A nasty, unclean gaggle of Americans read the nonstop reports of mass graves in Mexico, the mountains of dead bodies, the unending exhuming of slaughtered innocents and decapitated citizens and public officials at the hands of evil drug cartels, then nonchalantly purchase another load of the mind- and life-destroying dope that these subhuman heathens peddle.
And on default:
The brain-dead, zombielike nonsense blurting out of Democrats’ pie holes is mind-boggling as they feebly attempt to rationalize raising the debt ceiling, scrambling mindlessly to explain how increased runaway, criminal spending on gluttonous, wasteful, superfluous stuff is a good thing.
And there’s the dog that bit Ted. He indicates he might have bled to death. In Canada.
I end up in a state-of-the-art emergency room at a Canadian hospital with a serious blood-gushing dog bite and wait 6 1/2 hours to see a doctor.
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!
A file containing more than 90,000 e-mail addresses plus passwords, logins and other information was put on The Pirate Bay file-sharing site.
The group [Anonymous] said it stole the information by targeting a poorly protected server on the defence firm’s network.
Booz Allen Hamilton declined to comment on the incident.
In text accompanying the download package, Anonymous said it was “surprised” at how easy it was to infiltrate the server given the consulting firm’s record of working on defence and homeland security.
If one goes to the Pirate Bay and reads the preamble from the group, it carries the strong scent of they-had-it-coming. Which I’ve mentioned previously.
Specifically, Booz Allen Hamilton and its cybersecurity operations director, Michael McConnell, are targets probably because of the very large role they played last year in cyberwar hype.
McConnell took it upon himself to enter the opinion pages of the biggest newspapers, to appear on 60 Minutes, trumpeting the danger of cyberwar. In computer security circles this was seen by many as abusive revolving-door behavior aimed at transferring more taxpayer money to Booz Allen’s cybersecurity contracting.
Booz Allen has been very strongly committed to hiring computer security specialists from the clutches of the government then leasing them back at premium rates.
And I covered the business quite a bit about a year ago, here, in Cult of Cyberwar: When Booz Allen’s mouthpiece attacks.
Look for the box containing the number of counts for Booz Allen and Michael McConnell appearances in the press. They were definitely working it.
Earlier this campaign got into Lockheed Martin, another business very big in providing contracting cybersecurity services for the US military.
At this point in time, national cybersecurity interests have nothing to do with betterment or benefit for the middle class. Basically, its part of the ruling class/warrior class/arms manufacturer tier. Alert readers will have noticed this isn’t about shadowy enemies attacking what the cyberwarriors are always going on about — a threatened infrastructure, water and power. Instead, it’s an attack on the firm that regularly used the ‘argument’ as a reason for awarding it more contracts.
When you see discussions of cyberwar in the mainstream media, that’s where it’s coming from, not from any altruistic desire to protect the average person’s life from something bad. It’s all about money and the financialization of cyber-defense.
Computer security, the lack of it, on the global network is a very substantial problem. But our cyberwarrior contractors aren’t really about fixing it or even managing it in some equitable way. Think of them more as the clouds of flies following garbage trucks to the dump.
Collected posts on Michael McConnell, Booz Allen and cyberwar — here — from the archives.
Thirteen mostly conservative California counties would break away to create a 51st state known as South California under a proposal by a local elected official.
Republican Jeff Stone has asked fellow members of the Riverside County Board of Supervisors to support a motion to bring together officials from the 13 counties to discuss the idea. A vote is scheduled for Tuesday.
Stone says California is too big to govern …
Stone’s version of South California would not include Los Angeles County. Instead, it would encompass coastal Orange and San Diego counties, and inland Fresno, Imperial, Inyo, Kern, Kings, Madera, Mariposa, Mono, Riverside, San Bernardino and Tulare counties. It would have a part-time Legislature and no term limits.
And why would it not include Los Angeles County, boys and girls?
Because that’s where most of the people live — especially all those not-white people and others who vote Democratic and have made the GOP dogfood in California.
If you don’t like your state, start a secessionist movement.
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.
Unemployment soared during the financial crisis and its aftermath. So it seems bizarre to argue that the real problem lies with the workers — that the millions of Americans who were working four years ago but aren’t working now somehow lack the skills the economy needs.
