Fiorina's Presidential Plan To Save The Economy: Stop Lazy Workers From 'Watching Porn All Day Long'

Former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, who is expected to announce a campaign for president, said over the weekend that she could improve the economy by cutting federal worker pay because they were "watching porn all day long."

In a Sunday interview with Fox News host Chris Wallace, Fiorina said that there was a "higher than 90 percent" chance that she would become a Republican presidential candidate.

The former HP CEO explained that she would make a formidable candidate "because I understand technology: a transformational tool, because I understand bureaucracies, how they work and how you need to change them. And our government is a huge bureaucracy."

According to Fiorina, the United States was "destroying more businesses than we are creating" for the first time in U.S. history under President Barack Obama's administration. READ MORE

It's the 21st Century - Why Are We Working So Much?

Surveys show that most people think their jobs are
pointless. (photo: Henryk T. Kaiser/Rex)

By Owen Hatherley, Guardian UK

08 July 12

The right calls for hard work, the left for more jobs. The dream of mechanisation leading to shorter working hours seems forgotten.

f there's one thing practically all futurologists once agreed on, it's that in the 21st century there would be a lot less work. What would they have thought, if they had known that in 2012, the 9-5 working day had in the UK become something more like 7am to 7pm? They would surely have looked around and seen technology take over in many professions which previously needed heavy manpower, they would have looked at the increase in automation and mass production, and wondered - why are they spending 12 hours a day on menial tasks?

It's a question which isn't adequately answered either by the right or by the official left. Conservatives have always loved to pontificate about the moral virtue of hard work and much of the left, focusing on the terrible effects of mass unemployment, understandably gives "more jobs" as its main solution to the crisis. Previous generations would have found this hopelessly disappointing.

In almost all cases, utopians, socialists and other futurologists believed that work would come near to being abolished for one reason above all - we could let the machines do it. The socialist thinker Paul Lafargue wrote in his pointedly titled tract The Right To Be Lazy (1883):

"Our machines, with breath of fire, with limbs of unwearying steel, with fruitfulness wonderful inexhaustible, accomplish by themselves with docility their sacred labour. And nevertheless the genius of the great philosophers of capitalism remains dominated by the prejudices of the wage system, worst of slaveries. They do not yet understand that the machine is the saviour of humanity, the god who shall redeem man from working for hire, the god who shall give him leisure and liberty."

Oscar Wilde evidently agreed - in his 1891 essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism,   READ MORE

From Combat to Busboy: Looming Job Challenges for War Vets

By Aaron Smith, CNN Money

24 March 12

eterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan face unique hurdles in an already tough job market.

Many have suffered physical and mental injuries. Others have a hard time getting employers to see the value of their wartime experience.

"Being the best mortar man in the best battalion in the world doesn't mean a whole lot when you come out," said Sean Parnell, author of "Outlaw Platoon," a book about his experiences as an Army platoon leader in Afghanistan in 2006. "Fifty percent of my men who are now out of the military are living paycheck to paycheck - working as a busboy, or at a bar, or maybe not working at all."

More than 2.2 million soldiers, Marines and sailors have served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Another 90,000 troops are slated to return from Afghanistan by 2014.

For a long time, post 9/11 veterans have faced a much higher jobless rate than the general population. Just a year ago, it stood at 12.5%, well above the national average. A big push by employers and government knocked the rate to 7.6% in February, even below the overall U.S. unemployment rate of 8.3%.

Still, many veterans struggle to find work.

"These guys have these bang-up resumes for the military and then they get out and civilians don't know what to do with them," said Parnell. "So they end up working at a Subway."  READ MORE

What the Job Numbers Mean

By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog

08 April 12

he economy added only 120,000 jobs in March - down from the rate of more than 200,000 in each of the preceding three months. The rate of unemployment dropped from 8.3 to 8.2 percent mainly because fewer people were searching for jobs - and that rate depends on how many people are actively looking.

It's way too early to conclude the jobs recovery is stalling, but there's reason for concern.

