What's that thing you use to fasten wood together? The thing you use instead of a nail? The one with threads on it? I forget.
CNNMoney (10.18.04) - Challenger says cuts up 60% in 3Q, tech companies have no hiring plans.
"The U.S. technology sector suffered another round of widespread layoffs during the third quarter, with computer firms slashing jobs most aggressively, a report said Monday.
'High-tech job cuts are on the way up as the end of the year approaches,' said John A. Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas. 'Behind this trend is the fact that technology companies have virtually no pricing power,'
Job cuts in technology jumped 60 percent between July and September to 54,701, compared with 34,213 layoffs in the second quarter. Computer companies alone saw job cuts jump 127 percent, to 30,624."
CNNMoney (07.28.04) -
CEO pay hikes double
"The CEO's at the nation's largest companies saw their raises more than doubled in 2003 as the median raise handed out by S&P 500 companies to their top executives was 22.18 percent, according to a study by The Corporate Library.
'This double-digit rise in pay shows that calls for pay restraint appear to be being ignored,' said the statement from the group."
Forbes (08.31.04) - Outsourcing CEOs Get Big Pay Hikes
"U.S. companies that outsourced the most jobs in 2003 also offered well-above average pay increases to their chief executives.
The average CEO compensation at the 50 firms outsourcing the most service jobs increased by 46% in 2003. That increase compares to an average hike of 9% for CEOs at 365 of the largest U.S. companies....
The study says that CEOs of the top outsourcing companies earned an average of $10.4 million in 2003, 28% more than the average CEO compensation of $8.1 million."
Forbes notes that the average 9% increase is "far in excess of pay increases enjoyed by Americans in general." Us in general folks enjoyed a 3.2% rise in personal income between 2002 and 2003. And the EO-to-worker-pay ratio increased to 301:1 in 2003. Heck, it was only 282:1 in 2002.
And that's based on the average CEO pay hike at 365 of the largest U.S. companies, not those who were outsourcing.
301:1? That seems pretty big.
The study may be found at:
CEO Pay Soars at Companies That Send Jobs Overseas
Christian Science Monitor (11.04.05):
"The GOP has to be happy with a net gain of four seats. It makes filibusters more difficult and inches them closer to the magic number of 60 votes. But consider for a second the places where seats turned - North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, South Dakota, and possibly Florida.
You can try to paint that as the beginning of a mandate, but it is better described as the final falling out of party realignments that began long ago. All those states went for Mr. Bush and, except for Florida, they did it by wide margins.
At the same time, the GOP lost its Senate seat in Illinois - a seat that naturally realigned to Democrats - and its seat in Colorado, which tilts between the two parties.
In the House, four seats is clearly better than no seats or a loss of seats, but considering the popular vote win by the president it's hardly spectacular, or even very good. Consider that in Texas alone four Democratic incumbents lost largely due to redistricting following the 2000 Census. Again, welcome to the realignment of the states.
Is the red post-election tinge a mandate? Don't bet on it.
LATimes (11.04.04):
"In the weeks after the fall of Baghdad, Iraqi looters loaded powerful explosives into pickup trucks and drove the material away from the Al Qaqaa ammunition site, according to a group of U.S. Army reservists and National Guardsmen who said they witnessed the looting.
The soldiers said about a dozen U.S. troops guarding the sprawling facility could not prevent the theft because they were outnumbered by looters. Soldiers with one unit — the 317th Support Center based in Wiesbaden, Germany — said they sent a message to commanders in Baghdad requesting help to secure the site but received no reply.
The witnesses' accounts of the looting, the first provided by U.S. soldiers, support claims that the American military failed to safeguard the munitions."
Soldiers Describe Looting of Explosives
Slate, via MSNBC (11.03.04):
"Slightly more than half of the citizens of this country simply do not care about what those of us in the "reality-based community" say or believe about anything.
They don't care that Iraq is turning into murderous quicksand and a killing field for our children. They don't care that the Bush presidency has made us less safe by creating more terrorists, inspiring more anti-American hatred and refusing to engage in the hard work that would be necessary to make a meaningful dent in our myriad vulnerabilities at home. They don't care that he has mortgaged our children's future to give trillions to the wealthiest among us. They don't care that the economy continues to hemorrhage well-paying jobs and replace them with Wal-Mart; that the number without health insurance is over forty million and rising. They don't care that Medicare premiums are rising to fund the coffers of pharmaceutical companies. They don't care that the air they breathe and the water they drink is being slowly poisoned and though they call themselves conservatives, they even don't care that the size of the government and its share of our national income has increased by roughly a quarter in just four years. This is not a world of rational debate and issue preference.
It's one of "them" and "us". He's one of "them" and not one of "us" and that's all they care about. True it's an illusion. After all, Bush is a millionaire's son who went to Yale and Harvard and sat out Vietnam, not even bothering to show up for his cushy National Guard duty, and succeeded only in trading on his father's name and connections in adult life. But somehow, they feel he understands them. He speaks their language.
More 'them' than 'us'
One must make allowances for victory-bluster. And yet, what's striking is that each of these statements is demonstrably false. The GOP made a net gain of four seats -- four -- in the House. They owe those gains almost entirely to Tom DeLay's unprecedented mid-term redistricting plan in Texas, which broke tradition along with a number of campaign finance laws, leaving several participants in the scheme under indictment. DeLay himself might go down in the end.
More broadly, the fact is that the Republicans have gerrymandered themselves into a majority that is powerful and significant precisely to the degree to which it is insulated from public sentiment. (The Democrats achieved the same condition in their own congressional heyday.) At last count, 54 percent of the country rated the job done by Republicans in Congress as "only fair" or "poor."
GOP gains in the Senate were significant, but came largely in overwhelmingly Republican states. Tom Daschle's election was not a referendum on the Senate Democrats. It was an election in which just over one-half of America's fifth-least-populist state -- one which voted overwhelmingly Republican for president -- voted to send a Republican to the Senate, too.
MORE ON "MANDATES."