Fact-esque

It's the Greed, Stupid

Alabama has been a reliably conservative, even ultraconservative, state for decades. Pro-business, pro-privatization, anti-regulatory, anti-tax. In Northport, the McDonalds where Ronnie Rayguns stopped for a Big Mac is a major tourist attraction. Maybe the only one. Its two wingnut Senators, Dick Shelby and Jeff Sessions, are powerhouses in the far-right GOP. It has professed to have no truck with any stoopid liberal notions like watchdog agencies to prevent predatory practices. It has insisted that Business Is Always Right and it has turned numerous govt programs that used to be considered "public" over to private corporations because, after all, govt doesn't know what it's doing and they do.

So it's kinda difficult to work up any sympathy when you read something like this from Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone. I mean, it's a shame and a crime but on the other hand, these are people who practically got down on their knees and begged to be ripped off.

Banking Reform: We Can Do It If We Want To, We Just Don't Want To

OK, so Krugman isn't wild about Dodd's banking reform bill. Nevertheless he is bending over backwards to make it sound better than it is.

[H]ow good is the legislation on the table, the bill put together by Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut?

Not good enough. It's a good-faith effort to do what needs to be done, but it would create a system highly dependent on the wisdom and good intentions of government officials. And as the history of the last decade demonstrates, trusting in the quality of officials can be dangerous to the economy's health.

"Good faith effort"? That's pushing the benefit of the doubt past the breaking point. The admittedly minimal House bill was a "good faith effort" if your definition of "good faith" is an effort to just barely control the worst of Wall Street's usual financial scams, shenanigans, and skullduggery. Dodd's bill is a bad faith effort to make non-reform smell like reform, thus keeping Wall Street happy with him so his life-after-the-Senate will be a very comfortable one.

In-the-Tank Media Laud Geithner's Citigroup Scam

The NYT, WaPo, Bloomberg, everybody is breaking their journalistic arms slapping Wall Street Timmy on the back for his decision to sell Citigroup for what he - and they - are calling a significant "profit". Pay attention to that word.

Good News: Recession Makes Workers Lower Expectations

From the Desk of: PS Winterhalter, Dir Worker Management

To: John Engler, Pres & CEO, National Association of Manufacturers

Re: Update Report on Project Free Labor

Dear John:

The latest statistics are in from our most recent study and I am pleased to report that Project Free Labor has taken a giant step toward its ultimate goal of eliminating all labor costs.

As you know, we have been using our clout with our employees in Congress to create a labor situation that is extremely favorable to us. Wages have remained stable for 30 years while executive pay packs have skyrocketed in value. By joining our friends in Wall Street in their efforts to merge with the Executive Office and the White House, we have been able to promote a series of economic crises that have made us all rich and forced millions of workers to take major cutbacks. By destroying the part of the economy that benefits non-investors, we have made serious inroads into the most stubborn obstacle between us and our ultimate goal of unpaid labor.

I am pleased to be able to report to you today that worker expectations have been significantly lowered to the point where many previously picky workers who objected to low pay and unacceptable working conditions are so happy just to have a job that they are now willing to take them under whatever conditions we decree.

A result [of our planned recession/depression - PSW] is a new cadre of underemployed workers dotting American companies, occupying slots several rungs below where they are accustomed to working. These are not the more drastic examples of former professionals toiling away at "survival jobs" at Home Depot or Starbucks. They are the former chief financial officer working as comptroller, the onetime marketing director who is back to being an analyst, the former manager who is once again an "individual contributor."

The phenomenon was probably inevitable in a labor market in which job seekers outnumber openings five to one. Employers are seizing the opportunity to stock up on discounted talent....

As this article shows, we are now in the Third Phase of Project Free Labor where mid-level executives are being forced to accept jobs well below their former pay grade, thus increasing the downward pressure on all wages. After all, if an ex-CFO has to work for 20% of his old salary, shouldn't some line-worker or clerk be willing to do the same?

I know that we still have a long way to go to a labor pool that will cost us nothing at all because we won 't have to pay them anything, but I believe this latest development proves that we are on the right course and that, while contriving the deliberate near-destruction of the world economy was a somewhat daring strategy, it is now clear that it has been successful and was well worth the risks we took on behalf of ourselves and our investors.