Remember: Consumer spending is 70 percent of the economy. Employers won't hire without enough sales to justify the additional hires. It's up to consumers to make it worth their while.

But real spending (adjusted to remove price changes) this year hasn't been going anywhere. It increased just .5 percent in February after an anemic .2 percent increase in January.

The reason consumers aren't spending more is they don't have the money. Personal income was up just .2 percent in February - barely enough to keep up with inflation. As a result, personal saving as a percent of disposable income tumbled to 3.7 percent in February from 4.3 percent in January.

Personal saving is now at its lowest level since March 2009.
  READ MORE

Why Don't We Pay People Enough? 8 Facts About America's Struggling Working People

 

Millions of people in the U.S. work and are still poor.

January 23, 2012

“Our nation, so richly endowed with natural resources and with a capable and industrious population, should be able to devise ways and means of insuring to all our able-bodied men and women, a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.”  Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1937

Millions of people in the US work and are still poor.  Here are eight points that show why the US needs to dedicate itself to making work pay.

  

• One.  How many people work and are still poor?  
• Two.  What kinds of jobs do the working poor have?
• Three.  Which workers are most likely to be working and still poor?
• Four.  What about benefits for low wage workers?
• Five.  What rights do the working poor have?
• Six.  What about wage theft from the working poor?
• Seven.  What is a living wage in the US? 
• Eight.  What about jobs for the unemployed and underemployed?

 READ MORE

        

Jobs Won't Come Back to America Until the Government Pushes Greedy Corporate Executives to Invest at Home

Without bold government action on behalf of our workforce, good American jobs will continue to disappear January 23, 2012 Who should have the primary strategic responsibility for making American workers globally competitive – the private sector or government? This will be a defining issue in the 2012 campaign.
In his State of the Union address, President Obama will make the case that government has a vital role. His Republican rivals disagree. Mitt Romney charges the President is putting “free enterprise on trial,” while Newt Gingrich merely fulminates about “liberal elites.”

American business won’t and can’t lead the way to more and better jobs in the United States. First, the private sector is increasingly global, with less and less stake in America. Second, it’s driven by the necessity of creating profits, not better jobs.

The National Science Foundation has just released its biennial report on global investment in science, engineering and technology. The NSF warns that the United States is quickly losing ground to Asia, especially to China. America’s share of global R&D spending is tumbling. In the decade to 2009, it dropped from 38 percent to 31 percent, while Asia’s share rose from 24 to 35 percent.

One big reason: According to the NSF, American firms nearly doubled their R&D investment in Asia over these years, to over $7.5 billion.

 READ MORE

Rhetoric aside, since when do businesses care about job creation?

Romney in September, in a speech
detailing a 59-point job creation proposal.
(AP photo)

COMMENTARY | January 11, 2012

 Henry Banta points out that corporate leaders’ goal is to make a profit, and that ‘any sane businessman wants to employ as few people as he can.’ If jobs get in the way of profits, the jobs go – as Mitt Romney well knows.



By Henry Banta
henrybanta@aol.com

We’ve been hearing a lot from Governor Romney about how his experience as a businessman makes him an expert on job creation. While there has been some challenge to his claim of actually having created jobs, the basic notion that business experience gives a special insight into the creation of jobs deserves a lot more attention from the press than it has gotten. In particular, how do the policies promoted by the business community actually relate to the creation of jobs?

Start with a simple fact: The role of businessmen in our economy is not job creation. Businesses and their leaders are not rewarded for the number of people they employ. They are in business to make a profit. They have no incentive to create jobs per se. Capitalist markets reward profit, not employment. Indeed any sane businessman wants to employ as few people as he can. If jobs get in the way of profits, jobs go. (This is one aspect of the matter that Romney should remember well.)  READ MORE

Henry M. Banta is a partner in the Washington, DC, law firm of Lobel, Novins & Lamont.
E-mail: henrybanta@aol.com

The big battle over overseas profits

Pfizer is one of a group of corporations that could benefit from a tax holiday. | AP Photo

Goaded by battalions of corporate lobbyists, members of Congress are working to give a select group of U.S. multinational firms like Oracle, Apple and Pfizer a lavish tax break on $1 trillion stashed offshore.
A number of trade groups and corporations that would benefit have joined in a coalition called WIN America. New lobbying disclosure reports show that the group and its member firms have spent millions of dollars, and employed dozens of lobbyists, to press for the tax break, according to an analysis by iWatch News.

