Showing posts with label COMMERCE. Show all posts

Saturday, November 13, 2010

BUSINESS AND JOBS

I read this great article today ("Businesses Do Not Create Jobs", by Dave Johnson, November 11, 2010)
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AN EXCERPT:
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"Businesses do not create jobs. In fact, the way our economy is structured the incentive is for businesses to get rid of as many jobs as they can.

Demand Creates Jobs

A job is created when demand for goods or services is greater than the existing ability to provide them. When there is a demand, people will see the need and fill it. Either someone will start filling the demand alone, or form a new business to fill it or an existing provider of the good or service will add employees as needed. (Actually a job can be created by a business, a government, a non-profit organization or just a person doing the job, depending on the nature of the good or service that is required.)

So a demand creates a job. A person who sees that houses on a block need their lawns mowed might go door to door and say they will mow the lawn for $10. When houses start saying "Yes, I need my lawn mowed" a job has been created!

Demand also creates businesses. The person who is filling demand by mowing lawns for people might after a while have a regular circuit of houses that want their lawns mowed every week, and will buy a truck and a new mower and hire someone to help. A business is born!

Businesses Want To Kill Jobs, Not Create Them

Many people wrongly think that businesses create jobs. They see that a job is usually at a business, so they think that therefore the business "created" the job. This thinking leads to wrongheaded ideas like the current one that giving tax cuts to businesses will create jobs, because the businesses will have more money. But an efficiently-run business will already have the right number of employees. When a business sees that more people are coming in the door (demand) than there are employees to serve them, they hire people to serve the customers. When a business sees that not enough people are coming in the door and employees are sitting around reading the newspaper, they lay people off. Businesses want customers, not tax cuts.

Businesses have more incentives to eliminate jobs than to create them. Businesses in our economy exist to create profits, not jobs. This means the incentive is for a business to create as few jobs as possible at the lowest possible cost. They also constantly strive to reduce the number of people they employ by bringing in machines, outsourcing or finding other ways to reduce the payroll. This is called "cutting costs" which leads to higher profits. The same incentive also pushes the business to pay as little as possible when they do hire. (It also pushes businesses to cut worker safety protections, cut product quality, cut customer service, "externalize" costs by polluting, etc.)

This obviously works against the interests of the larger society, which wants lots of good jobs with good pay. And businesses, while working to cut jobs and pay less, need other businesses to hire lots of people and pay well, because that is what creates the demand that makes all the businesses work. ..."

Read the rest of the article at:

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2010114511/businesses-do-no-create-jobs

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

DON'T YOU JUST LOVE THE U.S. CHAMBER OF COMMERCE?

You've lost your job because the company you used to work for is outsourcing labor. You pick up the telephone to talk to someone from the company you used to work for and lo and behold, someone from India takes your call.

Now this is bad enough ... however, get this .... companies in India are donating thousands of dollars to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (whose members are some of the largest corporations in the world ... who do most of the outsourcing of jobs that used to be your job). The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is supporting Republican candidates because they know the Republican Party loves their members (who are outsourcing what were American jobs).

At the end of the now widely talked about Think Progress article, there is a list of foreign donors who have sent money to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Now tell me how warm and fuzzy you feel towards the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, its members and the Republican Party.

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Stop the Chamber!
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http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/think-progress-faiz-shakir-us-chamber
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And the CSC's [Clevelands Secret Club] remarks to the Greater Cleveland Partnership, who is a member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce [and our remarks to the Greater Cleveland Partnership's members]: Look GCP, before you get in bed with someone, check them out.
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Hell, the mafia gave money to many charities ... but my God, those charities were taking money from people who had blood on their hands.

