You Did It WHOSE Way?
by pessimist
Poor Georgie! Things just don't seem to be going the way Unka Dickie and der Karl told him it would!
Far from having it easy and having lots of time to strut before massed troops and look like a real military leader (as he will from time to time), his war bungling just might lead to Republican control being a casualty of the Iraq War! There are even claims that Republicans are already abandoning George right when he needs them most (and the source is VERY friendly to him, if you know what I mean! Do a search there if you doubt me!)
In addition, there are complaints about his tactics, with some declaring that Divisive tactics do not serve America's future. You mean, for instance, that Marriage should be beyond politics?
What a concept! Why didn't Condi and Scooter come up with that idea?
Then there is the much-vaunted economy. Notice how we aren't hearing "It's YOUR Money!" anymore? Maybe that's because both real estate agents and homeowners know that the housing boom over and there is no easy way to refi the house and suck out the 'profits' one more time?
But Wait! That's Not All!!
After all the hype about how well the holiday buying season was going to go, it's looking like reality is quickly setting in:
It may cost hundreds of dollars more to stay warm this winter. In total, consumers will spend $150 billion more on energy than they did last year. American workers haven't seen much of a pay raise this year. And a record number of consumers have just finished filing for bankruptcy.Already, many retailers are offering sales they would usually spring on consumers within two weeks of Christmas. Wal-Mart, the nation's largest retailer, has said it will match any other retailer's prices. "On Black Friday, the bottom may fall out," says Richard Feinberg, director of the Purdue University Retail Institute and a professor of consumer sciences. "Retailers are selling more cheaply and sooner than they want to."
For retailers, this is by far the most important time of the year. The Friday after Thanksgiving is called Black Friday because it has historically been the time of year when stores go from operating at a loss (in the red) to making a profit (in the black).
A strong holiday season, says Mr. Feinberg, gives retailers the cash to restock their shelves in the new year. However, a weak season means the retailer has to borrow more, which means lower profits, less merchandise, and less hiring, he says. "If they don't get the sales now, they can't expand and buy merchandise for the spring and summer of next year," says the Purdue professor.
It doesn't look like they are getting them - early sales campaigns or no:
Holiday shopping season off to flat start
The U.S. holiday season's first major shopping day got off to a relatively flat start compared to a strong 2004, despite special promotions, discounts and expanded hours, according to figures released on Saturday.
"With heavy discounting by non-mall retailers combined with the extended shopping season in 2005, consumers may not feel the pressure to shop early this holiday season," retail research group ShopperTrak said in a statement. Data from ShopperTrak showed Black Friday sales were flat, down a slight 0.9 percent from a year ago to $8 billion.As consumers grapple with steep energy prices and rising interest rates, investors are watching closely for any sign of a spending pullback. The November-December holiday season typically accounts for about one-fourth of annual retail sales, and the biggest chunk of profits for jewelers, electronics chains and clothing stores.
Well, gee! Why might that be? Could it be that the economy went forward but left many behind?
Ben Harris' expenses are rising faster than his paycheck. A 26-year-old technician at Jackson National Life Insurance in Lansing, Mich., Harris is an hourly employee who usually receives a 3% annual raise, plus a bonus. Problem is, consumer prices have jumped 4.3% the past year and gasoline prices are hovering above $2 a gallon.
"If you add up what it takes to get to work, as far as food, buying clothes, gas, car, everything, almost half of what I make goes into just" that, Harris says. "Things have to get better, because if they don't, I'm not going to make it."
Harris is one of millions feeling pinched in a time of plenty. Broad economic data show the nation in the midst of a four-year expansion with strong growth, low — though rising — inflation, a muscular housing market and robust corporate profits.
But they also show that prosperity hasn't been spread evenly. The poverty rate has risen. Wage gains are among the slowest on record. Many corporate pension plans are in a death spiral. Health care costs are rising. The personal savings rate has fallen.
The data in part reflect what Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and others call a widening divide between lower-skilled and more-educated workers. Though wages are stagnant, broader measures of income have been expanding at a somewhat healthier pace, pulled up by stock options and bonuses.
The 20% of the workforce in supervisory jobs have seen recent wage gains nearing 10%, while production workers have experienced gains of less than 4%.
The Census Bureau says inflation-adjusted median earnings for full-time male workers declined 2.3% from 2003 to 2004. Women's earnings dipped for the second year in a row. Though the drop was a smaller 1%, until 2003 women's wages hadn't declined since 1995. A separate government measure found wages and salaries for workers in private industry advancing at the slowest pace since its record keeping began in 1975.Those trends, along with higher energy prices and a slower housing market, could spell lower consumption and growth.
They have already created political problems for the White House, as polls show Americans souring on President Bush's economic policies. Sluggish wage gains are also fueling a debate in Congress over increasing the minimum wage, which has held at $5.15 an hour since 1997. Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott recently endorsed raising it, saying his customers are having a hard time making ends meet.
