And they have to be able to get help from the siblings. And that's not always easy. Some of the people haven't been natural caregivers. Some of the people live longer distances. So I think what we want to say is this has to be something that's out on the table that people talk about. How can we share this? The friends had other advice to pass along as well. They stress the importance of finding

practical ways to preserve to love one's dignity. Even as he or she struggles with embarrassing or debilitating loss of function. My mother-in-law had to deal with incontinence for a long time before she died. And I think actually it's a problem that many, many older women have. And it is probably one of the biggest thieves of dignity. It is a reason that elderly women often refuse to visit their friends to go out to do anything social because they're tremendously embarrassed by it. There are a lot of products on the market that can help things like deodorizers in rooms, clothes that have Velcro fast things instead of buttons when you're going out. Make sure that you'll be sitting in a restaurant at a table that's very near a bathroom. Those kinds of things that you can think of ahead of time will really help protect your elders' dignity.

In the book you use the phrase guilt is a four-letter word. What we mean by being a four-letter word is that guilt is so non-productive. It can totally incapacitates you. It makes you not make the right decisions and you have to really ask yourself if I'm doing everything that I can, then you shouldn't let anyone else make you feel guilty and you shouldn't feel guilty about the things that you just can't accomplish. And that means the friends say, never say never, including vows not ever to place a loved one in a nursing home. You need to stay flexible because with elder caring, the only constant is change. I don't feel any guilt right now for putting my mother in this long-term care facility, even though every older person's fear in life, my mother included very specifically that they don't want to go to what is a nursing home because it's like the end of the line and yet we're just calling it long-term care and this is the best we can do so we're not going to feel guilty. We have to do this for her to get the right care, the proper

care. Finally, the friends say, it's inevitable that elder caring will unleash a flood of emotions. Brenda Vera recalls her mother's illness and death. I still get weepy when I think about it. My mother was my best friend and it was a lesson to me that the reason elder caring is so difficult is that besides the physical work which we all can do when you're caring for somebody, it involves the longest relationship of your whole life and so you bring all of the emotions of that relationship into the caring process. These messages have struck a chord with thousands of people who've bought and read the 14 friends book. Although they've become caregiving experts, many of the 14 friends keep the book close at hand to reread when the going gets rough. Carol Warner did that during her mother's recent hospitalization, even as her friends rallied around

to provide support. Many of them recalled Mrs. Cummings' fondly from their younger days. If there's such a thing as a Virginia lady, it's Mrs. Cummings. I think so too. One of the really fun things that I remember about Mrs. Cummings was I was at their house as usual and she was downstairs. This is the ultimate lady. She was changing the filter in the furnace and she looked at me and she said Linda, never learn how to do this. Once you learn how, it's your job. And she probably had on a silk plow. How are you? How do you feel now about Carol going through the crowd of her? Very proud. Very proud. Why proud? Because she's doing it with such love. It makes me proud to have Carol for a friend and the rest of the other 13 of this group. It's the hardest thing that I've

ever done and I think everybody in this group feels that way. Mother, you want to put this on the tray? We'll put it right here. We'll put one here. Amid and outpouring of interest in their work, the 14 friends are now considering other projects aimed at helping people care for ailing loved ones. We first aired that report last December 24th. In January of this year, 84-year-old Augusta Cummings passed away in the nursing home with members of her family at her side. Finally tonight, S.A.S.A.S. and Taylor Fleming offer some holiday thoughts about our prosperity. It is the season of high acquisition. You can hear the coast-to-coast kuching of the collective cash registers as America does its seasonal holiday thing. Parents scrambling to get the toys du jour for their own children and for themselves.

The truth is, this sort of high-pitch equisitiveness has been going on for a stretch of years now. It knows no seasonal downtime. We've been on a high-flying binge, a gilded age reduction. Fueled by techno fortunes and global marketering, we have been prosperous, deeper, longer, and at any time in our history. I walked the neighborhood where I've lived my whole life, once a relatively modest seaside suburb, and everywhere there is the expensive thrum of construction. People putting up huge gatsby-like mansions, air-sats, tusk and villas, so big that they swallow up the lawns and lots and actually block the sun, the very thing that brings people to Southern California. The weird thing is, we no longer see it, see any of this. At least, I realize I don't. Only occasionally do I register the true depth of the wealth that now surrounds me, that has taken such firm root here in the past decade. The $2, $3,4 million plus houses, $40,000 plus cars, the restaurants with their $40 and $50

and $60 entrees, the business women and their Armani suits, their Ivy League bound, pampered, and tutored private school kids. In fairness, this isn't just LA, the same is true in Northern California, and Atlanta, and Seattle, and New York City, where at his new restaurant, French chef Alan Dukas, is charging $60, not for an entree, but for an appetizer, and the Guggenheim Museum is showing George R. Armani's clothes as if they were, in fact, art. Somehow, all of this is flying under or over the radar screen. It is often said with justification that it is the poor or have not to become invisible, clearly that is true. But what is different now, and even more disturbing, is how invisible has become our own middle-class affluence. That was amply demonstrated by the huge success this summer of the show Survivor. We watched,

laughed, grimaced, and rooted for our favorites, as they pretended to struggle and starve on some deserted island. But that's all they were doing, pretending. It was faux starvation, fake deprivation, and we didn't seem to get it. Didn't seem to understand the moral implications involved in watching healthy adult Americans in island wear and shell necklaces play act at hunger for a million dollars, while hundreds of millions around the world are actually starving. You can only play hunger for laughs when it's the farthest thing from your imagination. At the risk of sounding curmudgeonly during the season, or preachy, or a little of both, I promised myself to look hard at what's around me, to make visible for myself the invisible, the extraordinary beneficence of this time and place, and my own share in it, and the poor who we seem to have forgotten about. There are masses of people living as well now on this earth, in this country and in this state and in this very city, as any people have ever lived,

and there are masses of people living in possibly hardlies. The least we should be is deeply, daily, aware of that fact. I'm Angela Fleming. Again, the major stories of this Monday, Christians around the world celebrated Christmas, but weeks of violence kept most people away from Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, and police in Indonesia were investigating a series of church bombings on Christmas Eve that killed 15 people. We'll see you online, and again here, tomorrow evening, I'm Margaret Warner. Thanks for being with us this Christmas evening. Good night. Thank you so much for joining us today. Imagine a system that produces and distributes food and helps improve nutrition and health here and abroad. Who is building such a global network?

Helping people with a state planning so that those they care about get more than a simple will can provide. See how we earn it. Salomon Smith Park. And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, this program was also made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you. Video cassettes of the news hour with Jim Lehrer are available from PBS video. Call 1-800-328-PBS.

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