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• Job Cut Reports
  • Comment 12/22/10: Re Dubuque Craigslist rave - in my opinion, not IBM's, Dubuque is just a red herring set-up to give the impression that IBM is investing in US workers and infrastructure. You may only be there as a puppet to demonstrate a handful of US jobs were created. However the GDF purpose was and is to fool US IBMers and the state and federal government. When Dubuque GDF was first announced some of us heard certain job categories would be moving there, such as "admin" activities. However, I only know of 1 out of 25 of these jobs in my organization really went to Dubuque; the rest went to unskilled, intern level India, Brazil, Argentina and other remote country resources instead. As for the GDF plans, moving US regional data center operations to Dubuque, we saw warnings that US SDC folks would have to rejoin an existing data center, then later take pay cuts and move at their own expense to the Dubuque GDF. Well, I saw lay-offs of delivery and data center friends but I've seen no evidence of a migration of existing skilled delivery folks going to Dubuque GDF. I expect Dubuque will remain a cheap skeleton of what a real IBM data center should be. IBM will not invest in you, sorry to say. If IBM is hiring cheapest overseas labor, not even skilled or even train them, why would they invest in a more expensive US resource? -Whoopee-
  • Comment 12/24/10: Has anyone noticed that someone being RAed instantly becomes "persona non grata" in IBM? Outcasted. Ignored. Swept aside. Treated as something perhaps less than human. For instance, folks that get RAed get no help from their management recommending them for another work assignment in IBM, no letter or memo .cc'ed to their peers thanking them for their loyal service, they get no proper and dignified send off that some folks that leave the company for another opportunity usually get like a luncheon. Etc. etc.. I personally knew someone who made the Quarter Century Club during the time he was RAed and got no mention of it to his peers like other IBMers traditional get. His book also had no congratulatory letters in it. It's sickening. It's degrading. Let's get a union and restore basic human dignity in IBM for 2011. -IBManagedOut-
  • Comment 12/25/10: IBM has been on a downhill death spiral for at least 10 years. Sam's method for keeping the stock price up has been to cut US jobs and offshore them overseas. You people still with IBM really need to wise up. Until you ban together and form a union this abuse to US employees will continue. It is sad how Sam thinks he is good for America. Until he stops the US job cuts and starts creating US jobs he is clearly bad for America. Join the Alliance and support a Union! -True Blue-

News and Opinion Concerning Health Savings Accounts, Medical Costs and Health Care Reform

News and Opinion Concerning the "War on the Middle Class"

"But dependency on government has never been bad for the rich. The pretense of the laissez-faire people is that only the poor are dependent on government, while the rich take care of themselves. This argument manages to ignore all of modern history, which shows a consistent record of laissez-faire for the poor, but enormous government intervention for the rich." From Economic Justice: The American Class System, from the book Declarations of Independence by Howard Zinn.

• New York Times: Estate Tax Will Return Next Year, but Few Will Pay It. By Paul Sullivan. Excerpts: Almost no one will have to worry about paying the estate tax under the tax legislation just approved by Congress. By one estimate, from Alan Rothschild, the chairman of the American Bar Association’s real property, trust and estate law section, less than one-half of 1 percent of people who die in 2011 will be hit by the estate tax. In contrast, 10.5 percent paid the estate tax in 1977.

  And even for the very few who will be subject to the tax, the increase in the gift tax exemption will allow them to give their heirs tens of millions of dollars before the estate tax even comes into play. “I think people will be seizing the opportunity for next year,” said Carol Kroch, head of wealth and financial planning at Wilmington Trust. ...

  Much is being made of how low the estate tax rate is above the $5 million exemption. Dan Kesten, a lawyer at Davis & Gilbert in New York, pointed out that a $100 million estate would pay $20 million less in taxes in 2011 than it would have if Congress had not acted and the estate tax had reverted to its 2001 level — a 55 percent tax rate for individual estates larger than $1 million. ...

