Bear in mind that the unemployed aren’t jobless because they don’t want to work, or because they lack the necessary skills. There’s nothing wrong with our workers …
“US has less extreme version of same. UK’s econ emerg: flatlining living standards, unskilled men.???
“Instead of a determination to do something about the ongoing suffering and economic waste, one sees a proliferation of excuses for inaction, garbed in the language of wisdom and responsibility.” writes Krugman, indirectly explaining the thinking of the very special good boy, David Leonhardt.
A pathetic story on job creation plans for the dead but still flopping fish middle class economy reveals the Obama plan is lame, and the GOP plan is what you already know — give more money to rich people.
Both the Obama administration and congressional Republicans released plans yesterday that they say will create jobs. The administration said it would scrap or scale back hundreds of unnecessary and burdensome regulations affecting everything from the environment to worker safety. White House officials claimed that this measure would save businesses hundreds of billions of dollars, making it easier for them to hire workers.
For instance, under the new guidelines, the Environmental Protection Agency will no longer require states to install systems to protect against fuel emissions at gas stations–a problem that has mostly been fixed by improvements in vehicle technology.
I think we can all agree stimulating gas station/convenience store hiring through deregulation must be part of quite an amazingly ambitious plan.
For one thing, there are specific forces holding back growth. Oil prices, though down in the last few weeks, are still 40 percent higher than a year ago and continue to siphon money away from the American economy to overseas economies. When I filled my gas tank last weekend, it cost $74, more than I think I have ever paid.
Gas is costing him more than ever says the sport with the six figure salary.
“State and local governments continue to cut jobs,” he continues.
“These specific problems worsen the broader insecurity of both households and business executives — insecurity that is typical in the wake of a financial crisis.”
Boy howdy! Remarkable!
David Leonhardt, we note, has 5,627 followers on Twitter, all through the magic of US innovation, the kind that has globally networked and lubricated the sucking up to your celebrity betters, in any field of endeavor.
A sampling of tweets:
“US has less extreme version of same. UK’s econ emerg: flatlining living standards, unskilled men.”
Sayeth the Yale man.
“Top colleges too focused on affluent, not meritocratic enough.”
In at number 2 on a list of 25 compiled by US News and the Glassdoor website, MITRE Corporation, which one can think of as a private sector arm of the government’s national security and intelligence apparatus.
The MITRE Corporation, which is based in Bedford, Mass., and McLean, Va., employs about 7,000 scientists, engineers, and support specialists, according to the company’s website. “Employees can adjust their hours around their children’s schedules,” an employee wrote on Glassdoor. “I don’t miss a thing with my kids’ lives, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything.”
In any case, two of the top five companies to work for, MITRE and United Space Alliance, wouldn’t exist without government contracts and the taxpayer.
So much for corporate America’s best and the love of the free market over guaranteed defense subsidy and jobs programs.
Facebook is number 7.
And none of the company’s in the top 25 make any durable goods.
Three of the top twenty five make nothing at all, being devoted only to
the parasite economy — business consulting, stock trades and financial instruments. Slalom (6), Scottrade (20) and FactSet (4), respectively.
Sheetz, a convenience store/gas station chain that provides minimum wage living jobs, is inexplicably rated #13 in the country for work life balance.
One assumes this is because working a lot for very little is the new standard of excellence.
That line, describing the CEO of Goldman Sachs, played by one of the the little bald guys from Sex In the City, is the level of dialogue in HBO’s Too Big To Fail, its dramatization of the behind-the-scenes dealings between the US government and Wall Street in 2008.
The telemovie actually attempts to portray Henry Paulson and the bankers of Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Chase as sometimes decent people, first as a fractious group, then at the end struggling together to avoid global economic collapse.
Once seen it can only be explained as a vanity project for the New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin, its executive producer.
Re Sorkin and yesterday’s post on snobs and the spoil for everyone at the top, he’s one who “Too Big to Fail” also seems to apply to. From his Wiki bio:
Sorkin graduated from Scarsdale High School in 1995 and earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Cornell University in 1999 … Sorkin has written, co-written or contributed to approximately 2000 articles for The Times, including more than 120 front-page articles and about 150 DealBook columns.
