According to our reporter in Washorkingtonsofcash DC major political parties are hoping to hold the 2012 election before Armageddon or the revolution .
“It feels like 1770 around here,” one pol told reporters, “people are really angry about the economy, wars, and chicklet white teeth with dollars bills stuck in them like parsley flakes.”
“We intend to continue holding circuses until next year when the number of clowns we have to fit into the magic bus is small enough that reporters can go along for the ride with VSPs.”
Obama said he would even use the “bully pulpit” to spread the word that nerdy is cool and that students should work toward degrees in the hard sciences.
“I want the pocket protector to be the new sex appeal,” said Obama, who held the meeting at a company, Cree Inc., that builds high-efficiency LED lights.
The other approach is to emphasize how much worse the recession could have been.
The President will be nearing eighty by the time the new “nerds” are reaching their peak in the hard science, assuming a certain number will even get there.
As for “nerdy being cool,” it has always depended on what kind of nerd you are. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates became cool (as for the latter, it depended on who you asked) when they rich. In the US, nerds only get a cool dispensation if they have bags of money.
In well over four decades (with the assumption you can’t be much of nerd in the low single digits) “nerdy” has never worked for me.
Here’s the rock bottom line: If you’re nerdy and you don’t have a fat wallet, you’re slightly less than wholeheartedly shunned. Always.
Anyway, it’s just more of the President putting up a smokescreen for 2012.
He may be around for another term even if the economy is still tanked because of what’s obvious — almost all the Republican candidates are unelectable by dint of being crazy, loathsome or both.
From a Politico piece:
Newt Gingrich faults big government for the lamentable absence of manned stations on the moon. Rick Santorum wants to “a system of discipline??? to “punish??? gay soldiers, which suggests that his problem with pornographic Google results is not likely to abate. Tim Pawlenty views Iraq as “one of the shiniest examples of success in the Middle East.???
However, those Democrats not running for President don’t have Obama’s luxury. They can all still get their necks rung in favor of local extremists by constituents.
At Pine View Farm, readers are pointed to an article in the Asia Times which indicates that current US economic activity is 40 percent transfer payments. It calls this a “zombi economy,” one where the banks sit on their cash, not dead and not alive, making money slowly on their toxic assets.
“Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke warned on Tuesday that a failure to lift the government’s $14.3 trillion debt ceiling risks a potentially disastrous loss of confidence in America’s creditworthiness,” reads the lede of a Reuters piece today.
Deep inside there’s a niggling desire, getting stronger, that maybe it would be better if the GOP pulled the pillars down on top of themselves and Washington. In the resulting turmoil and economic crash, the government might fall.
Then there would be a big enough excuse to get on with things.
The President continues his co-opting of tricks from the GOP playbook along with the community college obsession/cure-all in a swing through the south.
The latest, from the wires, is so Republican: We can only create jobs if we cut the deficit. Deficit cutting is job creation.
Also:
Before meeting with his jobs council at Cree, Inc., Obama toured a portion of the plant where LED lights are assembled. He met Josephine Lynch, a 43-year-old mother of four who landed the job two months ago after nearly three year of unemployment. She was a substitute teacher in New Jersey before losing her job. She then went back to school to get her electronics certification.
Obama hopes millions of unemployed workers will follow Lynch’s example by going back to school to get training for jobs in new industries, such as clean energy.
Empirical proof they’ve settled on the idea that mass unemployment is caused by stupid underskilled Americans who need to go to training camp to meet the skills of the 21st century. When all the data shows unemployment as a lack of demand, with the highly-trained as well as the unskilled hit.
Timed with Obama’s appearance with his “jobs council,” a Jeffrey Immelt authored piece on the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal.
You wouldn’t expect much from Immelt, now more famous because of GE’s reputation as a giant tax evader, and he does not disappoint.
Boost jobs in travel and tourism. This industry is one of America’s largest employers, but the U.S. has lost significant market share. By making it easier to visit the U.S. through improved visa processes, we can win back market share in travel and tourism and create hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Homeland security screening has not been good for tourism, it’s true. However, the idea that we’re going to magically rebound as a beacon to the world and a surge in an employment will result if we only loosen up the asshole at the Customs gate is surely grasping at straws.
Plus, there’s the community college thing:
There are more than two million open jobs in the U.S., in part because employers can’t find workers with the advanced manufacturing skills they need. The private sector must quickly form partnerships with community colleges …
Nobody, not the President or Immelt, mentions that a lot of the jobs that go to people successfully placed after retraining camp community college pay much less than the jobs held prior to entering camp. And some of them pay so poorly there’s no book for someone with a family to chase them around the country.
