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• Job Cut Reports
  • Comment 8/06/11: @going, I don't think US workers are that stupid and foolish to hang around for a measly 1,000 dollars worth of stock grant. I think it was geared more towards foreign countries where 1,000 bucks is a month's salary or more, and to help curb turnover, esp. in India, where it is several 100%, annually. -NotStupid-
  • Comment 8/05/11: Hello y'all i heard some rumblings out of IBM NY. There up to there old tricks. Techs now have to work on laptops. No training and get those numbers up -- Yeah boys, you do that -- just ask your fellow workers that went to Qualxserv (oh yea that's right they went out of business)where getting the numbers up got them ! the unemployment lines. Its the past repeating itself ! Be fore warned, your time is limited! -Rrrrrrrr-
  • Comment 8/04/11: Was resource action-ed today being told there are many others from same State account. At least they gave me one days notice this time. Last time I worked 3 more days till a manager finally realized I was RAd -Anonymous-
  • Comment 8/04/11: The strike in Argentina will have widespread implications with customers in the USA as much of the domestic work that was outsourced to IBM from other US companies was matrixed out and sent there. Argentina is considered a higher quality operation over India so more critical customer specific tasks are sent there. It also has the advantage of being on USA time. I should imagine that what staff that is left in the US will have to bear the brunt of the work stoppage. -anonymous-
  • Comment 8/03/11: I think by 2014 IBM will largely abandon the USA. It's a reason why USA employees got the paltry stock grant and was to just dangle a carrot so IBM can string along as much of it's USA workforce as possible so IBM can follow it's purge of USA workers without any exodus of critical workers leaving before IBM wants them to. IBM plays you USA employees as fools. Look at IBM Chile and Argentina? The USA IBMer who is not an Alliance member has no backbone. -going-going-and soon gone-
  • Comment 8/02/11: Re: Software Division, Tivoli -- No cuts YET. Exact same thing happened to me. Our product is successful, makes tons of money, I've been supervising a global team, no back-stabbing complaints from any peers, only praise, I'm not insubordinate, I'm doing massive amounts of overtime, etc. They so *wanted* to put me in the middle (liars), but just had to drop me to the top of the bottom group. And I'm there with all the global employees who are so much cheaper but don't care a whit about the customers, so insulting. What a joke this despicable company is. The moron manager who has no clue what is going on, will never leave. Why should she? Cushiest job ever for her. They're crucifying themselves. Unfortunately, in this town, there are few to no other choices for employment. They laid off 52 or 54 from the hardware group in May, trying to keep the software folks scared "straight" (the timing was odd, as per usual). -Anonymous-
  • Comment 8/02/11: IBM, IBM's Lenovo and their consultants knowingly displace top performing American workers with less qualified, less experienced, lower performing foreign workers in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and analytic roles. Many IBM and IBM-Lenovo employees filling engineering jobs have no engineering degree, no professional engineering qualification and no engineering credential. -Anonymous-
  • Comment 8/01/11: Officially informed by my manager today that other than sev 1's, there will be NO overtime for nonexempts and contractors for the rest of the quarter and also likely to be extended to 4Q. Please folks, we HAVE TO STOP THE INSULTS! -Anon-
  • Comment 7/31/11: Several contractors were let go in AIX support. I do not know the numbers. Might be as high as 20% and located across multiple sites. Also told some regular headcount is included in the cut. -Contractors let go-
  • Comment 7/30/11: Comments after a recent IBM Services question and answer session.

    Question: Maxim I. Novikov 21 Jul 2011 at 04:04 AM EDT Hello Victoria. Carrying out of such conferences is very useful and I always like IBM for this openness in working background, when we have feedback with higher management, staying in touch with future plans, growth and opportunities. Nevertheless I want to support Vishal here, because I have same situation. I had 2/2+/2+ during my working years with IBM, and my salary grown on 1%. I am not kidding, exactly on 1%))). I heard same stories from my colleagues, from all over the world, because I am working in Global Services and they all have the same problem, even worse for some. Like it was told by manager in