Yet that’s what you hear from many pundits these days: high unemployment is “structural,??? they say, and requires long-term solutions (which means, in practice, doing nothing).
Well, if there really was a mismatch between the workers we have and the workers we need, workers who do have the right skills, and are therefore able to find jobs, should be getting big wage increases. They aren’t. In fact, average wages actually fell last month.
The only thing missing is the obsession with re-training camp community college. Because, like in China — dude, they got all those workers going to community college to learn how to make the stuff we used to make and still need but don’t make but buy at Wal-Mart and Target and everywhere else you can shop.
My US-branded made-in-China socks, bought new three weeks ago, sprouted holes on the third wash. And those jobs went over there because of the fault of American workers, yep.
As far as newspaper editorials go, it basically shits on him for 750 words. Using polite language.
Here’s another video of a “rock band” of Republican congressman, including McCotter and one token Dem, playing badly at Farm Aid a few years ago. It’s unlistenable, twenty seconds being about all you can stand. Pantywaist vocals while murdering a Beatles tune plus the drummer making a good argument for replacement with a drum machine.
“We like to have fun every once in awhile,” says one of the men in the band called, wait for it, The Second Amendments. Mystifyingly, it appears to have been shot for television broadcast.
None of these guys ever rock, even remotely. Originally, I wanted to cut McCotter some slack because he so obviously loves to play guitar. But he just stinks at it — totally “dad rock.”
It’s doubly damning because he’s from Michigan, Detroit being known for many great electric guitar players in the Sixties and Seventies.
For example, if Jim McCarty of the Detroit Wheels was/is a Boss 302, McCotter is an old Pinto or Chevy Vega.
We live in the time of Google the Great, whose all-seeing eye has ushered in a golden age of musical democracy. Out at your local bar, and faced with an enchanting, but obscure, slice of music, you can call up an app, hold your mobile device aloft like a scepter, and all the vitals — song, artist, album — are swiftly known to you.
“Google the Great” … “musical democracy” … “hold your mobile device aloft like a scepter” …
Scintillating observation from a high-button fellow admiring his iGadgets.
In Michigan domestic manufacturing, except for cars and tanks, has disappeared. Electrolux, in Greenville, closed its plant, destroying employment in the town. All the jobs went overseas.
So to re-training camp, Montcalm Community College, to get people ready for the jobs of the future! In this case, solar panel manufacturing.
Problem, the jobs of the future are too few. And American companies still ship the jobs out.
Here:
Solar panel technology was invented in the United States. So was the key technology for advanced batteries for electric vehicles, for which Michigan is also developing a number of factories.
But in each case, sales and production are tiny compared with European countries.
Even if clean technologies were to bloom, it’s not clear that they would produce large numbers of new jobs.
The Uni-Solar plant is the size of 10 football fields but so highly automated that it requires only a few dozen workers at any one time.
“That was supposed to be the big savior for this area, and it never happened,” said Mike Wills, a former Electrolux employee who works as a supervisor at God’s Love Closet, a men’s shelter where he once lived.
The shelter didn’t exist before Electrolux closed, making it one more sign of how the effects of joblessness spread through a community.
“[The] U.S. usually has left matters to the private sector, and its multinational companies have moved tens of thousands of jobs overseas,” it reads.
It’s not the training. That is a rationalization.
In fact, a company could train people to do its work as easily, or even more quickly, than a community college. The US guitar and amplifier manufacturing industry didn’t send all its jobs to China because that country has community college training its workers to make rock and roll consumer electronics.
It’s all bullsht. The Los Angeles Times doesn’t state this. However, the story makes clear that re-training camp has a pretty good failure rate.
Underlying this story are choices made about what kind of country this is going to be for the future.
And that’s the equivalent of Swiss chocolates-maker to the world.
When it’s not arms manufacturing, it’s going to be the artisan goods, high-end and high-priced things made in small runs made for the rich and the haves of the world. And, even in this, there won’t be an edge. Europe can make the stuff just as easily as we can.
Paradoxically, in Europe — and in Canada, where the Greenville solar panel factory moved a lot of its jobs, there are laws in place to discourage companies from going out of country and to encourage retention of a labor force.
