News from the wires today on Mr. Corporate American Hates You — GE’s Jeff Immelt — on his compensation (as well as the compensations of his cronies in the President’s jobs council) and a new report on how to fix mass unemployment.
Sure to be on the agenda [today] will be the country’s stagnant labor market, but it’s doubtful the council will discuss their own executive compensation, which runs well into the millions annually for many in the group …
4. Jeffrey R. Immelt, CEO: $15.1 million General Electric (GE), energy, technology, consumer products and financial services company
A spokesman pointed out that since 2009, GE has announced the creation of 8,000 new U.S, jobs, 7,000 of which are industrial jobs and that GE will hire about 15,000 people in the country in 2011.
5. W. James McNerney Jr., CEO: $13.8 million Boeing (BA), defense and aerospace contractor
In January, Boeing announced 1,100 layoffs but had a spokesman said the company will have a net gain in U. S. jobs this year in Washington state and South Carolina.
There’s more, of course. But one gets the gist. It has been repeated so many times it’s now simply a pro forma list of the same old corporate kings and dukes consulted for their wisdom on everything because to go elsewhere for advice would be to roil and disturb the plutocracy.
GE chief executive Jeffrey Immelt, who also chairs the non-partisan advisory panel, said the long list of proposals — which include streamlining drug approvals, reducing costs of initial public offerings and improving air traffic control — could have a big impact taken together.
“We never thought there was going to be a silver bullet to create jobs,” Immelt told Reuters in a telephone interview.
“What we want to offer the president is a very broad set of ideas that can help more the economy forward,” he said. “It’s comprehensive and it’s specific.”
The ideas, as excerpted by Reuters, are all old bathwater, the same stuff the US has practiced for decades, the entrenched thinking of people who want things to stay just the same.
But who now realize that with public anger at a high level they must make up some new lies for purposes of repackaging.
So we get demands for more investment in domestic fossil fuel exploitation, the same stuff you can see in commercials everyday on MSNBC, ads from Exxon and the national propane lobby for expanded aggressive exploitation of domestic “fracking” in shale aquifers and mining Canadian oil sands.
We get the old model of expanded hiring of foreign scientists and engineers because they’re governments have a much more attractive track record of paying for their education here.
And we get Immelt’s biggest practice, more rent-seeking, in reduced taxation on the biggest corporations, tax repatriation holiday, less regulation on pharmaceutical industry, etc:
It also recommends lower corporate taxes for new companies in their first three years, a reduced capital gains rate for investors buying equity in young firms and other measures to encourage people to launch start-up companies.
The report calls for tax reforms to make it more competitive for companies to locate in the United States, part of an effort to attract more foreign direct investment.
All his employees love him eh? He wants people to root for him? Not very likely with the globalist corporate/business culture he’s engendered.Not to mention that there’s an engrained elitism towards those who work on the? factory/shop floors from many in mgmnt. How so many knowledgeable engineers were driven/forced out because the bs was incredible. Only to be replaced by inexperienced,arrogant brainwashed pricks who’ve been pumped up to reinvent the wheel
Immelt is the boss because he knows how to make you feel good while he’s screwing you. He’s making friends with GE’s investors, he has no moral obligations, it’s? all about the bottom line…profits. If it means he’s selling his soul to the devil and throwing middle class america under the bus, so be it.
Insane. Wall Street is alive with a movement that makes the tea party look? like a corporate funded joke (which it was), and Obama sends out this 1%er to cry about how Americans don’t “love” GE?
Tone Deaf!
I don”t trust that greedy bastard. He only cares about money, not creating American? jobs. The president needs to get rid of this poker face bastard.
Of course, it would be unfair to omit the contributions of the few who defend the king and the markets:
Fucking great. A super-major company (mostly owned by Buffet) CEO is hired by the Prez, and people talk about shooting him. That’s what’s wrong with this country, white-hot hatred. I don’t give a shit whether you or I trusts him. If he can help dig us out of this mess, he’s my boy. Now for the dark side. His success is building plants overseas where he believes (correctly) the opportunities lie. Does anyone really believe he can do the same for the US? ?