    Quest1 : "We always moving to high value...". This is not bad actually, in our capitalist world may be the only way. But why not make value for employees? We(employees) also having our values in this challenging world, we have to plan our future and think about future generation and aging generation. Does price for stocks making more sense? Sometimes I really do not understand why people, who making all job done by their hands and minds, are staying always somewhere behind... When I started to work at IBM, my colleague gave me a book of Buck Rogers : "The IBM way", and I was really impressed of its content and how highly he rated IBM capital - our People - he wrote, I and started to believe that many things will change in my life from that moment, but after 3 years of successful job I am getting more and more confusion. Regards, Maxim Novikov. -Soon2BxIBMer-

  • Comment 7/30/11: Folks, Posters here were right. Liquid Portal is going to allow IBM to get rid of all Java and Lotus Notes programmers inside the company. You failed to unionize, so you're gone!

    HIRING! Freelance! IBM Liquid Challenge Stefanini TechTeam is engaging Software Professionals to participate in the Liquid Player Program with IBM.

    In the Liquid Challenge Program, IBM project managers outsource design and programming components to freelancers aka IBM Liquid Players. The design and programming components are part of a larger technical application (solution) that IBM is building. IBM will be the one to select the Liquid Players who will design or program a particular component. Once a Liquid Player has successfully designed and/or programmed the specified component, IBM will notify the player that the submittal was successful and accepted. Payment will be issued by Stefanini TechTeam within 15-20 days of successful completion, and range anywhere from $60-840 USD, minus applicable taxes and program fees, and depending on the component that was completed. The payment for the component will be seen by the Player in the Liquid Portal. A component is payable only when approved and accepted by IBM.

    Project description:

    • 100% work from home opportunity.
    • You choose the programming components you want to develop!
    • Addresses really small units of work, usually partitioned from a larger unit of work, that can be defined and accomplished within ½ to 7 days
    • Players are paid on successful programming events, meaning that earning potential is unlimited!
    • The more successful you are as a Player, the more IBM will request you to work on programming events!

    Key Programming Languages Include:

    • JAVA/J2EE
    • Lotus Notes

    Key Platforms Include:

    • Windows
    • UNIX (Solaris, AIX, Linux)
    • DB2
    • Websphere

    If interested in joining the IBM Liquid Challenge program, please forward your updated Resume to cristina.zarici@stefanini-usa.com.

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

• Washington Post/Bloomberg: Health-care law could give rise to entrepreneurs. By Jill Lawrence. Excerpts: One character in the novel was a milliner who made fashionable hats in a home studio. A second was helping get a neighborhood newspaper off the ground. A third quit her job at Sotheby’s and bet her savings on what she had always wanted to do: open a vintage clothing store. I kept wondering, “Why aren’t these people obsessing about health insurance?”

  Then, it dawned: The story was set in London, where there’s universal coverage. No one there has to make life decisions based on getting or keeping insurance.

  This will be true for almost all Americans in 2014, if the Affordable Care Act is not repealed or unraveled in court. That’s when online health-insurance marketplaces called exchanges are supposed to be up and running in each state, offering private policies at reasonable rates to the uninsured — regardless of their medical histories — with subsidies available to help low-income buyers.

  The Department of Health and Human Services this month released guidelines on how to set up exchanges, and more than half the states already are taking steps to build them. Once they’re up and running, you’ll be able to quit your job at Large Company X and start that plumbing or carpentry business, that mom-and-pop restaurant or barbershop, without putting your family’s health or finances at risk. You can open that dance studio, play in that band, live off savings while you write or paint or launch the tech venture that could make you the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg.

  There’s nothing more American than starting a business. Yet contrary to our self-image, most developed countries have larger small-business sectors than the United States does. The Affordable Care Act could help close the gap — and spur the economy — by removing an obstacle to business creation and self-employment. ...

  Some studies have found that job lock — people who don’t change jobs for fear of losing health insurance — reduces voluntary turnover by 25 percent. How many of those people would quit to start their own businesses if they didn’t have to worry about insurance? At least two studies have found that people whose spouses have health insurance are more likely to start businesses. The most recent, a RAND study published last fall, found that 4 percent of all men earning wages or salaries start a business. For those with employer health insurance, the rate was 2.9 percent. Among those with insurance through a spouse, the rate was 6.6 percent.

