Malkinized
Michelle Malkin, frequent Fox News contributor and cause celeb for conservative wingnuttery, has been on fire lately. Ever the vigilent media critic, she's insisting that an AP news source in Iraq, Jamil Hussein, is a made up person... is an actual person but a lying tool of the liberal media... is possibly exaggerating about the immolation of six Sunni and destruction of four mosques in order to sabotage the U.S. war effort.
Sadly, No! smacks down the perpetually sneering Malkin here. Pretty amusing, if I do say so myself.
Sadly, No! smacks down the perpetually sneering Malkin here. Pretty amusing, if I do say so myself.
posted by Logic101 at 1/28/2007 03:34:00 PM
5 Comments:
OMG How freakishly strange you bring this woman up today? On every Saturday,the Amarillo paper runs her column. After reading yesterdays Michelle column, I had to write her e-mail address at the bylines and tell her for all her supposed left wing Demorcatic lies she supposedly exposes... she herself is nothing but a liar and I had the proof to expose her. In her last column she was on one of her usual rants about boader problems and illegal alliens. a paragraph from her article goes off on Bush's boarder policy and I'll quote her here "But no matter. Mouthing his same old bogus platitudes about the need to allow ' undocumented workers' to do the job Americans won't do ( never mind all those Americans who immediately lined up to apply for those meat-packing jobs after the December raids), Bush wants to pile millions of new ' guest worker' illegal alien applicants onto the teetering homeland security bureaucracy."
I just happen to live in the Texas county where the Swift raid took place and let me tell you... NOBODY, NO AMERICANS... NOBODY has been lined up to fill these jobs. INS rounded up about 1/10 the swift workfoce that day and that was just the ones they caught. Swift has been running on less than half production work force since then and has been desperetly trying to find employees. The ads in the classifieds have been running non stop since the raids, at first the hourly wage was advertised at $11.33 then went to $11.83 and now is advertised at $12.33, but still hardly any takers. When I was a young lad I worked there and had one of the better jobs but I wouldn't want to make a carreer out of life working that fabracation floor for 11 dollars an hour. But just wanted to tell you I have wrote Micheele to call her a liar and told her if she really believed people were lined up for these jobs to come on down, she could be hired tomorrow and I'm betting she will have quit by tomorrow afternoon.
Moral is I guess, Michelle, don't be slinging moral mud about lying to the American people when you yourself have a mean mud curveball.
Matthew
Michelle Malkin is the new Ann Coulter. *gag
I vaguely recall some photos of people lined up for jobs after the raids, somewhere (I don't remember where - Drudge?) but for some reason I didn't think too much about it.
Why do you think Swift has no takers there? That would be considered a fairly 'decent' starting wage around here... we don't have much of an industry left. Used to be a big manufacturing and machining town but that pretty much died in the 80's except for a few indy shops. Now most of our non-professional jobs are in services. I don't have anything against services other than that they tend to be expendable when times get tight and I think it's stupid to base an economy on them. My dad used to say, "How can a country survive if it doesn't produce anything?" I think my dad was very wise. :-)
The stock market will probably continue to flourish as we move from Industrial Capitalism to Financial Capitalism but it'll be a hard sell to convince me that it isn't going to turn into a concentrated wealth cluster at the top. Welcome to the return of the gilded age.
My perspective on these matters is probably colored by personal experience. I worked for a Fortune 500 company in the manufacturing industry ~1997 that moved as much as they could possibly move to Mexico so they could pay pennies on the dollar for labor and wouldn't have to abide by all those pesky environmental standards for the chemicals they use (and dump). They put a lot of very decent people out of work -- not unionized Big Labor... just guys making $11/hour or so, trying to live the American dream.
Now I work for a Fortune 500 company that is intensely focused - every day! - on how many professionals they can dump in favor of cheap labor in India or Brazil, etc. "It's the right thing for the business." It makes me want to puke.
I am not "anti-brown people". I don't have a problem with a guy in Mexico or a guy in India wanting a better life for his family and coming here and working hard for it. I just think there's something inherently wrong with the way we worship capitalism - an economic theory - like it's some kind of religious diety and excuse all of its associated transgressions as "good business".
I know there are certain realities in business but what's wrong with a little balance? This country thrives when there is an equalibrium reached between business interests and labor interests. When either side gets too powerful it all goes to shit. We're out of balance again... and IMO, it's going to shit.
I have it ok for now but, like many people in my industry, I am always aware that if they could figure out how to do my job out of India, I'd be fired tomorrow. And if that happens, that Swift job in Texas might start looking pretty damn good. :-)
Sorry... started with Malkin and digressed... I guess you can tell what my hot button topic is, eh? (other than Fox News, of course)
Well, the major reason Swift can't get many people to apply for the jobs is because it is very hard work. The turnover in new employees is very high, around 80 percent or better. When I worked out there on one day they hired 50 new employees, by the next day 30 of them had quit and by the end of the week 42 had quit. To give you a kind of mental visual of what the job is, imagine you are hired to cut a 4 inch by 4 inch block of wood in half with a saw in around 20 seconds. 20 seconds after the block hits you another one will be coming. At first it might be fairly easy, you make your cut with a couple seconds to spare, but after 15 minutes your arm is starting to get tired and your blade is getting duller so you have to use more force to make the cut, but the blocks keep coming every 20 seconds. Do that for a full 8 hours, and slime and fat tissue and blood collecting around your feet all for a whopping $90.00 a day. There are a few more perks to the job too like the fact the temp in the place has to stay reletivly cold so the meat doesn't spoil and the smell of the unusablt parts of the cattle being rendered down that gets into your hair, nostrils, cloths etc. until you never think it's going to come out and you can kind of understand why it is hard to keep workers coming back.
The 2nd part of your response the other day has always puzzled me. I mean I know corporations are grredy, bloodsucking parasites that only care about profit and the hell with anything or anybody else, BUT there has to be a time in order to achive this emornous profits that they need US and our decent standard of living wages. An example would be, lets say you and me work for the Simoneau Shoe Corporation in the good old USA and our hourly wage is $20.00. We can produce a pair of shoes for $50.00 and Simoneau Corp. can mark up those shoes 100% to $ 100.00 and still sell them at a good clip, plus they have room to have sales and discounts and still make a profit, but for the most part they sell great at $100.00. Now Simoneau Corp. comes to us and says, " Look, you either take a drastic pay cut and work for the same wages as the people in India and China or we're moving our factories there, you'll now bw working for $2.00 an hour." Me and you say ok we have no choice, we either work for 2 dollars or not work at all. So now Simoneau Corp is paying us $2.00 an hour and the cost to make a pair of shoes is now $5.00, but the best they can expect in markup and still be able to sell is 100% to $10.00. Now on paper the Simoneau Corp is still making the percentage profit but monaterally it is a bad cut in profit. It seems to me that must be a fine line in the number of jobs that can be outsourced to slave labor market countries and the number of jobs that need to stay in the decent standard of living countries in order for these bloodsuckers to make huge profits they are getting now.
The only reasoning that I can come up with as to why they wouldn't care to keep this balance of jobs is because their futuristic gurus have seen the writing on the wall. The education system in America is failing with 1 oou of every 3 students quitting school before graduating high school and other countries in the world are sending their kids to our colleges where they decide to study instead of seeing if they can drink an entire keg at a frat party.They take their education home with them and use that education to bring America to her knees with an economic attack, and it seems to be working. If thats the bloodsucking Corporations stategy, to suck as much profit as possible before the collapse and then bail for their other " multinational" factories, I would suggest that they pick up a copy and read " The Emperor Jones" for the communist and arab countries will not let them keep the blood money long.
Matthew
Hmmm... I sense you think I am one of those people who believe money isn't everything and we should all just give up our material possessions and go live on a kibbutz. Not so, dear Matthew.
Capitalism works ok, give or take, as long there’s some balance between labor and corporate interests. John Maynard Keynes said, "Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone." Astounding, indeed.
I've had a ringside seat in this whole offshoring scheme for many years now. Here's how it works:
Simoneau Corp is a shoe company making a reasonable profit. They’re paying their employees $20/hour and it costs roughly $50 to produce a pair of shoes. They sell their shoes for $100 a pair -- a very reasonable profit margin for shoes of decent quality. It’s a competitive shoe market, however, and their primary competitor, Pardy Inc, tries to get an edge on market share by taking a hit on their profit margin. They lower the price of their shoes to $80 a pair and Simoneau Corp has no choice but to follow suit. Eventually, after a cost war that makes consumers very happy, both companies settle around $65 for a pair of shoes. While they’re still operating at a profit, their investors aren’t seeing the return they once were. They dump the stock. Stock price goes down. Both companies go into panic mode and begin to examine their costs, embarking on various cost cutting programs. All of the cost levers are examined… labor, materials, distribution, etc. The company begins to cut corners. Processes are tinkered with to reduce labor costs but it starts to affect product quality. It also affects employee safety. Actuaries guide the company in these calculated risks… we can afford $X in employee injury claims per month. We can afford to let quality slip X number of defects per million. Both companies coast like this for a while but they haven’t regained investor interest. Neither of them can raise prices without losing market share to the other so they’re stuck.
Since labor is Simoneau Corp’s biggest expense, labor is where they decide to go for savings and they decide to offshore their production for $2/hour in Malaysia. Whew! Now the cost of producing a pair of shoes is about $30 and they’re still selling for $65. The investors take notice again and the Simoneau Corp execs get big big big bonuses for saving the company and everyone is happy except for the US employees standing in the unemployment line. Pardy, Inc, by the way, has figured out that they need to offshore, too. They’re retaining market share because their shoes are still priced competitively with Simoneau Corp’s shoes but Wall Street won’t give them the time of day because their GP is weak and they’re aren’t providing nearly the return they investors are getting from Simoneau Corp. And so it goes, and so it goes.
And no, neither Simoneau Corp nor Pardy, Inc, is the slightest bit concerned about the impact of unemployed workers on the shoe market. The language for that concern doesn’t even exist in their business dictionary. They are very myopic; there is no Department of Shoe Industry Planning. They are focused only on their quarterly numbers. Wallstreet is focused on quarterly numbers. Investors are focused on quarterly numbers. It’s not that Corporations are bloodsucking … it’s just that they have only ONE objective -- to make money. The real bloodsuckers are the enablers -- those who rig the game to give corporate interests all the power, throwing the entire equation out of balance.
Matthew, I wanted to add one thing. What's meaningful to me in that Keynes quote is that it articulates what I see all the time. People use the theories of Capitalism to excuse - and even to justify - very bad behavior. If I f* over my employees or even my customers (mon Dieu!), well hey man, it's a dog-eat-dog world! Gotta make a buck. The invisible hand will sort it all out, right? Truly wrong-doers won't stay in business for very long.
And I think in the long run people either believe that load of crap or they don't, and whether they believe it or not goes a long way toward explaining what they prefer in their politics. The libs get demonized for any attempt to add balance to the equation (labor rights, consumer protections, etc) if it's not in favor of big bi'ness. Sure, there are some way-lefties who won't be happy until we've got communism in play but for the most part I think people just want some balance between labor interests and corporate interests. We can argue all day about the best way to provide that balance but in the end our system doesn't work well for the majority without it.
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