At this point, we just have to accept it as a fact of life: Obama doesn’t, and maybe can’t, do outrage — no matter how much the situation calls for it. The purpose of last night’s speech, if there was one, was to rally the nation against crazy Republicans. But there were no memorable lines, no forceful statements of the very stark reality. “Now, now, that’s not reasonable??? isn’t going to move multitudes …
I really don’t see how this ends without either default or the belated discovery by Treasury that the constitutional option is viable after all.
Sadly, a three minute cyberwar wasn’t quite enough.
We now return you to the regular programming of being slowly tortured to death from the inside.
But Kristof never did although years later he lamely conceded that he had managed to “afflict the afflicted.”
Kristof kept his place at the toniest estate in journalism, polishing his reputation as a hand-ringingly sincere butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-the-mouth wise man who wants nothing but the best for everyone.
Today Kristof gets around to doing something that must have caused that person a bit of pain — naming the Republican Party as an obvious security threat, one greater than the foreign bogeyman we’ve grown accustomed to hearing of on a daily basis.
IF China or Iran threatened our national credit rating and tried to drive up our interest rates, or if they sought to damage our education system, we would erupt in outrage.
Well, wake up to the national security threat. Only it’s not coming from abroad, but from our own domestic extremists.
We tend to think of national security narrowly as the risk of a military or terrorist attack. But national security is about protecting our people and our national strength — and the blunt truth is that the biggest threat to America’s national security this summer doesn’t come from China, Iran or any other foreign power. It comes from budget machinations, and budget maniacs, at home …
So let’s remember not only the national security risks posed by Iran and Al Qaeda. Let’s also focus on the risks, however unintentional, from domestic zealots.
The rest of the column devotes itself to budget-cutting on education because — in addition to despising science — Republicans don’t like any money for things the wealthy have no use for. Which includes reading programs for children.
Ralph Nader stating the baldly obvious (although it’s nice he said it):
Corporations say they love their country, especially when it comes to manufacturing modern weapons systems for the Pentagon.So let’s extend this love and see how they measure up patriotically.
Is it patriotic for drug companies to leave our country without any production facilities for ingredients used in penicillin and other key drugs because they have shipped production rapidly in the past decade to China and India which lack the inspection standards we have here? Leaving America defenseless and so dependent in this critical area is especially galling. Remember Big Pharma accepts billions in tax credits and valuable free research, development and clinical testing by the National Institutes of Health for many important pharmaceuticals.
Is it patriotic for CEOs to demand and use taxpayer dollars to facilitate moving abroad with their industries? The latest version of this lack of fealty is taking large federal subsidies for solar energy research and development and then moving the production facilities to China.
It’s good to keep in mind that the big filch Nader mentions re Big Pharm also applies to our arms manufacturers. They get all their R&D money from Uncle Sam for making our marvelous killing technologies, stuff the Lockheed Martins and Raytheons then peddle to various pantywaist militaries around the world.
Companies are laying off employees at a level not seen in nearly a year, hobbling the job market and intensifying fears about the pace of the economic recovery.
Cisco Systems Inc., Lockheed Martin Corp. and troubled bookstore chain Borders Group Inc. are among those that have recently announced hefty cuts, while recent government numbers underscore how companies have shifted toward cutting jobs.
Cisco and Lockheed Martin are way too much in the news now. And not for good things.
I’d have a song for this but if I wrote a song for every bit about economic fail and decline in the once great nation I’d have to do three to five a day, easy.
So listen to Jonnie Pantywaist Blooz again. Which I tried to make light and topically funny but could just as well have turned into something from the business pages.
Months ago I named the GOP as a threat to security, primarily for its religious non-belief in science.
That was before it became recently clear that most of them would do anything — even bring about an even deeper depression recession — just for the sake of:
“Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! And since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale!”
GE’s Greenville plant, where all 22 gas power-plant turbines will be exported this year, is hiring 125 people in 2011. — SF Chronicle
Yesterday, arch rent-seeker Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric CEO and Obama’s job czar, headlined the “Campaign for Free Enterprise??? job summit. In typical fashion, Immelt had little concern for free enterprise or job creation. Since the beginning of the Obama administration, GE has realized that lobbying for big government, subsidies, and tax credits is far more profitable than competing and profiting from merit.
GE has chosen to specialize in rent-seeking behavior and has directly receiving millions of dollars from Obama’s stimulus and much more cash indirectly. GE notoriously paid zero taxes in 2010. — OpenMarket
The charge from labor-friendly liberals and free-market conservatives has been the same: the appointment [of Jeff Immelt as jobs adviser] represents pure crony capitalism. The leaders of the largest U.S. multinationals are hardly the best suited to give advice on domestic job creation, the line goes, when they spent the last decade eliminating 2.9 million jobs at home and adding 2.4 million overseas. And in particular, the chief of GE, No. 6 on the Fortune 500, shouldn’t be charged with heading that effort, considering the company’s sprawling lobbying agenda in Washington. — Fortune
The chairman of President Barack Obama’s jobs and competitiveness council said Wednesday there is no magic potion to jobs creation. — Newsday
Then the Obama administration sends Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric, which paid no federal income taxes last year, to lecture U.S. business firms to “stop complaining about government.” –letter to the Allentown Morning Call newspaper
Cisco Systems plans to cut 15 percent of its staff and sell a set-top box factory as part of a plan to cut annual expenses by $1 billion as the network equipment maker tries to revive its fortunes.