  The real benefit to the extremely rich is the increase in the gift tax exemption to $5 million from $1 million. To a couple who have given money away to the limit of the old exemption, this means they can pass an extra $8 million to their heirs free of tax. “That’s changing an awful lot of plans,” said Kacy Gott, chief planning officer at Aspiriant, a wealth management firm. “Now, with a two-year window, we’re expecting a lot of gifts.”

• truthout: Make Members of Congress Wear NASCAR Patches. By Thom Hartmann. Excerpts: The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it comes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group. — Franklin D. Roosevelt ...

  All of this is a way of saying that I am a somewhat typical “serial entrepreneur,” and fortunately we have a lot of them in America. They are generally middle-class people (my dad worked in a tool-and-die shop for 40 years, and my mom was a full-time homemaker with four sons), they generally do not have an inheritance or family money to draw on, and yet they spend their lives pursuing the American Dream.

  I have never relied on a member of Congress or a government agency to do me a favor or bend the rules. I have never given campaign contributions to politicians in hopes of getting favors that would help my business. I have never hired a lobbyist to try to amend laws that would serve my financial interest. And this is generally true of all the hundreds of thousands of sole proprietors and partnerships and small businesses across America.

  But that is not how big-time corporate America operates. To them making large campaign contributions and spending millions of dollars each year on lobbyists is just another investment that pays off handsomely. Their motto (in behavior, if not in fact) is You’ve got to pay to play.

  This flood of corporate money and influence in our government makes for a decidedly uneven playing field for businesses as well as taints and corrupts our government. Unfortunately, the trend is moving in the direction of allowing even more money to encroach into our politics, thanks to the Supreme Court. The absolutely necessary solution here is to bring honesty and transparency to our politics. ...

  As I noted in my book Unequal Protection, as of 2009 there were roughly 64 registered lobbyists for every member of Congress—more than 34,750 in total—and 138 of them are former members of Congress. Include state lobbyists, and there are more than 60,000 (because of variations in state laws on what is or isn’t a lobbyist, and who and how they should register, this may well be a significant underestimate: nobody really knows the true number.)

  Senator Bernie Sanders noted on my radio show during the Senate debates on financial services industry regulation that the banking industry was spending more than $1 million per day on lobbying and had hired more than 250 former members of Congress to lobby their peers, including people who had previously been considered to have highly ethical and spotless reputations like former Democratic presidential candidate Dick Gephardt.

• Wall Street Journal: Sotheby's Hammers the Bears. By John Jannarone. Excerpt: There is an ageless debate over whether art imitates life, or vice versa. But one thing is clear: When life is good for the rich, the art market is sure to follow. Just a year ago, auction-house Sotheby's was expected to make only $37 million in net income during 2010. Fast forward 12 months, and the crisis is only a memory for the seriously rich. Sotheby's auctions netted $4.3 billion this year, a 90% increase from 2009. Analysts expect that to translate into four times as much net income as they expected, or $148 million.
• truthout: Obama to the Corporate Powers: I Feel Your Pain. By Jim Hightower. Full excerpt: Guess who's whining the loudest these days, wailing that they're getting a raw deal from Barack Obama. Not the unemployed and barely employed - even though the White House has blithely ignored their critical need for a national jobs program. Not the poor, even though their ranks are swelling as millions of Americans fall out of the middle class.

  No, no, the most insistent demand for attention is coming from way above the poor and the middle class. Believe it or not, it's the CEOs of Americas biggest corporations and the top bankers of Wall Street who're stamping their little Gucci-clad feet, bawling that they should be getting more love and support from the president.

  It seems that the feelings of these precious ones have been hurt by Obama's occasional condemnation of the stupefying greed that's been shown by the likes of health insurance executives and Wall Street banksters. As one CEO put it, Obama's attitude "felt too much like we were the bad guys."

  Yoo-hoo, Mr. Multimillionaire Executive, YOU ARE! Corporate chieftains are ruthlessly downsizing the middle class, carelessly polluting our air and water, gleefully destroying our democracy by using their corrupting corporate money to buy our government and generally feeling entitled to run roughshod over everyone -- all while pocketing obscene levels of wealth for themselves. Yet they're the ones crying?