Jeebus.
Too Big To Fail is an unintentional credulity-straining trudge. At times it seems like every scene with Billy Crudup’s portrayal of Tim Geithner comes with the latter playing handball, tennis or jogging while using his cell phone to inform William Hurt’s Henry Paulson of whatever is his latest plan to save the world.
Too Big To Fail isn’t totally awful in the way of SyFy Channel is on Saturday evening.
But the people who made it, as well as the actors, are exhibits of those who suffer from such big egos they can’t see a movie that turns Henry Paulson and his small office staff of yes-people into the sole saviors of the world economy is, by definition, annoying.
In real life the characters vary between the narrow extremes of odious and/or repulsive. That being the case, anything in the movie that doesn’t reflect that becomes even more patience straining. So multiple scenes of Hurt/Paulson’s wife rubbing his troubled back or saying he’ll pull through just make you want to punch all the people who made this.
Hurt/Paulson, saving the world one mobile phone call at a time in Too Big To Fail.
My take was that Too Big To Fail wasn’t made for any average audience to enjoy. It’s purpose was to burnish Andrew Ross Sorkin’s famous person resume and fulfillment for HBO’s desire for cable TV awards from critics. The latter can always be depended on to provide print blowjobs.
Tim Geithner, chairman of the Federal Reserve, is portrayed by Billy Crudup as a sweaty weasel who’d make a deal with anyone, on any terms, if it took the pressure off him.
Like it or not, these [snob] colleges have outsize influence on American society. So their admissions policies don’t matter just to high school seniors; they’re a matter of national interest … For all of the other ways that top colleges had become diverse, their student bodies remained shockingly affluent. At the University of Michigan, more entering freshmen in 2003 came from families earning at least $200,000 a year than came from the entire bottom half of the income distribution. At some private colleges, the numbers were even more extreme.
And who better to write such a piece than someone who knows the smell of his own hole.
Born in New York, Leonhardt graduated from Horace Mann School in Riverdale, New York in 1990, and then continued his studies at Jonathan Edwards College, Yale University, graduating in 1994 with a Bachelor of Science degree in applied mathematics. At Yale, Leonhardt served as editor-in-chief of the Yale Daily News.
Next assignment: The wealthy get all the spoil in the US by the journalist who enjoys the modern spoils system. Second Pulitzer material, surely.
It is claimed that as an essay on what might be a framework for a new national security strategy, it is generating buzz.
If so, this only proves once again how a jumble of slogans, assertions about American exceptionalism and values, and unremarkable filler — fifteen electronic pages worth — thrills people who are not constitutionally disposed to speak frankly.
In other words, it must seem like great stuff for those who love writings by those who simply can’t.
The monograph, invitingly entitled “A National Strategic Narrative,” is here.
As said, it’s guaranteed to cause your eyes to cross in much less than its fifteen pages. Part of the thing calls for what the authors dub a National Prosperity and Security Act.
Including the preamble, the word “prosperity” is used 32 times in the piece. Yet nobody even vaguely gets around to explaining what this means to them precisely or how some facsimile of it might be restored in this country.
The best the two military men come up with is a recommendation to invest in education for young people. It reads like a line from a knee-jerk political speech on winning the future.
“By investing energy, talent and dollars now in the training and education of young Americans — the scientists, statesmen, industrialists, farmers, inventors, educators, clergy, artists, service members and parents, of tomorrow — we are truly investing in our ability to successfully compete in, and influence, the strategic environment of the future,” they write.
Effin’ Ay! That manages to shoehorn almost everyone into one run-on sentence.
Yes, soldiers, I think we can agree it is wise to invest in education.
“The National Prosperity and Security Act would: integrate policy across agencies and departments of the federal government and provide for more effective public/private partnerships; increase the capacity of appropriate government departments and agencies; align federal policies, taxation, research and development expenditures and regulations to coincide with the goals of sustainability; and, converge domestic and foreign policies toward a common purpose,” it reads toward the end.
Aside from the fact that this is another deadening run-on sentence of boilerplate — you gotta be kidding me!
This is what passes for scholarship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center?
