I'MMA LET YOU FINISH
if we pile all the dead bodies from the middle east accomplishement and than have all the unemployed pile on top of that pile and add all those mexicans on top of that pile surely we will be able to reach the moon while keeping the tax cuts for the rich. that karl what a mind......
Were those 1,000 guest worker jobs?
Let's just say the folks at the Labor Department wanted to keep their jobs....
I was wondering about this too. And when do the December totals get revised?
I still think the real question is why the "journalists" are just reprinting government press releases as news, rather than taking a few minutes to actually examine the numbers, then write an accurate report.
Maybe the fine fine career professionals who worker at the Bureau of Labor Statistics had nothing to do with this-- but it seems likely the White House did have something to do with this-- just like they mucked with EPA reports.
Bastards.
BLS came under huge pressure during the Nixon administration to alter the jobs data. Fred Mallek fired all the Jewish workers thinking they were purposely making Nixon look bad. But the remaining workers held firm, they would not alter data for political purposes.
And for years it was led by those who would have resigned rather than alter data. However, I think during the Reagen years those people reached retirement age and the new folks may have been intimidated.
Between Reagen, Bush 41 and 43 federal workers of every description have been under tremendous pressure. And their hometown newspaper, the WPost is no friend.
You just can't put this all on the BLS, the CIA or any other federal agency. The voters have to set this right. We have to elect a President, Senate and Congress who believe in quality government. That would be Democrats.
It's the same Labor Department that is teaching employers how to not pay overtime to employees, the same employers that are offshoring white collar jobs left and right.
I don't think that they are fine career professionals, I think that, simply, with the jobs reports, they have not found a truly effective way they can lie to us yet.
OT: check out this story:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/
2...ain592330.shtml
Bush was planning on invading Iraq right after coming into power. The money quote:
"In the book, O'Neill is quoted as saying he was surprised that no one in a National Security Council meeting questioned why Iraq should be invaded. "It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this,'" says O'Neill."
This happened within the first three months of the administration.
Kind of puts charges of Bush knew about 9/11 in a new light.
I think if there was any fudging going on, it was the BLS overstating the number of new jobs created in Oct and Nov in an effort to improve the outlook of the economy during the holiday shopping season.
They were probably hoping that real gains in Dec would help mask the inflated values of the previous 2 months.
Here's something to think about next time the newscaster tells you how great the economy is doing because the stock market is rising:
Jack Gordon: Wall Street curls its lip at Costco's ungreedy CEO
Sam's Club has 71 percent more U.S. stores than Costco, yet Costco's total sales are 5 percent higher. The average Costco store generates almost double the revenue of a Sam's Club. By any hard-nosed business measure, Costco is succeeding brilliantly against what may be the most formidable competitor in any industry on Earth.
Furthermore, Costco's success translates directly into benefits for workers and customers in the very manner that cheerleaders for corporate America have long described. The company offers "the best wages and benefits in retail." Its starting hourly wage is $10. Full-time hourly workers earn annual salaries of $40,000 after four years.
And get this: Whenever Costco buyers negotiate a good deal on products, the savings are actually passed on to customers. No, seriously; markups are capped at 14 percent.
Well then, you say to yourself, Costco CEO James D. Sinegal, the architect of this marvel, must be taking bows as a Hero of the Republic. Wrong. Instead he's defending himself from powerful forces that better understand how a business ought to be run.
In a single paragraph tucked matter-of-factly into Fortune's hymn to Sinegal and his company, as if it were one more piece of incidental data, we learn that "some of the practices that made Costco great have lately come under attack by Wall Street." What the complaint boils down to is that Sinegal is too generous to the peasants. Stock analysts have "pounded on" him to trim workers' health benefits "and to otherwise reduce labor costs." The critics' view is summarized by "Deutsche Bank analyst Bill Dreher, who recently wrote, 'Costco continues to be a company that is better at serving the club member and employee than the shareholder.' "
Off topic, but I really must:
I was wondering, if during Bush's formal announcement this week of sending some clowns to the Moon and Mars, all 9 of the Democratic candidates could go to various Hospital waiting rooms around the country (but, preferably, in Iowa and New Hampshire), and watch the announcement with just a few thousand of the 44 million uninsured in this, the richest country the world has ever seen.
The contrast would be quite amazing. Some 20 million children who have to depend on sitting in Hospital Emergency Rooms for basic care, while Bush wants to funnel billions to the states of Florida and Texas to play space cowboy.
I bring this up for personal reasons. I have a co-worker with an 8 year old daughter with asthma (they live in the Bronx, asthma capital of the world). She frequently has to take the entire day off of work (losing money) in order to sit in a hospital waiting room for 8, 9, sometimes 10 hours for basic health care.
WHAT WOULD JESUS DO???????????
It is my understanding that Jesus is "W"s favorite political philosopher......
The bullshit just keeps coming...... and coming...... and coming.......
This is part of the larger veil of misinformation that shrouds Dubya's administration. It needs to be pierced, but I'm almost depairing of how to do it.
Letters to the editor? Letters to news anchors, CNN personalities, calls to C-SPAN and talk radio?
The job of unseating W is going to be really hard, given how much propaganda is in the media. It would be SO much easier if John Q. Public got all the facts.
Well, bloggers - a challenge: how do we accomplish this feat? How do we get the truth to the people?
That is a very important report.
"O'Neill, fired by the White House for his disagreement on tax cuts, is the main source for an upcoming book, "The Price of Loyalty," authored by Ron Suskind.
Suskind says O'Neill and other White House insiders he interviewed gave him documents that show that in the first three months of 2001, the administration was looking at military options for removing Saddam Hussein from power and planning for the aftermath of Saddam's downfall -- including post-war contingencies like peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals and the future of Iraq's oil.
"There are memos," Suskind tells Stahl, "One of them marked 'secret' says 'Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq.'"
A Pentagon document, says Suskind, titled "Foreign Suitors For Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," outlines areas of oil exploration. "It talks about contractors around the world from...30, 40 countries and which ones have what intentions on oil in Iraq," Suskind says."