  The RAND study also found that the business-ownership rate among men rises in the month they turn 65 and can rely on Medicare. The rate doesn’t change in birthday months at any other age between 55 and 75. “It appears that what’s happening is that when they qualify for Medicare, they decide it’s a good time to start a business,” said economist Robert Fairlie, one of the authors. “One of the big constraints to starting a business is gone. They know they’ll have health insurance.”

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 op-ed: Bring Back Poppy. By Thomas L. Friedman. Excerpts: Watching today’s Republicans being led around by an extremist Tea Party faction, with no adult supervision, I find my mind drifting back to the late 1980s when I was assigned to cover the administration of George H.W. Bush, who I believe is one of our most underrated presidents. I have long admired the elder Bush for the deftness with which he dealt with the collapse of the Soviet empire. But, in later years, I came to admire him even more for the fact that he believed that math and science were not matters of opinion — a view increasingly rare in today’s G.O.P.

  Despite having run on the promise of “Read my lips: No new taxes,” when the deficit started spiraling to dangerous levels under his presidency, Bush agreed to a compromise with Democrats to raise several taxes, along with spending cuts, as part of a 1990 budget deal that helped to pave the way for the prosperity of that decade. It definitely hurt his re-election, but he did it anyway. ...

  On the economy, the G.O.P. has gone from the magical thinking of Vice President Dick Cheney — who argued that “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter” and used this argument to help run up the deficit to its current astronomical levels with huge tax cuts — to an anti-tax cult that spurned a “Grand Bargain” with President Obama because it would have not only cut $3 trillion in spending over the next decade but also involved $1 trillion in tax increases. Somehow, the G.O.P. has forgotten that even Ronald Reagan didn’t believe deficits don’t matter and he raised taxes when our fiscal stability demanded it. As for prudence today, well, the willingness to risk a default on America’s financial obligations by refusing to raise the debt ceiling may be many things, but it is not prudent. ...

  Where have all the adults in this party gone? Where is Dick Lugar, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Colin Powell, Hank Paulson and Big Business? Are you telling me that they are ready to fall in line behind Michele Bachmann, Grover Norquist, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin? Are these really the pacesetters of modern conservatism?

• New York Times op-ed: The President Surrenders. By Paul Krugman. Excerpts: For the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.

  Start with the economics. We currently have a deeply depressed economy. We will almost certainly continue to have a depressed economy all through next year. And we will probably have a depressed economy through 2013 as well, if not beyond.

  The worst thing you can do in these circumstances is slash government spending, since that will depress the economy even further. Pay no attention to those who invoke the confidence fairy, claiming that tough action on the budget will reassure businesses and consumers, leading them to spend more. It doesn’t work that way, a fact confirmed by many studies of the historical record.

  Indeed, slashing spending while the economy is depressed won’t even help the budget situation much, and might well make it worse. On one side, interest rates on federal borrowing are currently very low, so spending cuts now will do little to reduce future interest costs. On the other side, making the economy weaker now will also hurt its long-run prospects, which will in turn reduce future revenue. So those demanding spending cuts now are like medieval doctors who treated the sick by bleeding them, and thereby made them even sicker. ...

  In the long run, however, Democrats won’t be the only losers. What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it can’t.

• truthOut: Ransom Paid. By Robert Reich. Excerpts: Anyone who characterizes the deal between the President, Democratic, and Republican leaders as a victory for the American people over partisanship understands neither economics nor politics. The deal does not raise taxes on America’s wealthy and most fortunate — who are now taking home a larger share of total income and wealth, and whose tax rates are already lower than they have been, in eighty years. Yet it puts the nation’s most important safety nets and public investments on the chopping block. ...

  Many months ago, when Republicans first demanded spending cuts and no tax increases as a condition for raising the debt ceiling, the President could have blown their cover. He could have shown the American people why this demand had nothing to do with deficit reduction but everything to do with the GOP’s ideological fixation on shrinking the size of the government — thereby imperiling Medicare, Social Security, education, infrastructure, and everything else Americans depend on. But he did not.

  And through it all the President could have explained to Americans that the biggest economic challenge we face is restoring jobs and wages and economic growth, that spending cuts in the next few years will slow the economy even further, and therefore that the Republicans’ demands threaten us all. Again, he did not.