The Heritage Foundation isn't gonna like that!
But I digress.
Still, many ordinary Americans foresee little change in their situations. The percentage of Americans saying the economy is getting worse has been hovering above 60% in weekly USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup surveys, compared with early 2000, when more than 60% said economic conditions were getting better. Consumer sentiment has remained soft, even though the economy expanded at a robust 4% pace in 2004. The New York-based Conference Board in October found only 12% of Americans expected more jobs to open up in the next six months.Some also see their problems as largely self-created due to a love of the very consumption that has fueled the economy.
Which is why the foreclosure rates are beginning to creep upward. It's hard to hang on to a house when your wages don't match the increase in your monthly expenses, not to mention your insurance coverage costs and taxes!
The Labor Department says hourly wages for production workers, about 80% of the private workforce, rose 2.9% from October 2004 through October 2005, while consumer inflation rose 4.3%.A broader Labor Department measure of private-sector wages and salaries, the Employment Cost Index, found wages and salaries for private-sector workers up just 2.2% in the 12 months ending in September, the slowest rate since 1975. In inflation-adjusted terms the picture is bad, but not the worst. Wages and salaries, adjusted for inflation, dropped more than 4% in 1979. They are off 2.4% so far in 2005.
Some of the sluggishness is because employers have been increasing payments for benefits, such as health care, at the expense of wages. International competition has led to a loss of union manufacturing jobs, which pay more on average. Maine continues to lose lucrative factory jobs, the backbone of its economy.
Still, the slow wage and salary gains are unusual, particularly given a relatively tight labor market and surging energy prices, which in the past would have fueled wage increases. The share of the economy going to labor and wages has been declining, as the share going to corporate profits is on the rise.
The Topper$ wouldn't be Topper$ if they didn't take care of Number One, now would they? That's why they don't feel the pain that their workers are going to feel when they can't work anymore!
When Mike Montagna, 47, of Pittston, Pa., reaches retirement age, he'll receive his monthly pension checks not from Techneglas, where he worked for 27 years, but from the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. (PBGC), the federal agency that insures traditional pensions. Techneglas, which makes television tubes, filed for bankruptcy protection last year, leaving the PBGC to pick up $70 million in liabilities from its pension plan, which was only 40% funded.Montagna, who is married and has three children, had planned to continue at Techneglas until he was too old to keep working. Instead, he finds himself enrolled in a computer-training class, trying to start over. Maddeningly, when Techneglas declared bankruptcy, he was just three years shy of the 30 years of service needed to immediately begin collecting pension benefits — albeit at a much-reduced level.
Instead, he won't collect payments until he's 65, if, as he says, the PBGC still has funding at that time.
Montagna is confident he can find another job, but probably not one with the benefits he had at Techneglas. "There are a lot more jobs, but they don't pay quite as much, they don't pay the benefits ... they don't want to pay full time," Montagna says.Adding insult to injury, former Techneglas workers were recently notified by the PBGC that under federal law it must adjust their pension payments to reflect the fact that Techneglas increased its pension benefits within five years of the pension plan's termination. Many of Montagna's former co-workers who had retired before Techneglas declared bankruptcy are now uncertain about their monthly pension payments. Montagna doesn't know yet what his ultimate pension will be.
"There should be a law that any company who goes bankrupt should have to pay into the pensions before they are allowed out of bankruptcy," Montagna says.
The PBGC last year paid out more than $500 million in benefits to 78,000 people in Pennsylvania, which has more federally run pension plans than any other state.
From 2000 to 2004 alone, the PBGC took over nearly 600 corporate retirement plans. In addition, thousands of companies have been closing fully funded plans or freezing benefits, according to the PBGC. That means workers get the benefits they've earned but can't accrue more, while new hires don't have access to a pension plan. Congress is moving on legislation to shore up the system and avert a possible taxpayer bailout down the road, but lawmakers and the White House are still at odds on many provisions.
PBGC is already tasked with paying out pensions for the airline workers whose employers got bankruptcy court permission to cast their expenses into the winds of change, and many of the steel workers when that industry went cold. In fact, it's expected that PBGC will go broke, and Congress isn't going to have the money to pay for it.
Working or not, people are going to have to use energy for many things. This need isn't going to leave much money for holiday shopping:
James Windham, 63, of Hattiesburg, Miss., is a contract trucker for Buddy Moore Trucking in Birmingham, Ala. High diesel prices — which further increased after Hurricane Katrina — are an enormous problem, cutting into his earnings and savings and making it likely that he will have to postpone retirement.
Last year, he spent $40,000 for fuel. In 2000, he estimates, he paid less than $25,000.
Overall, energy is a big part of the reason that inflation has been running at its highest level in 14 years, and the full brunt of higher energy prices won't be felt until this winter, when consumers are expected to face sharply higher bills — 30% to 40% more or higher — for heating oil and natural gas.Windham's take-home pay has plummeted by a half to a third, or by roughly $1,000 a week, he says. "My bring-home pay is less than it was a year ago, even though we're making a whole lot more money," Windham says. "I'll have to work longer now — there ain't no way I can make it. We absorbed more than I thought we were going to have to. Everything has gone up."
Even as his income is being pinched, Windham and his wife, Janice, in July were hit with an increase in their health insurance premiums, which rose to $385 from $319 a week. The house he bought 30 years ago for $20,000 is now worth $40,000, but he hasn't benefited from enormous price gains that are the norm in some other parts of the country.
But at least he's still got a job, right, free marketeers? What if he didn't have a job, like so many auto workers face soon? What does he do then? He'll have to be very patient:
Nearly 20% of unemployed workers have been out of a job six months or more, the first time long-term joblessness has been so pronounced when the unemployment rate has been so low and falling, the National Employment Law Project says.
Until Hurricane Katrina, job growth in the United States had been accelerating, with businesses adding an average of 196,000 jobs per month from January through August. Job growth has cooled since Katrina and the other hurricanes, however, as businesses in the Gulf area have shut down and businesses thousands of miles away grapple with higher energy prices and signs of cooling consumer demand.
Maybe people in that position should adapt their ways and emulate these folks, who dumpster-dive for fun:
Why the middle classes go scavenging in dustbins
The Thanksgiving holiday is over and the frenzied Christmas shopping season has begun. This is bonanza time for the tribe of rummaging Americans known as “freegans”.The anti-capitalist freegans — the name combines “free” and “vegan” — are so appalled by the waste of the consumer society (the freegan philosophy of “ethical eating” argues that capitalism and mass production exploit workers, animals and the environment) that they try to live on the leftovers, scavenging for food in supermarket dustbins.
“It’s fun. It’s a thrill. It’s more fun and more satisfying than just going to the store and saying, ‘I wanted some bread and I got it’. It’s the surprise — and the prize,” said Janet Kalish, a New York high school teacher who describes herself as “60 per cent freegan”.
“The foraging itself is not that time-consuming,” Madeline Nelson, a former corporate communications officer at a national bookshop chain in New York, said. “I tend to go out twice a week, and I would probably go grocery shopping twice a week anyway. What takes time, and you need to do it, is to inspect and wash everything.”
For Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday, Ms Nelson bought the turkey, but most of the rest of the food was freegan.
Adam Weissman, a freegan activist and sometime security guard in New Jersey, says freeganism grew out of the radical 1960s “yippie” movement, but also has affinities with the hobos of the Great Depression who travelled around the country by stealing rides on the railways.
“I have pity for people who have not figured out this lifestyle,” he said. “I am able to take long vacations from work, I have all kinds of consumer goods, and I eat a really healthy diet of really wonderful food: white asparagus and cactus fruit, three different kinds of mushrooms and four different kinds of pre-cut salad. And I’m just thinking of what is in my refrigerator right now.
“Essentially, the sky’s the limit. We found flat-screen TVs, working boom-boxes and stereos. I have put together most of my wardrobe. Last year’s designer clothing in perfect shape is discarded because it’s no longer fashionable, so I wear a lot of designer labels.”
Freegans often go “dumpster diving” in packs, delving into skips at supermarkets and restaurants.
Their website lists “favourite foraging sites”, such as the vegan restaurant in Greenwich Village, New York, that throws out a “whole bag of stir-fried Asian food after 10 every night” or the Cincinnati bakery that dumps bagels and French bread. Often the best shops throw out the most food to keep their offerings fresh.
A 1997 study by the US Department of Agriculture estimated that the US wastes about 43 billion kilograms of food a year. That is about 27 per cent of US production, but the true figure is as much as 50 per cent, according to ten years of research by Timothy Jones at the University of Arizona.
WASTING AWAY# The US Department of Agriculture estimates that 27 per cent of total food production in the US is wasted every year
# Timothy Jones, who conducted a ten-year study for the University of Arizona, estimates that the amount that does not get eaten is as much as 50 per cent
# A typical household wastes 14 per cent of all food purchased
# Fifteen per cent of that includes products still within their expiry date but never opened
# An average American family of four throws away meat, fruit, vegetables and grain products worth $590 (£345) a year
“The No 1 problem is that Americans have lost touch with what food is for,” Professor Jones said. “We have lost touch with the processes that bring it to the table and we don’t notice the inefficiency.”
As the need increases, that misperception is certainly going to change. The economy is clearly going down no matter what kind of happy talk you hear from the wrong-wingers and the media. The proof you needs is all around you - all you have to do is look and listen. It will be easier to notice come January when all the holiday temps get laid off and the stories of Granny freezing to death in her unheated apartment become more frequent.
Still glad you voted for George, Red Staters? Aren't you proud of your Christianity for doing so?
Christianity - that religion you practice. The one that says to care for those in need, not those in greed.
Never mind.
I'm sure God loves you too.
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