56k is right, because the "nixon republicans" do not have a morality-they can fake the most superficial appearance of one but they simply cannot imagine why libruls feel guilt at the sight of a starving person in the richest nation on earth. The response of Mallek-that the Jews (always the Jews! At the height of the Cold War why not the Slavs, Mallek?) must be pushing their own agenda, as opposed to the loyal thing (pushing "our" agenda), reflects their amoral conception of reality. There's Clan Montegu[sic], with their of course self-serving plans, and Clan Capulet, with their of course self-serving plans, but there's no comprehension of why anyone but a paid interest group might have any basis for loyalty beyond money.
And of course it's that type of amoral bastard who never fails to invoke the Suitable for Public Display, light-up animatronic-motion, Cigar Store Christ.
Probably these numbers come from the Pentagon's Office of Special Operations...
Can't let all that creativity go to waste.
Perhaps the "career professionals" are trying to avoid having the "shrill" label pinned to their asses. Any Krugmanesque view of the current economic situation would be as welcome as a copulating couple doing their thing atop the Ten Commandments monolith.
No doubt the liars' house of cards will come tumbling down around them if the truth can get out to the public.
Please watch out though, that we don't scream at the pickler for injecting her opinion into her stories and then scream at these reporters for NOT immediately discecting the information coming out of government agencies. That is the job of the editorial/opinion writers/analysts in both cases.
BS at the BLS?
I agree with Anonymous. Why can't a journalist check the BLS books and procedures to see if some political BS gets mixed in?
What if every member of the Congress of the US (535) gave up their seat to one person in each family of an American KII (Killed in Iraq) for the State of the Union address so that George Bush would finally have to face the families affected directly by this folly. I know there have only been 494 killed, but the address is still two weeks away.
Alex, no one should be surprised if Bush was planning to invade Iraq the day after his inauguration. It doesn't mean squat about 9/11 beyond the fact that they ignored whatever intelligence they had.
If they had known about it in advance, I think Bush would have been making heroic speeches at the site of the twin towers instead of Guiliani. I think we might have even invaded Iraq before we invaded Afghanistan, or at the same time. We certainly would have seen a much more coordinated campaign to connect Saddam to 9/11.
Instead Bush flew around the country as if he had no idea what was going on, and Cheny hid in his undisclosed location. A few folks like Safire sent out trial balloons connecting Saddam to 9/11, but it really wasn't much of anything at the time compared to the push to invade Afghanisation.
What I find interseting is that no one talks about the fact that end of the year employment figures as well as other economic data tend to be pretty un-typical of the rest of the year. Any companies wanting to lay-off or oursource during the final two months of the year will wait rather risk the bad PR resulting from putting workers out on the street at Christmas.
“GOP REFUTES LIMBAUGH”
Palm Beach Post Editorial
Friday, January 9, 2004
On Wednesday, the very conservative Republican who is Florida's attorney general urged the Legislature to create a computer network that he believes will allow the state to better track abuse of prescription painkillers. On Wednesday, the very conservative Republican state senator who is sponsoring the bill urged the Legislature to do the same. On Wednesday, the state's drug czar -- who was appointed by the very conservative Republican governor -- urged the Legislature to do the same. All of them acknowledged that they were trying to capitalize on the publicity surrounding the very conservative talk-radio host who is under investigation for "doctor-shopping," fraudulently obtaining exessive amounts of prescription painkillers.
So were all these very conservative Republicans also "singling out" Rush Limbaugh? Roy Black, who represents the bombastic host, never has missed a chance to accuse Palm Beach County State Attorney Barry Krischer -- a Democrat -- of investigating Mr. Limbaugh strictly for political reasons. Yet when a Post reporter tried to ask about all the references to the case by Republicans, Mr. Black was unavailable. No surprise. For the past three months, Mr. Black and his client have tried to shift attention away from the issue -- prescription-drug abuse. Mr. Limbaugh is being singled out. Mr. Limbaugh's privacy is being invaded.
When The Post reported last week that doctor-shopping is a charge that is rarely filed in Florida, Mr. Black -- available that time for comment -- claimed that the statistics supported his charge of unfair treatment. In fact, the statistics do nothing of the sort. For one thing, the whole issue of prescription painkiller abuse is relatively new. OxyContin abuse began getting the government's notice in Florida just three years ago. The next year, the Republican-controlled Legislature -- singling out Mr. Limbaugh? -- made doctor-shopping a felony. Also, it's obviously easier for prosecutors to pick up on cases where a person has died because a doctor overprescribed such pills. One only can imagine Mr. Limbaugh's reaction if, say, Chelsea Clinton were the target of a similar investigation and her parents tried to shift the focus. The reality is that Sen. Mike Fasano, R-New Port Richey, not Mr. Krischer, said the state is in "crisis mode" on the issue of painkiller abuse.
Estimates are that the state is losing $1.3 billion from the Medicaid program because of related fraud. The number of doctors who engage in such abuse is low, but the effects can be deadly and devastating. Doctor-shopping is part of the problem. The Republican Legislature says so.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/
opi...c3e06000b2.html
John Stanton - That is one of the best ideas I have ever heard. We should send it to the members of congress and reporters.
OT but (by way of Fark, at "homepage"), 500 Idaho phone books bearing the image of an Iraqi Conquest casualty recalled until they get permission from the estate. The image was part of a effort to raise money for vet groups.
Tin Foiletry: Who wants to bet the "permission" is never secured?
"Alex, no one should be surprised if Bush was planning to invade Iraq the day after his inauguration. It doesn't mean squat about 9/11 beyond the fact that they ignored whatever intelligence they had."
I think Bush knew it was coming but didn't expect how big it would be.
Stanton-brilliant! Are there House rules on these things? It would be quite a thing, even without complete "replacement" (even if only a dozen or a few hundred families were in the aisles).
Already whines the squeal of McClellan: "The State of the Union is not a photo-op or a political appearance, it is a vital communication to members of the Congress. So this is just wrong-headed in principle. But really you'd have to refer that question to the Clerk..."
Retarded, it still doesn't fit the way these guys operate. If they knew it was coming, they would have had a ham-fisted campaign to capitalize on it in progress. Instead it took a while.
