Fact-esque

Union Backtalk at Delphi

Well well well. It seems that after 30 years of abuse it's finally paying off to be the member of a union, and the "I spit on unions - pah! pah! - what have unions ever done except take dues money?" crowd ain't at'all happy about it. To quote chief NYT whiner Bruce Gump, "I’m being thrown out with yesterday’s trash." Mr Gump's complaint? Union members at his company are having their pensions fully paid out while Mr Gump and his fellow non-union members might have theirs cut. Too bad.

Huge Health Insurance Price Hikes for Small Businesses - What a Good Idea!

OK, Quiz Time: If you were a health insurance corpo exec during the first national discussion of healthcare reform since Truman, a time when the public is pressing for a public option on the assumption that it is going to be way cheaper than anything private for-profit investor-driven health insurors have any intention of offering what with the continuous price hikes we've seen for the last 30 years running alongside a deteriorating healthcare system in which everything is a pre-existing condition and it always seems to turn out that nothing is covered and said public already, like, hates your guts, would you: Raise rates on smll businesses, the core of GOP and conservaDem voters, both of which parties are desperately trying to protect your profits in the face of enormous public opposition?

Would I go too far if I assumed your answer to that question is a resounding "Good grief, NO!" If not and that's actually your answer, um, you're wrong. That's precisely what the insurers are doing and promise they will continue to do right up to the point a real public option makes them completely irrelevant.

Foreign Co's Do What US Co's Can't...And in the US

OK. Here's the deal: US corpo's consistently claim they can't make money in the US unless they can underpay workers, strip their benefits, and kill their unions, and that that's why they have to outsource, globalize, and hire illegals. Americans, they say archly, don't want to work any more, don't have a work ethic, and spend more time worrying about their vacations than their jobs.

They say this despite the 1000 applications for every 25 jobs that show up, the 60+ hrs/wk Americans put in, the vacations they don't get and the holidays the corpo's ignore. They say this despite loading up many employees with the responsibilities that used to be handled by 5 people at the same time they cut salaries and benefits, which they call "a rise in productivity" and then brag about as if their management skills were the reason for it.

So if we're such schmucks and so useless, why do foreign companies want to hire us? And how come they can make money where their American counterparts can't?

Modern American Capitalism: Shoot the Ducks and Grab the Bucks (Updated)

As Marx predicted, so it has come to pass. Unrestricted capitalism is the snake that eventually eats itself after it has finished off everything else. Don't believe it? Here's an example:

For years - decades - now we have all bewailed the notion that "America doesn't make anything any more". There's a reason for that. Besides their conscienceless globalization that mercilessly exploits the poor in low wage, low tax countries, American Big Business has made its money not by building companies but by tearing them down for huge if short-term profits.

Ross Douchehat: The NYT Hired Him...Why, Exactly?

If David Brooks was a dumb move, what do you call the NYT's scooping up the worst conservative columnist this side of Jonah G? Inspired? Or suicidal?

Douthat, in that patented, barely acknowledged aside that smirks, "Everybody knows that", announced in his column today that the problem with Bush was that he was a - hold onto your braces - "crypto-liberal" president.

Pigs in Space 35: Kick 'Em When They're Down, Then Put Your Boot On Their Necks

Given the amount of NYT-dissing we've been doing lately it is perhaps time that we give a shout-out to somebody who works there but is neither an apologist for the administration nor an ass-kisser of the rich and powerful. Doubt that there is such a person left at the NYT? Actually, there are several, like Gretchen Morgenson in the Business Section (we haven't been hearing much from her lately) and Steven Greenhouse who covers Labor (though the paper won't call it that; they don't have a "Labor Section").

Greenhouse wrote yesterday of a reality we've all known about for years but which the NYT just hasn't had time to look at, what with all the time and space that singing sob stories about the R&P take up: the wide-spread ripoff by employers of workers they're already paying minimum wage to.

