Be Afraid...

Greetings good citizen,

We are about to find out just how badly broken our political process is.

There is no reason in the world to hand ‘victory’ to the, er, ‘party’ responsible for our broken economy, none whatsoever and yet you already know they won’t ‘lose’ the upcoming mid-terms.

We ‘know’ that because we’ve been told repeatedly by the bought and paid for MSM just how ‘strongly’ the ‘Tea Party’ conservatives have been ‘polling’…like we all haven’t asked ourselves just who (if anyone) was ever polled?

Be afraid, be very afraid good citizen!

What’s the ‘worst case’ scenario we’re looking at here? The Democrats lose a couple of seats in both houses but still retain, er, (slender) ‘majorities’ in both so the next (and last) two years of the Obama administration will go like the previous two have…’political gridlock’ will reign supreme.

IF the conservatives score a political upset and win back one or both houses of Congress you will see rioting/major social unrest sweep the nation.

People are already ‘suspicious’ of the thinly disguised corporate ‘vampire squid’ that is running this nation.

Face it, ‘one in five’ does NOT win elections, even when half of voters stay home!

Yet it happens all the time!

So you heard it here first. The, er, ‘conservatives’ will NOT retake either house of Congress (because they have already proven it is ‘unnecessary’, the Democrats take their marching orders from the same people the Republicans do.)

And the next two years will be ‘indistinguishable’ from the past two.

I have predicted in the past that the last election would be the ‘last’ one…and I’m standing by that prediction because it is unfathomable that ‘anyone’ (in their right mind) would run for the job of being the head ‘sock puppet’.

I can think of a few ‘entertainers’ who would do it for the right price now that the whole purpose of holding elections has been permanently undermined.

This is a cup of coffee that few have gotten an eye-opening sniff of. The last election proves conclusively that it doesn’t matter who you vote for if they all take their marching orders from the ‘same people’.

So the ‘mid-terms’ will change what? It will only make continued Republican ‘opposition’ more, er, ‘credible’ as we inch closer to full-blown Banana Republicdom.

Naturally this isn’t what any of us, er, ‘signed up’ for, but hell, this is precisely what happens when your ‘choices’ are made for you…

When do you get to ‘make some choices’ of your own?

You’ll get to vote with your gun as soon as you realize you’re screwed no matter what you do. (But there’s still a chance you can save your kids…)

Because that’s what it’s all coming down to…there will be those with guns and those who don’t…and you don’t want to be in the ‘don’t’ column.

Shifting ‘mental gears’ (haven’t done THAT in a while) here we come to the question of What should you ‘sacrifice’ to land a new job?

Bizarrely, this question is somewhat ass-backwards because it has finally become an issue of at what point is it ‘worthwhile’ to sell your time to an employer?

If the commute makes the trip back and forth to work, er, ‘nonsensical’ then accepting the job is a non-starter.

If the pay doesn’t ‘crack your nut’ (or relies on overtime to reach that goal) you’re probably ‘fucked’ as it is.

Understandably, looking for a job that offers a ‘future’ has become an exercise in futility if you’re not the owner’s progeny…

Ironically, many people don’t, ‘analyze’ what they’re being offered against what they ‘need’ which leaves people stranded in jobs that only dig the hole deeper.

Have I mentioned that there is no way out of this pickle using capitalism?

And THAT’S the GOOD NEWS!

The BAD NEWS is we’re stuck dealing with this self-serving system until it is, er, ‘eradicated’…

Hey, things look bleak but that only serves to re-enforce the point of ‘what have you got to lose (except your chains?)

While the (real) ‘opposition’ has yet to be organized, it will form in due time. The thing to be cautious of is the ‘fake’ opposition like the flaky ‘Tea Partiers’ (these people haven’t got a clue what they’re fighting, never mind fighting for!)

A Simple Plan…look for me when the time comes, I’ll be out there as I’m one of the few who doesn’t need a gun to defend themselves…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Things that make your head go 'boom'!

Greetings good citizen,

How many of you are thinking what I’m thinking? How the hell did BP get a permit to drill without having a failsafe method of capping the fucker IF something ‘went wrong’?

This brings us full circle to another ‘bizarre’, er, ‘coincidence’…have you noticed the fuckers are more concerned with being able to ‘get at’ the oil than they are in preventing an extinction level event in the Gulf?

They don’t want to ‘cap’ the fucking well! WTF is wrong with these people? This is way beyond stupid and the fact that the media has ignored this ‘option’ should tell you something.

If it were up to me, there would have been a HUGE HONKIN’ ROCK sitting on top of that puppy the day after the feed snapped! May not have sealed it ‘perfectly’ but at least it wouldn’t be blowing hundreds of barrels a minute into a sensitive eco-system either!

And we don’t even have that!

The level of, er, ‘ignorance’ displayed here is positively staggering! Once again ‘incompetence’ doesn’t even BEGIN to cover the level of ‘stupidity’ that has been indulged thus far!

Which brings us to tonight’s offering for another installment guaranteed to make your head explode!

I think we would gladly exchange all of the ‘artificial knowledge’ conferred upon the leaders of the world by their prestigious ‘college degrees’ for a ‘lick of common sense’!

HP to Cut 9,000 Jobs in Shift Toward Service Work
By Hugo Miller and Katie Hoffmann - Jun 1, 2010

Hewlett-Packard Co., the world’s largest personal-computer maker, plans to cut about 9,000 jobs and retool its computer-services business to help it compete with International Business Machines Corp.

HP will take a $1 billion charge for paying severance and modernizing its data centers to provide more automated services to customers, it said today in a regulatory filing. The Palo Alto, California-based company plans to replace about 6,000 of the eliminated positions with workers in different countries. [Somebody please explain to me why every Hewlett-Packard plant/retailer on US soil isn’t in flames right now? Why isn’t there a bill in Congress being ‘fast tracked’ to BAN HP products from the US market? Better, why isn’t HP’s charter being revoked? Or are the MORONS we elect to Congress TOO STUPID to understand what is in the public’s ‘best interests’?]

“These sets of actions will enable HP to grow better than the market,” Ann Livermore, executive vice president for enterprise business, said today on a conference call. “This is a substantial opportunity for us and something that we think is a good opportunity for our clients as well.” [You can insert ‘shareowners’ in there as well because this is another ‘cost based’ effort to reduce expense that will ultimately result in fewer customers!]

The job cuts come after HP raised its 2010 forecast last month for the third time since November as results beat analysts’ estimates on a revival in business spending. Chief Executive Officer Mark Hurd, who has announced more than 48,000 job cuts during his five-year tenure, has expanded into more profitable services as the recession crimped corporate budgets for equipment. He bought Electronic Data Systems Corp. for $13.2 billion in 2008, vaulting HP to No. 2 in services behind IBM. [Ironically, we can’t fault Mr. Hurd because he is following IBM’s example! Those, er, ‘ratfinks’ should also be banned from the US market and have their charter revoked as well!]

HP said the $1 billion in expenses for severance costs and asset impairments will be applied between now and fiscal 2013. The moves will result in net annual savings of $500 million to $700 million by the end of fiscal 2013, the company said. [Savings? You mean the company will ‘keep’ that money and it won’t be taken by Mr. Hurd as a well-deserved ‘bonus’? Heaven forbid the price of HP products might drop a few bucks, making them ‘more competitive! Because we all know this has NOTHING to do with competitiveness and everything to do with screwing the people who built the business from the ground up!]

Job-Cut History

The company had 304,000 employees at the end of its fiscal year in October. Hurd, 53, has cut jobs before to shift the workforce and expand the sales staff. When he became CEO in 2005, he cut 10 percent, or more than 15,000 positions, to lift profit. [And mostly to prove he had a pair…] In 2008, he announced a plan to eliminate 24,600 jobs over three years to save $1.8 billion after the purchase of EDS.

Livermore said today that the cuts and the new hiring will take place over a multiyear period. HP’s services unit will be hiring 6,000 workers in sales and in some “global delivery centers,” she said. [You can insert ‘call centers’ here…and don’t even imagine these jobs will be located within US jurisdiction. The corporate world are avowed ‘slavers’.]

“This company is focusing more and more on revenue growth in their services business,” said Aaron Rakers, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus & Co. in St. Louis. “IBM’s always going to have a big presence in services, but these guys are going to battle it out for big deals.” [And US workers can go suck rocks!]

HP said last month that services revenue rose 2.5 percent to $8.71 billion, while PC sales rose 21 percent and orders for server computers and storage devices jumped 31 percent. Services accounted for 28 percent of HP’s overall $30.8 billion in quarterly revenue.

Dell, Xerox

Hewlett-Packard isn’t the only hardware maker trying to gain ground on Armonk, New York-based IBM, the world’s largest computer-services company. Dell Inc., the No. 3 personal- computer maker, bought Perot Systems Inc. in November for about $3.9 billion. Round Rock-Texas based Dell said in February it plans to acquire more computer-services companies.

Xerox Corp., based in Norwalk, Connecticut, completed its purchase of Affiliated Computer Services Inc. for about $6 billion in February to accelerate its focus on computer services amid declining sales of printing equipment.

Hewlett-Packard fell 43 cents to $45.58 at 4 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The stock has dropped 12 percent this year.

“We are very supportive of this move,” Louis Miscioscia, an analyst at Collins Stewart Plc in Boston, said today in a note. “We believed there was more to be done” for HP to catch up to IBM, he said.

Never mind the obvious ‘pro-corporate’ spin of two US companies ‘slugging it out for market share’. What we’re seeing here is the reason why you (or your kid) can’t/won’t find a decent job! They’re all being ‘outsourced’ and the ignorant morons in Washington aren’t lifting a finger to stop it, despite campaign promises to the contrary!