I do not? blame Jeff afterall Unions demands and regulations are over the top. If Obama got out the unions pockets and stopped the regulations that kill jobs we would have more jobs. Push coal and oil and jobs would be back in a month. It is a joke to think GE could pay 50 dollars an hour here instead of right to work states or China and Brazel. But even Obama said we would be Brazels biggest customers for OIL? are you kidding me why not America being the producer not the customer …
Immelt: “I want you to root for me. Everybody in Germany roots for Siemens … I want you to say, ‘Win GE!’
“I think this notion that it’s the population of the US against the big companies is just wrong, it’s just wrong-minded … Our employees root for us, they want us to win. I don’t know why you don’t.”
“I am not a commie!” T-shirts, coming soon from the Pasadena Consulting Group.
Imagine DD’s delight at seeing Mr. Corporate America Hates You on 60 minutes last night.
As a symbol everything’s that wrong, as one of the very big reasons Occupy Wall Street is campaigning against economic injustice, General Electric’s Jeffrey Immelt didn’t have to work at it. All that was within came out and condemned him.
Behold the unapologetic CEO of the giant tax cheat, GE, using his spot to lobby for another tax holiday so his company could cash in on more swag.
How many jobs would be created?
Immelt did not know. But he thought giving his firm another big economic opportunity, even bigger than the one last year, would do something.
There was Immelt lobbying on national television for even lower corporate taxation. GE paid none, even received a giant bonus from Uncle Sam.
Immelt looked mentally and unconstitutionally incapable of seeing how he’d come off — another white-haired bigshot from corporate greed USA, smiling and demanding to be given more treasure because he is so great.
The head rent-seeker for a giant rent-seeking corporation doing even more rent-seeking on the most famous primetime investigative news show.
Near the end of the interview Immelt voiced the opinion that Americans ought to be more appreciative of their corporations. We should like them more, as the citizens of Germany allegedly do with theirs.
We should root for General Electric as much as the Deutsch root for Siemens Immelt indicated.
GE needs more bootlicking, please!
One must assume Immelt was self-referential, that he wanted to feel more love from the citizenry. After all, he said, when he visits GE factories everyone seemed to like him. They cheer. His employees love GE.
Cue to the sitcom or comedic movie or skit from SNL, a bit about a venal boss who gets applause on trips into the field. As soon as he’s out of the showroom everyone starts with the insults and takedowns.
Can guys like Immelt really be that bad?
It appears so since 60 Minutes isn’t known for playing jokes.
One could always see it coming.
Immelt, appointed to be Barack Obama’s jobs advisor months ago was immediately hit with a barrage of criticism. Immelt was a woeful and tone-deaf choice, his firm guilty of professional tax avoidance and off-shoring. Immelt’s selection was only a convenient signal from the president that he really wasn’t sore at big corporate America.
A person with a sense of national context and a basic inner decency, someone of substance and character or, at least, a working sense of shame, might have withdrawn from the position.
And there you have it. The human example defining one of the many problems systemic in America: A total lack of selection for decent leadership in favor of character as defined by pitiless avarice and self-service.
It’s probably not a coincidence that almost immediately YouTube informed me that “GE and Jeff (Taxavoidination)” might be eligible for a revenue sharing plan.
Is my leg being pulled? Or is it a nefarious trap?
“Jeff thought it was mighty funny, takin’ away all that money/Everyone else had to pay, but we bribe Jeff just to stay.” The Pasadena Consulting Group kills the Ecomagination p.r. with its first quarterly report.
The party of the plutocrats is marked by its loathing for many things, among them food stamps. If you search the public record over the past two years it’s clear the Republican Party, as it exists now, thinks people on food assistance are vermin.
From Newt Gingrich to Ted Nugent, it is abundantly clear.
DD came up with some eye-popping statistics to frame the astonishing number of people on food stamps in our nation.
By itself, the number is huge. Still, it becomes even more depressing when the magnitude of it is put in context.
Food stamp usage in the US is a symbol of national economic failure so systemic it takes your breath away. It is rock solid proof the US economy does not provide jobs which earn a fair living for a polyglot cohort that dwarfs entire western nations.
Between 44 and 45 million Americans use food stamps.