• New York Times op-ed: Tea Party’s War on America. By Joe Nocera. Excerpts: You know what they say: Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them.

  These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of America’s most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didn’t care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that’s what it took.

  Like ideologues everywhere, they scorned compromise. When John Boehner, the House speaker, tried to cut a deal with President Obama that included some modest revenue increases, they humiliated him. After this latest agreement was finally struck on Sunday night — amounting to a near-complete capitulation by Obama — Tea Party members went on Fox News to complain that it only called for $2.4 trillion in cuts, instead of $4 trillion. It was head-spinning.

  All day Monday, the blogosphere and the talk shows mused about which party would come out ahead politically. Honestly, who cares? What ought to matter is not how these spending cuts will affect our politicians, but how they’ll affect the country. And I’m not even talking about the terrible toll $2.4 trillion in cuts will take on the poor and the middle class. I am talking about their effect on America’s still-ailing economy.

  America’s real crisis is not a debt crisis. It’s an unemployment crisis. Yet this agreement not only doesn’t address unemployment, it’s guaranteed to make it worse. (Incredibly, the Democrats even abandoned their demand for extended unemployment benefits as part of the deal.) As Mohamed El-Erian, the chief executive of the bond investment firm Pimco, told me, fiscal policy includes both a numerator and a denominator. “The numerator is debt,” he said. “But the denominator is growth.” He added, “What we have done is accelerate forward, in a self-inflicted manner, the numerator. And, in the process, we have undermined the denominator.” Economic growth could have gone a long way toward shrinking the deficit, while helping put people to work. The spending cuts will shrink growth and raise the likelihood of pushing the country back into recession.

  Inflicting more pain on their countrymen doesn’t much bother the Tea Party Republicans, as they’ve repeatedly proved. What is astonishing is that both the president and House speaker are claiming that the deal will help the economy. Do they really expect us to buy that? We’ve all heard what happened in 1937 when Franklin Roosevelt, believing the Depression was over, tried to rein in federal spending. Cutting spending spiraled the country right back into the Great Depression, where it stayed until the arrival of the stimulus package known as World War II. That’s the path we’re now on. Our enemies could not have designed a better plan to weaken the American economy than this debt-ceiling deal.

• New York Times editorial: Pork? That? What Do You Mean? Excerpts: The road to Washington is paved with broken campaign promises. But few are so rich in hypocrisy as those of House Republican freshmen caught engineering hometown pork even as they vow to slash the federal budget for the supposed good of the nation.

  In March, just months after being sworn in, 22 of them plumped for more military spending in their districts than President Obama requested.

  Representative Steven Palazzo, of Mississippi, who campaigned fiercely against earmarks, voted to slash military spending and then voted for an amendment to quietly restore the same money, including $150 million for a warship to be built in his district. Pork? Earmark? No, he insists, saying he merely voted for a package that happened to include that hometown goodie and the Pentagon now must decide how to finance it. ...

  Representative Tim Scott, a Tea Party favorite from South Carolina, helped secure the down payment on a $300 million harbor dredging project back home. Not at all pork, said Mr. Scott, pronouncing the dredging a matter of the national interest. In the case of a new bridge in Wisconsin, Representative Sean Duffy reasons it’s no earmark since the legislation listed no specific costs. Representative Michele Bachmann, Minnesota’s three-term incumbent and presidential aspirant, also supports the bridge — and calls for a “redefinition” of what an earmark is. “There’s a big difference between funding a teapot museum and a bridge over a vital waterway,” is Ms. Bachmann’s head-scratching guidance.

• The Guardian (United Kingdom): Debt deal: anger and deceit has led the US into a billionaires' coup. The debt deal will hurt the poorest Americans, convinced by Fox and the Tea Party to act against their own welfare. By George Mombiot. Excerpts: There are two ways of cutting a deficit: raising taxes or reducing spending. Raising taxes means taking money from the rich. Cutting spending means taking money from the poor. Not in all cases of course: some taxation is regressive; some state spending takes money from ordinary citizens and gives it to banks, arms companies, oil barons and farmers. But in most cases the state transfers wealth from rich to poor, while tax cuts shift it from poor to rich.