Well don’t look now good citizen because believe it or not it’s even worse than it appears

Dead Cat Labor Market

Rebound in the labor market? Looks more like a dead cat bounce, where a great many of the jobs being created are either temporary, part-time, low wage, or stripped down, like those detailed in the following CNNMoney.com report, "Say Goodbye to Full-Time Jobs with Benefits":

Jobs may be coming back, but they aren't the same ones workers were used to.

Many of the jobs employers are adding are temporary or contract positions, rather than traditional full-time jobs with benefits. With unemployment remaining near 10%, employers have their pick of workers willing to accept less secure positions.

In 2005, the government estimated that 31% of U.S. workers were already so-called contingent workers. Experts say that number could increase to 40% or more in the next 10 years.

James Stoeckmann, senior practice leader at WorldatWork, a professional association of human resource executives, believes that full-time employees could become the minority of the nation's workforce within 20 to 30 years, leaving employees without traditional benefits such as health coverage, paid vacations and retirement plans, that most workers take for granted today. [What Bobo isn’t saying is that ‘churn’ has already devastated over fifty percent of the working aged population’s ‘benefit packages’.]

"The traditional job is not doomed. But it will increasingly have competition from other models, the most prominent is the independent contractor model," he said. [Why do you suppose that is? Because I.C.’s are ‘responsible’ for their own benefits, as well as making sure their taxes are paid! You think the government is in trouble now? Picture a largely ‘self-employed’ workforce where you have all of the downside and none of the upside of working for yourself!]

Doug Arms, senior vice president of Ajilon, a staffing firm, says about 90% of the positions his company is helping clients fill right now are on a contract basis.

"[Employers] are reluctant to bring on permanent employees too quickly," he said. "And the available candidate landscape is much different now. They're a little more aggressive to take any position."

Cathy, who asked that her last name not be used, lost her job as a recruiter for a financial services firm in February 2009. She started working on a contract basis four months later. She believes that many employers are taking improper advantage of the weak labor market.

"I work in HR, I understand that sometimes you need to hire a contractor because you have a project and you won't need the person when it's done in three months," she said. "But that's not what's happening here."

Cathy said her co-workers who had permanent jobs didn't treat her differently, but she still felt like a second-class citizen.

"At one job they were giving out H1N1 flu shots but the contract workers weren't eligible to receive them," she said. "I said 'You guys are still in trouble if I get the flu.'"

Much of the change is due to employers' desire to limit their costs. Stoechmann equates the shift to the one seen in retirement plans, in which employers moved away from the traditional pension plan toward defined contribution plans, which passes more of the burden onto the employee.

Yippee yi yo ki yay! Geez mo’ fo, ‘The Deal’ done got changed somewhere down the line and today’s kids are ‘too stupid’ to know things weren’t always like this!

Understand that you ‘surrender’ your right to ‘fend for yourself’ in exchange for having your needs met by society…but the ‘private sector fuckers’ think they are not bound to this ‘arrangement’.

The coming ‘energy crisis’ (which may be a lot closer than you think, considering what’s going on in the Gulf.) Will ‘short circuit’ the out-sourcing of physical products and the difficulty of long distance troubleshooting (think the Boeing ‘Dreamliner’, which still isn’t flying!) will claw back a percentage of jobs that are currently being done ‘over a wire’ solely to enrich the capitalist pigs.

It’s obvious the focus on ‘expense reduction’ was the primary driver behind the crisis in the Gulf today. The cheap fucks couldn’t even spend the money to change the batteries on the friggin safety device! It’s not like they weren’t making it ‘hand over fist’ or that oil was ‘dirt cheap’!

A little ‘trite’ to be saying ‘penny-wise and pound-foolish’ but there it is!

Better, the whole ‘loyalty’ thing will get a serious re-working because what you care about and why will suddenly matter very much!

The whole ‘profit’ thing is going to go right out the window because it has nothing to do with survival.

Funny how ‘life’ changes everything!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Slim picken's

Greetings good citizen,

There have been multiple reports that the labor markets are in the worst shape they’ve been in for a very long time. Some compare current conditions to those in the eighties and others compare them (statistically) to the Thirties.

Yet what we’re experiencing today has little in common with the events of eighty years ago. What we’re seeing today is the events of the mid-eighties, magnified considerably.

Sadly, some of you were born in the mid-eighties, so you only know what you’ve been told of those times, as a boomer, I lived those days…the so-called ‘Reagan Revolution’

They were dark days indeed, especially in manufacturing…

So we arrive at tonight’s offering where ‘new records’ are being set…

U.S. Job Seekers Exceed Openings by Record Ratio
By PETER S. GOODMAN
Published: September 26, 2009

Despite signs that the economy has resumed growing, unemployed Americans now confront a job market that is bleaker than ever in the current recession, and employment prospects are still getting worse.


Job seekers now outnumber openings six to one, the worst ratio since the government began tracking open positions in 2000. According to the Labor Department’s latest numbers, from July, only 2.4 million full-time permanent jobs were open, with 14.5 million people officially unemployed.

And even though the pace of layoffs is slowing, many companies remain anxious about growth prospects in the months ahead, making them reluctant to add to their payrolls.

“There’s too much uncertainty out there,” said Thomas A. Kochan, a labor economist at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management. “There’s not going to be an upsurge in job openings for quite a while, not until employers feel confident the economy is really growing.” [Bad news, good citizen; the same people leading the frenzy of ‘insider selling’ are the same people that are in charge of ‘adding capacity’…]

The dearth of jobs reflects the caution of many American businesses when no one knows what will emerge to propel the economy. With unemployment at 9.7 percent nationwide, the shortage of paychecks is both a cause and an effect of weak hiring.

In Milwaukee, Debbie Kransky has been without work since February, when she was laid off from a medical billing position — her second job loss in two years. She has exhausted her unemployment benefits, because her last job lasted for only a month.

Indeed, in a perverse quirk of the unemployment system, she would have qualified for continued benefits had she stayed jobless the whole two years, rather than taking a new position this year. But since her latest unemployment claim stemmed from a job that lasted mere weeks, she recently drew her final check of $340.

Ms. Kransky, 51, has run through her life savings of roughly $10,000. Her job search has garnered little besides anxiety.

“I’ve worked my entire life,” said Ms. Kransky, who lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment. “I’ve got October rent. After that, I don’t know. I’ve never lived month to month my entire life. I’m just so scared, I can’t even put it into words.”

Last week, Ms. Kransky was invited to an interview for a clerical job with a health insurance company. She drove her Jeep truck downtown and waited in the lobby of an office building for nearly an hour, but no one showed. Despondent, she drove home, down $10 in gasoline.

For years, the economy has been powered by consumers, who borrowed exuberantly against real estate and tapped burgeoning stock portfolios to spend in excess of their incomes. Those sources of easy money have mostly dried up. Consumption is now tempered by saving; optimism has been eclipsed by worry.

Meanwhile, some businesses are in a holding pattern as they await the financial consequences of the health care reforms being debated in Washington. [Nice! Always good to see the bogeyman held out (gratuitously) for all to see when business ‘unfriendly’ legislation is pending in congress…]

Even after companies regain an inclination to expand, they will probably not hire aggressively anytime soon. Experts say that so many businesses have pared back working hours for people on their payrolls, while eliminating temporary workers, that many can increase output simply by increasing the workload on existing employees. [A popular ploy that’s been around since…why by gum, since the darned mid-eighties! How about that?]

“They have tons of room to increase work without hiring a single person,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute Economist. “For people who are out of work, we do not see signs of light at the end of the tunnel.”

Even typically hard-charging companies are showing caution. [Er, like who? (outside the military)]

During the technology bubble of the late 1990s and again this decade, Cisco Systems — which makes Internet equipment — expanded rapidly. As the sense takes hold that the recession has passed, Cisco is again envisioning double-digit rates of sales growth, with plans to move aggressively into new markets, like the business of operating large scale computer data servers.

Yet even as Cisco pursues such designs, the company’s chief executive, John T. Chambers, said in an interview Friday that he anticipated “slow hiring,” given concerns about the vigor of growth ahead. “We’ll be doing it selectively,” he said. [Um, what does that statement tell you good citizen? It tells me some folks are already preparing for the ‘new normal’ and that shit ain’t gonna fly, not this time.]

Two recent surveys of newspaper help-wanted advertisements and of employers’ inclinations to add workers were at their lowest levels on record, noted Andrew Tilton, a Goldman Sachs economist.

Job placement companies say their customers are not yet willing to hire large numbers of temporary workers, usually a precursor to hiring full-timers.

“It’s going to take quite some time before we see robust job growth,” said Tig Gilliam, chief executive of Adecco North America, a major job placement and staffing company.

During the last recession, in 2001, the number of jobless people reached little more than double the number of full-time job openings, according to the Labor Department data. By the beginning of this year, job seekers outnumbered jobs four-to-one, with the ratio growing ever more lopsided in recent months. [At last report, the ratio of job seekers to open positions is more than 6 to 1…]

Though layoffs have been both severe and prominent, the greatest source of distress is a predilection against hiring by many American businesses. From the beginning of the recession in December 2007 through July of this year, job openings declined 45 percent in the West and the South, 36 percent in the Midwest and 23 percent in the Northeast. [In the meantime, off-shoring proceeds apace.]

Shrinking job opportunities have assailed virtually every industry this year. Since the end of 2008, job openings have diminished 47 percent in manufacturing, 37 percent in construction and 22 percent in retail. Even in education and health services — faster-growing areas in which many unemployed people have trained for new careers — job openings have dropped 21 percent this year. Despite the passage of a stimulus spending package aimed at shoring up state and local coffers, government job openings have diminished 17 percent this year.

In the suburbs of Chicago, Vicki Redican, 52, has been unemployed for almost two years, since she lost her $75,000-a-year job as a sales and marketing manager at a plastics company. College-educated, Ms. Redican first sought another management job. More recently, she has tried and failed to land a cashier’s position at a local grocery store, and a barista slot at a Starbucks coffee shop.