Let’s look at the populations of selected western countries:
Population of Norway 4.8 million
Sweden 9.3 million
UK 61.8 million
Spain 45.9
Greece 11.2
Three quarters of England fit in the US basket of food stamp recipients. Or Sweden, Norway, and Greece combined with a good surplus left over. Or 99 percent of Spain.
If you add up the populations of the 50 states, starting with the least,
the number of people on food stamps in the US is a number that roughly includes the summed populations of:
Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Idaho, Nebraska, West Virginia, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Arkansas,
Kansas, Mississippi, Iowa, Connecticut, Oregon, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Kentucky.
That’s 26 states.
Food stamp use cuts across a wide swath of American society.
This shows that even when one excludes the unemployed, a mass of jobs large enough to fill foreign nations provide work which is not compensated well enough to make a decent living.
Such jobs are essentially slave labor in which ruinous corporate wages are offset by government subsidy.
One can look at it as a process in which corporate America depressed wages for a fair day’s work, maximizing profit by shoving part of the cost of a barely subsistence wage onto the government, and by extension, the taxpayer.
This can only be seen as entrenched predatory behavior.
Take, for example, the national security machine. Since the onset of the war on terror, US defense contractors enjoyed an immense boom. They are among the biggest and wealthiest companies in the world.
Lately a lot of complaints have been made about the food stamp program. Let’s take a look a one group that gets food stamps — 14,000 military families were on food stamps in 2000.
The Pentagon does not keep track of any military families that are on food stamps. President Bush in 2001 decided to authorize a $500 subsistence pay increase that was taxable in order to help military families get off food stamps. It did not work. Military families increased on food stamps because food stamps are non-taxable.
From 2008 to 2009 military families were using food stamps at twice the rate as civilians, 25 percent to 13 percent. About $31 million of food stamps were used in nationwide commissaries.
From July 2009 to March 2011 in Oklahoma, where there are four military bases — Fort Sill, Tinker AFB, Vance AFB, Altus AFB — $1.8 million in food stamps was spent.
President Obama, in the 2010 Defense Authorization Bill, increased the food subsistence program for military families to $1,100 and made it non-taxable to help get families off food stamps. But will it?
The military pay scale does not match cost of living anywhere in America. So if the U.S can only pay men and women who volunteer to serve and protect our freedom a wage that reflects poverty, how can anyone complain about someone else getting food stamps?
15.9 percent of the population of Texas is on food stamps. If you believe the opinions of the GOP, they are all leeches.
The GOP’s view of food stamp use can be summed in various repellent quotes from Ted Nugent.
Nugent: The America [Obama] doesn’t … people are using food stamps for something other than good nutrition. You gotta be kidding me. We got a bunch of idiots out there that are absolutely raping and pillaging an otherwise positive humanitarian system.
Morgan: My issue about you and the welfare thing is it showed — to me it showed no sense of compassion for people who have genuine problems. Who genuinely need it.
NUGENT: Well, you see –
MORGAN: Your judgment, if you don’t mind me saying, is all encompassing. All sweeping. You think they’re all on the fiddle.
The food stamp program in the US serves a great purpose. And as a result not too many Americans think of ours as a place where violent food riots could erupt.
Credit Occupy Wall Street with its non-violent hostile encampment on Wall Street, symbolically drawing a long overdue bullseye on the backs of the Lloyd Blankfeins and Jamie Dimons of the country.
It is no surprise then that hackers would be after their private information.
The addresses of the Goldman Sachs CEO and similar material pertaining to Chase’s Jamie Dimon were posted to Pastebin by a hacking group called CabinCr3w.
“The group did not explain why it had targeted Goldman Sachs, one of the most prominent investment banks in the world,” reported a seemingly slow-witted reporter for ABC News on-line.
Months ago I posted that the Wall Street banksters remained relatively safe from overt demonstrations of anger because of their anonymity.
Outside of journalists who wrote best-selling books on the economic collapse, average America remained largely ignorant of their names and faces.
Even if there’s an appetite for a lynching in the public, if nobody knows the names of the to-be-lynched … then the latter are probably safe.
That may be changing thanks to the NYC protests and the crews of cyber-paupers who show no reluctance in getting after the plutocrats on the Internet.