The goal is to generate jobs and investment, but the offshore tax holiday was tried before, in 2004, and the lion’s share of the benefits went not to unemployed workers and their families but to corporate shareholders and executives.

Defenders of the tax holiday say bringing money back from overseas will be a net positive, adding an infusion of cash into the economy and creating opportunities for new jobs. The New America Foundation has estimated that the boost to the economy could ultimately lead to the creation of from 1.3 million to 2.5 million jobs.

But other estimates say the proposed tax holiday could end up costing the Treasury $40 billion to $80 billion over the next decade, and critics are asking why corporations and their shareholders should get a tax break on overseas profits, especially at a time of high unemployment. The high cost of the measure is one reason that its prospects for passage are mixed.  READ MORE

War Industry’s Accountants Can’t Count

The war profiteers’ shady lobbying campaign took another hit to its credibility today, as an accounting firm on which they relied to support their bogus “military spending = jobs” argument was cited for severe audit deficiencies. As our new War Costs short video shows, the war industry’s Second To None lobbying effort specifically cited numbers from Deloitte & Touche to claim an inflated importance of the military industrial sector to the U.S. economy. This claim was part of their larger effort, thoroughly debunked by our prior work, to try to convince Congress to protect their gravy train from budget cuts by tying war spending to job creation. Their entire narrative is false–military spending actually costs jobs compared to other ways of spending the money. READ MORE

Krugman: This is a Depression

Over the past year, I’ve seen these words posted by many of the FP’ers here, and they are thus: “It’s sad to see what passes for happy news about our economy these days.” IMHO, folks are grabbing at straws. Frankly, I get the sense from some that it’s bordering on (wilted) “green shoots” déjà vu. Those talking points didn’t work for our Party in 2010, and they sure as hell won’t do the job for us in 2012. Perhaps, as Paul Krugman notes in Monday’s NY Times (and if you read the collective commentary of some of the better-known economic pundits in the MSM over the past 48 hours), we really are teetering on the abyss. READ MORE

Study Shows Regulations Account for Only 0.2% of All Layoffs

By: David Dayen Friday October 14, 2011 6:22 am

The new new thing in journalism is a little thing called fact-checking. I know, it’s very novel. What happens is that claims are actually tested and subjected to a rigorous analysis. We’re still one step away from the test happening BEFORE the alleged facts get into stories; usually the “fact check” article is separate from the he said/she said article. But the discriminating reader can actually determine the truth from the lies after several years of reading.

So one of these fact-checks has gone ahead and debunked one of the two central themes of Republican job creation plans, that simply deregulating industry will bring about a job boom. Turns out that regulations aren’t responsible for jobs:
READ MORE

Rick Perry's Campaign Strategy? Distorting His Abysmal Economic Record

Get ready for a boat-load of spin.
August 14, 2011

Rick Perry's strategy for winning the GOP nomination – and then the White House – is simple: he'll try to get there by wildly distorting his abysmal economic record as governor of Texas beyond all recognition. The spin started even before he announced his candidacy on Saturday, when right-wing blogger Erick Erickson introduced him as the governor who had created 40 percent of all the new jobs in the U.S. since the “recovery” began. During the announcement, Perry went on to talk about “jobs” 11 more times.

Rick Perry can't tell the truth about his economic record. That's because, more than any other single factor, he has immigration to thank for those numbers – most of it from Mexico, and a large share of it unauthorized. You can't win the Republican nomination by bragging about being one of the states that has seen the biggest rise in Mexican immigrants during your tenure, and even if you could, it's not an economic model for the country as a whole as Mexican immigration has now slowed to a trickle.
READ MORE