The company said on Monday that it will cut 11,500 jobs, compared with the several thousand that analysts had predicted. The cuts come after Cisco’s chief executive John Chambers said in April that the company had “lost its way.”
Cisco will notify U.S. and Canada-based employees who are losing their jobs in the first week of August. The layoffs in other countries will take place later in compliance with local laws and regulations, Cisco said.
Cisco outsources about 90 percent of its manufacturing to contract manufacturers … [to the same factories in Asia that produce all of Apple’s iKit.].
Portraits of sociopathic minds in action. Two guys, one who is part of a “jobs council” but whose most notable achievements are off-shoring and tax evasion, the other one who maintains on the premier news program in the US that tax relief will create jobs while making plans to reduce his labor force by fifteen percent.
The wealthy class needs gardeners who can plant tulips.
Today, inspired by GOP Presidential candidate Thaddeus McCotter’s inimitable series, Rock Solid with Thad, DD has thrown his hat into the ring of public educational shows on national affairs, too.
And while I don’t have the same authority and gravitas conferred by government service, I play guitar a lot better.
Rock Hard features a crew from the country and some of you may recognize them. And in the first show we tackle unemployment and reinvigorating your skills for the economy of the future through vocational training at Flatsonville Community College near the bucolic birthplace of author Conrad Richter. Which could be in any state you know.
DD knows Americans are busy, particularly when looking for the jobs of the future. And I’ve kept that in mind on Rock Hard! It’s advice you can take in three minutes! Although, being educational, it may seem longer.
Or, uh, cartoon. Mark Fiore’s lacerating spoof on the old Reagan “Morning in America” commercial.
Back when I ate shoe leather and like it when I wrote for the Village Voice, before it turned into something with no identity except ads, movie reviews, and trivial in-house bloggers who don’t get paid much, it ran the animations of Fiore.
Earlier this year Cisco put its CEO, John Chambers, on 60 Minutes to attest how US corporate tax rates were preventing it from bringing profits and jobs home.
“Trending now: the dark side,” announced the ad. Which could just as well be applied to Cisco itself, now one of the standard corporate cheats/predators on the national landscape.
Cisco’s international earnings have been taxed at about 5 percent since 2008, records show.
Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO), the largest networking-equipment company, may cut as many as 10,000 jobs, or about 14 percent of its workforce, to revive profit growth, according to two people familiar with the plans.
The cuts include as many as 7,000 jobs that would be eliminated by the end of August, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t final. Cisco is also providing early-retirement packages to about 3,000 workers who accepted buyouts …
Moving along, the Financial Times ran a special on outsourcing IT to overseas data centers, again “moving it to the cloud,” so to speak.
The remaining countries in the top ten are Mexico, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines and Chile.
There’s some discussion on using outsourced data centers as replacement for various corporate enterprise security functions.
DD found this hysterical. The last three years saw the US press and government alive with stories about Chinese infiltration of American networks — business, military and otherwise.
As karmic justice, the US government ought to mandate search for lowest bids providers — in this time of austerity, you know.
If this were to happen, Chinese service centers could replace Booz Allen, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman contracting services in this area. At substantial savings I would imagine.
At a recent outsourcing industry meet-and-greet in China, [an American outsourcer] was surprised to discover that other US attendees were public-sector workers, representing a number of cities and states. They wanted to understand how subsidies were being packaged in China, so that they could do something similar back home.
If you read the subtest of these stories, it’s clear China, India and other countries subsidize their service center IT shops for the express purpose of getting American (and other western) contracts.
It’s kind of an anti-labor national protection racket and it has nothing to do with the free market and everything to do with capitalizing on the US ecology of multi-national corporate vultures.
Now, the US government could easily do the same kinds of things and protect US labor. But the only place this happens is in the defense industry. The domestic non-military side is left to be picked clean. As a look at the Cisco story makes clear.
It’s not only IT that is outsourced. Anything that doesn’t require being tied to a particular geographic location in the continental US is fair game.
People in the sciences of the pharmaceutical and molecular biology industries already know this as the last few years have seen more and more their jobs just outsourced to R&D labs in Asia.
Like most other big pharmaceutical companies, AstraZeneca has also outsourced much of its IT.
“We have also signed a contract to outsource some of or human resources work, and we’ve already done some selective outsourcing of some of our R&D work,??? explains Mr Glynn.
Mr Dalal points out that the pharmaceutical industry is full of examples of companies that outsource their R&D activity for drug development.
In small part, this explains one of the reason why the war on infectious microbial disease is being lost to increasing antibiotic resistance and the lack of new compounds.
Do you really believe US pharmaceuticals are interested in the hard work and often initially unprofitable nature of this kind of work if the corporate heads are mostly focused on how fast they can send their labs to India and China?
Rhetorical, obviously.
For the future the obvious growth positions are then in jobs, services actually, which cannot be moved.
