Originally published on 2.0: The Blogmocracy.

By Rodan

Polls show that most Americans think the False Messiah understands their problems more than either Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney. I, for the life of me, don’t get the benefit of the doubt this man is given. Clearly it has to do with him being Black and too many Americans don’t want to admit he’s a failure. This perception is not the reality.

At his Google town hall, the False Messiah is confronted by a woman whose husband is unemployed. Believing his own Obama Boom hype, he is stunned and taken aback. Obama said the economy was fine and that her husband should find a job. The women doesn’t back down and takes Obama to task for wanting to increase H1-B Visas. Obama then asks for her husband’s resume!

During his Google+ hangout Pres. Obama tells a woman that her husband shouldn’t be unemployed from the growth he has seen in the economy. Obama said he finds it “interesting” because he is getting “the word” that someone in her husband’s job field “should be able to find something right away.”

Obama offered to do something if she would just send him her husband’s resume.

The woman wants to know why Obama is extending visas for foreigners when there is tons of demand for American jobs by Americans.

“I don’t know what your husband’s speciality [is], but I can tell you that there is a huge demand around the country for engineers,” Obama told the woman.

“I understand that,” she responded. “But how am — given the list that you’re getting, I mean we’re not getting that. You said in the State of the Union address for business leaders to ask what can they do to bring jobs back to America.

There is demand for engineers in America. Its just businesses don’t want American engineers, they want cheap foreign labor. Does this sound familiar (Illegal immigration)? This has been very detrimental to the US economy. With declining wages and foreigners getting preferences, Americans are not interested in the Engineering field. There’s no longer an economic reward to justify the high costs assorted with attaining that degree. The H1-B visa program needs to stop. If someone wants to immigrate here, cool. I do think educated foreigners (Non Islamic) should be given a speeded up process, but to bring in people specifically for certain jobs has been a disaster in the IT field. Unlike farm work, these are jobs Americans would love to do.

This incident shows the delusion Obama lives in. Clearly, his own administration thinks the economy is doing fine. That woman is a patriot for hitting The False Messiah with a dose of reality. The job market sucks, no matter how much the Regime lies.

Update: Carolina Girl expressed my feelings on this matter.

Well said!

Michael Coren & VDare’s Peter Brimelow on Immigration

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by SDAMatt2a on Jan 6, 2012

Peter Brimelow, founder of VDare.com and author of “Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster” joins Michael Coren to discuss immigration in the U.S.A.

In my last post, I warned that the stranglehold of public sector unions has caused property taxes to skyrocket, so that there can be no recovery from the housing bubble until all public sector unions are gone. I also have warned, more than once, about the imminent bursting of the college tuition bubble.

What we call the American educational system, at all levels, is a bubble that is in the process of bursting. Government-run or government-funded schools are an expensive form of indoctrination. In addition, unionized and/or tenured employees of the educational system form a major part of the protected class of apparatchiki who are enslaving and looting the rest of us.

Our “educational” system has also created a new class of radicalized who think they have an “education” but who have no prospects in what little is left of the US economy. Too many of those students who have been thoroughly indoctrinated by this failed system, and who have nothing to show for it but a crushing burden of debt, have been recruited into the “Occupy” movement. It’s a handy form of scapegoating, in that the unions, the DNC, the socialist academics, and the other nefarious organizations who are funding and running and promoting the “Occupy” movement are largely to blame for leading these students into their current predicament.

As an aside, Zombie and many PJM commenters have created an official, comprehensive list of all “Occupy”/99% supporters. Those on the list are our enemies, one and all, and I don’t care who they think they are.

What will be the upshot when the bubble finally collapses? The article excerpted below is well worth reading in its entirety.

Daniel Greenfield at Right Side News: The Education Bubble

(h/t: Speranza at 2.0: The Blogmocracy)

Flip through enough of the 99 percent signs and you realize that the majority of that demographic aren’t complaining about the lack of financial regulation or income inequalities, so much as they’re upset that they took on loans to pay for college degrees to get jobs that don’t actually exist.

The fault here isn’t Wall Street’s, it’s a policymaking apparatus that decided the way to deal with the loss of manufacturing jobs was to get as many college graduates out there as possible to create the industries of tomorrow.

This was Clinton’s platform and it’s Obama’s “Winning the Future” platform, pump enough money into education and the jobs will create themselves. The Dot Com boom in the nineties seemed to back up that policy with entirely new companies springing to life with valuations in the hundreds of millions and twenty somethings at the helm. But a good deal of those companies were nothing more than the foam on another bubble– and more problematically the cream of the tech companies were created by college dropouts. Even more problematically, the tech companies liked to save money by importing Chinese and Pakistani employees on H1-B visas as cheap labor, while their lobbies insisted that this would protect “American” innovation.

But the real problem was that swapping manufacturing for college degree jobs solved nothing. American companies that manufacture anything become the tip of an outsourced iceberg. All the companies with the shiny logos depend on Chinese manufacturing and raw materials. They can’t create anything that the People’s Republic of China can’t take away from them when the time is right.

American companies aren’t outsourcing labor to China, China is outsourcing design and marketing to them and allowing them to serve as middlemen between Chinese manufacturers and American consumers, until a Chinese company decides to buy their product unit or its reverse engineered copies of their products are good enough that they invest the money in a marketing campaign to establish their own trusted brand.
[...]
The system would rather have 10,000 subsidized jobs that it creates than 10,000,000 jobs in the free market. It would rather have a middle class of 5 million college graduates, (40 percent of them government employees), than have a free market middle class of a 100 million, (only 30 percent of them college graduates and less than 0.5 percent of them government employees.) And it would rather have an angry mob camped out near Wall Street, than have a viable economy.

The educational bubble isn’t creating a new Middle Class that will keep social security viable, it is creating dissatisfied people who feel that they are entitled to better and don’t know who to blame. Like the rest of the government, the education bubble is too big to fail, which means that by the time it fails, so will the whole country.

Read it all.

Also see:

• The Volokh Conspiracy: The Fragmenting of the New Class Elites, or, Downward Mobility

Pajamas Media has the story:

We are not prepared for an electromagnetic pulse attack. Iran is almost prepared to launch one…

The first thing they will notice is there is no power. Another damn power outage, they will grumble — but then again, there has been no storm. Confused, some will try to call for information, but the phones will be down. The TV, the radio — nothing, no reception.

The panic will come when cars won’t start.

The traffic lights will be out, too. It will get much worse. Most will not survive to see life get back to normal in America.

Thousands will be stranded on subways, and over a million passengers who fly daily across the continent will be stuck at airports with flights canceled. Those already in the air will meet a deadly fate as planes plunge from the sky, their electronics fried.

Within the next few days, water supplies will run out: water-pumping stations will grind to a halt and electric pumps for water purification will also stop. Remaining water supplies will soon become contaminated.

Next is the food supply. Without power, food plants can no longer operate, and without transportation, food inventories in warehouses rot. Many cities will run out of food in just three days, others in just a bit longer.

This will be the result of an electromagnetic pulse attack over the atmosphere of the United States. In less than a billionth of a second, the electrical intensity on Earth becomes so hot that microchips fry, power lines overload, and the electrical grid collapses. Everything with microelectronics in it fails.

Within days, tens of millions of Americans will need to leave their homes looking for water and food. Within five to 10 days, due to water pollution and sanitation issues, many will fall ill — people across America will face starvation, disease, and death. In just one year after the attack, up to two-thirds of the American population will cease to exist.

Our enemies know this. The radicals ruling Iran have openly talked about it as they have called for the destruction of America and a new world order that excludes America. While pursuing their nuclear bomb project, the Revolutionary Guards of Iran have successfully test-launched a ballistic missile from a ship in the Caspian Sea. Recently, they also announced that all their vessels now have been armed with long-range ballistic missiles, and that soon they will start a mission in the Atlantic Ocean that extends into the Gulf of Mexico.

The Guards have also progressed with their missile program under the guise of a space project. Soon they will launch another rocket into space, this time carrying a 330-kilogram payload, a sign that they can now deliver a nuclear warhead to any point on Earth. The Guards have openly stated that the rocket used to launch the satellite can be shot parallel to the Earth’s orbit, which would transform it into an intercontinental ballistic missile.
[…]
Though an EMP attack on America by the jihadists in Tehran must not be ruled out, our modern society in America could also be endangered by a natural phenomenon. Solar explosions from the sun have hit the Earth before and will do so again. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has predicted that a major solar storm could hit in May of 2013. A similar storm in 1859, known as the “Carrington event,” hit telegraph offices worldwide, causing failure in the telegraph system. Today such an event could be catastrophic due to the role microchips play in our infrastructure. [emphasis added]

We can avoid such catastrophes if we, as responsible citizens of the United States, take action. The SHIELD Act (H.R. 668), currently before the U.S. House, needs to be passed this year. If it isn’t, it could very well be too late to protect the national electric grid.

The SHIELD Act would empower the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to work with industry and other government departments and agencies to protect the national electric grid from EMP threats. The act would ensure that the United States has enough extra-high-voltage transformers to survive and recover from an EMP event.

The act also would provide a financial mechanism to pay for the protection of the grid. The FERC estimates that the cost for protecting the electric grid would add only 20 cents to the annual bill of the average rate-payer for a period of three years.

It is critical that we call on our political leaders to take action and protect America. If we fail, we have only ourselves to blame.

The next attack on America could very well be the end of America.

Read it all here; comments are open.

Protecting the power grid is only the first step.

We need to go much further. The federal government is aware of, and concerned about, the danger of EMP weapons. Private industry and the public, not so much. It’s time to start working on shielding all of our infrastructure, including privately-owned medical devices, motor vehicles, appliances, computers, cell phones, and other communications equipment. We’ve scarcely begun that task. It’s a matter of educating the public so that consumers will demand products that are properly shielded to withstand both enemy attacks and solar phenomena.

I must also point out that not all of our enemies are nation states, and EMP weapons can also be delivered by less sophisticated means, such as container ships.

More Information:

• NASA: A Super Solar Flare
• National Geographic: What If the Biggest Solar Storm on Record Happened Today?
• Wikipedia: March 1989 Geomagnetic Storm
• Wikipedia: Electromagnetic pulse

by Hesperado

Of the many disquieting aspects of the whole Perry Affair (i.e., the disturbingly, but unsurprisingly, Islamophiliac tendencies of the popular “conservative” candidate Texas Governor Rick Perry ), one particular aspect smell fishiest.

The links Spencer provided in his article about the seemingly pro-Islam bias of the Texas school curriculum which Perry collaborated on with a Muslim leader (“His Highness” the Aga Khan) seem to have been scrubbed: the links no longer work.

Spencer then recently wrote a new article about this scrubbing — “All traces of Perry/Aga Khan curriculum removed from web.”

However, what Spencer neglected to mention seems even worse.

In the nearly 100 comments to the first Spencer article, toward the very end of the comments, a helpful reader (named “joublough”) posted this:

“FYI

It is now available only in cached form here.”

At the word “here”, joeblough posted what he said was a new link, a link that works — unlike the link Spencer used.

However, when I just now tried both Spencer’s link and joublough’s link — not only did both fail to work, but both links have exactly the same URL!

See and compare:

Spencer’s link:

The requested URL /search?sclient=psy&hl=en&safe=off&biw=1294&bih=728&source=hp&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.saisd.net%2Fadmin%2Fcurric%2Fsstudies%2Fmhcp%2Fmhcproject.html&pbx=1&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.saisd.net%2Fadmin%2Fcurric%2Fsstudies%2Fmhcp%2Fmhcproject.html&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=40302l41605l1l41957l6l4l0l0l0l1l231l791l0.2.2l4l0 was not found on this server.

joeblough’s corrected, new link:

The requested URL /search?sclient=psy&hl=en&safe=off&biw=1294&bih=728&source=hp&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.saisd.net%2Fadmin%2Fcurric%2Fsstudies%2Fmhcp%2Fmhcproject.html&pbx=1&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.saisd.net%2Fadmin%2Fcurric%2Fsstudies%2Fmhcp%2Fmhcproject.html&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=40302l41605l1l41957l6l4l0l0l0l1l231l791l0.2.2l4l0 was not found on this server.

Both are exactly the same. This would not seem possible, unless the URL joeblough provided — which was supposed to be different — was changed after the fact; or unless there is some technical way to transform links already published on the Net into links that have become duds through scrubbing.

Furthermore, the link that Spencer provided leading to information less seemingly damning to Perry — “This supposedly tough part of the Perry/Aga Khan curriculum…” — continues to work just fine! Try it!

Even though Spencer points out the flaws of that “supposedly tough” part of the curriculum which seem to expose it for Islamophiliac weakness if not dhimmitude, the argumentation Spencer used may have been deemed too subtle to worry about affecting the average reader — and voter. Thus, no need to scrub it.

In addition, a reader critical of Spencer’s article links, in a comment, to the cached curriculum with the same link that doesn’t work. However, when he links to “Wiltse’s lesson plan” — “That’s where you find Wiltse’s lesson plan: among the lesson plans developed by the 80 teachers who attended these sessions” – the link works fine (here it is).

Visit these links, read, and learn:

• Ed Driscoll: The Community Reinvestment Act Comes Full Circle
• Patrick Richardson: Business Owners Speak on Struggles with ObamaCare, Regulations
• Foreign students walk off Hershey’s factory job in protest
  (h/t: Peter)

Socialist policies are no cure for joblessness anywhere in the world.

You can sugar-coat it as the New Deal or the Stimulus Package or “green jobs” or whatever else; the result is prolonging the agony for those that the government pretends to be trying to help.

From Chickadee on Blogmocracy:

Take a look at these long lines. Then and Now.
Nothing has changed much except the style in clothing.
Same sadness and misery.

Says taxfreekiller:

The two party evil money cult is using legal and illegal immigration to cut your wages all of you.

The elites of both parties are using immigration not merely to cut our wages, but to put well-educated, experienced, loyal, and hard-working Americans out of work entirely. Many of us are working at low-paying jobs outside of our technical fields just to put bread on the table. Just for starters, the h-1b visa program should be ended immediately and permanently, and the same for all other visa programs for bringing in foreign tech workers. The h-1b program was a complete fraud from the get-go, and it’s scandalous that it has been allowed to continue during a period of high unemployment and underemployment in the US.

Is There a Shortage of Skilled Foreign Workers?

…Supposing the employer — and many of them operate this way — would prefer to ignore the two million-plus unemployed graduates in the country, and ignore the 10 million or so STEM-trained people employed outside STEM occupations, and wants to hire foreign workers. Well, there are plenty of opportunities to do that through, for instance, the numerically limited aspects of the H-1B program. Of the 85,000 numerically limited slots in that program for the coming fiscal year 57,900 of them remained open on June 17, 2011, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).3

In addition there are numerically unlimited opportunities to hire skilled foreign labor in the L, J, O, and F-1 (with OPT) categories that are described below. In the last-named category the employer gets a bonus of as much as $10,000 for hiring a foreign graduate of an American university rather than a citizen or a green card graduate of the same university with the same skills.4 That may be hard to believe, but it is the case.

Do these macro indications show a need to import more foreign workers than we already do? I do not think so, but first let’s look a little further at the current and prospective inflows of foreign skilled workers under existing laws…

Read the entire report here or download it as a PDF.

Also see:

Zilla: Our Tax Dollars ‘Saved or Created’ Jobs – OVERSEAS!

From Zilla of the Resistance:

I’ve said again and again how I loathe gutless dhimmi weenies in the GOP and how we need strong leadership to get America off her knees, on her feet and back to kicking ass the way we used to as the undoubted leader of the free world. I believe former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum has they type of strength and moral clarity that our country so desperately needs.

If you do a simple web search for Rick Santorum, all kinds of vile, horrible things come up in the search engines, from vicious nasty leftists, who are clearly afraid of what Rick Santorum represents: pro-life, pro-Israel, anti-sharia, anti-jihad, anti-islamocoddling, strong on immigration issues, and not afraid to speak the truth in clear no-nonsense terms. CRAPTASTIC geeks have “Google bombed” the search engine to manipulate results attached to Santorum’s name so that the very first thing to come up in results is something so vile, disgusting and explicit that I won’t even write it here, but you can go see for yourself quite easily.

Rick Santorum isn’t afraid to come right out and speak the truth about what an unmitigated disaster Obama and his leftist cohorts have been for Americans. Here’s an excerpt from an article he wrote in April of last year…

Read the rest.

Comments, anyone?

The Obama Administration is attacking not only Boeing, but also the State of South Carolina and the US Constitution.

Real Clear Politics: The Newest Labor War: Union, Feds Attack Boeing

(h/t: vagabond trader)

April 22, 2011
By Tom Bevan

Welcome to South Carolina, the newest front in America’s organized labor wars.

On Wednesday, the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint against Boeing, seeking to prevent the aircraft manufacturer from opening a second production facility in Charleston, South Carolina for its new 787 Dreamliner.

The NLRB alleges that Boeing violated the law, opening the non-unionized South Carolina plant in retaliation against union workers for past strikes at its facility in Everett, Washington and also as part of an effort to discourage future strikes. The NLRB wants an administrative court to force Boeing to relocate its second production line back to a unionized plant in Washington.

Needless to say, with labor controversy still roiling some states across the country, particularly in Wisconsin, news of the story rang out like a shot at Fort Sumter.

South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint denounced the move as “nothing more than a political favor for the unions who are supporting President Obama’s reelection campaign.” DeMint vowed to “use every tool at my disposal to stop the president from carrying out this malicious act.”

His GOP colleague in the Senate, Lindsey Graham, called the NLRB’s complaint “one of the worst cases of unelected bureaucrats doing the bidding of special interest groups that I’ve ever seen.”