Substitute teaching assignments once helped her pay the bills. “Now, there are so many people substitute teaching that I can no longer get assignments,” she said.

“I’ve learned that I can’t look to tomorrow,” she said. “Every day, I try to do the best I can. I say to myself, ‘I don’t control this process.’ That’s the only way you can look at it. Otherwise, you’d have to go up on the roof and crack your head open.”

Hell of a time to be unemployed, I’ll find out tomorrow if I’ve got a job to return to…

I doubt it.

I’ve run a number of similar articles recently and a common thread is emerging…look at the age of the people trying to find work but can’t…they’re all in their late forties to early fifties.

Nobody wants ‘em, they’re too old to ‘keep up’ (although long years of vigorous beatings have taught us the values of ‘punctuality, good attendance and reliability’.)

Yes, I’m a member of the ‘Over the hill gang’ too, and if I’m not mistaken, this will make my 9th er, ‘job change’ since 9/11.

It was a while ago now that they reported the number of ‘help wanted’ ads listed in newspapers had hit an all time low…I haven’t heard anything on this topic since the last election, and I doubt that’s a coincidence…

Life sucks and then you die…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Where's the jobs?

Greetings good citizen,

I’m getting a late start tonight as I have been away all day at a cookout. I know, excuses, excuses but what are you going to do?

Once again we encounter the ‘dueling memes’ where on one hand you have ‘eminent economic recovery’ right around the corner and on the other we have the current ‘victims’ of the downturn complaining things aren’t getting better, ‘as advertised’.

Who’s right? I guess, once again, it comes down to your own judgement. You’re the one who gets to decide if the glass is half-empty or half-full. Some of you will ignore the evidence and let your own point of view (your ‘personality’ if you will) decide while others will weigh their experiences and put off making a judgement until the picture is clearer.

So we arrive at tonight’s offering for a mixed bag of tales from the ‘front lines’ of the economic downturn….

For the Jobless, Labor Day Is Hardly a Holiday


Published: September 5, 2009

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Every day it's a battle.

The nearly 15 million unemployed Americans won't enjoy Labor Day as a relaxing respite from work. Instead, they'll once again need to prepare to get up, hit the pavement and keep hunting for a job.

As the jobless rate nears 10 percent, even those fortunate enough to be employed fret about keeping their jobs. But for those without them, it's a daily struggle with emotional and economic distress.

''It's hard to maintain your focus that you're a valuable member of society when you go three months and nobody really wants to employ you,'' says David O'Bryan, 59, of Barre, Vt.

To cope with the stress, O'Bryan jots down his thoughts in a journal he carries around. He's seeking a new career in the education field. In one recent entry, he wrote:

''I'm finding the process of trying to get into schools both tedious and frustrating. I wish I could have some concrete feedback on why I'm not being hired. Overweight? No para-educator certificate in effect? No confidence in my ability to perform the job?''

The economy is showing signs of being on the mend. Yet that's hardly reassuring to the unemployed this Labor Day weekend. The job market is in lousy shape and will stay that way for a while.

The nation's jobless rate jumped to a 26-year high of 9.7 percent in August from 9.4 percent in July. It's expected to top 10 percent this year and keep climbing into part of next year before falling back. The post-World War II high was 10.8 percent at the end of 1982.

And it could take four years or more for the unemployment rate to fall back down to a normal level of about 5 percent.

Gregory Przybylski, 46, of suburban Milwaukee has grown increasingly anxious since losing his job as a machine operator in March 2008.

''It's getting scary,'' said Przybylski, a bachelor who has spent the past several months studying for a high school equivalency degree. ''I'm just hoping to be working by Christmas.''

Przybylski said he's using his time to study and improve himself so he'll be ready once the economy turns around. But he fears being thrust into a new career after spending so many years as a machinist.

''I've been doing this since 1980 -- that's what I know,'' he said, slowly shaking his head.

''It's stressful whether you have a job or not,'' says Patricia Drentea, associate professor of sociology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. ''If you are out of a job, it can be demoralizing to know that the tide has not yet turned. For those still in jobs, there is the constant worry that there is going to be more layoffs.''

The worst recession since World War II has claimed a net total of 6.9 million jobs -- and more losses are expected, casting a pall over this year's Labor Day.

The strains of rising unemployment are making people -- those with jobs and those without -- more frugal. And they're likely to remain cautious spenders in coming months, crimping the budding economic recovery.

Ethan Fierro of Chicago has managed to survive a round of layoffs at his accounting firm. But he's not taking his job for granted and is clamping down on the household budget, and cutting out the little extras.

''Now, movie nights have to be Netflix nights,'' says Fierro, 33, who has a wife and a 1-year-old son.

Chrysantheum Dickens, 43, of Tampa, a church pastor who also works in sales at an information technology company, shops at a Salvation Army store for school clothes for her sons.

''It's a different age now, and you never know what's going to happen,'' she says.

Job seeker Ileen Goldberg of Tampa stopped scheduling doctor's appointments and sold her car to save money and help make ends meet.

''It's horrible out there,'' says Goldberg, 48, who lost her job as an administrative assistant in June. ''I have no prospects, so every day it's a mental battle when you get up.''

Laid off eight months ago from her secretarial job at a health clinic, Mary Pat Didier, 60, is preparing her five grandchildren for the possibility she might have to move away from her home in Rockford, Ill., in hopes of finding employment.

Didier has begun applying for jobs in Chicago and in Milwaukee. So far, no luck. Her unemployment benefits are set to expire in January, but she hopes to qualify for extended aid. She's burned through her retirement savings.

''There's no place to go from here,'' Didier said. ''I'm too young for Medicare, but I ended up with no health (insurance). I get frustrated, but I can't give up, so I try to not to dwell in it,'' she adds. ''I finally know what it's like to live in the moment.''

An Associated Press-GfK poll last month found that 43 percent of Americans were worried ''some'' or ''a lot'' about losing their job, even though the pace of layoffs has slowed. And statistically, that wasn't much changed from the results in February, when job losses were much heavier.

A growing number of people have grown so frustrated that they've stopped looking for work. The number of such ''discouraged workers'' totaled 758,000 in August -- nearly twice as many as a year ago. Because they've abandoned their job searches, they aren't included in the government's count of the 14.9 million people who are unemployed.

If discouraged workers and people who have settled for part-time work are included, the unemployment rate would have been 16.8 percent in August, the highest on records dating to 1994.

''Right now, there are six people unemployed for each job opening,'' says economist Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute. ''If you are not successful in finding work, you are in a cruel game of musical chairs with six people circling around one chair.''

Earlier this week, Federal Reserve officials said they expected the pace of the recovery to pick up in 2010, but the likely strength of the upturn is uncertain because of concerns about how much consumers will borrow and spend. [With no jobs there won’t be a ‘recovery’, it really is that simple.]

A ''poor'' job market, evaporated wealth from home and stock values, hard-to-get credit and wages that aren't likely to rise much anytime soon mean Americans face ''considerable headwinds,'' Fed officials said. How consumers behave is crucial to the recovery because their spending accounts for roughly 70 percent of economic activity. [How can anyone read the above statement and not conclude something is radically wrong with our socio-economic model?]

Labor Secretary Hilda Solis' advice to the unemployed: ''I would tell those workers and families not to lose sight of hope.'' She urges them to seek the skills, education and training needed for new jobs. But she acknowledges these are tough times.

''Americans are facing monumental challenges,'' she says. ''I know that every job lost, every hour cut from the workweek, means another family having to make difficult decisions.''

So what is Madame Labor Secretary doing about it? She’s doing what she can, which is nothing.

Some cabinet posts have power and some don’t…although there are certain things that could be done if one were granted such a post.

Look at what Hank Paulson did with the Treasury Department during a crisis…

And if this isn’t a crisis, I don’t know what is?

I mean, okay, Hank took certain ‘liberties’ but the nation was essentially ‘rudderless’, if he didn’t take action, nobody would.

It would be unfair to describe the nation as ‘rudderless’ today. After all, the incumbent just took office six months ago, unlike his predecessor who was ticking off his last days in office, Mr. Obama is still, er, in-charge, there’s no reason for an appointee to ‘take the initiative’ like Hank Paulson did…

That aside, until we start producing what the US markets want with our own people and materials, our economy is NEVER going to recover…and until someone PROSECUTES the greed-heads that are off-shoring our jobs to generate bigger bonuses for themselves, our creditors are NEVER going to be repaid.

Anyway, thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

'Prosperity'

Greetings good citizen,

The mind is a funny thing as it is often only truly ‘aware’ of what’s going on in its immediate vicinity. Reports of other events elsewhere are usually accepted at ‘face value’. If the media reports things are going gangbusters, who are you to disagree?

And for a very long time now, the ‘news’ such as it is has seemed like it was being beamed in from another planet. I was consistently unable to independently verify the ‘robust’ economy boasted of by either Bush or Clinton.

The ‘Dot.gone’ era was particularly spooky because the markets were (like today) loaded with sky high share prices that had no basis in reality.

This was followed by the equally ‘funky’ real estate markets, where the words on everyone’s lips were, ‘Who the hell is buying this stuff at these prices?’. Like the dot.gone era, it was obvious there weren’t enough ‘qualified’ buyers for these prices to be realistic. (The 'housing boom' was also a 'symptom' of too much money seeking too little investment opportunity.)

A rather ‘simplistic’ but perfectly logical explanation for the ‘dot.gone’ era was the lack of investment vehicles juxtaposed against a glut of earnings among importers seeking ROI.

This explanation is eerily similar to why the Housing bust occurred. Although the housing bust had a decidedly ‘sinister’ backdrop to go with it and that was the raping of the world’s pension trusts, who were the largest buyers of ‘collateralized debt instruments’…

Well good citizen, if you too have been wondering whether all of the babbling about how ‘strong and vigorous’ our economy was unvarnished BS, then welcome to tonight’s offering . Where ‘job growth’, as measured over the past decade turns out to have been positively abysmal.