  So the rich, in a nominal democracy, have a struggle on their hands. Somehow they must persuade the other 99% to vote against their own interests: to shrink the state, supporting spending cuts rather than tax rises. In the US they appear to be succeeding.

  Partly as a result of the Bush tax cuts of 2001, 2003 and 2005 (shamefully extended by Barack Obama), taxation of the wealthy, in Obama's words, "is at its lowest level in half a century". The consequence of such regressive policies is a level of inequality unknown in other developed nations. As the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz points out, in the past 10 years the income of the top 1% has risen by 18%, while that of blue-collar male workers has fallen by 12%.

  The deal being thrashed out in Congress as this article goes to press seeks only to cut state spending. As the former Republican senator Alan Simpson says: "The little guy is going to be cremated." That means more economic decline, which means a bigger deficit. It's insane. But how did it happen? ...

  The movement started with Rick Santelli's call on CNBC for a tea party of city traders to dump securities in Lake Michigan, in protest at Obama's plan to "subsidise the losers". In other words, it was a demand for a financiers' mobilisation against the bailout of their victims: people losing their homes. On the same day, a group called Americans for Prosperity (AFP) set up a Tea Party Facebook page and started organising Tea Party events. The movement, whose programme is still lavishly supported by AFP, took off from there.

  So who or what is Americans for Prosperity? It was founded and is funded by Charles and David Koch. They run what they call "the biggest company you've never heard of", and between them they are worth $43bn. Koch Industries is a massive oil, gas, minerals, timber and chemicals company. In the past 15 years the brothers have poured at least $85m into lobby groups arguing for lower taxes for the rich and weaker regulations for industry. The groups and politicians the Kochs fund also lobby to destroy collective bargaining, to stop laws reducing carbon emissions, to stymie healthcare reform and to hobble attempts to control the banks. During the 2010 election cycle, AFP spent $45m supporting its favoured candidates. ...

  AFP mobilised the anger of people who found their conditions of life declining, and channelled it into a campaign to make them worse. Tea Party campaigners take to the streets to demand less tax for billionaires and worse health, education and social insurance for themselves. ...

  What's taking place in Congress right now is a kind of political coup. A handful of billionaires have shoved a spanner into the legislative process. Through the candidates they have bought and the movement that supports them, they are now breaking and reshaping the system to serve their interests. We knew this once, but now we've forgotten. What hope do we have of resisting a force we won't even see?

• Jim Hightower: America's real "job creators" are broke. Excerpts: As narrators used to say in Western movies: "Meanwhile, back at the ranch..." Our policy makers in Washington have totally lost sight of what's happening at the ranch. Both John Boehner's GOP-controlled House and Barack Obama's White House are riveted on slashing trillions of dollars from the federal budget, as though that's America's most important need. Bovine excrement! If they'd lift their vision to the countryside, even they could figure out that our great economic urgency is for the creation of good, middle-class jobs to get America moving again – moving upward and moving together.

  Today, we are a dangerously dis-united society. Elite CEOs and big investors are grabbing all the gains, leaving the vast majority mired in recession and facing falling incomes. Since the recession technically "ended" 18 months ago, corporate profits have zoomed, sopping up an unprecedented 88 percent of America's economic growth. Meanwhile, only one percent of the growth that we all help produce has gone to wages and salaries, which is the source of income for about 90 percent of us.

  Yet, those same CEOs say they won't invest in new jobs or raise wages until consumers start buying again. That's like saying, "The beatings will continue until morale improves." Hello – the consumers CEOs are waiting on are the workers whose jobs and wages the CEOs won't increase.

  You see, despite the GOP's ideological claptrap about corporate executives being "job creators," it is ordinary Americans who actually create jobs by spending from their paychecks. This is why our obtuse policy makers need to quit pampering the rich and fussing over budgets – and start launching a national, FDR-style jobs program that'll immediately increase paychecks, perk up consumer spending, and generate grassroots economic growth.