The CSC's [Clevelands Secret Club] suggestion is to not do business with any of the GCP's members or become a shareholder in any of these companies; however, there are a lot of large corporations in their membership that may surprise you. If you presently do business with (or are a shareholder in) one of the GCP's members, you have to do some soul searching and planning on how to either end that business/shareholder relationship or tell them you don't want them to be in bed with the GCP as long as the GCP is in bed with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
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Apple Inc. withdrew from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Good for them - We love you and applaud you Apple.
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GCP and your members ... grow a pair and do the right thing. Students who attend Case Western Reserve and Cleveland State should tell the heads (and Boards) of these schools to get out of bed with the GCP unless the GCP gets out of bed with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
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Everyone, take a really deep look into the investments, associations, and leadership of all the companies and corporations you do business with, or are anticipating doing business with.
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Last, don't even think about harassing CSC members and friends. You cannot intimidate us.

Apple Drops Bombshell, Immediately Withdraws from U. S. Chamber (October 5 2009)
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More on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce
-"The Supreme Court Sold Out Our Democracy - How to Fight the Corporate Takeover of Our Elections", by Joshua Holland, October 25, 2010
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2bju39fTTI

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GAP WIDENS BETWEEN THE HAVES AND HAVE NOTS

"72,000,000+ Americans (over half) earn $25,000 or less a year. Another 34,000,000+ earn between $25,000 and $45,000. The notion that everyone is feeling the pain of this recession equally is completely deceptive. Working and middle class Americans are feeling the brunt of this recession. You would think that after the worst crisis since the Great Depression things would be different today in Q1 of 2011. Yet nothing has changed and in fact, we have invigorated the too big to fail with our current government policies. This is a government built by Wall Street banks and for Wall Street banks. Don’t be surprised when the next crisis hits because nothing has changed."

From MyBudget360 :Source "Social Security" -

What "Free Trade" Has Cost The World | OurFuture.org, by Dave Johnson, March 14, 2011

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Excerpt: "Income VS Wealth

There are a few people who make hundreds of millions of income in a single year. Some people make more than $1 billion in a year But that is in a single year. If you make vast sums every year, after a while it starts to add up. (And then there is the story of inherited wealth, passed down and growing for generation after generation...)

Top 1% owns more than 90% of us combined. "In 2007, the latest year for which figures are available from the Federal Reserve Board, the richest 1% of U.S. households owned 33.8% of the nation’s private wealth. That’s more than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent." (Also from the Working Group on Extreme Inequality)

400 people have as much wealth as half of our population. The combined net worth of the Forbes 400 wealthiest Americans in 2007: $1.5 trillion. The combined net worth of the poorest 50% of American households: $1.6 trillion."

9 Pictures That Expose This Country's Obscene Division of Wealth | Economy | AlterNet by Dave Johnson, February 13, 2011

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More GRITtv

Our Country Is Lost Believing in What It Sees on Screens, and We Are Going to Pay a Nasty Price for It

by Chris Hedges (article appeared on TruthDig "We do not shake ourselves awake quickly from our electronic hallucinations and defy the elites who are ruining the country and trashing the planet. -

October 8, 2010 -

Nemesis was the Greek goddess of retribution. She exacted divine punishment on arrogant mortals who believed they could defy the gods, turn themselves into objects of worship and build ruthless systems of power to control the world around them. The price of such hubris was almost always death.

Nemesis, related to the Greek word némein, means “to give what is due.” Our nemesis fast approaches. We will get what we are due. The staggering myopia of our corrupt political and economic elite, which plunder the nation’s wealth for financial speculation and endless war, the mass retreat of citizens into virtual hallucinations, the collapsing edifices around us, which include the ecosystem that sustains life, are ignored for a giddy self-worship. We stare into electronic screens just as Narcissus, besotted with his own reflection, stared into a pool of water until he wasted away and died.

We believe that because we have the capacity to wage war we have the right to wage war. We believe that money, rather than manufactured products and goods, is real. We believe in the myth of inevitable human moral and material progress. We believe that no matter how much damage we do to the Earth or our society, science and technology will save us. And as temperatures on the planet steadily rise, as droughts devastate cropland, as the bleaching of coral reefs threatens to wipe out 25 percent of all marine species, as countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh succumb to severe flooding, as we poison our food, air and water, as we refuse to confront our addiction to fossil fuels and coal, as we dismantle our manufacturing base and plunge tens of millions of Americans into a permanent and desperate underclass, we flick on a screen and are entranced.