The fact that they had the information available and didn't do squat is much more likely, and just as damning.
It fits with Bush's "management style," too. Remember, the guy doesn't really pay attention to things he's not interested in.
John Stanton - brilliant! I've a letter on its way to my delegation!
I am probably terminally cynical, but it would not surprise me to see CEOs hiring people as the election approaches just as a favor to the Bush relection.
"Some 20 million children who have to depend on sitting in Hospital Emergency Rooms for basic care,.."
Wasn't Bush taken to court as governor of Texas to force him to enroll poor children in Medicaid?
Won't there be some interesting comparisons with Dean, who brought healthcare to all Vermont kids, and
undermine the bold new Bush initiative on child healthcare that is undoubtedly on the way?
it would be too little too late.
There are rules for the SotU. It's a required report. So far as I know, it can still be delivered in writing. Funny thing, though: when Bush misled us with that uranium-in-Africa business last year, I kept pointing to the need for a Congressional investigation because of the constitutional requirement for the SotU repot.
Congress ("Tom Delay; Bill Frist") control who gets to sit where, basically. No floor seats are available. Gallery seats, maybe. How many, I don't know.
Atrios, if you're reading these, make John Stanton's suggestion of 12:23(families of Iraq [and IX/XI?] survivors to appear at the SOTUATC) a proper post "out front."
Also OT but to continue our following of Sharon's spoiling for a Syrian war, see "homepage."
Just getting the idea out may be enough to open some eyes.
It's not the career professionals
you have to worry about; it's
folks like Mitch McConnel's wifey.
Per the NYT, some of the real reasons for the "great economy" and the continuing decline in jobs:
"Friday's report on unemployment in December was much weaker than either the administration or most independent economists had predicted. Job creation was virtually nil, and the unemployment rate declined only because the labor force shrank by 309,000 workers. Many of those were people who had simply become too discouraged to keep looking for work.
[snip]
"It's not a good idea to give excessive weight to any particular statistic," said N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. "If you look at the pattern, most of the economic news has been good rather than bad."
[snip]
Yet job creation has been slower than in almost any previous recovery, and wage growth has slowed to a crawl. That appears to reflect another big new element that lies entirely outside the president's control: the enormous increases in productivity, which have made it possible for companies to squeeze more output from each worker.
"The evidence is powerful that we can have 4 or 5 percent growth without hiring much," said John Makin, a senior economist at the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Makin has long been among the more pessimistic economic forecasters, but the employment and wage data on Friday came in far worse than even he had expected. "I was stunned, quite frankly," he said.
[snip]
Administration officials know that the crucial issue in an election season is jobs. And President Bush's track record, a net loss of more than two million jobs since he took office, remains one of his biggest political weaknesses."
[snip]
"Without the passage of the president's plans, by the second quarter in 2003, the unemployment rate would have been nearly one percentage point higher," Treasury Secretary John W. Snow said earlier this week. "As many as 1.5 million fewer Americans would be working, and real G.D.P. would have been as much as 2 percent lower."
It is impossible to prove or disprove such contentions, but they are unlikely to comfort voters in big industrial states where hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs have been lost over the last three years."
Re-elect Bush! It could have been worse!
Sorry for the OT post but I just saw this over at Kos:
Hmm. This Free Republic thread has a photoshoped image of Dean in a Nazi uniform.
The picture is not as excessive as the complete lack of self-awareness is at FreeRepublic.
"Some Freepers here are crying foul but this illustrates a problem we Republicans face. We hold ourselves to one standard but permit Democrats to attack us relentlessly without limits. We are rotarians, members of churches, upstanding citizens. We try to raise the level of discourse only to be shouted down by more vocal liberals who avail themselves of every dirty rhetorical tactic in the book. At the end of this verbal contest, we come away as greedy racist pigs in the eyes of the pulic. This is our "reward" for trying to be decent."
They actually believe their own thoughts. Spooky.
Speaking of job losses, I heard on the news last night that Levi's is closing its remaining U.S. plants. All of its production will now take place outside the U.S.
"Retarded, it still doesn't fit the way these guys operate. If they knew it was coming, they would have had a ham-fisted campaign to capitalize on it in progress. Instead it took a while.
The fact that they had the information available and didn't do squat is much more likely, and just as damning.
It fits with Bush's "management style," too. Remember, the guy doesn't really pay attention to things he's not interested in.
M."
I'm not saying Bush "knew". But the National Security Council was told to find a way to invade Iraq and they got explicit warnings of 9/11--- supposedly they decoded them a day too late -- riiiight. It's quie possible the NSC did this without Bush exactly knowing. I'm just saying...
"quite" possible.
Well, they won't be able to revise the December report downward without reporting a loss of jobs. That might generate some headlines, even if it is delayed a month.
Loss of jobs (1000 new ones in December is so pitiful), Iraq, Iraq WMD lies, 9/11 investigation, the Plame investigation--- so many time bombs that can go off and really damage the administration. If we had a real media, anyway.
nasty, suspicious minds think alike. This is what I posted on Brad Delong's site:
When a nasty suspicious mind combines with complete ignorance, the results are usually not great, but I wonder:
1. whether the initial numbers showed a loss in jobs, and they "revised" November downward in order to add those jobs in December, and show a net gain, however small?
2. Whether *part* of the large productivity gains comes from treating the rise in health care spending as productivity growth, reflecting better quality health care, rather than as inflation?
Re: Bush's early plans for invading Iraq, I'm pretty sure I've posted this before:
+++
Republican Presidential Debate
Manchester, New Hampshire
December 2, 1999
MR. HUME: Governor Bush, Saddam Hussein is still there.
What would you do about that, if anything, that is different from what President Clinton has done?
GOV. BUSH: I wouldn't ease the sanctions, and I wouldn't try to negotiate with him.
I'd make darn sure that he lived up to the agreements that he signed back in the early '90s. I'd be helping the opposition groups. And if I found in any way, shape or form that he was developing weapons of mass destruction, I'd take 'em out. I'm surprised he's still there. I think a lot of other people are as well.
MR. HUME: Take him out?