PS Winterhalter, Director

The Free Labor Project

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Sticks & Stones May Break My Bones But Threats Will Never Hurt Me

You may remember not too long ago when the banksters were insisting that they just had to have their bonuses and their GIGANTIC salaries because otherwise they just wouldn't be able to get anybody to work in banking any more. If, in fact, they lost as much as a single percentage point, they'd all go John Galt on us and we could just see how hard they worked screwing their investors and wrecking the planet, and when we were overwhelmed and bloodshot and wringing with sweat, then we'd understand how important they were and come crying back to them, begging them to take over again.

Turns out all that whining and threatening was kind of, well, bullshit.

IBM Lays Off 1000's in US While Offshoring 1000's of Jobs

"Change", my foot. Corporate America goes on just like before, the same tricks, the same dodges, the same hatred of its own employees.

IBM was heavily invested in a place called Research Triangle Park around Raleigh, NC, where I spent some time in '08. There were some 20,000 workers plus in and around Raleigh at several different facilities which were built when the company moved South to avoid the union pressure they were getting up North.

The Carolinas are both right-to-work states, a misleading appellation that ought more accurately to be stated as right-to-work-for-the-lowest-possible-wages-and-zero-worker-protection states because that's what corpo's and their state pol-puppets interpret the phrase to mean. But that doesn't prevent unions from organizing - no state law can accomplish that, and believe me they've tried - and several unions have been working in the Triangle trying to make inroads. It got a lot easier when the dot-com bubble burst and it began to dawn on the techies that they weren't going to be millionaires after all, but it was still uphill going. Right-to-work laws heavily favor predatory employers who historically pull out all the stops smashing local economies that threaten to force wages upward even a little bit.

As the Bush Depression hit harder, IBM - not one of the most innovative thinkers in the corporate world - noticed that the unions were beginning to make a dent with sign-ups. At that point, they did what Jack "The Axe" Welch taught them to do: make Wall Street happy by firing a lot of people and dumping their jobs on the poor schnooks who were left. When it wasn't enough to stop the unions, they began to take a leaf out of GM's book: they outsourced and went global, moving many of the operations in the US offshore to low-wage, low-tax countries.

Has Goldman Gone Too Far? Buying a Couple of Elections Will Fix It

Time to spend a little time connecting dots again. Today's Dots: Goldman Sachs and the SCOTUS decision allowing unlimited corporate interference in our elections.

We Made You and We Can Break You (Updated)

Because it's obvious how pissed off everybody is, Obama has chosen to talk a tough populist line lately, threatening bonuses and executive salary caps along with new SEC regs and restrictions on bankster enterprises that looks a lot like the Glass-Steigal law the corpo's just paid $millions$ to undo. They don't like it much, of course, and they're fighting back with threats of their own.

Business Schools Considering Classes in Critical Thinking? I Don't Think So

The NYT Business Section's mindless acceptance of any corporate utterance, no matter how inane or flatly untrue, sometimes leads to unintentional hilarity. James Clay Fuller ran across one such article in last Sunday's Times in which a reporter code-named "Lane Wallace" wrote a breathless piece on how America's corporate training grounds, the "business" schools, are now going to begin encouraging "critical thinking" in future corporate scam artists - oops, sorry - executives by offering classes in Critical Thinking.

Yeah. That'll work. Fuller thought the whole idea was hilarious.

The VISA Credit Card Scam: From Now On, Use Your PIN

This is for those people who think maybe that all the credit scams of recent years are of recent vintage. Hardly. Credit card scams in particular have been going on as long as credit cards have been in existence. They'd barely broached the idea before the creditors were figuring ways to scam the consumers who used them. Watch carefully now. Which shell is the pea under?

Every day, millions of Americans stand at store checkout counters and make a seemingly random decision: after swiping their debit card, they choose whether to punch in a code, or to sign their name.

It is a pointless distinction to most consumers, since the price is the same either way. But behind the scenes, billions of dollars are at stake.

When you sign a debit card receipt at a large retailer, the store pays your bank an average of 75 cents for every $100 spent, more than twice as much as when you punch in a four-digit code.

***

[S]ignature debit cards dominate debit use in this country, accounting for 61 percent of all such transactions, even though PIN debit cards are less expensive and less vulnerable to fraud.

(emphasis added)

Got that so far? Punch in a PIN, a 30c charge. Sign your name, 75c. multiplied by millions and millions and millions over decades. How, you ask, did they do it - besides hiding from consumers how much extra it was costing them to sign their names?