While they still enjoy the protection of the government and the rule of law — which, as many have figured out, only gets applied for the benefit of the top one percent, they enjoy no public sympathy. And it cannot but help to continually put their names in front of growing crowds of angry people.
A reprint from the old blog, well over a year ago, originally entitled “How To When to Quit Your Country.”
Worth a couple laughs, it’s still fairly accurate. More recent events make one only very modestly more hopeful.
Today’s post comes courtesy of the parasite industry devoted to selling articles and services on how you can get a job in the dreadful economy.
DD cadged it off Yahoo a few weeks ago for it’s especially ludicrous nature: Ten signs on how to know when to quit your job because the business you work for is dreadful. Well, that would be more than half of the jobs in the United States, at least, DD reckons.
So I’ve chosen to steal it and rebrand the thing as a test on how to know when to quit your dreadful, or dysfunctional, country.
10 Signs Your Country is Dysfunctional
Does the United States drive you crazy? Do you sometimes wonder if you are the only sane person living in it? Is America dysfunctional, or is it you? Here’s how to find out!
Sign No. 1: Do large numbers of people in your country spout conspicuous value statements filled with vague but important-sounding words like “freedom” and so on.
Examples:
“America has the best healthcare in the world!” — see here.
“We’ve found each other and we’ve found our voice and we are determined to fight for our freedoms,” says [a man who’s last name is Scott], wearing a white ‘Freedom Czar’ baseball cap at the convention.” — see here.
These slogans are never based in reality. They’re just rubbish statements used to end reasonable arguments or cheer-leading pap.
Sign No. 2: Bringing up a problem is considered more as evidence of a personality defect rather than as an actual observation of reality.
Example: “Those who oppose waterboarding are moral fools.” — see here.
In a dysfunctional country, if you don’t adhere to a belief held by many, you are the problem. Anything horrendous, illegal or plainly evil is justified on the basis that it’s a necessity for national security.
Sign No. 3: If by chance there are problems, the usual solution is a motivational pep rally.
From the Associated Press:
First, the independent Ross Perot contingent. Then, the liberal ”netroots” mobilization. Now, the conservative ”tea party” coalition.
No doubt this is democracy at work, a quintessential part of America.
Will the latest political phenomenon become a society-changing movement influencing elections and beyond?
”We are people who understand something wrong is going on in this country, and we want to change it,” says Dan Garner, a married 40-year-old sales representative from nearby Carthage who is new to politics. Like so many others, he’s had enough. ”The core thing is a loss of individual liberty.”
Attitude is everything. In dysfunctional America, there’s always a mob on the loose — a self-abusive confused mob more interested in tearing things down, setting fire to the place and obeying the interests of wealthier and more powerful people outside the mob aimed at destroying the lives of the people who comprise the mob.
To appear sane you must pretend that the mob is a symbol of democracy, not just a nuts crowd. Dysfunctional America is full of crazy mobs but if you have a good attitude, you won’t mention it. Or you’ll glorify them as part of the way the country solves its problems.
From AP:
“‘America is ready for another revolution, and you are a part of this,” Sarah Palin, the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee, told convention attendees Saturday.
Sign No. 4: Double messages are delivered with a straight face. Too many to list.
America is always ending war and bringing freedom by starting up more war or escalating whatever wars it is in.
From Krugman:
Today, by contrast, the Republican leaders refuse to offer any specific proposals. They inveigh against the deficit — and last month their senators voted in lockstep against any increase in the federal debt limit, a move that would have precipitated another government shutdown if Democrats hadn’t had 60 votes. But they also denounce anything that might actually reduce the deficit, including, ironically, any effort to spend Medicare funds more wisely.
Sign No. 5: History is regularly edited to make executive decisions more correct.
Huge bankster salaries and bonuses for people who wrecked the economy require justification.
“Bonuses must be paid to retain top talent.”
Sign No. 6: Directives are threatening.
“Your seatbelt fine is $720.”
“The fine for that red-light infraction is $500.”
“[With] the national G.O.P. having abdicated any responsibility for making things work, it’s only natural that individual senators should feel free to take the nation hostage until they get their pet projects funded.”
Sign No. 7: Democracy means giving someone the power to do something and then watching them not do it.
Example: Obvious when you think of it, really.
Sign No. 8: Resources are tightly controlled.
The big pieces of the national swag pie go to the military/national security and Wall Street while little or nothing is diverted for the social good or advancement of the country.
Whatever is proposed with regards to advancement and social good, the first and loudest response is that it will saddle the country with ruinous debt.
Sign No. 9: You are expected to feel lucky to live here because America is always the greatest country in the world. And if you don’t like it you should get out, preferably to some other country regularly mocked even though that country has a higher standard of living.
Sign No. 10: Rules and success are enforced based on who you are.
In a dysfunctional country, there are clearly insiders and outsiders and everyone knows who belongs in each group. If you’re wealthy, powerful and/or a celebrity, you’re always an insider and it is everyone else’s job to be a lickspittle to you and to reward you who have so much with even more. Most of the outsiders know this and like it. Only a few don’t and they’re all losers with bad attitudes. Class war is forbidden unless you want to wage it on others in your own class or those in one beneath yours.
Little Tommy Friedman tries to come up with a new phrase for “innovations” that reduce people to penury. It won’t catch on and I’m not gonna repeat it. Doubtless it will wind up in the title of one of his next insta-books.
But he’s tagged onto the big world of Internet crowd-sourcing sites where hundreds of thousands of people work at largely pointless jobs, stuff that keeps the plutocracy and service economy humming a bit, but which pay pennies.
Friedman seems astonished at this progress in a world where most people don’t see any unless one counts the global destruction of making a living as improvement.
The new jobs and innovations have too often been described as disruptive technologies.
After well over a decade of seeing and hearing this poisonous pap come out of the Silicon Valley and tech industry it’s easy to redefine disruptive technology.
Disruptive technology is jargon for something invented that destroys your way to make a living by siphoning 99 percent of the profit into the hands of the “innovator.”
The most obvious recent example from the news is represented by Jeff Bezos and Amazon.
A great world discovery and invention was the vaccine for smallpox. Eradication of polio in the US through mass vaccination when I was a child was another fine leap forward. And if malaria is ever conquered, that will be another. (The first two, incidentally, did not result in fabulous riches for the creators. However the eventual benefits to the human condition are immeasurable — in a most grand way.)
Mechanical Turk, another Bezos innovation in which hundreds of thousands of people work free-lance for virtually zero doing no-social-value process tasks, is nothing to be proud of either although it doubtless makes much money.
Matt Barrie, is the founder of freelancer.com, which today lists 2.8 million freelancers offering every service you can imagine. “The whole world is connecting up now at an incredibly rapid pace,??? says Barrie, and many of these people are coming to freelancer.com to offer their talents. Barrie says he describes this rising global army of freelancers the way he describes his own team: “They all have Ph.D.’s. They are poor, hungry and driven: P.H.D.???
Barrie offered me a few examples on his site right now: Someone is looking for a designer to design “a fully functioning dune buggy.??? Forty people are now bidding on the job at an average price of $268. Someone is looking for an architect to design “a car-washing cafe.??? Thirty-seven people are bidding on that job at an average price of $168. Someone is looking to produce “six formulations of chewing gum??? suitable for the Australian market. Two people are bidding at an average price of $375. When Barrie needed a five-word speech to accept a Webby Award, he offered $1,000 for the best idea. He got 2,730 entries and accepted “The Tech Boom Is Back.??? Someone looking for “a rap song to help Chinese students learn English??? has three bids averaging $157.
While the inane (“The Tech Boom is Back,” acceptance of a “Webby”) is commonplace in Friedman’s world of free-lance opportunity, one thing is going missing from the great global talent pool: The capacity to make life better. All the work being done is of virtually no benefit except to those who either put together the Internet aggregator or very large corporations using labor pools to drive compensations for menial service work in corporate nuisance industries to the lowest possible levels.
You can glean the free-lance crowd-sourcing jobs junk pile for days and literally not find one that improves the human condition even slightly. I’ve tried.