The Lost Decade... Part II

[Missed part one so this will have to stand alone…]

Earlier this week we took a look at the Lost Decade for the S&P 500. Business Week provides another lost decade... jobs (EconomPic detailed this trend at a higher level earlier this month):

Between May 1999 and May 2009, employment in the private sector only rose by 1.1%, by far the lowest 10-year increase in the post-depression period.

It’s impossible to overstate how bad this is. Basically speaking, the private sector job machine has almost completely stalled over the past ten years. [But you knew that. It’s not what the media was telling you but it jives with what your brain absorbed as what was going on around you…even if you didn’t consciously recognize it.]

The chart below shows the number of jobs added / subtracted by sector.

[Since we don’t have a ‘photo bucket’ to work with, I’m gonna have to do this the hard way.

Rising ‘sectors’ were : Private Health care, Food & Drink ‘places’, gov’t Edu, Professional & business ‘services’, Gov’t itself (except health care and Ed), Social Assistance (assumedly non-profits like shelters and food pantries…), ‘Private Education’ (albeit modestly), Arts & Entertainment, Gov’t health…(which is a bit puzzling as Gov’t health is ‘excluded’ elsewhere) he last two sectors to ‘grow’ over the past decade are mining and financial services.

Shrinking sectors (otherwise known as ‘losers’) are as follows: Transportation & Warehousing (bigger vehicles and less inventory ‘on hand’ have cut into both sectors), Retail (which is a bit worrying given our ‘shopping mall’ economic model.), Accommodations (as teleconferencing ‘replaces’ face to face meetings.), Wholesale, another disturbing sign that illustrates the collapse of distributor networks.) Construction (largely due to ‘overbuilding.) Information and last but not least Manufacturing both of which have sustained heavy losses due to ‘off-shoring’.

The graph shows roughly how much each sector gained or lost respectively.]

Health care, education, and government sectors added a total of ~7mm jobs over the past 10 years. Everything else? A drop of almost ~4mm.

Do you agree with the above conclusion or does it look like the author ‘mis-read’ the graph?

If you click on the link and look at the graph, Manufacturing has lost more than 5 million jobs by itself!

While the ‘gain’ looks pretty close it behooves us to pay attention to where most of the gains have been made.

The leader is ‘private health care’ with what I’d ‘eyeball’ to be a gain of roughly 3 and a half million jobs ‘in the past decade’. Think about that, we aren’t talking the last quarter or even all of last year, we’re talking 3.5 million jobs over the past ten years combined!

If we ‘eyeball’ the next two, the ‘hospitality’ industry edged out the Education market by what looks like a hundred thousand or two jobs as both are on either side of the two million jobs mark. And this indeed gives us roughly 7 million in the ‘plus’ column.

The other six ‘up’ sectors don’t look like they’d add up to a whole million jobs combined.

Let’s return to our ‘minus’ side of the puzzle and ‘eyeball’ what the losing side looks like again.

The biggest single loser is manufacturing, hands down, at roughly 5 and a half million…but it looks like losses in IT are up there a little bit too. Maybe another half a million…on the other hand, ‘in-sourcing’ has been the big trend in IT via the H1B Visa program. So this quarter of a million may be larger than it appears.

Then we arrive at the ‘construction’ numbers. You know and I know that construction is ‘flat’ and has been for over two years…yet they have shed only…what’s it look like to you, a hundred thousand or maybe a hundred and fifty…over the last decade!

Well, if we use the BLS ‘Birth/Death’ model then there’s a new construction company opening every other week and it hires at least 20,000 men (to work on who knows what…)

Sorry good citizen but even this data from Business Week shows signs of being heavily ‘massaged’.

And in the meantime the news reports continue to be far removed from reality as you actually encounter it.

Perhaps most perplexing is how every week the labor markets shed over 600,000 jobs yet when we get to the monthly figures it magically shrinks to six hundred thousand or less.

There aren’t any jobs in the papers…so where are these two million laid-off workers finding work?

What industry is prospering when so many of us are hurting for income?

Are all of these ‘displaced’ workers finding jobs with the ‘aid’ organizations they appeal to? Which is pretty incredible because we’re talking about roughly two million people that definitely got the axe during the month but somehow miraculously ‘disappear’ when the ‘first Friday’ of the following month rolls around.

Understand what I’m saying good citizen, since the beginning of the year the ‘weekly average’ of job losses has been in the six hundred thousand range…while the monthly average has been reported to be around the six hundred thousand mark total.

Unless the people at the BLS can’t add, there is something very wrong here, beginning with the ‘assumption’ that the missing two million workers found jobs between the time they were laid off and the next reporting period.

I’m here and willing to listen to any potential explanation, theory or speculation regarding the unemployment number conundrum, which is shrouded in enigma and wrapped in mystery…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The Slide

Greetings good citizen,

Apparently ‘Fear’ drove ‘Greed’ out of the markets again today as the Dow slid 171 points by roughly 2:00 PM EST.

Sadly, there has been no sign of ‘Sanity’ for the past three months and it’s presumed she’s ‘missing in action.’

‘Speculation’ has it that today’s release by the IMF of a rather gloomy economic outlook is responsible for the sudden ‘reversal’ of the market rally that is going into its third month.

Worse, what was initially seen as ‘green shoots’ has turned out to be ‘Poison Ivy and Hemlock’.

Nobody is doing anything about the deteriorating job market although, ironically, the US stimulus plan may be responsible for boosting China’s GDP from a projected positive one percent to a positive seven percent for the year.

In an eerie repeat of the housing crisis, where pundits repeatedly assured us the problem was ‘contained’ to the sub-prime market. I have recently seen several posts claiming we have ‘avoided’ the ‘Death Spiral’ where reductions in the labor force leads to a reduction in overall spending which leads to production cuts, which lead to further reductions in the labor force.

In my recent post ‘The New Normal’ we see precisely this variety of ‘creative destruction’ taking place. The six million jobs (and their related paychecks) are never coming back.

The reason to be concerned good citizen is because the people losing their jobs weren’t ‘greeters’ at Wally-Mart, the people that lost their jobs were stock brokers, mortgage executives, Real Estate brokers and banking executives, most of whom made a ‘pretty penny’ during the recent ‘good times’.

These highly compensated jobs fled not only our own job market but from job markets around the globe…never to return in our lifetimes, thanks largely to the global race to the bottom!

There are more questions than answers in tonight’s offering and I’ll be asking a few of them after this (comparatively) brief piece.

Wall St. Starts Week with a Slide

BY JACK HEALY
Published: June 22, 2009

Was all of that optimism about an economic recovery a bit too hasty?

Resurgent fears about the struggling economy jolted Wall Street and Europe on Monday, dragging stocks broadly lower after their first losing week in a month. The Dow Jones industrial average slumped to its lowest levels since late May, and the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index slipped back into negative territory for the year. [Of course good citizen there has been quite a few reports of um, ‘absurd’ trades taking place while the markets were being ‘pumped up’ on what amounts to very low ‘volume’. Which is to say there are now a lot of stocks whose valuation has no relationship with their earnings or their market share. It seems their prices were ‘driven up’ (solely) in order to drive up the markets.]

A new report by the World Bank underscored broader concerns that the global economy was not ready to snap back from the worst downturn since World War II. The bank predicted that the global economy would shrink 2.9 percent [This is double its original prediction] this year before rebounding in 2010 [What happened to the ‘broad consensus’ that recovery would occur in the second half of THIS year?], and said that the world was “entering an era of slower growth” that demanded tighter oversight of the financial system. [Damn, aren’t we lucky the Treasury just put the banks in charge of regulating themselves by naming the bank owned Fed their new ‘regulator’?]

“The market’s gone too far, too fast,” said Karl O. Mills, president of the investment adviser firm Jurika, Mills & Keifer. “It’s writing checks that the recovery can’t cash.” [How long will it be before we’re in the same position for pretty much the same reason?]

After 3:30 p.m., the Dow Jones industrial average was down 156 points, or 1.9 percent, while the S.& P. 500 fell 2.5 percent. The technology-geared Nasdaq was off 2.8 percent.

At the close of European trading, the DJ Euro Stoxx 50 index, a barometer of euro zone blue chips, was down 3.1 percent, while the FTSE 100 index in London was down 2.6 percent. The CAC 40 in Paris and the DAX in Frankfurt both fell 3 percent.

“Basically it’s a reality check,” Gerhard Schwarz, an equity strategist at Unicredit in Munich, said. Optimistic investors have bid stocks up by more than 30 percent from their nadir, he said, but “there’s been a lack of confirmation that it is justified. We’re waiting for hard economic data to show the economy has turned around.” [Otherwise the ‘recovery’ has all been a figment of the pundit’s imagination…or their greed in getting investors to buy via scaring them into believing the markets had ‘bottomed’.]

Investors sold financial stocks, apparently drawing little difference between big banks and small ones, banks that had returned government bailout funds and those that were still holding onto taxpayer money. Shares of Bank of America fell 6 percent while JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley were down more than 2 percent. In Frankfurt, Commerzbank fell 6.7 percent and Deutsche Bank fell 6.3 percent.

Shares of Apple were down nearly 2 percent, to $136.99, after reports over the weekend that its chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, who has been on a medical leave since January for treatment of what he called a hormone imbalance, underwent a liver transplant two months ago.

Apple shares fell despite the company announcing that it had sold more than a million units of its latest iPhone model in the first three days.

The prices of commodities like crude oil, copper and gold slumped as investors faced the prospect that emerging markets and developed economies were not about to ramp up industrial production or witness a spike in levels of consumer demand and consumption. [Um, several scathing comments come to mind but I regularly belabor the point that investors aren’t too bright, the above two paragraphs merely serve as further proof.]