GOV. BUSH: Take out the weapons of mass destruction.
+++
Notice the "take 'em out" vs. "take 'im out" slipperiness -- which makes no sense in context, considering that the statement is immediately followed by "I'm surprised he's still there."
weren't there reports of Rummy trying to blame IX/XI on the Iraqi's within hours of the first attack? That has been a long-term goal of the PNAC.
Hey, I found some money to help pay for schools and job creation:
The U.S. federal government spent $19.179 billion dollars in 2003 on the War on Drugs, at a rate of about $600 per second.
Source: Office of National Drug Control Policy
"...and a candidate for president of the United States is obligated to stand for the rule of law." - Howard Dean, 1/4/04 Iowa debate on bin Laden.
"I approve of the assasination policy against Hamas by Israel." - Howard Dean, 1/9/04 Iowa press conference.
In case the liberals here don't quite get the meaning of this, then let me spell it out...
Nowhere in international law is the policy of assasination or extra-judicial killing sanctioned.
Nowhere.
This policy is illegal by every international standard one wishes to cite. What this falls under is the category of war crimes, crimes against humanity, or atrocity.
This man is a proponent of war crimes.
I think the liberals here need to ask themselves a simple question: "How much principle am I willing to sacrifice for the sake of political expediency?"
I think Elias needs to ask himself a simple question: How much better do you think a second Bush II administration will be? Because the choice is between whoever gets the Democratic nomination and Bush II.
Didn't we say, "Just wait for the revision." There's always a revision of these figures, just surprised they came so fast this time.
EPT, you're the perfect example of the liberal who stands firmly with astride the fence.
1 degree to the left of center in peacetime, 89 degrees to the right of center in wartime.
It's why the liberals are much more dangerous than the rightwing. With the right, at least you know what you're getting. There's no dispute about where they stand.
With liberals, the spout lofty principles, but when it comes to taking a hard, principled stand, they waver and worse, adopt the principles of the right in order to achieve power.
This is always framed by the lesser of 2 evils argument, which only perpetuates the status quo...
I'm saddened that you've taken this path...
For what it's worth, had Lou Dobbs on in the backgroung last night and he was all over the "1,000 jobs created in December", and highly critical of the "recovery", noting that many economists disagreed with the administration's characterizations of the economy.
Elias, what's your answer to this question?
Who do you want as the next president - one of the dems or Bush?
There are no other choices.
EPT...
What evidence do you have that US foreign policy will drastically change under Prez Dean?
If we listen to his words, he would continue to support the illegal Israeli policy of assasination, which means that he surely wouldn't oppose a similar US policy.
If we listen to his words, we understand that he will keep US troops in Iraq so that it won't become a haven for "terrorists."
So how exactly will a Prez Dean be any different than a Prez Bush on foreign policy?
pie, I will be voting for Kucinich...what's the surprise?
pie, there actually is a choice...that is, if you refuse to follow conventional wisdom...
Well... I'm waiting. What is it?
Elias is a troll.
This cannot be refuted.
Sorry, didn't see your first comment. Kucinich. Hmmmmm.
What are his chances of getting the nomination?
"Retarded, it still doesn't fit the way these guys operate. If they knew it was coming, they would have had a ham-fisted campaign to capitalize on it in progress. Instead it took a while.
Wrong. They absolutely did have a "ham-fisted campaign to capitalize on it in progress" and they wasted zero time in implementing it. It's called the Project for a New American Century [PNAC].
ref
As ominous as this radical expansion of military control is, the domestic governmental change that PNAC advocates and that the Bush administration has begun to implement is just as frightening. Essentially, PNAC thinkers desire military control over the American polity. PNAC planners understand that America’s voters “will shape the pace and content of transformation as much as the requirements of current missions.” Attaining absolute political power, then, will enable neo-conservatives to institutionalize their policy goals within the federal bureaucracy. As the new Department of Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, the ongoing infringement of civil liberties and the growing climate of fear demonstrate, some of these goals have already been met.
PNAC planners realized several years ago that the American public must live in fear in order for such imperialistic plans to be accepted as reasonable. Writing a year and a half before Sept. 11, 2001, the PNAC noted that the process of bringing about this public state of fear would likely take a considerable length of time, “absent some catastrophic and cataclysmic event — like a new Pearl Harbor.” In other words, a Pearl Harbor-type event offered the possibility of accelerating the American public’s willingness to accept the project of world domination (and the stifling of domestic dissent) as its own.
Bush saw Sept. 11, then, precisely as an “opportunity” — Condoleeza Rice’s word in a policy briefing the next day — to galvanize the American public into quickly accepting belligerent policies as necessary for America’s defense.
I'll have to agree, the foreign policies of Wallace (no, back before that one), Sevenson, Commoner, Nader, etc. were so much better. Wonder why no one ever notices this?
Candidates who don't win don't matter. Kucinich is my favorite but he won't win this one. The perfect is truly, the enemy of the good. It is also the enemy of the less bad than. When you've got the worst, less bad is better.
Elias, I understand your anger when Dean says we have to stay in Iraq.
I didn't want this awful war, but the US is responsible now for what happens there. To abandon the people would be even more shameful and criminal. We need to get out as soon as we can, but we can't just get out. And no candidate who favors that plan can possibly win.
If Kucinich actually had a chance at the nomination, I wonder if he'd be
saying this.
One thing nobody seems to be looking into concerning Bush II's immigrant worker proposals is how many jobs that currently pay wages that can support a U.S. family are going to be offered at substantially lower salary to foreigners seeking work visas to the U.S. Corporations cut payrolls and more American-born workers are going to be out looking for any kind of job to keep from sliding into poverty.
Today, a majority of jobs in meat packing firms are held by immigrants. We are told no American wants to take those jobs. But only a generation ago, on Chicago's south side, when unions negotiated working conditions and salaries with packing giants Swift and Armour, meatpacking jobs were not only considered good, but people clamoured to get them. Fathers did everything they could to push their sons to the front of the hiring lines. This all changed when firms like Iowa Beef took the jobs out of the urban areas, trimmed wages and sped up kill lines by up to three times. The jobs became very dangerous and poorly paid. So only immigrants hoping to get a foothold in the U.S. job market would take them. There are plenty of jobs out there that Americans will take if only they were infused with safety, dignity and a means to support a family at American levels.
pie, hmmmm, I'm not concerned with "chances". I'm conderned with principle...