A sentence that reads:
“Above all, this act would provide for policy changes that foster and support the innovation and entrepreneurialism of America that are essential to sustain our qualitative growth as a people and a nation.”
Really?
Boy, things are even worse than I thought.
If this were some graduate school essay tendered by students who put their names to it without the preamble of some allegedly important person, you’d be hard pressed to give it more than a C.
I’d give it a D. Which in the grad school environment is sub-failure.
This thing was actually featured on The Ed Show on MSNBC tonight.
Lawrence Wilkerson fronted for it.
Wilkerson was Colin Powell’s assistant, the water-bearer who helped Powell somehow include all the pretend rubbish into the famous UN Security Council speech on Iraq, the one that ruined the latter’s career and image.
Wilkerson astonishingly compared this to Eisenhower’s famous 1961 speech on the danger of an uncontrolled military industrial complex.
That would only be true, of course, if Eisenhower were someone who, instead of speaking bluntly, delivered his cautionary message in boilerplate and run-on sentences seasoned by liberal use of the semi-colon.
It’s a progressive call to arms, yowled Ed. Well, if it’s progressive it’s pretty weak tea.
As said, it recommends investing in education!
This is the brain trust of Admiral Mike Mullen, said Wilkerson.
That explains two things. First, the reason why it has publicity with everyone rushing to polish the apple. Secondly, and this is more minor, why intellectual scholarship just ain’t there in this domain.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for this to take its place in national history.
The grand prize winner of General Electric’s Good Time line dance exercise in corporate lickspittling was announced by the company, to little fanfare, Friday.
Even during its own pr stunt, General Electric couldn’t resist putting fingers on the contest scales, just like it puts its fingers on the scales of its corporate income tax bill in the US.
The majority of the winner’s views, according to the video’s own statistical breakdown, came from embedding on property run by GE’s pr effort Without the cheating, the entry would have been less popular, in line with much of its competition.
Which is to say, despite the big pr effort and presence on YouTube, these things were not popular at all.
Had DD’s “GE & Jeff (Taxavoidination)” been in the contest, by numerical count, I would have won.
As part of the astro-turfing campaign, GE paid for fluffer videos from some of the most subscribed to young entertainers on YouTube, pop artists like David Choi and the group, Boyce Avenue.
The promotional videos were viewed hundreds of thousands of times. None of it rubbed off. In fact, they look brainless and phoned in for the cash, like this example by Choi.
“This contest is here to promote clean-ness in the world,” says Choi in the video. “That’s a great cause. Who doesn’t like clean stuff?”
He meant clean water. However, apparently, to GE’s dismay, Choi really wasn’t paying attention after he got the check.
Choi apparently has about 800,000 subscribers on YouTube, an astonishing number and an obvious reason why GE solicited him.
It didn’t help. GE’s Ecomagination winner was viewed over 1300 times, nowhere near the return one might expect after pushing by various YouTube celebrities.
Achievement of corporate joy through celebrity and employee pimped astro-turfing — major fail.
As for the “clean stuff,” the company could just have given the bottled water away to the impoverished and skipped the volunteer employee advertising.
For the delight of adult children, Michio Kaku is hard to beat. In the past couple of weeks I’ve seen him asked to bring light to the awfulness of the Daichi nuclear disaster on cable news.
It’s the way of the hosts and producers. If you smile a lot, tell wondrous stories and are glib — or are just wonderfully oily — you’re perfect for the jobs of science popularizer and explainer of all problems with a science component.
That’s Michi Okaku.
Earlier in the week, on discussion roped in for the one-year anniversary ‘celebration’ of the BP oil disaster, Kakio burst out:
“The solution for the pollution is dilution!”
Wow. Can’t beat that.
The adult kids who love Kaku need great stories, too. Preferably short, well-repeated ones, because they easily forget things.
“You’re the best guy to talk about this,” comedian Bill Maher says to Kaku before getting the skinny on the tragedy of Daichi, laughing it up.
First, Kaku compares the situation to nuclear facilities being run by a “Homer Simpson,” a rib-tickler he’s pushed for the past couple weeks. [Much audience laughter.]
“This is a science experiment and we are the guinea pigs!” Kaku adds.