Pigs in Space 34: Cognitive Dissonance in the NYT Business Pages

Seems to be "Pick On the NYT Week" - or something - but one can hardly help it. The Times is rapidly approaching in its business pages the kind of propagandistic cheerleading that the Post has become famous for providing in its "war coverage". I have to put that in quotes because the WaPo doesn't cover the war so much as it covers official excuses/rationales for its inception and official denials/lies about its failure. So does the NYT cover Wall Street these days, pimping for the corporate/financial message that It's All Good and Everything Is Fine & Dandy. They've spent many pages and pixels telling us the sad, sad stories of how the economioc downturn has discommoded the rich; they've applauded every govt giveaway to the financial pirates who screwed us; yesterday they even insisted that TARP had worked and the economy was turning around. Pretty soon I'm going to have to start putting quotes around "business coverage" whenever I'm talking about the NYT.

Pigs in Space 33: Cognitive Dissonance on Wall Street (Updated)

I realize that I'm just whistling into the wind here but someone has to say that the phony optimism being ginned up by Wall Street is simply the lead-in to another con.

Nearly a year after the federal rescue of the nation’s biggest banks, taxpayers have begun seeing profits from the hundreds of billions of dollars in aid that many critics thought might never be seen again.

The profits, collected from eight of the biggest banks that have fully repaid their obligations to the government, come to about $4 billion, or the equivalent of about 15 percent annually, according to calculations compiled for The New York Times.

This might - might - mean something if the profits had been generated by increased income from new business but it's important to remember: they weren't. They were generated either by one-time sell-offs of subsidiary companies or businesses, or they were generated by the kind of insider financial trading that Paul Krugman called "worthless if not destructive from a social point of view."

Pigs in Space 30: Thar's $$$ in Them Thar (Mortgage) Bills

Yessir, when you've got a good thing going and you've squeezed it dry, all you gotta do to make the money flow again is "help" the people you just took to teh cleaners. Plus you get to pretend you're a goddam hero. It's a nice perk.

This week, the Obama administration summoned mortgage company executives to Washington to demand they move faster to lower payments for homeowners sliding toward foreclosure. Treasury officials called on the companies to hire and train more people quickly to field applications for relief.

But industry insiders and legal experts say the limited capacity of mortgage companies is not the primary factor impeding the government’s $75 billion program to prevent foreclosures. Instead, it is that many mortgage companies are reluctant to give strapped homeowners a break because the companies collect lucrative fees on delinquent loans.

Even when borrowers stop paying, mortgage companies that service the loans collect fees out of the proceeds when homes are ultimately sold in foreclosure. So the longer borrowers remain delinquent, the greater the opportunities for these mortgage companies to extract revenue — fees for insurance, appraisals, title searches and legal services.

(emphasis added)

We suspected all along that the reluctance of the banking industry to re-finance delinquent homeowners had something to do with $$$. We knew it when they fought tooth and nail to keep the Congress or the Obama Admin from passing laws or setting up banking regulations that would allow bankruptcy judges to reset mortgage deals in court. Now, thanks to the NYT's Peter Goodman, we know a little jore about how the latest scam works.

What, did you think they were going to set it up to help you? They set it up so that yet another layer of fees can be gouged from what little they've left in your account. The Blue Dogs have, of course, helped the banksters to head off any attempt to keep them from raking off your money for the privilege of fixing the mess they made from raking off your money. It's a two-fer.

No conscience, no morals, no ethics. It's The World According to Ebeneezer Scrooge: we exist only as long as we perform the function of victim for the rapists. When we can't do that any more, when we're completely tapped out and the rich have appriopriated all our money, all the nation's resources, and all the planet's useful (read: profit-making) materials, there will no longer be any reason for our existence and we'd best die to decrease the surplus population.

You thought Dickens wrote a cautionary tale, didn't you? Turns out he wrote the Modern Banker's Ethics Handbook.

The Poor Rich and How the Recession Hurts Them

Yesterday I started a post about an NYT article that whined on concerning how tough the Bush Recession is on the jewelry industry, but when I tried to save it my library computer melted down and I lost the whole thing. Maybe it's just as well because I come back today and here's another article on the NYT Business pages about how rough it is to be a millionaire who owns a $5.4M mansion on Nantucket and can't sell it. I don't know if this is supposed to be a "series" - it isn't billed as one - or if the NYT is simply convinced that the only audience it has that matters are all Bernie Madoff clones who work for Goldman Sachs but if so I think I just figured out why their circulation is down: that's what happens when you need to sell a couple million papers but you aim them at only a couple thousand people, 1500 of whom hate your guts.

This is not a good business decision, no?