We confuse the electronic image, a reflection back to us of ourselves, with the divine. We gawk at “reality” television, which of course is contrived reality, reveling in being the viewer and the viewed. True reality is obliterated from our consciousness. It is the electronic image that informs and defines us. It is the image that gives us our identity. It is the image that tells us what is attainable in the vast cult of the self, what we should desire, what we should seek to become and who we are. It is the image that tricks us into thinking we have become powerful—as the popularity of video games built around the themes of violence and war illustrates—while we have become enslaved and impoverished by the corporate state. The electronic image leads us back to the worship of ourselves. It is idolatry. Reality is replaced with electronic mechanisms for preening self-presentation—the core of social networking sites such as Facebook—and the illusion of self-fulfillment and self-empowerment. And in a world unmoored from the real, from human limitations and human potential, we inevitably embrace superstition and magic. This is what the worship of images is about. We retreat into a dark and irrational fear born out of a cavernous ignorance of the real. We enter an age of technological barbarism.

To those entranced by images, the world is a vast stage on which they are called to enact their dreams. It is a world of constant action, stimulation and personal advancement. It is a world of thrills and momentary ecstasy. It is a world of ceaseless movement. It makes a fetish of competition. It is a world where commercial products and electronic images serve as a pseudo-therapy that caters to feelings of alienation, inadequacy and powerlessness. We may be locked in dead-end jobs, have no meaningful relationships and be confused about our identities, but we can blast our way to power holding a little control panel while looking for hours at a screen. We can ridicule the poor, the ignorant and the weak all day long on trash-talk shows and reality television shows. We are skillfully made to feel that we have a personal relationship, a false communion, with the famous—look at the outpouring of grief at the death of Princess Diana or Michael Jackson. We have never met those we adore. We know only their manufactured image. They appear to us on screens. They are not, at least to us, real people. And yet we worship and seek to emulate them.

In this state of cultural illusion any description of actual reality, because it does not consist of the happy talk that pollutes the airwaves from National Public Radio to Oprah, is dismissed as “negative” or “pessimistic.” The beleaguered Jeremiahs who momentarily stumble into our consciousness and in a desperate frenzy seek to warn us of our impending self-destruction are derided because they do not lay out easy formulas that permit us to drift back into fantasy. We tell ourselves they are overreacting. If reality is a bummer, and if there are no easy solutions, we don’t want to hear about it. The facts of economic and environmental collapse, now incontrovertible, cannot be discussed unless they are turned into joking banter or come accompanied with a neat, pleasing solution, the kind we are fed at the conclusion of the movies, electronic games, talk shows and sitcoms, the kind that dulls our minds into passive and empty receptacles. We have been conditioned by electronic hallucinations to expect happy talk. We demand it.

We confuse this happy talk with hope. But hope is not about a belief in progress. Hope is about protecting simple human decency and demanding justice. Hope is the belief, not necessarily grounded in the tangible, that those whose greed, stupidity and complacency have allowed us to be driven over a cliff shall one day be brought down. Hope is about existing in a perpetual state of rebellion, a constant antagonism to all centers of power. The great moral voices, George Orwell and Albert Camus being perhaps two of the finest examples, describe in moving detail the human suffering we ignore or excuse. They understand that the greatest instrument for moral good is the imagination. The ability to perceive the pain and suffering of another, to feel, as King Lear says, what wretches feel, is a more powerful social corrective than the shelves of turgid religious and philosophical treatises on human will. Those who change the world for the better, who offer us hope, have the capacity to make us step outside of ourselves and feel empathy.