You should try it sometime...
"We need to get out as soon as we can, but we just can't get out."
Typical Liberal Logic...
"I'm against it but I'm for it."
You only need to read the Times or Post on microfilm for the period 1965-75 to find the same tired logic...
I really don't have time for it now...
Elias, I'm a lot less concerned with principle than I am in reality, what actually is possible, what actually happens. It is immoral to waste time on the impossible, the unattainable. Pushing things a little bit towards the good is a lot more useful than standing on the side and pouting about things not going far enough, fast enough.
Course other's might disagree but I've wasted enough time on unreality just now.
Now, Elias. Let's not start attacking people who disagree with you. That gets you zero points and weakens your position.
I haven't done that to you.
I'm as principled as you are, just not as idealistic. I've lost some of it along the way and become more pragmatic.
pie, EPT...
Where are the supporters of Humphrey/Muskie now? They took exactly the position you take 35 years later...
How much more of this pathetic liberalism can we take?
We're doomed to a dark future if you continue this. The future is in your hands.
Please think about what you're doing.
Dean is just another Humphrey...
Dear, dear, and here everyone has been telling us Dean's another Mcgovern. Now we find out he's another Humphrey. Wish they'd make up their minds. I suspect he's neither, certainly not Humphrey, the candidate of the establishment, winner of no primaries, if memeory serves. Mine not America's. Look at his donor base. No McGovern either (loved that George, just don't think he was an effective candidate.) He won't lie down and get kicked around.
Dean also said he would "strongly speak out against violence of any kind in the Middle East. That's what I mean by being even-handed." (More on violence)
"You must condemn all civilian killings, including any terrorist attacks," he said.
However, in retrospect, Dean said he should not have used the term "even-handed."
"I've since learned that that is a very sensitive word to use in certain communities, so perhaps I could have used a different euphemism," he said. "But the fact of the matter is, at the negotiating table, we have to have the trust of both sides."
Asked about the dismantling of Jewish settlements, Dean said that was an issue to be decided during negotiations between the two sides, although he said even the Israelis have conceded that some settlements will have to go.
Asked if he would oppose the Israeli policy of selectively killing leaders of Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups, Dean said, "I think no one likes to see violence of any kind."
But he also said that "there is a war going on in the Middle East, and members of Hamas are soldiers in that war, and, therefore, it seems to me that they are going to be casualties if they are going to make war."
Wow. That Howard Dean is one unprincipled monster!
Or, maybe Elias is just stupid.
Dean is so many other people, it's a wonder he knows his own name.
Whatever, Elias.
If Dean gets the nomination, I'm voting for him. One vote. You have one vote. Come back when you have 51% of the voting public in your corner.
Dean is just another Humphrey...
. . . and Bush another Nixon.
The choice is yours.
Guess he's gone, off to other threads. Honored to be mentioned in the same line as you, pie.
The feeling is mutual, EPT.
RE:Jack Gordon: Wall Street curls its lip at Costco's ungreedy CEO
So what is the explanation for Wall Street's attitude toward Costco's strategy? Is it:
1. That they don't appreciate that Costco's relatively better working conditions are one of the reasons for the sucess of the
company?
2. Or are they worried about the example this will set for the entire labor market and fear that once workers get more that a
few crumbs that they might actually start fighting for a whole piece of pie?
Elias, will you write in Kucinich in the general election if he fails to get the Dem nomination?
I won't.
The greater evil is far too great for that. Yes, I am appalled that Dean supports Israeli assassination tactics. But the issues on which Dean is superior to Bush (the environment and health care, to name just two) far outnumber the ones on which my principles would force me to sacrifice my vote for DK.
That said, vote for Kucinich in the primary--he's the real deal, and we deserve someone like him for a change.
Re: Costco, I am glad they are succeeding so well in the face of competition with Sam's Club. In fact I noted with glee that last year they closed a spanking new store opened only 2 years earlier.
OTOH Wall Street's attitude enrages me. I guess these bastards won't be happy until we are all indentured servants.
This is what I have been going on about: there is an increasing divide in this country, we are being split into the investor class (the barons) and the wal-martized working class (the serfs), and fuck the middle class, it's just evidence that corporate America isn't putting the screws to its employees hard enough.
And a working class that's kept struggling hard just to stay afloat, is a quiet and quiescent class of folks that will leave the oligarchs in peace to pursue their right-wing Wall Street friendly agenda.
oh, he's gone? oh well.
"So what is the explanation for Wall Street's attitude toward Costco's strategy?"
"Wall Street" wants companies to behave in a specific way: contiuous growth with as large as possible profits. Now, what if Costco is the most successful store of its type? That should be good enough, right?
Well, maybe not. Workers on a balance sheet are not humans, they are an expense. The average investor buys into the stock market, holds onto stock for a long time, and cashes out years later. This works in the general sense that the market always grows over long periods of time, even if an individual company fails. Just don't put all your eggs in one basket.
Stock traders, however, buy and sell with much greater frequency. They look at quarterly profits. To many stock traders, long term strategy is meaningless. They are actually a drain on the market because of regular "profit taking". They cash out, let the stock drop a bit, then get back in.
So, long term strategies are not important. They just want to see expenses cut to the bone, so profits are larger, and thus the potential growth in the value of the stock is larger. Labor and benefits for employees are usually the greatest expenses, and therefore the quickest way to cut expenses is by cutting labor costs. This makes the "professionals" happy, and many companies adhere to this myopic viewpoint.
Workers are no longer considered a good investment. They are a liability, a commodity. Welcome to the capitalist utopia.
However, in retrospect, Dean said he should not have used the term "even-handed."
Maybe he should have said "foreign-handed". That never got the Great Leader W in any trouble.
I think Elias was saying, and I agree, that its better to have a clearly defined enemy than a fair weather friend.