• New York Times: Even Marked Up, Luxury Goods Fly Off Shelves. By Stephanie Clifford. Excerpts: Nordstrom has a waiting list for a Chanel sequined tweed coat with a $9,010 price. Neiman Marcus has sold out in almost every size of Christian Louboutin “Bianca” platform pumps, at $775 a pair. Mercedes-Benz said it sold more cars last month in the United States than it had in any July in five years.

  Even with the economy in a funk and many Americans pulling back on spending, the rich are again buying designer clothing, luxury cars and about anything that catches their fancy. Luxury goods stores, which fared much worse than other retailers in the recession, are more than recovering — they are zooming. Many high-end businesses are even able to mark up, rather than discount, items to attract customers who equate quality with price.

  “If a designer shoe goes up from $800 to $860, who notices?” said Arnold Aronson, managing director of retail strategies at the consulting firm Kurt Salmon, and the former chairman and chief executive of Saks. ...

  The luxury category has posted 10 consecutive months of sales increases compared with the year earlier, even as overall consumer spending on categories like furniture and electronics has been tepid, according to the research service MasterCard Advisors SpendingPulse. In July, the luxury segment had an 11.6 percent increase, the biggest monthly gain in more than a year.

  Tiffany’s first-quarter sales were up 20 percent to $761 million. Last week LVMH, which owns expensive brands like Louis Vuitton and Givenchy, reported sales growth in the first half of 2011 of 13 percent to 10.3 billion euros, or $14.9 billion. Also last week, PPR, home to Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and other brands, said its luxury segment’s sales gained 23 percent in the first half. Profits are also up by double digits for many of these companies.

  BMW this week said it more than doubled its quarterly profit from a year ago as sales rose 16.5 percent; Porsche said its first-half profit rose 59 percent; and Mercedes-Benz said July sales of its high-end S-Class sedans — some of which cost more than $200,000 — jumped nearly 14 percent in the United States. ...

  Apparel stores are holding near fire sales to get people to spend. Wal-Mart is selling smaller packages because some shoppers do not have enough cash on hand to afford multipacks of toilet paper. Retailers from Victoria’s Secret to the Children’s Place are nudging prices up by just pennies, worried they will lose customers if they do anything more.

• Slowpoke Comics: Deficit Memories.

  

• New York Times op-ed: The Wrong Worries. By Paul Krugman. Excerpts: In case you had any doubts, Thursday’s more than 500-point plunge in the Dow Jones industrial average and the drop in interest rates to near-record lows confirmed it: The economy isn’t recovering, and Washington has been worrying about the wrong things.

  It’s not just that the threat of a double-dip recession has become very real. It’s now impossible to deny the obvious, which is that we are not now and have never been on the road to recovery.

  For two years, officials at the Federal Reserve, international organizations and, sad to say, within the Obama administration have insisted that the economy was on the mend. Every setback was attributed to temporary factors — It’s the Greeks! It’s the tsunami! — that would soon fade away. And the focus of policy turned from jobs and growth to the supposedly urgent issue of deficit reduction.

  But the economy wasn’t on the mend. ...

  Consider one crucial measure, the ratio of employment to population. In June 2007, around 63 percent of adults were employed. In June 2009, the official end of the recession, that number was down to 59.4. As of June 2011, two years into the alleged recovery, the number was: 58.2. ...

  These may sound like dry statistics, but they reflect a truly terrible reality. Not only are vast numbers of Americans unemployed or underemployed, for the first time since the Great Depression many American workers are facing the prospect of very-long-term — maybe permanent — unemployment. Among other things, the rise in long-term unemployment will reduce future government revenues, so we’re not even acting sensibly in purely fiscal terms. But, more important, it’s a human catastrophe. ...

  To turn this disaster around, a lot of people are going to have to admit, to themselves at least, that they’ve been wrong and need to change their priorities, right away. Of course, some players won’t change. Republicans won’t stop screaming about the deficit because they weren’t sincere in the first place: Their deficit hawkery was a club with which to beat their political opponents, nothing more — as became obvious whenever any rise in taxes on the rich was suggested. And they’re not going to give up that club.

  But the policy disaster of the past two years wasn’t just the result of G.O.P. obstructionism, which wouldn’t have been so effective if the policy elite — including at least some senior figures in the Obama administration — hadn’t agreed that deficit reduction, not job creation, should be our main priority. Nor should we let Ben Bernanke and his colleagues off the hook: The Fed has by no means done all it could, partly because it was more concerned with hypothetical inflation than with real unemployment, partly because it let itself be intimidated by the Ron Paul types. ...