  Those guys are pathetic - they're a bunch of narcissists with a sense of entitlement. Obama ought to send each of them a box of Kleenex and tell 'em to go to hell. But unfortunately, he's no Harry Truman. So instead, he's giving in to them!

  "(I intend) to make clear to the business community," he recently announced, "that the most important thing we can do is to boost and encourage our business sector." Hello ... they're doing fine. The most important thing you can do is boost America's middle class.

  Obama's helping not only multimillionaire corporate CEOs. He's also helping their friends at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Of all the groups in America that need the president of the U.S. on its side, you'd think the last to win a pledge of support would be the Chamber.

  After all, this outfit, which is largely funded and run by a handful of America's biggest corporations, has become the most powerful lobbying force in Washington - and one of the richest front groups funneling secret corporate cash into our elections. Indeed, it poured tens of millions of those dollars into campaign ads this fall to demonize the president and turn the U.S. House over to anti-Obama Republicans.

  Yet, the day after the election, the Chamber found itself being wooed by the White House. The president even dispatched his treasury secretary to the Chamber's opulent headquarters to eat crow and promise that, henceforth, Obama and Team would be more corporate friendly.

  Good grief! Friendlier than Obama's Wall Street reform that coddled the big banksters, or his health care reform that further entrenches profiteering insurance giants inside the system? Or the tax bill cave-in that needlessly awards billions of dollars in special breaks for corporations and rich CEOs?

  Yes. So friendly that Obama is now holding an ongoing series of closed-door policy meetings with assorted CEOs. So friendly that he's already delayed regulations to strengthen anti-pollution rules. So friendly that his deficit-reduction panel proposes cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 26 percent. So friendly that he's planning to put a high-powered CEO right inside the White House with him, as demanded by the whining corporate powers who say they're not getting enough love from the president.

  Why do they get a special presidential slot? Why not one for labor, small farmers, consumers, the unemployed? Remind me again -- is this guy a Democrat?

• New York Times op-ed: The Big (Military) Taboo. By Nicholas D. Kristoff. Excerpts: We face wrenching budget cutting in the years ahead, but there’s one huge area of government spending that Democrats and Republicans alike have so far treated as sacrosanct. It’s the military/security world, and it’s time to bust that taboo. A few facts:
  • The United States spends nearly as much on military power as every other country in the world combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. It says that we spend more than six times as much as the country with the next highest budget, China.
  • The United States maintains troops at more than 560 bases and other sites abroad, many of them a legacy of a world war that ended 65 years ago. Do we fear that if we pull our bases from Germany, Russia might invade?
  • The intelligence community is so vast that more people have “top secret” clearance than live in Washington, D.C.
  • The U.S. will spend more on the war in Afghanistan this year, adjusting for inflation, than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War combined. ...

  Let me be clear: I’m a believer in a robust military, which is essential for backing up diplomacy. But the implication is that we need a balanced tool chest of diplomatic and military tools alike. Instead, we have a billionaire military and a pauper diplomacy. The U.S. military now has more people in its marching bands than the State Department has in its foreign service — and that’s preposterous. ...

  Paradoxically, it’s often people with experience in the military who lead the way in warning against overinvestment in arms. It was President Dwight Eisenhower who gave the strongest warning: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” And in the Obama administration, it is Defense Secretary Robert Gates who has argued that military spending on things large and small can and should expect closer, harsher scrutiny; it is Secretary Gates who has argued most eloquently for more investment in diplomacy and development aid. ...

  They should remind themselves that in the 21st century, our government can protect its citizens in many ways: financing research against disease, providing early childhood programs that reduce crime later, boosting support for community colleges, investing in diplomacy that prevents costly wars. As we cut budgets, let’s remember that these steps would, on balance, do far more for the security of Americans than a military base in Germany.