Crude oil futures fell $2.82, to $66.73 a barrel, their lowest levels in three weeks, even as discord and protests in Iran raised questions about the stability of one of the Middle East’s largest oil producers. Gasoline prices in the United States held steady at a nationwide average of $2.69 a gallon, according to AAA, the automobile club.

The declines in commodities pulled down energy producers like BP in London, Total in Paris and Marathon Oil and Chevron in New York. The declines also weakened companies that produce basic materials like chemicals and steel.

The day’s declines offered more evidence that a new bull market was not in the offing.

Stocks shot higher this spring after dipping to their worst levels in more than a decade, but many Wall Street analysts say investors who have dived back into the markets are ignoring fundamental problems in the economy. The S.&P. 500 is down 5 percent since earlier this month, and many analysts say the stock markets could get stuck in a broad trading range as investors look ahead toward a sluggish recovery.

Unemployment is rising and is suddenlyexpected to reach 10 percent or more, even after the broader economy begins to recover. Hundreds of big and small banks across the country are still on government lifelines. And while credit markets are returning to normal after last year’s financial crisis, analysts say higher interest rates on Treasury notes and mortgages threaten to disrupt the government’s attempts to right the economy.

Investors are paying close attention to the bond market this week as the Treasury Department prepares to auction a record $104 billion in government notes. Yields on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note fell to 3.69 percent on Monday afternoon, indicating higher demand for save-haven government debt. [Which still leaves the question of whether or not the debt of THIS government is even remotely ‘safe’?]

Okay folks, the Dow dropped another 40 point in the last 15 minutes of trading to close down and even 200 for the day…Understand that exchanges across the planet (except Asia) um, suffered large losses today.

Before today’s ‘plunge’ I was reading a piece that asked the identical question to the one raised in this article, What happens after the third quarter and nothing even resembling a ‘recovery’ fails to materialize?

Which is to suggest that maybe the boys in charge of the ‘smoke and mirrors’ decided to pull the plug before they created a full-fledged panic.

Hell, the economy still sucks but the boys at Goldman sucks Sachs have already announced that they expect to pay record bonuses this year!

How do you suppose they managed that?

Well, with the banks now firmly in charge of the justice system, we may never know.

As I stated earlier, this ‘turn of events’ raises more questions than it answers.

Of particular concern to all of us is how a ‘recovery’ will occur at all when the global economy is suffering from ‘over capacity’?

Which is a bit of a misnomer because the crisis is not due to a lack of consumers, it is due to inability of the consumer to purchase what is produced.

It is important to understand ‘why’ the consumer isn’t able to buy the goods. The consumer is both ‘over charged’ AND ‘underpaid’.

Understand good citizen that our current ‘bumper crop’ of billionaires got their heap from ‘somewhere’.

To understand how this works we need to go to the very beginning of the ‘production cycle’, the ‘raw materials’ themselves.

How much do raw materials ‘cost’ good citizen? They don’t cost the ‘owner’ a single cent because Mother Nature doesn’t have a cash register!

How much does ‘labor’ cost good citizen?

Same freaking answer but this time it’s due to the price of labor being contained in the price of the object produced, it’s actually a ‘profit center’ for the employer regardless of what step in the production process it is added!

Whatever you get paid, your employer makes that plus from your efforts!

How much do you suppose production equipment costs?

Yup, once again the answer is it’s free! The ‘cost’ of equipment is ‘amortized’ over the amount of goods that equipment produces.

Good to be the ‘employer’ isn’t it?

With so many ‘free’ things accruing to the owners of various endeavors, why is this pyramid collapsing?

The population continues to grow but opportunity/market share continues shrink.

When it’s all said and done good citizen the real problem here is that the name of the game is the same as it ever was…survival.

Our system of commerce, for decades if not centuries, has proven incapable of providing the means of survival for all that need those means. Despite the fact we have more than enough capacity to provide every living human with a ‘relatively’ abundant life.

For the third time in as many decades, the global economy will ‘shrink’ while the global workforce expands.

Perhaps, not too surprisingly, the ‘owners’ of commerce have decided to deal with the crisis by reducing their customer base rather than foregoing their very rich profits.

Which, logically, questions the wisdom of continuing to allow a few to ‘own’ what we all need to live.

It’s not a ‘meaningless’ question because in it is contained the key to the survival of our species.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Spots in their eyes

Greetings good citizen,

While the stock market itself seldom makes much ‘sense’ it seems as though not everyone is rolling over and playing dead. Today’s bond sale ‘surprised’ to the ‘upside’ as the “buy all you want, we’ll print more crowd” was forced to pay more interest on their bonds in order to attract buyers.

But you saw that coming, didn’t you?

The stock markets scream and shriek that they need lower interest rates, then the bond market comes back and puts the Treasury’s nuts in a vise.

And so it goes.

Well, tonight’s offering isn’t about today’s bond market sale, it’s about the ‘Happy Talk’ being spouted by the Fed…

Economy Remains Weak, but Fed Sees Bright Spots

By JACK HEALY
Published: June 10, 2009

Economic conditions in the here-and-now may be dreary, but the Federal Reserve said Wednesday that at least one thing is improving: expectations for the future are improving in [too few] scattered areas.

That was one of the conclusions of the Fed’s June beige book, a regular yardstick of local economies in a dozen Fed districts from New York to St. Louis to San Francisco. Although the economic health “remained weak or deteriorated further” from mid-April to May, some less-bad indicators bubbled to the surface. [Now click you heels three times and chant ‘There’s no place like home!’]

Manufacturers reported a slightly better outlook.[?] Home sales bounced back in some markets.[Wherever there has been a glut of foreclosures.] Import and export traffic brightened elsewhere. And some parts of the country even said the abysmal job market was leveling out or improving slightly.

Retailers in Boston were “cautiously optimistic” about an economic recovery, the Fed said, while those in Philadelphia expected sales to “gain strength slowly.” Employers in New York expect job losses to level off in coming months.

Of course, 18 months into the worst downturn since the Depression, any signs of improvement are relative, and hope does not translate into jobs or profits.

More than six million jobs have vanished since the recession began, home prices are still falling in many markets, and businesses faced with continued losses and smaller profits are not expected to increase their hiring or investment anytime soon.

Although businesses and others in 5 of the 12 Fed districts said the sharp pace of economic declines was tapering off, that does not mark much improvement since April, when the beige book noted that 5 of the 12 noted a similar moderation. And even those who are more hopeful “do not see a substantial increase in economic activity” this year.

The economic landscape across the country remained grim. [But there’s no reason for you to be ‘grim’ as well, it’s all about ‘hope’.]

In Cleveland, manufacturers predicted that demand this year would be even lower than last, and they said they continued to make layoffs and reduce their capital spending. Commercial real-estate and development remained abysmal in different parts of the country as vacancies rose and credit stayed tight. Tourism spending fell in Atlanta. In Chicago, construction was weak, and property values fell.

The economy shrank at an annual pace of 5.7 percent during the first three months as businesses cut their costs and consumers slashed their spending in response to the financial crisis last year on Wall Street. Many economists expect the economy to contract at a slower and slower rate, before it begins to grow slightly toward the end of the year. [If there’s any evidence of this they have yet to show it.]

“While the rate of decline in economic output has slowed, there have been very few, if any, signs of an overall turnaround in consumer spending, business investment and the economy at large,” Dan Greenhaus, an analyst in the equity strategy group at Miller Tabak & Company, wrote in a note. “Stabilization, at some point, becomes stagnation.” [Yes, just because things stop falling doesn’t mean they will automatically improve, even though they will declare the ‘recession’ over.]

The Fed said that retail spending was still shaky, and that consumers seeking to stretch their budgets continued to shop for bargains and avoided luxury purchases. Discounters reported an uptick in sales — mirroring reports of strong sales at stores like Wal-Mart — while luxury hotels suffered.

Purchases of new cars were still depressed across much of the country, although auto sales picked up in Chicago as a result of sales and promotions, the Fed said.

One, count ‘em, one freaking city and these asshats are doing handsprings and cheering!

Didn’t the title of this piece claim the Fed saw ‘bright spots’ as in more than one?

Today’s bond sale was bad enough that Mr. Market finished down today, albeit not down as much as it would have been if not for that late day rally (literally the last ten minutes of trading) that’s been happening every freaking day!

It’s been so reliable that you can bet traders have been selling into it, driving down what has become an overly optimistic rally as the big trading desks attempt to ‘paint the tape’ at the end of the day.

Yves over at Naked Capitalism has noted four distinct incident over the past two weeks, I think it is more frequent than that…and I think they got their heads handed to them today!

Yeah, not everybody is rolling over and playing dead, the traders are watching.

Other articles that focused on today’s bond sale noted that rising bond prices ‘have the potential’ to nip a recovery in the bud as mortgage prices leap back up into the ‘unaffordable’ range.

So the ‘bright spot’ of higher car sales in Chicago was most likely due to disenfranchised dealers trying to ‘liquidate’ inventory.

A ‘bright spot’ that won’t be there when the next ‘Beige Book’ report is released.

But at least sales are ‘up’ at the largest employer in the US…Wal-Mart! We can all bet that China is pretty pleased with that news.

In other news it appears the Obama administration has appointed a ‘salary czar’ to oversee enforcement of executive pay in companies that have received taxpayer funds…and there was Timmy, on the radio, talking about how ‘counterproductive’ salary caps would be.

It is the wide held belief that lower profits will ‘rein in’ run-away executive pay without the need for Federal oversight…Ha!

In other ‘rumblings of the ground’ questions/comments have surfaced regarding why our financial sector remains ‘unregulated’ almost two years after it melted down…

Disturbingly, the answers aren’t pretty, it seems certain big time former investment banks would lose their shirts if more ‘transparency’ were added to the markets.

