Another day, another golf outing after layoffs

Today's ridiculous corporate piracy story comes out of Gannett Newspapers where the president is playing in a charity golf tournament on the company dime. Of course this comes after the company laid off 3,000 workers over Christmas. Naturally the same golfer released a phony sympathy memo at the same time going a little something like this :

"As all of you are painfully aware, the fiscal crisis is deepening and the economy is getting worse. Gannett’s revenues continue to be severely impacted by this downturn, and our local operations are suffering. While we are doing our best to reduce all non staff-related expenses, I am sorry to report that we must do another round of layoffs across our division.

Ahh, I wonder how many jobs that golf trip cost. Naturally, after the AIG scandalous parties and the pay to the CEO of Lehman Brothers nothing surprises me these days. Using the CEO pay database and comparison tool, I saw that the compensation for the CEO of Gannett was 314 times that of someone making an entry level salary of $42,000. To put it another way, it would take an entry level worker 314 years, or 4 lifetimes to make as much as the CEO makes in a single year. I guess I better work on that reincarnation gig if I hope to be able to keep up.

Regime Change 2009

Well the Bush regime has finally ended and the Obama one begun, so here's to four new years. Watching the helicopter take Bush to Andrews Air Force base, I noticed something I never saw in the other changings of the guard--people cheering that the previous president was leaving. Also, I found it a bit ironic that the senator who used to be a member of the KKK collapsed during the inaugural luncheon for the first African American/biracial president. Obama now has the unenviable job of dealing with a decaying global economy and cleaning up the mess left behind by decades of deregulating the financial system and dismantling the mechanisms to police the financial world brought on by four terms of Clinton and Bush.

Bush's Legacy

As the end of the Bush years draws closer by the minute I have noticed show after show about this legacy. The chorus from all but the most partisan individuals seem to put him in the bottom half of the presidential lists, so this got me thinking as one who has done a lot of studying of history and politics to consider the validity of statements such as the one by historian Robert Mcelvaine on whether Bush justifiably is the worst president so far:

Like a majority of other historians who participated in this poll, my conclusion is that the preponderance of the evidence now indicates that, while this nation has had at least its share of failed presidencies, no previous presidency was as large a failure in so many areas as the current one.

Arguing with these sentiments definitely proves to be something above both my paygrade, to quote the incoming president, and would be an affront to my belief in using reason. On the domestic front Bush had many failures, which all stem from a basic inability to govern and instead takes the worst of all approaches by compromising to appease nobody but special interest. Let us take the case of the response to the 9/11 attacks as just one example of this ineptitude. Rather than beefing up domestic security in vital infrastructure such as actually checking the cargo coming in at ports, Bush instead set up a giant bureaucracy in the Department of Homeland Security. Since the new jobs created by the bureaucracy such as the TSA airport screeners were unionized, the Democrats signed off on the creation of the DHS along with the very questionable Patriot Act. Now the government became too busy making sure that travellers were not carrying four ounces of liquids on planes or not patriotically reading the proper books. We are not any safer as a result, but billions of dollars were spent in a knee jerk reaction which took in many people, myself included in the days following September 11. The list of failures to accomplish anything meaningful for the American people is long during these eight years, from dealing with illegal immigration to the social Security System to bailing out billionaires.

Now for the hard part, to find achievements of Bush's to contrast with the myriad failures of the past eight years. Among his better acts was the increased funding for NASA, which not only improved greatly human understanding, but it is also a way to increase the prestige of the US around the world with such wonders as the Hubble(and soon to be Webb) telescopes, the ISS, and the manned space program. The only other positive act from this administration that immediately comes to mind was the product of Bush meeting one of my favorite world leaders, Lula da Silva(president of Brazil), in Rio de Janeiro. There Bush finally removed the tariffs on Brazilian ethanol, which is produced much cheaper than the corn ethanol in the US and opened up trade with one of the world's future economic powers.

