When I first saw that John McCain was pushing failed CEO Carly Fiorina as his frontperson on business/economic issues I figured it was a little weird. There are a lot of successful business/CEO types who are happy little soldiers for the GOP, I can’t for the life of me figure what the upside of picking Fiorina is.
She was brought on board to grow HP, but instead laid off people then pushed the company into a merger with Compaq that turned into a mess and was opposed by Walter Hewlett, son of HP co-founder and tech pioneer Bill Hewlett. A little after that she was effectively fired by the board of directors.
And yet, this is the leading voice on the Republican side for business and economics. She must have some freaky pictures of someone or something, because even the McCain people can’t be this stupid.
Here is a chart of HP’s stock performance during Fiorina’s tenure (July 19, 1999 - February, 10, 2005):
And here is HP’s chart post-Fiorina (July 19, 1999 February, 10, 2005 - present):
Newsweek calls her “McCain’s Economic Brain”. Perhaps a lobotomy is in order.
Despite extensive efforts to educate workers about saving for retirement, many employees are not doing a good job of managing their company-sponsored 401(k) accounts, a new study indicates.
The analysis of nearly 1 million retirement portfolios found that 69 percent have inappropriate risk or diversification of holdings and 36 percent have worrisome concentrations of company stock. In addition, one-third of savers aren’t putting enough aside to qualify for the full company matching contribution.
In case you were wondering that in the midst of all the drama on the Democratic side of the aisle it was possible for the Republican party to remain brain dead on the seminal issues of our time… wonder no more.
Sen. John McCain on Tuesday rejected calls by his Democratic opponents for universal health coverage, instead offering a market-based solution with an approach similar to a proposal put forth by President Bush last year.
McCain’s belief in the power of the free market to meet the nation’s health-care needs sets up a stark choice for voters this fall in terms of the care they could receive, the role the government would play and the importance they place on the issue.
The Republicans largely really believe some of this bull about the free market. They really think in their heart of hearts that the solution for every issue is to sprinkle some of that magical “free market” fairy dust and all will be well. The problem is, that is not what Americans feel. Oh sure, we’re willing to give the market a go of things - and for some things it works great. But we effectively operate under a free market health care system right now and its woefully unpopular. That’s the reason why health care is a serious issue in 2008 in a way that it wasn’t in 2004, 2000, etc.
John McCain is so out of touch with normal Americans (his health care costs are covered by his military disability, his Senate health care plan and should anything fall through the cracks his wife’s generous inheritance can take up the slack) that he believes that what people want is more of the current mess.
Yet the American mood on large national issues like this is not a faith based free market system, but rather historically tends to favor a collective system where we all pay in and benefit.
I was thinking about this but then someone actually did the work. One of the major issues I wrote about on this blog back after 9/11 was about the free money congress and the president handed to the airlines. Just let them die. Trust the market, and let them die. I fear that my sentiments about Bear Stearns are going to work out similarly.
Wall Street and the right want to eat their cake and have it too. They want vital financial institutions to be left alone, given free reign to do as they wish - but when they screw up and cause a ripple effect throughout the economy they come running to the government for a no-strings-attached bailout.
Eh-eh.
You want the government to have a hand in the game, you have to play by the rules. You need oversight, regulation, a catchers mitt over the invisible hand. The crisis we’re facing now is a product of our government abandoning its watchdog role and becoming nothing more than a cheerleader on the sidelines. It’s time once again for our government to put on its referee’s uniform and get this game back under control.
I fail to understand what the purpose is of the free market if we’re going to engage in socialism and bail out companies like Bear Sterns who claim to be masters of capitalism. This reminds me of the free money the government gave to the airlines after 9/11 that they subsequently used to make their service even worse. Let these companies fail so that they don’t live another day to screw up the economy again. Spend that money on helping the people who work for them, rather than to line the overpaid CEO’s pockets. If he or she were so smart why’d they get them in such dire straits?