I’ve got places to be in the AM so I’ll cut it here,

Thanks for letting me inside you head,

Gegner

What happened to the three million jobs the stimulus package was supposed to create?

Greetings good citizen,

Since December 2007, the economy has shed more than seven million jobs, more than the total number created during the eight years of the Bush presidency.

Naturally, if we look underneath the numbers we’d find that the Bush administration created 5 million jobs, most of them in banking, real estate and construction, while shedding 15 million manufacturing jobs!

Bad news good citizen, we’re still shedding manufacturing jobs faster than any other category.

Understand good citizen that manufacturing is THE process where raw materials are converted into ‘wealth’. These are not only the physical items we ‘trade’ for other items we need but these items ‘back’ the strength of our currency!

The more we produce and sell, the more valuable our currency is.

But you may have noticed that mainstream economists are curiously quiet on this ‘econ 101’ fact.

What you need to understand is what the difference is between an economically ‘strong nation and a Banana Republic. The ‘strong nation’ has the capacity to produce what it needs for itself, leaving what comprises a Banana Republic somewhat ‘self-explanatory’…

Over the past thirty years we have lost tens of millions of manufacturing jobs and are very hard pressed indeed to find anything on our retailer’s shelves that is in fact US made…which makes us, well, what do you think?

But that’s only half the problem, good citizen. Over the years automation has become so efficient that, like farming, it no longer requires very many people to produce what the world consumes.

This is a ‘double bum-blast’ not only do we have too much capacity to produce what we consume but we also don’t have enough funds to buy it!

This is ‘capitalism’ turned on its head…goods should be so cheap producers would be giving them away...but that's not what’s happening.

While we tend to be a bit myopic when it comes to economic reporting, there are currently tens of millions of people unemployed world-wide.

Ironically, if we were to define ‘unemployed’ as an individual that doesn’t collect a paycheck, then there are literally billions who are in fact ‘unemployed’.

Keep that figure in mind as we consider tonight’s offering where we compare six hundred thousand to six billion.

Obama Promises Job Creation in Plan

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: June 8, 2009

WASHINGTON — The rising unemployment rate is giving President Obama’s critics an opportunity to raise questions about the effectiveness of his recovery plan and his economic leadership. The huge budget deficit is focusing fresh concern on the national debt.

So Mr. Obama began a new effort on Monday to show that his stimulus plan was yielding concrete benefits, saying that his administration expects to save or create 600,000 more jobs this summer, as the federal government spends billions to expand care at health centers, spruce up national parks, hire teachers and improve military facilities. [Will he ‘spruce up’ National parks while they’re closed to the public because the states they’re located in can’t afford to pay park employees? While updating military facilities is all fine and well, what are his plans for the tent cities springing up around the nation…what does he expect these people to do once cold weather returns?]

At a meeting with Mr. Obama and the cabinet, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. outlined 10 major initiatives that he said would “build momentum and accelerate job growth” over the next 100 days. After Mr. Biden ticked off a list of programs — including water and waste projects in rural America and rehabilitation of 98 airports and 1,500 highways — the president took aim at his critics.

“Now I know that there are some who, despite all evidence to the contrary, still don’t believe in the necessity and promise of the recovery act,” Mr. Obama said, “and I would suggest to them that they talk to the companies who, because of this plan, scrapped the idea of laying off employees and in fact decided to hire employees. [For a complete list see…nowhere] Tell that to the Americans who receive that unexpected call saying, ‘Come back to work.’ “ [This would be far more convincing if he could point to a website where such information was posted so the public could verify these claims…but he’s too busy to bother with such things, like ‘the good lord, you gotta have ‘faith’.]

A little less than four months after he signed the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law, Mr. Obama is now in the position of trying to convince Americans that the stimulus measure — his signature legislative achievement thus far — is working,even as the job losses mount.

On Friday, the Department of Labor reported that unemployment was now 9.4 percent, the highest in 25 years, although the rate of monthly job losses dropped off in May. The president’s top aides spent the weekend trying to tamp down expectations that the unemployment rate would turn around anytime soon. One adviser, Austan Goolsbee, told Fox News the nation was in for “a rough patch,” a phrase often invoked by Mr. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush

With Mr. Obama talking up the stimulus bill, Republicans went on the offensive.

“The Obama administration is continuing to fabricate job creation numbers related to the stimulus,” Tony Fratto, a deputy press secretary in the Bush administration, said in an e-mail message to reporters. He added, “Their so-called models would not stand the light of day.”

The administration maintains that 150,000 jobs were either created or saved in the first 100 days after Mr. Obama signed the stimulus bill on Feb. 17. The 600,000 figure the president discussed Monday is not new; it was made public by Mr. Biden on May 13. It includes 125,000 part-time summer jobs for teenagers, which the administration counts as 62,500 full-time job equivalents. [Memory recall time…wasn’t the ‘stimulus package’ supposed to provide 3 million new jobs? So what’s this 600,000 BS!]

Independent experts say those figures — estimates based on macroeconomic models and projections — are plausible, although they say it is very difficult to measure the number of jobs created. But Republicans say the teenage jobs estimate proves that there is less than meets the eye to the stimulus package.

“The administration looks dramatically out of touch as they highlight the creation of temporary summer employment in the face of job losses unseen in decades, record unemployment and massive deficits,” said Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House Republican whip. [At the time when the president elect announced a rather disappointing creation figure of ‘2-3 million jobs’, the economy had already shed 5 million jobs…]

In preparing his report to the president, Mr. Biden said he had asked cabinet secretaries to give him a list of projects “that they were absolutely certain of they could get up and running in the second hundred days.”

The Department of Health and Human Services, the White House said, will either build or expand 1,129 health centers to provide service to approximately 300,000 additional patients across the country. The Justice Department will hire or keep approximately 5,000 law enforcement officers on the job. The Department of Veterans Affairs will begin improvements at 90 veterans medical centers across 38 states.

By spotlighting specific projects that he expects will get under way this summer, Mr. Obama may be trying to use his presidential platform to prod states into spending the federal dollars at a critical period, when the weather is more conducive to construction projects in the Northeast and teenagers are free to work, giving a temporary boost to the job market, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. [Seriously good citizen, construction NEVER STOPS up here in the Greater Boston area, those poor workers are out there in all kinds of weather, usually at night. Hell, they paved the entire Southeast Expressway in the dead of winter last year!]

“The economy is at a very key juncture,” Mr. Zandi said. “We are right at a turning point from recession to recovery. If they can juice things up just even a bit, that may make a big difference.” [He is an economist thus does he ‘have his own version of the truth’, it’s ‘axiomatic’.]

But complicating Mr. Obama’s efforts are the predictions of two of his own economic advisers: Jared Bernstein, the top economist for the vice president, and Christina D. Romer, the chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. In January, 10 days before Mr. Obama was inaugurated, they released a report forecasting that the unemployment rate would remain at 8 percent or below in 2009 if the plan were enacted. [Guess that didn’t work out too well…]

“When they passed this spending plan, Democrats said it would immediately create jobs,” said Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader, “yet nearly four months later, unemployment has continued to climb and none of their rosy predictions have come true.”

Mr. Bernstein, addressing reporters on Monday at a contentious White House briefing, conceded that his forecast had been “clearly too optimistic.” He said it had not taken into account figures from the fourth quarter of last year, because those numbers were not available at the time. But he said unemployment would be higher were it not for the economic recovery package. [This is doubtlessly true.]

“Job losses would have been deeper,” Mr. Bernstein said. “The unemployment rate would have been — by our estimate, by the end of next year would have been between one and a half and two points higher than it otherwise will be.”

What it looks like is what it is. More ‘weasel words’ and waffling. What the hell happened to the (originally 2 million) and then 3 million jobs the stimulus program was supposed to create? We’re talking nearly 800 billion with a B bucks here!

I’m guessing he wouldn’t have gotten that much if he had said up front the was going to dump most of it into the worthless banks…

In light of the seven million jobs lost to date. 600,000 is just a piss hole in the snow, especially for nearly 800 billion invested.

Worse, most of the jobs provided in the example are ‘saved’, not ‘new’…while the economy gushes billions from our overall payroll.

Understand, the ‘Economic Recovery Act’ is in full swing up here in Boston, there isn’t a single major roadway within thirty miles of town that isn’t being resurfaced, worse, they’re all being done at the same time so traffic is FUBAR.

Oh, PS by the way, all of these projects are being worked on by ‘the usual suspects’ as most of us don’t have the capital (or political pull) to buy a hundred 18 wheel dump trucks, a pavement shredder and a half a dozen steam rollers.

For more ‘business as usual’ There are more state troopers than construction workers at any one of these work sites.

Due to the ‘capital intensive nature’ of these road projects, there wasn’t much of a chance that any ‘new’ jobs would be created. Sure, some of the guys got their kids summer jobs but that would have happened anyway…what will be interesting to see is what happens next year, when neither the states nor the Fed has the funds to ‘do it again’.

The failure to restore job growth will inevitably result in greater tax shortfalls…which could potentially cause the start of a cascading systemic failure.

The States will cut benefits, which cause the needy to resort to using much more expensive ‘emergency services’, defeating the purpose of cutting benefits in the first place.

As I have said before, there is no way out of this crisis, the problem is insoluble using the system as it is currently configured.

The only question remaining is which will be worse, the eventual collapse of society or the poisonous cure the elite will force upon the survivors.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Baffle 'em with BS!

Greetings good citizen,

The ‘meathead markets’ closed ‘mixed today with the Dow climbing a few points while the S&P and the Nasdaq both lost ground.

Perhaps more, er, ‘astounding’ is today’s unemployment report, where the BLS ‘birth/death model’ shaved not a couple or three thousand from the ‘rough’ (new claims) unemployment number but a whopping 220,000!