“By year-end we also will have looked at and made recommendations on building and improving systems for national competitiveness, including R&D investment, tax policy … ” Immelt continues.
Immelt had the gene for shame surgically removed years ago.
“America needs more growth … Government, business and labor need to work together to get this done,” Immelt concludes.
Thanks, Dad. Did you buy lunch for the staffer who wrote this for you?
Good news, lads! Good news! The view count ticks up every time Jeff Immelt is in the news.
In related matters, General Electric has permanently dispensed with the happy line dance. Now its commercials are about all the “imagination” it’s bringing to life, since a lot of this “stuff” is done overseas, a sore point.
Now the commercials are about GE Capital financing American businesses. Or technology not made here, like a medical scanner. Or technology that’s not really new but mostly sold to foreign countries, now misleadingly cast as improving American conditions, like GE gas turbines.
Some of GE’s biggest global growth drivers are built right here in the U.S. Our Greenville, South Carolina, site is the largest gas turbine manufacturing plant in the world, producing the majority of its advanced gas turbines for global export.
Built in 1968, this GE Energy site originally housed 250 employees and focused on building the Frame 7 gas turbine. Today, the Greenville site manufactures a diverse range of energy and infrastructure products on a campus spanning 413 acres with over 3,000 employees.
GE Energy’s innovative solutions, such as fuel flexibility for turbines, have been critical in winning major deals, including the $3 billion agreement signed between GE Energy and the government of Iraq, the largest single win in the history of GE Energy.
General Electric’s strategy of pursuing environmentally friendly business has given its Greenville site new jobs making wind turbines, softening the blow of layoffs that cut the plant’s work force by more than 600 jobs in the past three years.
More than 200 employees will be laid off from GE Security’s Tualatin manufacturing facilities this year, company officials confirmed Monday. GE Security, which makes video, access-control and anti-intrusion products, is cutting all of its manufacturing jobs in Tualatin, moving them to GE locations across the United States and Mexico, said spokeswoman Michelle May.
“GE exists for the benefit of the executives and the directors,” Meyer says.
“The four executives I looked at received and realized total compensation of roughly $30 million a year during a time when the stock price declined and underperformed the S&P 500. Immelt totally underperformed and totally missed expectations.”
Meyer made the right move for his client, as GE shares are down more than 45% since the beginning of 2007, before the financial crisis that crushed GE Capital, one of the company’s many business units. While the finance unit has stabilized in recent quarters after Immelt shrunk it, GE’s reputation has been tarnished in other ways.
The upshot is that it takes thirty seconds to find lots of Internet notices and news about GE destruction of jobs in the past decade.
But everyone knows this. Which only makes Jeff Immelt’s advice on job creation all the more odious.
But that seems to be the corporate lizard brain for ya. It was just two months the company was still into this smarmy ad campaign on YouTube.
The bioterror defense company Emergent BioSolutions, years ago known as BioPort, has had its boss, Fuad el-Hibri, appointed to the board of directors of the US Chamber of Commerce.
Emergent, which supplies the BioThrax anthrax vaccine to the US government, its only buyer, is a company that does two things: suck off the taxpayer teat and sue/dirty trick its competition in the bioterror defense industry.
“In 2010, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce joined with Scholastic Books to distribute roughly 100,000 books about the potential perils of government fossil fuel regulation to classrooms across the country,” reads one paragraph on the organization at SourceWatch.
“[The US Chamber of Commerce] aims to convince people that [Obamacare] is fiscally reckless, [and] will ‘lead us down the road to total government control of our health …'” reads another.
“Throughout his career, Fuad El-Hibri [of Emergent] has successfully identified and expanded on business opportunities that contribute to creating jobs and growing the economy,” said U.S. Chamber CEO Thomas Donohue to the Washington Business Journal. “The Chamber will benefit from his vast experience in international business and partnering with the U.S. government.”
It contains no revelations being entirely a rehash of old news. Watch it if you want to see Nick Davies of the Guardian and Adrian Lamo, the ex-criminal hacker snitch who turned in Bradley Manning.
Lamo appears in a trench coat. Between that and an obvious nervous tic which manifests as weird blinking before the camera, he’s a sight. If you need someone who genuinely looks the part of a squealer for a budget movie or tv show, Lamo is someone to consider. (It can’t be ruled out that this was all stagily contrived.)