A print-based culture, as writer Neil Postman pointed out, demands rationality. The sequential, propositional character of the written word fosters what Walter Ong calls the “analytic management of knowledge.” But our brave new world of images dispenses with these attributes because the images do not require them to be understood. Communication in the image-based culture is not about knowledge. It is about the corporate manipulation of emotions, something logic, order, nuance and context protect us against. Thinking, in short, is forbidden. Entertainment and spectacle have become the aim of all human endeavors, including politics, which is how Stephen Colbert, playing his television character, can be permitted to testify before the House Judiciary Committee. Campaigns are built around the manufactured personal narratives of candidates, who function as political celebrities, rather than policies or ideas. News reports have become soap operas and mini-dramas revolving around the latest celebrity scandal.

Colleges and universities, which view students as customers and suck obscene tuition payments and loans out of them with the tantalizing promise of high-paying corporate jobs, have transformed themselves into resorts and theme parks. In this new system of education almost no one fails. Students become “brothers” or “sisters” in the atavistic, tribal embrace of eating clubs, fraternities or sororities. School spirit and school branding is paramount. Campus security keeps these isolated enclaves of privilege secure. And 90,000-seat football stadiums, along with their millionaire coaches, dominate the campus. It is moral leprosy.

The role of knowledge and art, as the ancient Greeks understood, is to create ekstasis, which means standing outside one’s self to give our individual life and struggle meaning and perspective. The role of art and scholarship is to transform us as individuals, not entertain us as a group. It is to nurture this capacity for understanding and empathy. Art and scholarship allow us to see the underlying structures and assumptions used to manipulate and control us. And this is why art, like intellectual endeavor, is feared by the corporate elite as subversive. This is why corporations have used their money to deform universities into vocational schools that spit out blinkered and illiterate systems managers. This is why the humanities are withering away.

The vast stage of entertainment that envelops our culture is intended to impart the opposite of ekstasis. Mass entertainment plays to the basest and crudest instincts of the crowd. It conditions us to have the same aspirations and desires. It forces us to speak in the same dead clichés and slogans. It homogenizes human experience. It wallows in a cloying nostalgia and sentimentalism that foster historical amnesia. It turns the Other into a cartoon or a stereotype. It prohibits empathy because it prohibits understanding. It denies human singularity and uniqueness. It assures us that we all have within us the ability, talent or luck to become famous and rich. It forms us into a lowing and compliant herd. We have been conditioned to believe—defying all the great moral and philosophical writers from Socrates to Orwell—that the aim of life is not to understand but to be entertained. If we do not shake ourselves awake from our electronic hallucinations and defy the elites who are ruining the country and trashing the planet we will experience the awful and deadly retribution of the gods."

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, is a senior fellow at the Nation Institute. He writes a regular column for TruthDig every Monday. His latest book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

Clevelands Secret Club Blog

Saturday, November 13, 2010

BUSINESS AND JOBS

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

DON'T YOU JUST LOVE THE U.S. CHAMBER OF COMMERCE?

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9/2012 VIDEO TAKES 30 SECONDS TO LOAD AFTER CLICKING ON THE PLAY ARROW - ALSO SEEN ON VIDEO SITE

BILL CLINTON AT DNC 2012

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What Is Fox News Latino? The Network's Shameless Ploy to Both Pander to and Demonize Hispanics

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Bill Moyers and Thomas Frank - Dark Money in Politics -wait 20 seconds after clicking play arrow

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TED NUGENT EXPOSED! DID EVERYTHING HE COULD NOT TO SERVE IN THE MILITARY

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GLENN GREENWALD LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR SOME

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PART TWO

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JOE SCARBOROUGH - RE: TAVIS SMILEY'S POVERTY TOUR SERIES -OCTOBER 10, 2011

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THE CAPITOL - WASHINGTON, DC

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Block the Vote: Ohio GOP Bars Early Voting to Suppress Pro-Labor Turnout

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BAILED OUT AND SOLD OUT

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US ECONOMY BOUGHT - CAMPAIGNS

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HANDING THE ENVIRONMENTAL HEN HOUSE TO THE FOXES

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U.S. MEDIA FAILING TO REPORT REAL NEWS