The major automakers shuttered over the past couple of weeks, what, some 3,000 dealerships between them? Okay, they didn’t all fall dead when they got their letter but given the automotive ‘climate’ out there, it is doubtful that ‘floundering’ dealers kept bleeding cash once they learned their ‘franchise’ had been cancelled.

Then there are the ‘furlough’s’, some for as long as eleven weeks being imposed by both Chrysler and GM…who seriously thinks more than a handful of these laid off workers are EVER going to return to work?

How many workers at GM & Chrysler’s 11,000 plus suppliers have been ‘furloughed’, many of them permanently?

Well, the ‘gross’ unemployment figure was 565,000 minus the 220,000 the BLS thinks ‘started their own companies’ and we arrive at 345,000.

Um this ‘green shoots’ nonsense was born of last months’ ‘better than expected’ unemployment numbers.

Sadly good citizen, it’s far from over, in fact its only just begun!

There was another interesting ‘statistic’ reported today but again we only have the statistic. Another ‘green shoot’ has been sighted, the number of overall unemployment claims dropped by 15,000 for the first time in six months…also, coincidentally, the average length of an unemployment claim.

Did these intrepid 15,000 find jobs over the month of May or did they merely exhaust their claims?

I’m here to tell you bubba, there ain’t no jobs…so it’s sure looking like exhausted claims to me.

So we arrive at tonight’s offering where the fact I share above are ignored and these idiots wonder why advertisers are fleeing print media in droves!

Joblessness Hits 9.4%, but Slowing Losses Raise Hopes

Economists described the Labor Department’s monthly jobs report, released Friday, as an unambiguous sign of improvement, yet also clear evidence of broadening national distress, as millions of households grapple with joblessness and lost working hours.

The fact that a report showing the highest unemployment rate in more than a quarter-century was embraced optimistically [by Wall Street] testified to the stark fears over the economy in recent months.

“The free fall that the job market was in does finally appear to be tapering off,” said Stuart G. Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services Group in Pittsburgh. “It’s the prelude to an economic and job recovery later this year.” [Yeah, and the housing crisis wasn’t going to impact the ‘real economy’ either…fucking liars!]

Although stock markets shrugged off the report, interest rates on government debt surged, hitting their highest levels in six months, as investors bet that inflationary pressure would accompany any recovery. [You don’t suppose that ‘bet’ is being made by the same ‘speculators’ that are driving oil prices to the stratosphere…AGAIN! Do you?]

The Obama administration pointed to the slowdown in job losses as proof that its $787 million package of spending measures was stimulating the economy. [Which is bizarre because only 50 billion has actually been disbursed to date…]

“Today is a sign that we are making progress,” said Christina Romer, a White House economic adviser. [If the ‘goal’ is bankrupting the nation, I’d have to agree!]

But experts emphasized that the slowing pace of deterioration did not alter the reality that the economy remained very weak. [Up is down and down is up…if you slide you hands into your back pockets, do they cover your ass?]

“These are still terrible numbers,” said Ian Shepherdson, chief United States economist at High Frequency Economics. “We’re a million miles away from a recovery.” [Finally, a ‘voice of truth’…probably just talking his ‘book’ but anyway.]

Rather than a sign of renewed vigor, the May jobs report suggests merely the end of panic unleashed last fall, when the investment house Lehman Brothers crumbled, freezing credit through much of the economy. [Excuse me? We lost 3 million jobs BECAUSE Lehman Bros bit the dust? I want some of what they’re smokin’!]

“That wild disgorging of inventories and workers that we saw in the aftermath of Lehman, what you’re seeing is the reversal of that dynamic,” said Robert Barbera, chief economist at the research and trading firm ITG. “You had companies throughout the world that suddenly had serious concerns about access to capital, and they slashed spending and cut workers well beyond any connection to demand. There’s now a better tone to the data.” [Um, from the data we’ve seen so far, nobody is guilty of shedding too many workers that resulted in a failure to meet demand. Recent retail figures prove demand is still tanking…or do these assholes think we’ve forgotten what was reported only a couple of days ago?]

But if primal fear has ended, comfort is nowhere to be found. Home prices appear to have hit bottom in some areas of the country, [Another bald faced lie!] but construction remains weak. The auto industry and retailing remain in distress. The job market is likely to remain in the doldrums for many months, Mr. Barbera said. [Try ‘years’ Bubba!]

A home foreclosure crisis is growing, thus far unchecked by an Obama administration program aimed at stemming the problem. As more foreclosed properties land on markets, real estate prices are falling further, adding to the losses and uncertainties confronting banks. [How can these morons contradict themselves like this in a matter of a couple of sentences? The paragraph directly above this one claims a ‘housing bottom’, WTF!]

“That’s now the most significant threat to the economic recovery,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com.

For more than a decade, economic growth and attendant American job opportunities [Excuse me, where have I been for ‘the past decade?’] were fueled by swelling wealth and liberal access to credit. As home prices soared, homeowners availed themselves of myriad forms of credit that turned increased real estate values into cash. They sprinkled those funds on an array of industries, generating jobs from auto factories and lumber mills to construction companies and restaurants. [Oh, I remember, I’ve been living in the Republican run state that ranked 49th in job creation for the past decade!]

Now, as paychecks disappear and home prices fall, people are increasingly inclined to save — a rough transition in a country in which consumer spending makes up roughly 70 percent of economic activity. [Um, not for nothing but that figure SHOULD be less than 50% and until they ‘changed’ how that figure was calculated, it was as high as 83%…]

“People are not going to be moving forward based on housing wealth, and they’re not going to be taking on debt,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “They’ve got to get wage growth.” [Yet out-sourcing proceed apace…]

Yet wage growth has been stagnating even as gasoline and medical costs rise, putting pressure on household finances. Average hourly wages were 3.1 percent higher last month than they were in May 2008, but the month-to-month increases in April and May were just 0.1 percent, to a seasonally adjusted $18.54, from $18.52, according to the Labor Department. Wages for manufacturing workers fell 0.1 percent. [Tell me about it, I’m lucky to be offered what I used to make in 1989!]

The jobs report presented a statistical puzzle. After shedding an average of more than 700,000 jobs each month during the first quarter, the economy lost 504,000 jobs in April, according to revised data, and the number was smaller still in May. Yet the unemployment rate leapt from an already high 8.9 percent, reinforcing fears it would reach double digits. [This is true, there is something ‘wrong’ with this month’s figures as far as the unemployment ‘percentage’ goes…]

This disconnect owes to the way in which the government collects data. The number of jobs comes from a survey of employers, while the unemployment data is derived from a survey of households. In April and May, the number of people who told surveyors they were actively looking for work increased by more than one million. These people would have previously been considered outside the work force and thus excluded from the unemployment calculation. Now, they are officially back in the hunt, yet struggling to secure work. [Methinks rising prices is pressuring ‘marginalized’ workers to renew the hunt for more income…]

Manufacturers cut 156,000 jobs in May, with worse on the way: General Motors announced plans this week to close or idle 14 American plants, imperiling as many as 20,000 workers. [When it’s all said and done, GM USA will likely be lucky to still employ 20,000 US workers…total. Worse, most of those 20,000 will be in management!]

Construction jobs fell by 59,000, though that was a marked improvement from just a month ago, when employment in that industry sank by 108,000 jobs.

Professional and business services shed 51,000 jobs, though that represented a slower pace of losses than in recent months. Health care remained a rare bright spot, adding 23,500 jobs. Restaurants and bars added nearly 9,000 jobs.

The economy has lost six million jobs since the recession began in December 2007, and some economists anticipate two million more to come. Even after the economy resumes growth — perhaps later this year — businesses will probably be conservative, cognizant that credit is relatively tight, and consumers will be inclined to save. Instead of hiring full-time workers, many may rely on temporary employees or add hours for existing employees. [Um, we, that vast majority of us, cannot afford another ‘jobless’ recovery. Despite how the government ‘measures’ unemployment, we are rapidly approaching the point where 50% of all working aged citizens are ‘jobless’.]

“The jobless rate is going to continue to rise,” said Bernard Baumohl, managing director of the Economic Outlook Group. “It’s a dismal job market. It’s going to remain awful, easily for the balance of this year. Even when the economy begins to recover, we might be witnessing the mother of all jobless recoveries.” [Can you say ‘widespread civil unrest’? I knew you could!]

That would keep the pressure on the seven million Americans who have been out of work for 15 weeks or longer.

Since losing his job as a legal courier in February, Dante Whitfield, 35, has been riding the bus around San Jose, Calif., in a futile quest for work, subsisting on unemployment checks and the Value Menu at McDonald’s.

“There’s days I come home in tears,” Mr. Whitfield said. “You just feel lost. You don’t know what to do.”

Well Dante, I hate to be the one to tell you this but capitalism isn’t about ‘full employment’, it’s about profits for shareowners.

Worse, the things that ‘need doing’ but can’t be done ‘profitably’. Well, the tax base that pays for these ‘unprofitable but necessary’ occupations is ‘tapped out’ too.

What I’m saying here is the system itself is ‘fatally flawed’. How long do you suppose those the system excludes as ‘superfluous’ will sit idle, waiting for what they know isn’t going to happen?

Put that shoe on the other foot…how long will you wait?

Patience is a virtue but you can very easily be ‘patienced to death’.

Wait too long and you won’t be able to help yourself.

The clock is ticking good citizen and we’re down to a few short weeks before the whole thing blows apart.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Amazingly, off-shoring proceeds apace

Greetings good citizen,

Chrysler may emerge from bankruptcy as soon as next week but it’s anyone’s guess as to when it will resume production. GM, having only entered bankruptcy protection yesterday, may not emerge for months…

But Mr. Market doesn’t mind, there are still too few buyers and even less demand.