CNN digs up a US military man to interpret the Collateral Murder video and the damage Assange has allegedly done to the US. He’s so wan and obviously from stock upright military man talent booking you won’t be able to remember the guy’s name or what he said. Except that WiliLeaks is bad.
Footage of Newt Gingrich, looking like a hippo, calling Assange an information terrorist is aired.
Ironically, the special aired the weekend news broke that the US wants to make Internet-in-suitcases available to nations where the citizens wish to revolt against their leaders. This is being done using the argument that transparency is critical in giving voice to those who wish to shed light on their corrupt governments.
In case the underclass parasites get the idea to come for your stuff:
When she costs $230,000, as Julia did, the preferred title is “executive protection dog” …
Julia and her ilk have some of the same tracking and fighting skills as the dogs used in elite military units like Navy Seal Team 6, which took a dog on its successful raid of Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan.
In fact, Julia was sold by a trainer, Harrison Prather, who used to supply dogs to Seal Team 6 and the British special forces. But then Mr. Prather switched to a more lucrative market.
“Either rich people discovered me or I discovered them — I can’t remember which happened first,??? said Mr. Prather …
“She’s a top deal,??? Julia’s owner, John Johnson, said as she escorted him around the grounds of his 15-acre estate outside Minneapolis … Mr. Johnson said he got his first protection dog after receiving personal threats while he was running the Northland Group, a debt-collection company in Minnesota that he founded and eventually sold three years ago …
Michael Galpert rolls over in bed in his New York apartment, the alarm clock still chiming. The 28-year-old internet entrepreneur slips off the headband that’s been recording his brainwaves all night and studies the bar graph of his deep sleep … Before he eats his scrambled egg whites with spinach, he takes a picture of his plate with his mobile phone, which then logs the calories. He sets his mileage tracker before he hops on his bike and rides to the office, where a different set of data spreadsheets awaits.
“Running a start-up, I’m always looking at numbers, always tracking how business is going,” he says. Page views, clicks and downloads, he tallies it all. “That’s under-the-hood information that you can only garner from analyzing different data points. So I started doing that with myself.”
His weight, exercise habits, caloric intake, sleep patterns—they’re all quantified and graphed like a quarterly revenue statement.
The founder of his own online company, Galpert is one of a growing number of “self-quantifiers ….”
“I’ve rewired my brain [with smart pills],” [says another ‘self-quantifer’].
[The annoying guy has made it into a product, sharing] his results with the CEOs and venture capitalists he consults with through his executive coaching business, BulletProofExecutive, but he’s found an even more welcoming audience at the first-ever international Quantified Self Conference.
Over the last weekend of May, in the upstairs of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, 400 “Quantified-Selfers” from around the globe have gathered to show off their Excel sheets, databases and gadgets.
Participants are mostly middle to upper class, mostly white …
“I was giving birth to our son, and instead of holding my hand and supporting me and hugging me, [the self-quantifier husband of this poor woman] was sitting in the corner entering the time between my contractions into a spreadsheet,” says Lisa Betts-LaCroix.
You can’t change what you can’t measure, say the “self-quantifiers” in the piece.
It’s true. How do you measure the amount of asshole in your personal composition? The douchebaggery? There’s no machine for it, no way to digitally quantize, no way to visualize it in an .xls file.
But you know it when you see or hear about it.
It’s a dilemma, not being able to change something because you can’t measure it even when you know it must be there.
Today the President officially left the building, tossing all job creation to the private sector, conceding to the dumb-unskilled-American structural unemployment argument. So all he has to do now is recommend retraining camp community college enrollment until 2012.
Having washed his hands of the unemployed, perhaps some politicians in the Democratic Party will realize they’re going to get their necks wrung for it when the national experience hasn’t measurably improved by 2012.
President Barack Obama said the private sector must take the lead in creating jobs as the as the economy recovers, with the government assisting by making sure workers have the necessary skills.
“Government is not, and should not be, the main engine of job-creation in this country,” Obama said in his weekly address on the radio and Internet. “That’s the role of the private sector.”
On June 13 Obama will meet in North Carolina with executives who are on his Jobs and Competitiveness Council to talk about proposals to encourage private-sector hiring without additional government spending.
In today’s address, Obama said a good education is “a prerequisite for success” in the workplace, so he is pushing states to improve schools.
It’s actually pretty slick, purloining the Republican meme that if government would just get out of the way and become a lubricant, business would just make short work of this ding-dang Great Recession business.
Next thing he’ll be slyly dropping word that he’s read Atlas Shrugged and found it enlightening.