The video of the segment is here. If you savor the image of turning a combined tsunami/earthquake/meltdown disaster into 90 seconds of laugh lines, then by all means, go – go – go!
Kaku knows that to keep the adult children cooing and clapping their hands in delight, you need money shots. Kaku’s money shots are his encapsulations, specifically this nose-gold:
“This is a science experiment and we are the guinea pigs!”
Here is Kaku last year, using it twice for the BP Oil disaster (the first incidence comes at about 5:30):
Good news, lads ! Good news! Olbermann may be gone but Michio Kaku ain’t!
A sampling of Kaku yields more riches:
On Daichi: And you begin to wonder, I mean, is Homer
Simpson operating this nuclear power plant?
Again on Daichi, this time on contaminated water leaking from the plant, for MSNBC:Well, think of the little Dutch boy facing all these cracks in a dike. This hole, that hole, that hole has to be taken care of.
For MSNBC, not Maher: We`re witnessing a science experiment with humans, us, as the guinea pig.
Kaku on the book he’s currently flogging, Physics of the Future:
The job market of the future will consist of those jobs that robots cannot perform. Our blue-collar work is pattern recognition, making sense of what you see. Gardeners will still have jobs because every garden is different. The same goes for construction workers. [Who will live in giant shanty towns because they’re only paid minimum for tending the gardens of the wealthy, like in California, now.]
The losers are white-collar workers, low-level accountants, brokers, and agents. Already when you book a flight, do you really talk to anybody? No. People involved in software, ideas, human values, leadership, and creativity will still have jobs in the future. [Like Michio.]
The military, of course, is pioneering this technology. They have a version of this now. I’ve tried it. Through a little eyepiece I saw an entire battlefield, with the positions of friendly troops, enemy troops, and tactics all marked.
Yes, the US military has these things which map out where all things is. That’s working well in [fill in the name of your favorite country we’re at war with.]
Our grandkids will lead the lives of the gods of mythology. Zeus could think and move objects around. We’ll have that power. Venus had a perfect, timeless body. We’ll have that, too. Pegasus was a flying horse. We’ll be able to modify life in the future.
If you upload home videos to YouTube you notice the practice of corporate lickspittling attached to your page as monetization. This happens through the ‘promoted’ vids put at the top of your suggested viewing column.
Almost exclusively they’re devoted to corporate efforts, for want of a better description, GE “good time-y” excrement.
For example, lately I’ve noticed a piece from Wells Fargo Bank.
It’s hit count was unbelievable. Really, people click on some thing identified as being from a big corporate bankster?!
So, out of curiosity, I clicked on it to see that not only does the company pimp up the count but that it’s a large group of paid street performers the bank has hired to look like a “flash mob” in New York.
It’s eight minutes long, almost impossible to view for even two, unless you like watching generally no-talent highly contrived collections of people paid to look happy and staged in Manhattan for purposes of advertising.
Closer to home is previously mentioned General Electric’s obvious campaign to get employees (or any miscellaneous crowd of able bootlickers) to spam YouTube with videos of themselves happily line dancing in homage to the “Good Time” commercial.
(In related matters, GE’s Jeff Immelt is also spammed into YouTube by way of various deadening lectures where he’s given the baton of a master of the universe invited to speak before the country’s business schools. These appear to notorious flat tires. And also now magnets for random comments conspicuously hating on General Electric.)
Anyway, here’s country music superstar Alan Jackson — the man who does the “Good Time” tune — shilling for the man, stoking the employee base to upload its line-dancing videos pronto.
Good news, lads! Good news! Water for the poor if you’ll do a line dance!
Now you can still sort of think of it as just a bit of innocent fun. Except this is America in 2011. No big company does this shit just as innocent fun.
It’s squamous, transparently timed as it was in coincidence with the firm’s exceptionally bad image.
As a star of country music, allegedly an of-the-people heartland thing, Alan Jackson surely ought to have been less reptilian.
GE would give away bottled water to the world’s impoverished if American workers do this, Jackson said. Well, they could just have given away bottled water anyway without using it as a small carrot aimed at getting people to spam the happy GE country line dance for purposes of corporate p.r.