GM is said to, er, ‘support’ in the vicinity of 11,500 parts suppliers. Naturally most of these suppliers provide parts for other carmakers. It’s the few that make ‘brand specific’ components (like fenders and headlight/tail light assemblies) that are finding themselves behind the ‘eight-ball’

Already a couple of the larger parts suppliers have filed Chapter 11. Left to our imagination is how many of the 11,000 plus others can weather a three plus month ‘drought’.

Before the GM bankruptcy is was estimated that roughly 3 million workers had jobs connected to the automotive manufacturing industry. Whereas one in ten jobs is related to the transportation industry.

If we were to add in warehousing and distribution we’d be talking one in four jobs. (I’m hip-shooting here, it may be higher than that, considering who our number one employer is.)

That said, one thing is certain, our automotive industry will be considerably smaller than it used to be. How many of the three million workers that ‘used to’ earn their living from the auto manufacturing sector will be permanently displaced, we can only guess.

With the global economy doing so lousy, you’d think patriotic US companies, especially companies on taxpayer ‘life support’ would be doing their best to hire ‘displaced Americans’.

sadly, no

India Feels Less Vulnerable as Outsourcing Presses On

By HEATHER TIMMONS
Published: June 2, 2009

NOIDA, India — The global downturn has slowed the rapid growth in India’s outsourcing business, but only slowed it. In fact — because of the pressure on companies, and even governments, to reduce costs — many outsourcing businesses are booming. And a mood that was deeply uncertain just six months ago has turned much more optimistic.

Unemployment has risen to 8.9 percent in the United States, a 26-year high, increasing longstanding pressures to “keep jobs in America.” But managers of companies big and small, squeezed between political pressures and the necessity of slimming down to survive, are choosing the bottom line.

J. Brandon Black, president and chief executive of the Encore Capital Group, a debt collection company based in San Diego, said he planned to significantly increase his work force in India in the next few years, in part because of the tough economic times.

“The thing it boils down to is the supply of well-trained educated labor at reasonable prices is just too great to ignore,” said Mr. Black. In India, “we’re hiring college-educated people.” The company is not doing that in the United States, where it would incur greater infrastructure and health care costs. [Tens of millions of US citizens are losing their jobs and THIS is how US commerce repays us? Worse, this is how our government is ‘protecting’ us?!]

“Outsourcing is here to stay,” Mr. Black said. [But you on the other hand, may not be.]

Some of America’s biggest companies continue to invest in India, even as they trim costs at home.

Hewlett-Packard said last month that it would cut an additional 6,400 jobs, on top of the 24,000 it said it was eliminating in September after a merger with Electronic Data Systems. About half of the September cuts are expected to come from the United States. In March, the computer giant said it was opening “HP Software University” in eight cities in India to train software testers. [Tell me good citizen, how inclined are you to buy a HP printer now?]

Last month, Honeywell International, the manufacturing behemoth based in Morristown, N.J., said it would invest $50 million in a new research and development facility in Bangalore that would employ 3,000. The move comes after Honeywell began a reorganization, closing plants and trimming hundreds of jobs recently in the United States. [This while the US is bleeding jobs!]

The company declined to comment for this article, but when it initially announced its India plans, its chairman and chief executive, David M. Cote, said about half of Honeywell’s employees and half of its business were outside the United States. [How would Mr. Cote like ALL of his business to be ‘outside’ the US?]

“Anything that creates any kind of protectionism, anything that stops the globalization activity, will be harmful,” he said. [There is the ‘problem’ good citizen, these morons may have MBA’s but none of them understand what TREASON is!]

Many in India say they believe that demographics are on their side in the long run.

“In most developed economies, the work force is aging,” said Ranjit Tinaikar, a partner with McKinsey, a consulting firm. The health care costs associated with employing those Western workers will continue to increase, he said, creating a “big opportunity” for India. [Where apparently if you get sick they drag you out to the gutter and shoot your sorry ass.]

A decade ago, McKinsey and India’s powerful information technology and outsourcing trade group, Nasscom, predicted that revenue from outsourcing by foreign companies would reach $50 billion in India in 2010. The global economic slowdown has delayed that by three or four quarters — revenue is predicted to reach $47 billion this year. [Understand good citizen, these are jobs US citizens could (and should) be doing.]

And in April, Nasscom and McKinsey predicted that by 2020, outsourcing would yield $175 billion in revenue here.

Growth will slow this year at many of India’s biggest outsourcing companies, however, because of the implosion of some of their largest clients: banks, mortgage servicing companies and Wall Street firms. But that does not mean revenue is no longer growing. [Um there isn’t one Wall Street firm that isn’t taking the US taxpayer’s dime…]

“People who have never looked at outsourcing before are saying they have to do it,” said Amitabh Chaudhry, the chief executive of Infosys BPO, the outsourcing arm of one of the largest Indian information technology companies. He expects his unit to grow 25 to 30 percent this year, compared with 40 to 50 percent in the past.

But political pressures are making a difference in how business is done. One growing trend, many outsourcing executives say, is placing more Indian employees in offices in the client’s home country. That way the job, ostensibly, does not move abroad. [Same fuckin’ difference!] But over the long term, many are likely to be moved across the globe.

“Our view is we start work onshore, then move it to Poland or Morocco, and then over time to India,” said Sachdev Ramakrishna, director of marketing for Steria, an information technology and outsourcing company. Steria is based in Paris, but one-quarter of its employees are in India, and it has offices in Morocco and Poland. “It’s like opening the tap in bits.”

Since Steria’s clients include public utilities and governments in Europe, getting them comfortable with the idea of moving jobs abroad can take time. “Everyone recognizes that this is a changed world order, and the focus is more on preservation of jobs,” Mr. Ramakrishna said. [The preservation of jobs! Easy for the thief to say…but it brings up and crucial point, if the workers weren’t ‘needed’ then neither would their jobs.]

And yet, new business is coming from all over: insurance companies with a growing number of elderly clients to monitor; pharmaceutical companies looking for more efficient ways to conduct drug trials and handle customer calls (even emergency inquiries, like overdose concerns); [Great idea. let’s out source matters of life and death to people where English is their second language! Is their no limit to their greed?] corporate legal teams balking at $350-an-hour fees to outside law firms. Even companies based in once union-friendly countries like France and Germany, as well as once-flush Middle Eastern firms, struggling media companies and companies that have been taken over by private equity firms are looking to outsource. [Mostly because these private equity firms leverage everything they touch to the point of unprofitability!]

Indian companies that relied on Wall Street and big banks for much of their business are aggressively learning new skills.

East of New Delhi, on a corporate campus that was once farmland, dozens of Indian doctors, nurses and pharmacists are scheduling checkups for patients in the United States and monitoring clinical trial data for some of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies. [Yet drugs still cost an arm and a leg…where’s the ‘savings’? Check the CEO’s pockets!]

Thirty miles to the southwest, in the town of Gurgaon, hundreds of Indian lawyers in a glass high-rise are conducting due diligence on deals, combing through contracts and studying intellectual property rights for Western clients. [Yep in a world ‘infested’ with ‘terrorists’, we want to send our sensitive, proprietary information to a ‘low cost’ not particularly secure country to be vetted…insane! I’m sure you are all aware that thousands of US lawyers have been sacked in the past six months, many of them with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of student debt.]

In the legal field, “there’s been a sea change in awareness of what’s possible” in the last 12 months, said Daniel Reed, the chief executive of UnitedLex, which has its headquarters in Atlanta but has the bulk of its employees in Gurgaon. More and more sophisticated work is coming to India, he said.

Matthew Fawcett, the general counsel of JDS Uniphase, a fiber optics company in California, started looking at outsourcing some legal work to India two years ago and is now a UnitedLex client.

“When you run a legal department of a publicly traded company,” he said, “you care about cost and overhead.” [But nobody gives a shit about jobs for US workers?]

Patni Computer Systems, which employs doctors and nurses in Noida, is working with health insurance companies in the United States whose policies provide home care for elderly patients. Patni’s doctors and nurses call the patients regularly for checkups, and if the patient needs a physical examination, they call the insurance company, which dispatches a nurse. [Have we just found out why US health care costs are climbing exponentially? It sure as shit ain’t getting ‘cheaper’! Every health care provider that uses these services should be prosecuted for fraud!]

“It’s a proactive measure, rather than reactive” said Sanjiv Kapur, the head of Patni’s outsourcing business, intended to prevent the patient from falling ill and winding up in the hospital. “It’s less costly for the insurance company.”

So, we have the US hemorrhaging jobs while US employers can’t off shore jobs fast enough! Worse, many of he worst offenders are currently on taxpayer supported life support!

Are you ‘pleased’ that these ‘frugal’ companies are watching their costs or are you bullshit that these traitorous bastards are keeping the ‘savings’ for themselves?

I’ll once again charge ‘off the reservation’ to point out a very basic point…if a pig is a pig and a duck is a duck then a dollar is a dollar.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A LOW COST LABOR POOL!

What we’re witnessing is CURRENCY MANIPULATION, plain and simple!

If we fail to put a stop to this nonsense, we won’t have an economy left to save!

Understand that we have already lost ALL of the jobs created during the eight years of the Bush administration. Yet US employers have been ‘focused’ on building their overseas workforces…

That shit don’t float. If the Indians want to provide healthcare services for somebody, their population is FIVE TIME LARGER than ours, We don’t have enough qualified caregivers here, surely they must be experiencing the same situation?

We don’t ‘need’ healthcare providers located six thousand miles away, there are plenty right here more than willing to do the job for a living wage.

No US workers equals no US economy…but apparently the greed heads can’t figure this one out.

I’m not saying anything you don’t already know. The ‘management’ of our nation is badly broken; we have precious little time (and no tools) with which to repair it.

The ‘no tools’ part is the most troubling aspect because it means we can’t fix what we have, we will be forced to replace it.

Worse, time is running out.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner