But the UAW statement only fueled anxiety in Ford plants and offices across North America as workers braced for the announcement of further cuts scheduled for Friday morning.

Catherine Madden, an auto industry analyst at the consulting company Global Insight Inc., said although not all 75,000 workers will take the packages, the size of the offer illustrates the magnitude of Ford's troubles.

"No matter what, the number reflects the pressure the Ford Motor Co. is under right now," she said. "That's how significant the mounting pressures are on Ford."

The offers also show a realization of Ford's troubles by the UAW, which said in a statement that it agreed to the packages due to the "extraordinary circumstances in the domestic auto industry."

Ford had about 82,000 workers represented by the UAW at the end of last year, but about 6,500 have taken previous buyout and early retirement offers made mainly at plants already slated for closure, company spokeswoman Marcey Evans said Thursday.

UAW President Ron Gettelfinger said its members have made hard choices under difficult circumstances.

"Now, it's Ford Motor Co.'s responsibility to lead this company in a positive direction - which means using the skills, experience and dedication to quality that UAW members demonstrate every day in order to deliver quality vehicles to customers," Gettelfinger said in a statement.

The buyouts are part of the larger restructuring plan approved by the Ford board.

Ford has been battered by the auto market's shift from trucks and sport utility vehicles to more fuel-efficient cars and crossovers. Its market share and sales have dropped while its Japanese competitors have gained.

Under the buyout and early retirement plan, detailed in a UAW statement, workers can choose between eight packages that offer from $35,000 to $140,000 depending on their years of service, age and how close they are to retirement age.

"I think it's a good package," said Chris Kimmons, president of UAW Local 919 at the Norfolk, Va., assembly plant. "I think they worked real hard on it. They've got to do something to help Ford out of this crisis."

Depending on which plan is chosen, workers may have to give up health benefits.

The offers are similar to those made earlier this year to hourly workers at the General Motors Corp., where 35,000 people have agreed to leave the company.

The announcement also came as UAW local leaders at Ford plants gathered in Detroit to discuss Ford's financial situation and the buyouts.

The Ford board meeting wrapped up Thursday afternoon and the company issued a statement saying it would announce details of the restructuring in a news release at 7 a.m. Friday, followed at 9 a.m. by presentations to employees and the media.

Mulally, who was hired away from Boeing Co. just last week, attended the board meeting and will be part of Friday's announcements, the company said.

Ford lost $1.4 billion during the first half of this year and is under pressure from Wall Street to make further cuts and roll out new cars and trucks more quickly.

In July, the company pledged to accelerate its "Way Forward" restructuring plan, which when introduced in January and called for the up to 30,000 job cuts as well as closing 14 facilities by 2012.

Madden said her company expects Ford to announce the closing of two more plants. Ones that make truck-based sport utility vehicles and cars built on older platforms are likely to be closed, she said.

The scope of the buyout offer could indicate that more than two plants could be closed, Madden said.

Ford shares fell 10 cents to close at $9.09 on the New York Stock Exchange. Its shares have traded in a 52-week range of $6.06 to $10.09.

Separately, Ford said that Anne Stevens, an architect of the restructuring effort at Ford and one of the auto industry's highest ranking women, is retiring. Stevens, 57, had been at the center of Ford's turnaround efforts since October 2005, when she was named executive vice president.

There were 46.6 million uninsured Americans last year, or nearly 16 percent of the population, according to U.S.
Census Bureau figures which represented a slight gain from a year earlier. Among the fastest-growing segments of the newly uninsured were those with jobs.

For employers still providing health insurance, more are promoting higher-deductible plans, which is leading to burdensome medical and credit-card debt, the Commonwealth Fund study found.

"People are being squeezed as employer coverage is either not available or contains very high out-of-pocket costs," said Karen Davis, president of the Commonwealth Fund.

"The alternative of last resort -- to seek individual health insurance -- is not a safe haven," she told Reuters.

For those who need to get health insurance on their own, the high cost is a significant barrier, Commonwealth found.

About 43 percent of those with individual coverage spent more than 5 percent of their income on health premiums, compared to 14 percent insured through employer plans, the study found.

In all, 89 percent of people seeking to buy individual health insurance in the last three years did not do so, the study said.

One in five people were turned down or charged a higher premium for individual insurance because of an existing medical condition. Nearly 60 percent of those who sought individual health insurance did not buy it because they could not afford it.

Researchers polled 1,878 people aged 19 to 64 in telephone interviews from August 2005 through January 2006. The study has a margin of error of 2 percentage points.

The share of U.S. employers offering health insurance has been slipping, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Roughly 60 percent offered health coverage during 2005, down from 63 percent in 2004 and 69 percent in 2000.

The high cost of increasingly complex medical technologies and the unchecked use of health services are the two biggest drivers of medical costs and health inflation in the U.S., experts say.

BLUNT INSTRUMENT

In lieu of dropping health coverage altogether, some employers are offering new higher-deductible plans, which are typically paired with tax-favored savings accounts created specifically to pay health expenses.

Proponents call this approach "consumer-directed," because patients have more responsibility for paying costs and have incentives to exert more control over their care.

But the study found that patients with these plans are nearly twice as likely to skip prescriptions or fail to follow up with their doctors than those with traditional insurance.

"The problem is that cost-sharing is a blunt instrument," Davis said. "You pay less, but you get less care. And sometimes it is less essential care."

Workers in high-deductible plans were more than twice as likely to take on credit-card debt to pay medical bills than those in traditional plans, the study said.

Davis said that since employers offer health insurance to attract the best workers, dissatisfaction with the plans will change employer offerings.

"I think the fact that workers don't like these plans is going to dampen the enthusiasm of the employers for offering this coverage," she said.

The number of jobs at stake is unclear but the paper, the fourth largest in the country, has eliminated more than 200 positions over the last five years from an editorial staff that now numbers about 940.

"I am not averse to making cuts," Mr. Baquet told the paper. "But you can go too far, and I don't plan to do that."

The paper reported that Scott C. Smith, president of the Tribune Publishing division, had asked the paper's executives to come up with a plan for trimming their budgets, but when Mr. Smith visited Los Angeles late last month, they had produced no such plan.

Mr. Baquet "made his opposition to further cuts clear and said there was no need for further discussion," the paper reported.

A spokesman for Mr. Baquet and Mr. Johnson said they would have no further comment.

Mr. Smith said in a statement: "In this rapidly changing media environment, we are all working together to best serve our communities, customers and shareholders."

It is rare for an editor to go public with a position on internal budget battles and for the editor's own newspaper to report on it. The decision by The Los Angeles Times to take its battle against Tribune public may signal that Mr. Baquet is trying to rally support on the paper's behalf, at a time when Tribune is in turmoil and some local businessmen have expressed interest in buying the paper.

An editor at the paper said the article was prompted by a letter on Tuesday from 20 civic leaders, who called on Tribune to put more money into the paper or consider selling it. A Tribune spokesman said the company would respond to the letter in the near future.

The showdown is a dramatic example of a long-simmering conflict between many newsrooms and boardrooms around the country as newspapers face an industrywide economic slump and continued demands by Wall Street for improved financial results.

The stock prices of most public newspaper companies have been flagging for about two years, yet many of their publications remain profitable. The Los Angeles Times reported that its operating profit margin was 20 percent, higher than that of the average Fortune 500 company.

Many papers, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as other Tribune properties - among them Newsday, The Sun of Baltimore and The Hartford Courant - have announced buyouts and job cuts over the last year. Newspaper costs, particularly for newsprint and personnel, are outstripping revenues and the Internet is siphoning off readers and advertisers.

The Belo Corporation announced yesterday that 111 newsroom employees at The Dallas Morning News had taken buyout offers, leaving 450 editorial employees to retrench and focus mainly on local news. Last month, David Black, whose Black Press is the new owner of The Akron Beacon Journal, laid off 40 editorial employees, about 25 percent of the newsroom staff.

At The Los Angeles Times, circulation has been falling from its peak of 1.2 million in 1990. For the six months that ended in March, it was 851,500, down 5.4 percent from the period a year ago. It was the biggest drop among the top 10 dailies and more than twice the industry average.

Tribune has been in particular turmoil because of a conflict in recent months with the Chandler family, its largest shareholder, over management of the company, which includes 11 daily newspapers and 25 broadcast television stations. The Chandlers have said the company, in which The Los Angeles Times is the biggest business, is mismanaged and have called for the company to sell its assets.

The Tribune board has defended management and has been in talks with the Chandlers to try to iron out their differences. The company said earlier this year that it would buy back $2 billion worth of company stock and make $200 million in cost cuts companywide over the next two years. It has sold some television stations, and announced a deal yesterday to sell its station in Boston, but it has not specified where it will find the bulk of those savings.

The statements in yesterday's Los Angeles Times seemed a declaration that Tribune would not find much of those savings in Los Angeles - or it could lose its top executives.

John S. Carroll, the paper's previous editor, quit last year in part because of pressure from Tribune to cut costs. Mr. Baquet, a close friend of Mr. Carroll and his heir apparent, had threatened to quit then, too, but stayed on.

"Have I had disagreements with Chicago and others about the paper?" Mr. Baquet told his paper at the time. "Sure. But obviously I feel like I am in sync enough with the people who own the joint" to have accepted the editor's job.

Several staff members said the stance that Mr. Baquet was taking now, with support from Mr. Johnson, had given the newsroom a morale boost.

"Johnson comes out from Chicago and goes native," said Steve Lopez, a columnist for the paper. "He's had a stiff drink of the Dean Baquet Kool-Aid and he's on the team."

He said many in the newsroom thought Tribune would be reluctant to fire the editor and the publisher because doing so could bring further embarrassment and spell chaos for the already troubled company. But it is not clear how the company will respond.

"Tribune isn't shy or sentimental," said Martin Kaplan, associate dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. "My guess is that they don't want to be backed into a corner."

The paper's 14 unions, representing more than 1,100 employees, "must be willing to negotiate new contracts that would restructure the Post-Gazette to lower costs significantly, streamline staff and change existing work rules that currently inflate staffing and compromise efficiencies," said David Beihoff, the paper's president.

The Post-Gazette is owned by Block Communications, which also owns The Blade of Toledo, Ohio, where the company is engaged in a bitter battle with its unions. Most of The Blade's labor contracts expired in March and about 200 workers there - including engravers and drivers - have been locked out and replaced by temporary workers.

Mike Bucsko, president of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, and Joe Molinero, president of Teamsters local representing drivers and circulation, said the unions were willing to work with the company.

The unions, for example, were willing to start paying for part of their health care, eliminate positions and reduce overtime, Molinero said. The company responded by presenting a contract that Bucsko and Molinero said would undo union protections.

"We're certainly cognizant of the situation they're in, but their approach, it's very draconian and if they expect to obtain an agreement, they need to change their strategy," Bucsko said.

Asked if streamlining would include job cuts, Tracey DeAngelo, the newspaper's director of marketing, said it would be premature to speculate about potential changes.

"We want to make this a viable paper and keep it under current ownership," she said. "We are committed to resolving these financial issues in the best interests of the Post-Gazette, our employees, our readers, our advertisers and the entire community."

The paper spends 70 percent of its revenue on employee costs, compared with 40 percent at comparable newspapers, she said.

John Morton, of Morton Research Inc., a longtime newspaper industry analyst, said a 70 percent labor cost is "very high." He said the typical costs are closer to 50 percent.

"It's unusual for a paper with that much of the market to lose money," he said.

The paper has a daily circulation of more than 235,000 and a Sunday circulation of nearly 400,000, down from a 1995 high of more than 249,000 daily and nearly 453,000 Sunday. It has 247 newsroom employees.

Morton said a long-standing rule of thumb is that there should be at least one editorial employee for every 1,000 in circulation, based on a seven-day daily average. That would mean 259 jobs based on the Post-Gazette's figures.

The Post-Gazette's newsroom staffing is "not extraordinarily low, no, but it's certainly not fat," Morton said.

In an announcement made before markets opened Friday morning, Ford said it would close the Essex engine plant in Windsor, where 730 workers make V-6 engines, in 2007.

It also said it would go ahead with previously announced plans to close a casting plant in Windsor next year, affecting 500 workers, and confirmed that it would cut the St. Thomas, Ont. plant to one shift.

But Ford had some good news for Ontario workers. It plans to move production of the Lincoln Town Car from the Wixom plant in Michigan to St. Thomas, where the Lincoln will be built beside its venerable Crown Victoria.

About 2,300 people now work at St. Thomas on an hourly basis.

Ford will also add production at its huge plant in Oakville, Ont. The company said that plant will produce an all-new full-sized crossover, based on the Ford Fairlane concept. The seven-passenger vehicle will go on sale in 2008.

Job cuts moved up four years

The company has already announced plans to cut 25,000 to 30,000 hourly jobs and 4,000 salaried jobs across the continent by the end of 2012. On Friday, it said that schedule has now been moved ahead by four years.

Friday's announcement brings Ford's total number of white-collar job cuts to 14,000, or one-third of its salaried workforce in North America.

Ford has 87,000 hourly and 35,000 salaried workers across North America.

Reductions to Ford's U.S. workforce will be made through early retirements, voluntary separations, buy-outs and, "if necessary, involuntary separations," the company said.

Ford did not specify how many jobs would be lost in Canada. Those numbers will be announced by mid-October.

These cuts are designed to reduce the company's operating budget by $5 billion US a year by the end of 2008. Even with these cuts, Ford does not expect to make a profit in North America until 2009, one year later than expected.

"Rapid shifts in consumer demand that affect our product mix and continued high prices for commodities mean we must continue working quickly and decisively to fix our business," chairman Bill Ford said in an announcement Friday.

'Clearly needed,' new CEO says

Alan Mulally, who succeeded Bill Ford as the automaker's chief executive officer last week, added that the cuts "are clearly needed to ensure the ultimate turnaround of the business in Ford's biggest and most important market."

Company officials have scheduled a news conference for later Friday.

The announcement followed board meetings on Wednesday and Thursday to discuss the cost-cutting plan, which was first outlined in January.

Called "The Way Forward," the plan called for up to 30,000 job cuts and the closure of 14 plants by 2012.

The Detroit News reported Thursday that Ford could post a pre-tax loss of $8 billion US to $9 billion US this year, much worse than analysts had expected.

Ford lost $1.4 billion US in the first six months of the year.

The newspaper cited a leaked Sept. 6 internal report prepared by Ford's chief financial officer.

Norwich Union said jobs had to go because customers were increasingly finding their own insurance online, and cheaper workers were available in India.

Half the job cuts will be through compulsory redundancies, and personnel losses in Scotland will be offset by the transfer of around 150 posts from Newcastle and Belfast to Dundee.

The staff redundancies are expected to save the company £50 million annually from 2008.

Patrick Snowball, Norwich Union chief executive, said: "We have to ensure that Norwich Union remains highly efficient. Customers' buying habits are changing rapidly as technology becomes more accessible.

"Already half of our new direct motor insurance policies are purchased over the internet."

Aviva also said its 107 BSM high-street driving schools would shut by next year. In future, lessons will be booked over the phone or on the internet, leading to 30 job losses at eight schools north of the Border.

The cuts follow 700 jobs going at the Lexmark printer plant in Rosyth and 270 at Edinburgh Crystal.

Workers in Perth said they had been instructed by Norwich Union management not to talk about the cuts.

However, one said: "It's not the Indians' fault. If you can get someone for 2p an hour and make profit out of it then that's what they're going to do." Alastair Dorward, president of Perthshire Chamber of Commerce, said:

"Perth and Kinross is reliant on the call-centre economy and it is alarming to learn of such a large number of redundancies in this sector."

Workers outside the Glasgow base in West Regent Street were "shellshocked" and "numb", while others attacked the way they had been informed.

One female worker said: "I am utterly disgusted. We knew nothing about this before we came in to work this morning."

David Fleming, Amicus national officer, hit out at yet more call-centre jobs going to India, saying: "This is absolutely brutal and compulsory job cuts and offshoring will not be accepted by us or our members."

Roseanna Cunningham, SNP MSP for Perth, met Mr Snowball to express her anger at the job losses in the town where workers have helped Norwich Union to post massive profits.

- Meanwhile in Hawick, ten jobs are going at luxury cashmere manufacturers Johnstons of Elgin, due to tough international competition and soaring fuel prices.

Johnstons employ 700 people overall - 260 in Hawick - but remain optimistic of their future in the cashmere trade.
The pride of Perth

NORWICH Union's job cuts will be a particular blow to the Perth area, where the insurance industry has long played a central role.

In 1885 the firm General Accident was founded in the town by a group of local businessmen.

The company originally concentrated on business in the community - its first policy was issued to a cabinet-maker.

But the headquarters, at the post office building in Tay St, soon became the hub of an international operation as the firm expanded to Canada, New Zealand and eventually America.

By the time a new head office was opened at Piheavlis in 1983, the business was the main engine of the area's economy.

In 1897 General Accident's southern competitor, Norwich Union, failed to take over the Perth company. It would be more than a century before the two firms eventually merged in 2000.

Fears immediately surfaced over job security after Aviva incorporated the Norwich Union brand in 2002.

But Perth emerged largely unscathed from the first round of job cuts in 2003 after the insurer shifted 2,350 jobs to India.

Aviva now has sites in Bangalore, Pune and Noida and Sri Lanka.

The preservation of the system takes precedent over the lip-service to ideology; the "invisible hand" will always be overpowered by the manicured and mettlesome fingers of banking elites and Wall Street big wigs. This is their system and they're not going to let it be obliterated by some foolish commitment to principle.

The Plunge Protection Team was first uncovered in comments by Clinton advisor, George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America on Sept 17, 2001. Here's what Stephanopoulos said:

"Well, what I wanted to talk about for a few minutes is the various efforts that are going on in public and behind the scenes by the Fed and other government officials to guard against a free-fall in the markets....perhaps the most important the Fed in 1989 created what is called the Plunge Protection Team, which is the Federal Reserve, big major banks, representatives of the New York Stock Exchange and the other exchanges and they have been meeting informally so far, and they have a kind of an informal agreement among major banks to come in and start to buy stock if there appears to be a problem. They have in the past acted more formally... I don't know if you remember but in 1998, there was a crisis called the Long term Capital Crisis. It was a major currency trader and there was a global currency crisis. And they, with the guidance of the Fed, all of the banks got together when it started to collapse and propped up the currency markets. And, they have plans in place to consider that if the markets start to fall."

Stephanopoulos comments are hardly shocking. They simply underscore the fact that "deregulation" has created an economic monster which requires more and more tinkering from the stewards of the system. Without the stopgaps provided by the Plunge Protection Team and the actions of similar organizations which forestall business bankruptcies, (bailouts) the whole over-leveraged system would quickly crash and burn. The irony is that the same corporate kingpins and banking moguls who've benefited the most from removing the rules for prudent investment are now trying to create a safety net for when it inevitably begins to unravel.

It won't work. The numbers are too large. Trillions of dollars are presently held in shaky hedge funds and derivatives markets. If the market takes a steep and sudden downturn, there's nothing anyone will be able to do.