Amidst some of the talk about Sen. Obama sort of buying into conservative worry-speak about the strength of social security, I was reminded of a bet I made with a friend recently. He barely pays attention to the news - he’s got a wife and a new kid and work - or politics, but in one of those annoying “I saw it on tv somewhere” things he has it in his mind that social security won’t be around for him. Granted, he doesn’t need it by a long shot, but regardless he’d rather not have the money being taken away and thrown into the ether (he’s sort of a fiscal libertarian and he lives in one of the reddest states but he’s normal on the social issues). So I made him a bet. I bet him $10,000 that I don’t have that in 2037 or so when he’s eligible, he will get his social security check. I don’t bet much, and the only other bet I’ve ever been so sure of was when I bet on the Steelers in the Superbowl a couple years ago.
I told him already that I want the $10k in its 2037 equivalent.
In the 1990s people felt the economy was doing well. In the Bush administration, the GOP keeps saying the economy is doing hot - but if it were, would they keep having to say that? I don’t think so.
The calculus of living paycheck to paycheck in America is getting harder. What used to last four days might last half that long now. Pay the gas bill, but skip breakfast. Eat less for lunch so the kids can have a healthy dinner.
Across the nation, Americans are increasingly unable to stretch their dollars to the next payday as they juggle higher rent, food and energy bills. It’s starting to affect middle-income working families as well as the poor, and has reached the point of affecting day-to-day calculations of merchants like Wal-Mart Stores Inc., 7-Eleven Inc. and Family Dollar Stores Inc.
Food pantries, which distribute foodstuffs to the needy, are reporting severe shortages and reduced government funding at the very time that they are seeing a surge of new people seeking their help.
While economists debate whether the country is headed for a recession, some say the financial stress is already the worst since the last downturn at the start of this decade.
While I clearly believe Alan Greenspan is engaging in Monday Morning Quarterbacking of his cheerleading of the Bush administration’s dumbass fiscal policies, it’s clear his criticism has some weight as it isn’t every day that the odious Vice President Cheney “writes” an op-ed in the GOP’s Murdoch owned company newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, to defend themselves.
Don’t you love it when big business lays off thousands of workers and gets a huge wet kiss in the form of tax breaks? You bet
Here was Ford Motor Co. announcing yesterday that it had cut 10,000 jobs last year and that it will cut up to 30,000 more. But shedding jobs at muscle-car acceleration rates didn’t stop Ford from pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars courtesy of the American Jobs Creation Act.
No, I’m not making this up. Right there, on page 2 of one of its news releases yesterday, Ford said that “repatriation of foreign earnings pursuant to the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 resulted in a permanent tax savings of about $250 million.”
The “American Jobs Creation Act” passed the House with 207 Yeas from Republicans, and 124 Nays from Democrats.
I think it’s kind of amusing for the media to jump all over the Dow crawling its way above 11,000 without noting that under the Bush administration the market is at about the same level the Clinton administration left it at. I’m also waiting for all of those armchair economists on the right who swore up and down a week ago that the Dow didn’t matter to know explain to me that it does matter because… er… well… Bush!
The president doesn’t have a magic wand that he can wave over the markets, but I’m willing to admit that the sound fiscal policy we had under Clinton (cutting taxes for the middle class, eradicating the debt) had something to do with the unprecedented economic expansion of that era.
On the flip side cutting taxes for Paris Hilton, Bill Gates, Ken Lay and Tom DeLay has done essentially nil — and the deficit has returned with a vengeance.
Don Evans, former commerce secretary, is now going to go work for Vlad Putin. You have to wonder, when Evans was commerce secretary, was he just doing Mother Russia’s dirty work?
Vioxx maker Merck & Co. concealed heart attacks suffered by three patients during a clinical study of the now-withdrawn painkiller in a report on the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2000, the journal wrote in an editorial released Thursday.