Janitors, sanitation workers, bedpan technicians, staffers of mini-marts at local gas stations, prison guards, car wash employees, waiters, bartenders, re-training camp community college instructors for 18-month certifications and bondings for these types of jobs.
Bl-a-a-a-t! I bought some new IT! It was made in China!
Hennigan’s e-mail must now be jammed with junket offers from the domestic arms industry. And that’s because he regularly acts as a stenographer for Raytheon project developers.
Today it’s e-warfare, specifically the EA-18 Growler fighter jet. It’s used now over Libya, part of the standard US military policy of bombing the paupers and pantywaists of the world, enemies with militaries so ineffective, outnumbered and outgunned we could beat them with stuff that’s fifteen years old.
A few excerpts:
The Pentagon is seeking to increase its technology research budget, which includes electronic warfare, to $12.2 billion in fiscal 2012 from $11.8 billion — and that doesn’t include spending in the classified portion of the budget.
[And Hennigan is doing his part.]
With a price tag of about $74 million each, Boeing Co.’s Growler is a showpiece of American electronic know-how with high-powered radar systems made by Raytheon Co., and tactical radar jammers made by ITT Electronic Systems and Northrop Grumman Corp.
But as the Growler enters wartime service, work has already begun on a new jamming device for the jet to give it an even greater ability to befuddle the enemy.
Four aerospace giants are competing for a jamming device contract estimated at $2 billion: Northrop, BAE Systems, and Raytheon Co and a team of ITT and Boeing. A total of $168 million has been handed out by the Navy to the companies for research and development on the program.
The story does not mention the US destroyed Moe’s air force and air defense system with cruise missiles and strategic bombing months ago.
Jets that can fly faster and jam more powerfully are about as necessary as you needing a new pair of motorcycle boots to stomp ants on the sidewalk. Your old shoes work fine, thank you.
And no Empire’s Dog Feces story is complete without Brookings Institution fugleman, Peter Singer, for an obvious and somewhat awkward comment, delivered to seem gnomic:
“War fighters have gone from using physical weapons like spears and knives, to chemical weapons such as gunpowder and explosives, to electronics with radio waves and computer codes,” said Peter W. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “It’s a natural evolution in warfare.”
“This is the new generation of electronic warfare,” said a saleman for Raytheon, “[a] former Marine Corps pilot,” to the newspaper. “The enemy should never know what’s coming their way.”
And they won’t as long as Uncle Sam keeps spending more than the top ten other militaries in the world combined on this stuff. However, at home, everyone else is left to rot, making it increasingly obvious that there will be less and less to defend. From the depredations and the calumnies of those many pantywaists.
These types of stories aren’t even hard to do. As a frontpage thing in the actual paper edition of the newspaper, even more indefensible. The reporter gets a trip, with a photographer, to go see the military hardware, escorted around by US military and arms manufacturer types. Who all spout some great-sounding bullshit about American military technology.
In terms of journalism, it’s right up there with writing laudatory pieces about pop stars, sprinkled with pictures from recent concerts and comments from record label flacks and fans.
If there’s one thing Obama does have going for him in Pennsylvania it’s that voters don’t think much of any of his prospective Republican opponents either. Bachmann has the ‘best’ favorability rating but it’s still a -7 spread at 34/41. That’s followed by Romney (35/46) and Cain (22/33) at -11, Pawlenty (21/39) at -18, Palin (36/57) at -21, and Santorum (31/54) at -23. Obama’s able to tie Romney and lead the rest of the GOP hopefuls despite his own unpopularity because they are even more unpopular. It’s just another reminder that with the economy still doing poorly Obama’s best hope may be for the Republicans to put forth someone so unpalatable that he wins on a sort of ‘lesser of two evils’ vote.
Side note: Rick Santorum fits the image of someone suffering from a pathologically entrenched insanity. He’s loathed in his home state but smilingly maintains that voters believe in him.
Tomorrow is a special election in soCal. In Los Angeles, you get another sort of hold-your-nose vote, Janice Hahn, to replace Jane Harman, over a orthodox Tea Party-backed candidate not worth mentioning.
It’s always the Bible-beaters masquerading as people in service to the beliefs of our Lord who wind up doing these things.
In any case, the inability to run away from such a man in any contest says much about how uninspirational Janice Hahn is.
Hahn comes from a family of wealthy and unremarkable career politicians. Her brother, Jimmy, was a michtoast mayor of Los Angeles from 2001-2005.
Early last week Pasadena Dems were set to run a phone bank for Hahn and sent out a call for volunteers. It was for Sunday and I received one e-mail announcement, among I assume at least hundreds.
Anyway, there’s little to recommend Hahn other than she’s not the Republican. And that hold-your-nose vote in combination with soCal’s entrenched tilt toward the Democratic Party will install her.
I went to a band rehearsal and it was time much more well spent.
Pasadena has a Tea Party affiliate.
Everyday, on the way to lunch, I pass a local house off the el Molino bridge, one with a front yard sign that not infrequently espouses its beliefs.
The Pasadena chapter has an uninteresting Facebook page concerned primarily with posting anti-Romney articles.