John Crudele of the New York Post has done extensive research on the Plunge Protection Team (aka; the Working Group on Financial Markets) and provides the blueprint for "rigging" the markets when catastrophe hits. The idea came from an a former member of the Federal Reserve Board named Robert Heller who suggested that "instead of flooding the entire economy with liquidity, and thereby increasing the risk of inflation, the Fed could support the stock market directly by buying market averages in the futures market, thus stabilizing the market as a whole."

Whatever happened to the idea of completing the "market cycle" and allowing markets to self-correct? What about the ethical question of whether government manipulation should be permitted in a "free market"? And, who gives the government and the privately-owned banks the right to interfere in the equities markets and snatch up zillions of futures in order to prop up the unstable and debt-ridden system.

No doubt, the supporters of these drastic measures are the same "market purists" who appear frequently on the business channel extolling the virtues of the "free market" in the most lyrical language as though they were gazing at the subtle and wondrous workings of the universe. Once the pretense is stripped away, they're exposed as unprincipled phonies trying to stitch together a faltering system on its last legs.

Crudele added that, "Over the next few years, people like me (meaning those who watch the financial world with a critical eye rather than a blind one) suspected that Heller's plan was indeed in effect. Whenever the stock market was in trouble someone seemed to ride to the rescue."

Crudele is probably right; there are back-channel ways to move the markets. Fed-master Bernanke even confirmed the role of the Plunge Protection Team in recent testimony to Rep Ron Paul (R-Texas). The larger question is whether the group operates in the public interest or merely tends to the needs of establishment elites who hold all the levers of power. Certainly, no one would object if the main goal was simply to remove some of the disruptive bumps in market activity. What's worrisome is the conjugal relationship between the state and the privately-owned banking establishment which is designed to operate exclusively in the interests of its shareholders. This is a basic conflict of interest and puts the small investor at a real disadvantage. He has no way to lobby government to mettle in the markets. He must make his investment decisions on reasonable evaluations from publicly available information.

The same rule applies to bailouts as does to interfering with the equities markets. Bailouts only serve the interests of the ruling elite and undermine the credibility of the system. Whenever a major corporation or a hedge fund finds itself slipping into fiscal quicksand, the Counterparty Risk Management Policy Group (CRMPG) leans on the federal government to throw them a lifeline. The CRMPG is a mix of hedge funds and mega-banks who are the "self appointed" caretakers of the system. Here's their statement:

"Since we know that financial shocks will occur in the future, and we no that no approaches to risk management or official supervision are fail-safe, we also know that we must preserve and strengthen the institutional arrangements whereby, at the point of crisis, industry groups and industry leaders, as well as supervisors, are prepared to work together in order to serve the larger and shared goal of financial stability."

All very noble, but the bottom line is they serve the limited interests of corporate plutocrats who need taxpayer money to paper-over their business failures. The CRMPG is just a fancy-sounding lobby designed to prevent their colleagues from slipping into bankruptcy. Bailouts are a fundamental contradiction to free markets. If privately-owned corporations cannot succeed on their own merits they should be allowed to fail.

The Plunge Protection Team and the CRMPG illustrate the collusive relationship between the banking establishment, the uber-corporations and the state. They've worked assiduously to remove the safeguards which have traditionally protected the average investor from hucksters and scam-artists, and paved the way for a full-system breakdown. The market is more vulnerable now than anytime since the late 1920s, a fact that was emphasized in a statement from the IMF just days ago:

"Financial markets have failed to price in the risk that any one of a host of threats to economic security could materialize and deliver a massive shock to the world economy. It is clear that risks are on the downside of a sharper than expected slowdown in house prices that would produce weaker-than-expected growth that would have implications for global growth and financial markets." ("IMF: Risk of global crash is increasing" UK Independent)

The country now faces the growing probability of an economic tsunami triggered by the rickety hedge funds, the falling dollar, and the rapidly deflating real estate bubble. The solid foundation of government oversight and regulation has been eroded by the persistent attacks of the corporatists and banking giants. The entire system is now on shaky ground. When the scaffolding starts to fall, the futile maneuverings of the Plunge Protection Team won't make a bit of difference.