I think Elias was saying, "Look! I want to convince you that Dean said something that he didn't say by misquoting him! Look! Don't vote for Dean! Look! He's a monster!"
Something like that.
Howard Dean holds a slight lead in Iowa with just a week to go before the state's Democratic presidential caucuses and is maintaining his dominant position in New Hampshire, campaign polls out Saturday found.
In Iowa, the former Vermont governor was at 30 percent, with Dick Gephardt at 23 percent and John Kerry at 18 percent, according to the Los Angeles Times poll of likely Iowa caucus goers. John Edwards, a North Carolina senator, was the only other candidate in double digits, at 11 percent.
A New Hampshire poll showed Dean holding a lead of about 20 points over his closest competitors. The poll done for the Concord Monitor by Research 2000 found Dean with the support of 34 percent, with Clark at 14 percent and Kerry at 13 percent. Others were in single digits.
No, Elias thinks implementation of his principled ideas won't have any consequences.
He can't see the forest for the trees.
If only life were so simple.
I worked for several years as a BLS analyst and have regular contact with friends who still work there. Trust me, there's no fudging going on. If there ever was pressure to fudge numbers it never made it to the people who do the actual work. The Labor Department might be (and apparently is) a different story, but BLS is pretty much left alone.
That's not to say that there are never problems with BLS data. If people asked the right questions about BLS statistics they'd be a lot more careful about using them as gospel. But these are in-house methodological problems, not the result of administration interference.
syaloch - and the right questions would be...what?
One More Way the Trolls Forced Us to Back Dean:
Know how Dean's a hypocite on international law?
As it regards-Israel! (assassination of Hamas leaders)
Is Elias completely ignorant of American political history since the very late '60s? We are not a sovereign state. We are a colony of Israel. It's not so bad, because they really don't care about how we do things in our own backyard and so on, but it is an absolute stonecarved law that any American politician who decides to go after the Holy Rogue State gets sunk. Israeli discourse is limited in America to, "to what extent should we be wildly supportive of Likud? Should we sacrifice ourselves for Sharon, or (blasphemy) should we try to force those wily Ay-rabs to behave themselves?"
So Dean doesn't hold Israel to the same laws other terrorist sub-Jew unChosen ("rejected"?) flithy pig-eater nations have to obey. Neither does any other American politician. Elias might as well have complained that, screwing over the Lakota audience, Dean insisted on speaking in English.
But Israel isn't alone-you also have unique American support of lesser terror in Turkey, when it existed Apartheidist South Africa, Colombia, China, up to recently in Iraq. Is Dean willing to go (far) out on a limb on an issue most of his audience probably doesn't even recognize?
Beware of those who are so convinced they are right and everyone else is wrong that they will not bend.
He's an idealogue and I've heard enough from idealogues to last me the rest of my life. I like flexibility, which is why I don't get upset when candidates or politicians change their minds on things, as long as they have valid reasons for the change.
Re: the revised employment figures - I was shocked this morning that the Dallas paper carried the story of the job losses on the front page. It was very damning to the administration and the so-called "recovery."
Depends on the stats. In my area (PPI), when discontinued products were replaced by substitutes, comparing the two to factor out quality-base differences was complicated. leading (among the lazy) to a bias toward showing no change -- just assume the old product and the new one were comparable.
The CPI has encountered similar problems with substitutions, which led to all the questions about whether inflation was being measured correctly.
A lot has been said about recent productivity numbers, but do people really know what's they mean? Many assume productivity is just output per worker, but BLS claims it measures output per worker per unit time.
If this is correct, people putting in more hours can't explain changes in the productivity numbers. But the interesting question is, how are hours worked determined for salaried workers? Apparently they're still using results from a 1977 survey, even though other BLS studies show significant increases in hours worked since 1977.
In case there is any confusion, I was referring to the Freen troll. Pie called him an idealist - but he's not. He's an idealogue, and he should start his own Nader blog and leave us alone. I'm sick to death of the whole fucking thing. How many times is he going to flog that horse before it falls down and finally dies?
Tortured Grammar, courtesy of Moonie Times
New jobs near halt despite growth
"Job growth slowed to nearly a halt last month as 309,000 workers, discouraged that a boom in economic growth at year's end did not produce enough new jobs, dropped out of the labor force and drove the unemployment rate down to 5.7 percent, the Labor Department reported yesterday. "
Huh?
Remember, dirty peasants, the economy is the gift of heroic entrepeneurs, and unemployment is the spiteful choice of ungrateful workers. If only we paid them less...
I really don't have time for it now...
One can only hope...
Regarding Costco and Sam's (and I'm glad to hear Costco takes care of it's employees. One more reason I don't shop at Wal-Mart, and I feel better using Costco when I do): Business, according to Wall Street, exists for investors.
Employees are a business expense, a necessary evil.
Investors are good. They risk money. Money is a higher good than human life. Employees only give you their time. Investors give you their money. So investors deserve first pickings at the dividing of gains. Employees cost money, so deserve only what it takes to make them as productive as possible. And no more.
It's enough to make one into a Marxist.
Robert - to be fair about it - investors shoulder the risk of financing a corporation in order to share in the profits. When it works as it's supposed to work, everyone wins. You can't paint investors with such a broad brush, nor is it fair to make it seem as though employees are just objects. A good corporation - like Southwest Airlines, for example, or the corporation my husband works for, values it's employees because they are also assets. Sure, their salaries are a business expense, but what else would they be? It's money going out, so it has to go on that side of the balance sheet. Not all corporations are Enron or
Pal, by the time you can even think those thoughts you expressed:
...Investors are good. They risk money. Money is a higher good than human life. Employees only give you their time. Investors give you their money. So investors deserve first pickings at the dividing of gains. Employees cost money, so deserve only what it takes to make them as productive as possible. And no more.
much less dare to express them, you are a Marxist. I know you shudder to imagine the general public knowing, one is shunned, demonized. As you pass on the sidewalk mothers pull their children aside and hiss, but still... give in.
"investors shoulder the risk of financing a corporation in order to share in the profits."
Actually, short term investors are vultures. Repeated profit taking results in a net loss of stock value, which comes at the expense of long term investors. The long term investors are not who the article refers to.
It's similar to the difference between funding schools or funding prisons. Cut funding to schools, crime rates go up, more prisons are needed. Eventually, the cost of maintaining the prison system far outweighs what it would have cost to adequately fund the schools all along.
Costco's strategy works out magnificently as a long term strategy. They save a lot of the cost that high employee turnover rates create. They also gain in those intangibles such as good will, customer satisfaction, loyalty. It's really a fantastic business model, unless you are an incredibly greedy business owner.
Tena-he wasn't painting investors with any brush, he was elucidating a well-documented survival of primeval hatred, like racism or sexism. And maybe the answer is an ethic that considers workers to be a more intensive form of investor, putting them on a similar footing.
But we ain't buyin' this crap about some guy who puts money in bank and half the time isn't aware of what the bank does with it being equal to what a person does with 90% of their waking life. If investors believed in their investment so much, and weren't benefitting from a certain snobbery, they'd be workers. That's the meat of the late fashionability of the "small business."
Tena--
Your point is well made, and well taken. I don't mean to impugn all investors, but was responding to a quote WAY up thread criticizing Costco for not giving enough return to shareholders.
That curiously narrow way of looking at companies, as only existing to give returns to shareholders, was my target. Managers and executives should be seen (and see themelves) as serving both investors and employees. As someone else also pointed out, Costco should be praised for good business practice, not denigrated for a smaller than industry average dividend.
But then, perhaps the opinion I responded to is a minority opinion, as well. In either case, it deserves to be roundly repudiated.
kei & yuri - where exactly did I say that a guy who puts money in the bank and doesn't know what happens to it is equal to someone who invests their working life in a company? I didn't. I did address Robert's statement that, basically, investors = bad, workers = good. That's oversimplified, to the nth degree.
I'm not a Marxist, and I don't think Marxism is a workable system. At the same time I believe that any capitalist system needs strong laws regulating it.
But mainly I'd like to know what you think the alternative to corporate structure should be.
I think the liberals here need to ask themselves a simple question: "How much principle am I willing to sacrifice for the sake of political expediency?"
This man is a proponent of war crimes.
As opposed to Bush who is an actual practicioner.
Asshole.
Robert M Jeffers - I didn't take the entire situation you were addressing into account. You were right under those circumstances.
Let me reiterate - unchecked capitalism is not a good thing at all. Unchecked anything can go very wrong. I think any corporation that operates solely to give a good return to its investors is asking to ultimately fail. I agree there are too many that are too large and too unconcerned with anything but return. So you and I agree there. But in theory, the idea of corporations is not an evil idea at all. The problem is that the government in this country has spent far too much time and energy worrying about corporate returns and not enough about the gazillion other factors in play - like employees' lives. Strangely, some corporations apparently agree with that, and they are usually the most successful. Like Southwest Airlines, which is very successful and treats its employees very well.
"But mainly I'd like to know what you think the alternative to corporate structure should be."
Well, a modest proposal would be to reverse the court decisions that a corporation is a person under the law.
Corporations were originally chartered to function for the public good, much like the airwaves were to be licensed in the public interest. Neither idea has worked out quite so well in practice, but it's a good return to basics for a new beginning.
And, again, I wasn't equating investors with evil, workers with good. The comment I was responding to equated good pay with bad business practice, because it left less money for dividends. That is a pernicious notion I will always oppose. My reference to Marx was to his perfectly legitimate observation that workers trade their energy, almost literally their lives in some cases (I've worked with manual laborers, and I'm glad I don't have to now), for the employers benefit. Investors ain't sh*t, to put it crudely, without employees. But no investors, no jobs for employees, either.
There should be a commerce between them, as Ezra Pound suggested to Whitman.
Tena--
Cross posts which may look like cross-purposes.
I agree with you, especially the model of Southwest Airlines, a company I greatly admire (albeit from afar).
And given the scattershot content of this thread, my initial comment was hardly "in context," so it was easily misunderstood.
But yes, clearly, we agree with each other, at least on these points.
Lewis Lapham once suggested that the Chinese discovered capitalism centuries ago, but abandoned it for fear of the damage it could do (ironic, no?).
The idea of capitalism is still a grand experiment, and the burning question is: can it be controlled enough to be valuable? The best argument for it is still John Stuart Mill's utilitarian one: it produces the greatest good for the greatest number. But, as critics like John Rawls have pointed out, that ain't the same thing as being a just system.
And so the question remains: can it be regulated well enough to also be just? And is the greatest good for the greatest number the best standard society can create?
Sorry, about to swing into teaching another intro. philosophy course. Can you tell?
Robert - I was kind of asking kei & yuri for their idea of an alternative, but since I love what you just said, I'm glad you answered.
You're right, and that's the way I see it, too. Both sides - workers and investors/management - have legitimate interests that need to be equally addressed. Ideally there is a balance, but of course, we all know the ideal is seldom the practice. The problems have gotten worse and I blame government for a lot of it - there are supposed to be laws that help to maintain a balance, but as you have pointed out, it's gotten skewed in favor of the corporation and its investors. And that is wrong.
Costco, SWA's management philosophy
tena-since our hyperbole was restricted to attitudes and not economic reality, the "alternative" would be for workers to be respected for the work they do, instead of grudgingly tolerated. no investor sacrifice justifies the surreal dichotomy in how we regard high-stakes shoppers vs. the people whose sweat makes our world possible. not like the government isn't the biggest investor, either. for real economic alternative we like some mixed economy like canda, britain or sweden. Americans would happily pay Swedish-calibre taxes if we thought they would be managed wisely.
jeffers-why don't you just preach some time? The idea of the Chinese rejecting capitalism like a Roman internal combustion engine is the most fascinating thing we've heard in a while.
kei & yuri - well, I certainly can't argue with what you are saying about the way workers should be viewed by management/investors - for god's sake, there is no company without people willing to work to do what the company does. And I agree, especially, that this country has gone crazy. In a very economically dangerous way. I think it's nuts to base an entire economy on consumerism, and I hate the way it debases everyone. We are all just targets of advertising, which is literally everywhere. I find that disgusting.
And I wish I could sign up for one of Robert's philosophy classes. That was fascinating. I'm reminded yet again of how lucky I am to have found Atrios and to be able to have conversations with people like you, Robert, and you, kei & yuri. I've learned a lot.
wow. anyone who can be that grateful after our weak-ass answer ("uhhh...sweden") must be a exemplarily good person.
but to attempt a save the swedes did pick up on the "nurture capitalism" thing years before John Maynard Keynes loudly and rudely spanked the "nature" fundamentalist economists whose refusal to interfere with "a market that would, any day now, self-correct" allowed the depression to last a decade.
Bearing in mind Russell's explanation that religion and science do not overlap and could happily co-exist if they didn't fight over territory, looking at the success of mixed economies against the failures of "pure capitalism" and various communisms, the lesson of the history of philosophies is the very Buddhist formula that nobody has "the answer," and "the answer" is very likely a compromise.
W. Kiernan: Is that adequacy.org a sideline for Ed Anger?
Here's my fave quote:
"The sole purpose of "reality TV" is to desensitize Americans to Communism."
HA HA HA HA HA!
kei & yuri - exactly my philosophy - I believe in balance, insofar as it is possible, and that involves compromise from all sides.
Compromise gets a bad rap. I don't ever mean that compromise with actual evil is possible, 'cause it isn't. But otherwise, the Buddha is, well, the Buddha.
'Course, the Buddha would likely say that evil only exists in our minds which are full of delusion. That is one of the harder points I tried to swallow when I still practiced. But, I'm not the Buddha.
Or maybe, having the Buddha nature, I am, but I'm too ignorant to know it. Alas.
I have to say, while I have a somewhat peripheral--if not actual--love for Atrios, this is one of his most unfair and uninformed posts. This is the tactic of the "enemy" (fuck Republicans). We can not acknowledge the rationality and good faith of those who compile the statistics while surreptitiously questioning the numbers they provide. Either the Labor employees were true to the task and compiled the numbers in an honest fashion, or they weren't. But don't pussyfoot around it.
"A senior administration official tells Sunday's WASH POST: O'Neill's suggestion 'is laughable. Nobody listened to him when he was in office. Why should anybody now?'... "
The smear campaign begins.
"A senior administration official tells Sunday's WASH POST: O'Neill's suggestion 'is laughable. Nobody listened to him when he was in office. Why should anybody now?'... "
Hahahahahahaha! Scramble, suckers.
Bush Seeks Ways to Create Jobs, and Fast
Kind of puts charges of Bush knew about 9/11 in a new light.
Alex | Email | Homepage | 01.10.04 - 12:04 pm | #
No, it DOESN'T. Iraq has NOTHING to do with 9/11, therefore Bush's intent to invade Iraq had to have been motivated by something else.
O'Neill's book and his appearance on 60 minutes are a delicious morsel handed to the American people.
Obviously, O'Neill has an axe to grind and he has planted that axe in Bush's back. Revenge is quite sweet for those who seek it.
The media and the WH are seeking to discredit O'Neill, (hopefully there will be no unfortunate plane crash or heart attack) and will probably trot out the same lame idiots who will question his sanity, (ala Dean), call him a liar (ala Gore) or trot out fellow cabinet members to call into question his prior work history and temperment (ala Clark), or maybe find a Jewish grandmere (ala Kerry) that he was hiding.
I think that as time passes the formerly unthinkable is becoming more commonly accepted among the non-mouth breathers in America, that Bush knew, that Bush and his administration let 9-11 happen (me thnks he was quite happy when the towers fell and he could now become the dictator he was longing to become) and that more than 500 American deaths and 9,000 maimed were a small price to pay to avenge his daddy and crown him King George of America.
Of course, the labor statistics are "massagable". Duh. But even more troubling is the news media fawning over this great RECOVERY!
"The true capitol of business is labor" Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican President of the United States. I think the main reason for Wall Streets' distaste for Costco's operation is that they are not following the grand plan of Wal-Martification of America by paying a below the poverty level wage, providing no health care, which will eventually be an extreme burden on governmental departments which will go unfunded so that many government services can then be outsourced to private firms, making more Republicans richer, and finally eliminating the middle class entirely.
"jeffers-why don't you just preach some time? The idea of the Chinese rejecting capitalism like a Roman internal combustion engine is the most fascinating thing we've heard in a while."
Not sure I follow this: are you intimating that capitalism could only have been discerned by Europeans at a certain point in "humane development?" Are you aware that banks, which many consider a backbone of capitalism, appeared in Europe during the medieval period, when the feudal system was dominant?
Or do you think that only people in recent history, say, post-Enlightenment, are "enlightened" enough to come up with such "subtle" concepts as "capitalism"?
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." And more depth of human experience and thought than you seem to think possible. Conceiving a capitalist economic system is a fair simpler thing than developing the engineering and understanding of physics necessary to design an internal combustion engine.
Lapham may be full of blue mud, as my grandmother used to say. But to implicitly argue that the Chinese were too "simple" to develop capitalism before Europeans did, is intellectually vacuous.
jeffers
ummm...not only did we not say that, not only are you appearantly unaware that some ancient levantine culture or other did (maybe not Romans) develop and reject the internal combustion engine, as well as a number of other labor-saving devices (to preserve slavery), but the Chinese rejecting slavery thing was your quote man. You said the Chinese did that...and then someone using your name turned it into some kind of racist explanation for the third world.
christ. message received-never compliment you by way of asking for a free lecture snippet again...unless that lecture is about what child-molesting anti-semitic racists we are...
"not say that" like you managed to twist it, we mean. Again:
[thread]: capitalism has certain tendencies away from stability, which some might look at and reject as a bad idea even while our economists swear by it and insist thee has never been and can never be an alternative.
[jeffers]: among many other points as an aside, the ancient chinese could have had but rejected capitalism.
[kei & yuri]: neat. tell more.
[jeffers]: by their above statement kei & yuri are obviously racists who doubt that "chinks" can be as good as whites.
?
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