  Well, it’s time for all that to stop. Those plunging interest rates and stock prices say that the markets aren’t worried about either U.S. solvency or inflation. They’re worried about U.S. lack of growth. And they’re right, even if on Wednesday the White House press secretary chose, inexplicably, to declare that there’s no threat of a double-dip recession.

• New York Times editorial: End the Debt Limit. Excerpts: It has long been clear that the federal debt limit is far too dangerous and unstable for lawmakers to use as a political weapon. Allowing that to happen in the last few traumatic weeks created an artificial national crisis that put the economy and the savings of Americans at risk and helped produce a loss of confidence that lingered as a cause of Thursday’s stock-market plunge.

  None of that, however, has stopped Republican leaders, who announced this week that they intend to repeat this explosive episode over and over, in perpetuity. With the bad memory still fresh, President Obama should quickly seize the opportunity to make clear that he will not allow it even once more, never mind permanently. Instead of raising the debt ceiling every few years, it’s time to eliminate this dangerous game once and for all.

  As this page said in 1961 — not remotely for the first time or the last — the “debt limit does not limit the debt.” It’s an illusion of a law, instituted in World War I, to persuade gullible taxpayers that Congress is exercising responsible oversight over borrowing. Congress already controls spending and taxation, and if it wants a smaller debt it can cut spending or raise taxes at will. To allow the deficit to rise, and then refuse to pay for it months later, is the definition of financial irresponsibility. ...

  The 14th Amendment, adopted during Reconstruction, says the validity of the public debt of the United States cannot be questioned. Threatening the economy with calamity to achieve partisan goals does just that. President Obama should use every power at his disposal to fend off Republicans’ irresponsible threats and invite them to meet him in court if they want to resist.

• truthOut: America in Decline. By Noam Chomsky. Excerpts: “It is a common theme” that the United States, which “only a few years ago was hailed to stride the world as a colossus with unparalleled power and unmatched appeal is in decline, ominously facing the prospect of its final decay,” Giacomo Chiozza writes in the current Political Science Quarterly.

  Another common theme, at least among those who are not willfully blind, is that American decline is in no small measure self-inflicted. The comic opera in Washington this summer, which disgusts the country and bewilders the world, may have no analogue in the annals of parliamentary democracy.

  The spectacle is even coming to frighten the sponsors of the charade. Corporate power is now concerned that the extremists they helped put in office may in fact bring down the edifice on which their own wealth and privilege relies, the powerful nanny state that caters to their interests.

  Corporate power’s ascendancy over politics and society – by now mostly financial – has reached the point that both political organizations, which at this stage barely resemble traditional parties, are far to the right of the population on the major issues under debate.

  For the public, the primary domestic concern is unemployment. Under current circumstances, that crisis can be overcome only by a significant government stimulus, well beyond the recent one, which barely matched decline in state and local spending – though even that limited initiative probably saved millions of jobs.

  For financial institutions the primary concern is the deficit. Therefore, only the deficit is under discussion. A large majority of the population favor addressing the deficit by taxing the very rich (72 percent, 27 percent opposed), reports a Washington Post-ABC News poll. Cutting health programs is opposed by overwhelming majorities (69 percent Medicaid, 78 percent Medicare). The likely outcome is therefore the opposite. ...

  Meanwhile new gifts are regularly lavished on Wall Street. The House Appropriations Committee cut the budget request for the Securities and Exchange Commission, the prime barrier against financial fraud. The Consumer Protection Agency is unlikely to survive intact. ...

  “The major political parties borrowed a practice from big box retailers like Walmart, Best Buy or Target,” Ferguson writes. “Uniquely among legislatures in the developed world, U.S. congressional parties now post prices for key slots in the lawmaking process.” The legislators who contribute the most funds to the party get the posts.

  The result, according to Ferguson, is that debates “rely heavily on the endless repetition of a handful of slogans that have been battle-tested for their appeal to national investor blocs and interest groups that the leadership relies on for resources.” The country be damned.