In light of a brief examination of the Bush years, where would I rank him among presidents? The answer follows below with an explanation of the presidents below him:


39-Bush
40-Warren G. Harding-had cabinet members selling the oil reserved for the Navy for personal gain
41-William Henry Harrison-died shortly after taking office, so nothing was done
42-Andrew Johnson-His refusal to grant civil rights during his term made reconstruction much more acrimonious.
43-Andrew Jackson-Removed the Cherokee and Creek Indians to gain the gold on their land, in violation of the Supreme Court. He destroyed the banking system of the US by removing the second national bank. Why he is on the twenty dollar bill is still a mystery to me.

Made shittily in China

I am angry, to say the least. Yesterday while riding my bike, I was nearly at the halfway point of my eight mile ride and I push down on the pedal and the pedals move and the wheels do not. I inspected, thinking that the chain was off, and discovered that the pedals were broken. The crank which drove the chain broke off next to the pedals. Now, this was even more infuriating since this was maybe the tenth time I had ridden the bike. Naturally, I went to see where this was made, and naturally it was made in China.

Suddenly, the absolute lack of workmanship made perfect sense. In order to save a fraction of a cent, some greedy individual outsourced the factory from some small town in America to China. Since the Chinese use slave labor, this made perfect sense from the bottom line. After all, if you can pay $300 a month to a Chinese worker, why would you pay $300 a week to an American one? Further, to reduce the cost of shipping from Asia back to the American markets, the cost will be great, so the incentive to reduce weight is paramount. Therefore, the American firm will tell the Chinese supplier to cut down on the amount of material used for certain parts, which will reduce each unit by half a pound, which saves tens of thousands of dollars in fuel costs. This of course means that the quality of product is reduced because the probability of product failure is increased, the risk of recall goes up, and the consumer satisfaction goes down. However, the elites will always tell you that people like buying Chinese goods since X number of billions of dollars a year are spent on them. When goods such as casual use bicycles are only made in China, how is that any kind of an endorsement? It's like saying that the local utility is doing a good job because it's monopoly is the most used source of power in the city.

It is the most disheartening because these poorly made trinkets are being bought by generations not yet born. With a larger and larger share of the national debt going to interest on treasury bonds and more and more deficit spending, the burden of these cheap products will be borne by new generations. Why can people not see that we are paying interest on these cheap pieces of crap from China each year, so they are not a better deal?

I Will Return

I promise to put up more posts in the second half of this month. I have been waiting until after the inauguration to discuss the upcoming economic policies of the new administration as they are revealed.

Why Can't We Make Him Sit in a Corner?

Once upon a youthful time, it was a fun prank to use a paper generator to create a nonsensical paper with a fake name to have a teacher read it then start laughing. Copying and pasting a paper and turning it in, however, was forbidden even in an age of such vapidity. Unfortunately the same rules do not apply to the Bailout Czar, Neel "I don't work in the interest of Goldman Sachs, honestly" Kashkari. This story might be laughable if this individual were not doling out $700 billion dollars which will be borne by generations. It also makes you wonder what are the real qualifications for these big wigs to haul in the loot they do when they seem to be incapable of doing a competent job at anything other than playing golf and signing the layoff agreements. When you had a grad school dropout with only a history degree who also happened to be an alcoholic and a drug user running Bear Stearns and being number two at the OMB you know that something is wrong with the elite in this nation.

The worst part is not just just that the incompetent are in high positions, but that they are recycled from one prominent position to another. Without an infusion of new blood, the country stagnates and the incentive to work hard drops off since your effort does not matter since an unqualified MBA from Harvard, or a connected buffoon will get the top jobs.

Farewell 2008

At long last the year of losing half of my stock investments ended. Now we will be entering the pivotal reporting period when the retail numbers for December come out, which will really see if this recession has legs. If the numbers point to a huge drop in retail sales and major retailers go bankrupt, then the unemployment rate will shoot up in the double digits nationwide and cause some serious panic. If the number are not a big change from last year than we will have dodged one bullet. Let us see when the numbers come out what happens with the retail numbers.

In the news today, the legislative author of the subsidized federal loan passed away today. In memoriam I will soon put up an economics lesson on the effect of subsidies on price and output showing why student loans cause the price of college to rise very quickly.