There was the job of checking your cable tv movies on demand menu for the presence of a few specific titles. Then there was the job, devised by a couple college professors, to test how scared you were by a series of mock terrorist attacks as shown on fictitious news broadcasts. There are the jobs at rewriting and uploading articles seeded with keywords for those wishing to game Google with spam blogs and sites. And the bottomless ocean of transcribing audio from mind-numbing corporate meetings and lectures, all for a couple thin dimes.
The list presented by Friedman today as evidence of busy hubbub is no exception, and painfully so.
In southern California, notably in Pasadena, the idea of someone designing a “car-washing cafe” through global free-lance work is unintentionally hilarious. There’s no shortage of them. One down the street from me offers shoe-shines, massage chairs and an outdoor lounge while you wait.
Ninety-nine percent of the labor employed in it also qualifies as sweat-shop work. Thanks to the decades long effort to curb unions and destroy the rights of workers no one can make any real living at it unless they pack themselves in at the lowest level of existence manageable, seven or so to an apartment.
Of course, very stupid people will believe that using Internet crowd-sourced free-lance work to design such a car wash is really something.
“How Did the Robot End Up With My Job?” is the title of Friedman’s Sunday column.
Friedman has been indistinguishable from a robot for some time. So he certainly knows.
The trick is in getting those few slots where the robots, as exemplified by Friedman, are richly rewarded.
Here’s Friedman getting hit with a pie in a famous incident, set to my Captain Beefheart imitation.
Reading, PA, is now officially the face of poverty in the US. It is of personal interest because it is where DD earned his undergrad degree in biochemistry.
Back then it was a blue collar town anchored by heavy industry, most notably at Carpenter Technology and Kawecki Beryllium, and textile mills.
Reading was also a pretzel, candy and cough drops (Luden’s) manufacturing center. Candy and pretzels remain. It seems those industries cannot be entirely shipped off to China. But remuneration is very poor. (Corporate America has been hard on Luden’s too. It was sold to Hershey, the Great Satan of candy-making, and then to others even less interested. Click the link.)
Everyone knows now that national policies and the very upper class saw to it that this was all destroyed.
Mass unemployment is entrenched in Reading. The jobs that the US economy does create, thanks to compression of wages and the relentless destruction of labor rights, don’t pay enough to make even a reasonable living. Waves of teachers fired at the state level due to the economic collapse now view for jobs that pay minimally.
Even for young people with a bachelor’s degree, the economy is making life difficult. Vickie Moll, who runs the day care center, said the number of applications from teachers who have lost their jobs had grown as the waves of budget cuts washed over the state. “We have people in here with bachelor’s degrees making $8 an hour,??? she said.
Social services feel the effects, too. The Greater Berks Food Bank — Reading is the Berks County seat — is on track to distribute six million pounds of food this year, up from three and a half million pounds in 2007, said Doug Long, manager of marketing …
And jobs just seem to pay less. Ms. Santiago recently took a temporary job at a candy factory where she had worked more than eight years ago, when she was still in her 20s, before she had completed her associate’s degree. At the time she was making $10.50 an hour. In her most recent stint, her hourly wage was $9.25.
“Eight years ago I said, ‘I don’t want to do this, I have to further my education,’ ??? she said. “And now here I am, still packing candy, and making less.???
Taylor Swift, the most famous of young country pop singers, is from Wyomissing, one of the nicer enclaves near the city. As throughout America, poverty is speckled by those adjacent areas where many things still seem just fine.
It is a feature of modern America, one that defines the country. Poverty, almost but not quite hidden amid the greenery. If you choose to you can squint a bit and not see the decay. And it is probably one reason that violent rioting, now overdue, hasn’t yet erupted.
A hunting buddy of mine proposes the following plan to ultimately eliminate the Social Security congressional slush fund:
Anyone over the age of 45 will receive Social Security. Anyone under the age of 45 will not receive a Social Security check upon retirement. However, those younger than 45 will still be required to pay into Social Security to cover the benefits of those who are 45 or older. What they will get in return is that all of the money they accrue through investing in their 401(k), etc. programs will be tax-free when they retire.
Nugent, protestations to the contrary, is (from evidence gathered over the past couple years from his columns and TV appearances) brainless. It’s a trait which binds him to Rick Perry. They are kindred souls, he’s implied a couple times. And I certainly believe him.