Cast-iron pipe manufacturer McWane Inc. (McWane) and company executives James Delk, Michael Devine, and Charles “Barry” Robison were sentenced today in federal court for environmental crimes connected with the operation of McWane Cast Iron Pipe Company in Birmingham, Ala.
Judge Robert Propst sentenced McWane to pay a fine of $5 million and serve a period of probation for five years. McWane, Inc. is also ordered to perform a community service project valued at $2.7 million. Judge Propst ordered McWane executive James Delk to serve probation for three years, including six months of home detention and a fine of $90,000; Mike Devine received two years of probation, including three months of home detention and a fine of $35,000; and Charles Robinson received two years of probation and a fine of $2,500. Additionally, Robinson will serve 150 hours of community service work.
After a six week trial McWane; James Delk, a former Vice President and General Manager; and Mike Devine, a former plant manager at and current employee of McWane in New Jersey, were found guilty in June of this year of conspiracy to violate the Clean Water Act (CWA) by discharging industrial process wastewater into Avondale Creek in Birmingham through storm drains, in violation of their permit. McWane and Delk were also convicted of 18 counts of discharging pollutants-including hydraulic oil and sludge containing zinc and lead-into Avondale Creek and eventually Village Creek, which runs into Bayview Lake, between May 1999 and January 2001. Devine was additionally convicted of seven counts of discharging pollutants into Avondale Creek between May 1999 and January 2000. In a related count, McWane and Charles Robison-its Vice President for Environmental Affairs-were convicted of making a false statement to the EPA by misrepresenting that various locations relating to wastewater management were acceptable when this was not an accurate description of those locations. Further, many of the purported inspections had not been conducted.
The point is this: in the southern small-town, rural and exurban communities I know best, and among the low-to-moderate income “working family” voters Democrats most need to re-attract, Wal-Mart is considered pretty damn near sancrosanct. And if Democrats decide to tell these voters they can’t be good progressives and shop at Wal-Mart, we will lose these people for a long, long time.
Last week when I was in Atlanta with my aunt, grandmother and cousins we went to one of those gigantic mega Wal-Marts. As I walked in, I realized… you could live there. Literally. You could get enough food to feed an army, grab a dvd player and a plasma tv, get a tent, an airbed, and several days worth of clothing — in one damn building.
Wal-Mart is guilty of some horrible labor practices and has shown a capacity to be an economic pariah, but you aren’t going to get very far if you try to make people ashamed to shop there.
Wal-Mart provides a wide variety of merchandise at low prices. There is much pressure that needs to be brought to bear against them, but much like Microsoft — they have become a part of America. It’s messy, and not always fair and honest with room for much improvement, but it isn’t going away.
These latest developments shed light on a news story, first reported by Reuters, that CEO Lee Scott and Wal-Mart were developing a secret strategy to address the growing WakeUpWalMart.com grassroots movement. As part of Wal-Mart s new public relations strategy, Wal-Mart, through its public relations firm Edelman, has hired Mike Krempasky to help spread its public relations deception. Mike Krempasky is a right-wing blogger, founder of redstate.org, and the former political director for Richard Viguerie s American Target Advertising.
Supply side “economics” meets reality, and reality wins
Colorado residents have voted to suspend their Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, the strictest government spending limit in the nation, and give up more than $3 billion in tax refunds to help the state bounce back from a recession.
Fiscal conservatives were dismayed at the outcome Tuesday night and worried about its impact on other states considering similar spending limits.
But supporters said Colorado couldn’t afford to vote no, not with higher education, health care and transportation already suffering from millions of dollars in budget cuts.
“It means we can join 49 other states recovering from the recession, we can make up some of the cuts,” said Republican Gov. Bill Owens, who stunned his own party by joining Democrats in crafting the ballot measure.
weird. There are a lot of successful business/CEO types who are happy little soldiers for the GOP, I can’t for the life of me figure what the upside of picking Fiorina is.
healthy dinner.