You can also make the argument, that corporate-wise, paying for all this, including the little bit of charity bottled water (which can be written off), was still a lot cheaper than paying a reasonable and legitimate corporate tax to Uncle Sam.
If you click on the “watch on YouTube” link you’ll notice the blandishment wasn’t nearly as popular as Alan Jackson’s name would seem to merit. Others seemed to perceive the mildly nauseating smear of corporate lickspittling coating the enterprise.
On Monday, Progressives United and MoveOn.org delivered our petition for GE C.E.O. Jeffrey Immelt to resign from President Obama’s jobs panel — along with your signature and over 200,000 others — to GE corporate headquarters in Fairfield, Connecticut.
Because you joined us, we were able to change the debate in Washington. Instead of constantly conceding to corporate interests in order to be seen as “business friendly,” the discussion turned to what really needs to be done to fix our economy, create jobs, and improve our nation’s finances. As you know, the answer is not to give the largest multinational corporations everything they want.
When the plutocracy and US big business come in for months of bad publicity, they just lobby for more bribes from the US government. And the US government caves in.
In the Middle East, they riot. What’s missing here? What’s been put in the water? It’s not the fluoride. For years after fluoridation the nation did all right with it’s middle class.
U.S. corporations have enjoyed a two-year bull run on Wall Street. They are sitting on a record amount of cash and are back to paying bonuses that are the envy of executives around the world.
And the icing on the cake for many of them might be just around the corner: a tax cut that has bipartisan support in Congress.
As part of their budget plan passed last week, House Republicans want to cut the corporate tax rate to 25% from 35%. The Obama administration and many Democrats also are looking to slice the current rate, but not as much.
Supporters of the corporate tax cuts say they’re needed to make U.S. companies more competitive with their foreign counterparts, and the administration and House Republicans say they want to offset rate cuts by eliminating unspecified loopholes and tax breaks.
Yet despite complaints that they fork over too much money to Washington, U.S. corporations have been paying an increasingly smaller share of federal taxes over the last half-century.
Nearly a third of all federal taxes came from corporations in 1952. Last year, they paid just 8.9%, according to government figures. Loopholes, credits and the ability to shelter earnings abroad have helped many of the country’s biggest companies pay far less than the corporate tax rate set into U.S. law.
Take Hewlett-Packard Co., which reported $11 billion in pre-tax earnings in 2010. Its chief executive for most of the year, Mark Hurd, earned $24 million in salary and other compensation, and three other executives earned more than $9 million apiece.
The company said it paid $2.2 billion in income taxes — a rate of 20.2%, well below the 35% U.S. rate.
(Note distinction as frontpage news in the delivery edition. On-line, the LA Times cyber-dummkopfs buried it.)
Big business ratchets up the class war against the middle of the nation. And then, except in Wisconsin and Michigan, the sound of crickets or huzzahs.
This is a stark turnaround from the 1990s, when 2.7 million jobs were created in multinational units abroad while 4.4 million were added at home. All told, these major companies employ one-fifth of all working Americans, 21.1 million in 2009. The story was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
The data provide fresh context to the tepid job growth experienced during the past decade even at the height of the boom. And while small businesses create most jobs, the larger corporations tend to provide higher salaries and better benefits for American workers. The strength of their domestic operations is also critical to small-business vendors.
No easy fix for this trend is to be found. The world is awash in cheap, high-skilled labor. The fastest-growing markets are in Asia. In China, especially, American corporations are pressured to set up factories and even research facilities there — not that they probably need much nudging. According to the Journal, 30 percent of GE’s business was overseas in 2000, while today 60 percent is. As a result, 54 percent of GE employees are located abroad vs. 46 percent in 2000.
The statistics are irrefutable. You give corporate America tax breaks, or allow it to abuse the tax code, it ships jobs overseas anyway. Lower taxes create no new jobs domestically. There is no trickle down.
The only thing that does happen is the the big business lobby runs another stick-up on the US government, threatening to shoot the dog it’s already shot a few times if it isn’t sufficiently bribed right away.
Could the news out of General Electric be any worse? Jeff Immelt could get caught tormenting the neighbor’s cat in video and the president wouldn’t get rid of him. However, the guy who speaks the truth about the treatment of Bradley Manning looking bad had to go.