Nugent doesn’t realize or chooses to ignore that for millions of Americans, Social Security is all they have. And that as the nation slides further into its relentless decline with less good paying jobs of any kind, this number is likely to increase.
Therefore millions of Americans, under the “Nugent hunting buddy plan” would still see money being taken out of their paychecks to cover Social Security for elders. But have nothing when they retired.
Which is genuinely a Ponzi scheme, a criminal malpractice. Perhaps that is the entire idea.
Mary Rathbun gets an $809 check every month from Social Security and an additional $100 in food stamps. The 74-year-old former nurse pays $550 in rent for her apartment in St. Helens, Ore. That leaves less than $400 for food, utilities and other expenses, including medical bills.
When Social Security was launched 70 years ago Sunday, it was meant to be a supplement for retirees, not a full pension. But today, 10.6 million people, or 22% of the 48 million who will receive Social Security benefits this year, live on that check alone, the Social Security Administration says.
Living on only Social Security isn’t a happy prospect. It means stretching every dollar, depending on a patchwork of family, charity and state programs to pay for what Social Security doesn’t cover — and sometimes doing without. Those living on nothing but Social Security are often single women and minorities. AARP, the senior advocacy group, says 25% of retired women, including 46% of unmarried Hispanic women, have no income beyond Social Security. AARP also says 33% of retired African-Americans live on Social Security alone.
Those numbers could grow as the baby boom generation enters retirement. Currently, 53% of people in the workforce have no pension, and 32% have no savings set aside for retirement.
Under the “Nugent hunting buddy plan,” homelessness, premature death, hunger and truly destitute poverty among the elderly would explode. You don’t even have to do any arithmetic. The explanation and numbers in the entirety of the USA Today piece would predict a truly appalling future for everyone but the most wealthy and their class of most enthusiastic attendants.
What would you expect in wisdom from a “hunting buddy”? Would you like to live in a country run by the heartwarming charity and homespun country savvy of the “Ted Nugent hunting buddy”?
The United States is building a ring of secret drone bases in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula as part of an aggressive campaign against al Qaeda affiliates in Somalia and Yemen, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing U.S. officials.
One base for the unmanned aircraft is being established in Ethiopia and another base has been installed in the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, the newspaper reported.
A small fleet of “hunter-killer” drones resumed operations in the islands this month after an experimental mission demonstrated that the unmanned drones could effectively patrol Somalia from there, the report said.
The U.S. military also has flown drones over Somalia and Yemen from bases in the African nation of Djibouti and the CIA is building a secret airstrip in the Arabian Peninsula to deploy drones over Yemen, the article said.
The Empire’s dog feces American innovation and technical supremacy on display, for knuckling a few of the poorest as long as we like, so that the 45 million on food stamps and those who aren’t can allegedly sleep easier.
Help make Jeff Bezos the richest man in the world. Work at an Amazon warehouse sweatshop in the scenic Pennsy Dutch Lehigh Valley. Enjoy the amenities of getting computerized e-mail notifications of temperature being so hot in the building you’ll suffer from heat exhaustion. Because Amazon cares so much, ambulances from a local company are kept onsite to take you to the hospital.
Don’t worry. While you’re being written up for missing work another temporary worker is being groomed.
One temporary employee who spent several months unloading boxes of books in the Amazon warehouse said: “Everybody gets backaches, but if you slow down, they reprimand you. They’re killing people mentally and physically. They just push, push, push.”
During one shift he hurt himself. After seeing a doctor, the worker went on “light duty.” The staffing firm didn’t have any such assignments available. So every scheduled work day he reported to the ISS office on Tilghman Street.
“You’re not allowed to walk around,” he said. “They put a chair in the corner and you sit there.”
His job was to count the number of people coming into the office. Another person he observed on light duty had to count how many trains passed by outside the office window.
Beatings will continues until morale improves.
Not by coincidence this is a “beggar they neighbor” corporate economic strategy, one which feeds off the atrocious job market by taking advantage of the desperation of laborers. The laborers, who will take ever decreasing compensation in relationship to work performed, make the goods cheaper but profits to those who already have the most, soar.