On the other side, the International Association of Machinists District 571, which filed the grievance in March of last year, predictably hailed the filing as “a victory for all American workers.”

At issue is not whether companies can retaliate against union workers – they can’t – but whether they have the right to open new facilities (or relocate old ones) where they choose based on a variety of business factors, including the consideration of potential labor strikes in the future.

The IAM has had a collective bargaining agreement with Boeing since 1975, and in that time has led five strikes in the Seattle plants, two of them in the past six years. Boeing CEO Jim MnNerney has been open about his desire for “dual sourcing” capabilities so that the company can meet its obligations with “strikes happening every three to four years in Puget Sound.”

The union contends that the opening of the new non-union facility in South Carolina amounts to intimidation, and that its workers will now be forced to either to accept employment concessions or face the prospect of seeing more and more production migrate from Everett to Charleston. Acting NLRB General Counsel Lafe Solomon fully embraced with the union’s novel legal theory, and stated in his Wednesday order that he will seek an order requiring Boeing to build the second 787 Dreamliner assembly line in Washington.

In response to the uproar Thursday spokeswoman Nancy Cleeland responded in an e-mail: “As Acting General Counsel Lafe Solomon made clear in his statement yesterday, this is about the law. The right to strike is guaranteed by the National Labor Relations Act, and employers must stay within the law in making their business decisions.”

Boeing’s lawyers slammed that claim as “legally frivolous” and said the NLRB’s effort to restrict the company’s business represents a “radical departure” from precedent. They were quick to point out two 1965 Supreme Court cases affirming employers’ right to consider potential strikes in making business decisions, and they refuted the union’s claims of intimidation by pointing out that in the eighteen months since the announcement of the South Carolina plant, Boeing has added more than 2,000 union jobs in the Puget Sound area.

The NLRB’s complaint is controversial because of its conspicuousness – labor experts can’t seem to recall any similar complaints or comparable court cases – and also because of the board’s inherently political nature. With Democrats taking control of the five-member board in 2008, the New York Times described the move against Boeing as “the strongest signal yet of the new pro-labor orientation of the National Labor Relations Board under President Obama.”
[...]
Unlike Wisconsin, however, the battle in South Carolina is unions and the federal government pitted against private business and “right to work” states. At stake is whether unions have the power to effectively veto companies’ decisions about where they choose to do business.

Also unlike Wisconsin, South Carolina is a critical – some would even argue determinative – early primary state in the Republican presidential nominating process, which is just getting under way. Some, but not all, of the prospective Republican presidential hopefuls are scheduled be in South Carolina in less than two weeks for the first televised debate of the primary season, hosted by Fox News.

The subject of the NLRB’s complaint will surely arise. This issue might even prompt candidates who hadn’t figured on attending the South Carolina debate to tinker with their schedules. And because of South Carolina and Wisconsin, the war between the federal government and unions versus states and the private sector is sure to be a defining issue of next year’s presidential race.

Tom Bevan is the co-founder and Executive Editor of RealClearPolitics. Email: tom@realclearpolitics.com

Read it all.

This evil attempt to impose tyranny on Boeing and on the State of South Carolina is nothing more than liberal fascism combined with institutionalized union thuggery. Whether or not the NLRB ultimately succeeds, the very fact that they even attempted such an infringement will encourage our few remaining US-based manufacturers to move their entire operations overseas. Once outside of the jurisdiction of the US federal government, their companies will no longer be subjected to the malicious whims and depredations of American democracy – and yes, I do mean mob rule in every sense of that word. The US was founded as a republic, not a democracy, with the powers of the federal government strictly limited to those provided in the US Constitution. Evidently, the Constitution in general, and the Tenth Amendment in particular, has gone by the wayside.

Chile is looking better and better! (See 2.0: The Blogmocracy: Chile Says No to Collective Bargaining.) Unlike the US, the nation and people of Chile love and respect liberty.

If at first you don’t secede, try, try again!

As for South Carolina and the other States of the American South, I would suggest that it is long past time to consider secession once again. The outcome will be very different this time around. It is painfully obvious that the US federal government is bankrupting itself through egregious fiscal irresponsibility and is destroying American society in every possible way. The federal government is not sustainable and a collapse and breakup cannot now be avoided. The time has come for each liberty-loving State to assert its rights.

I found this link about a serious violation of privacy in the State of Michigan in a worrisome Blogmocracy article about another significant threat to our electronic privacy, namely Apple iPhone secretly records owners’ every move. It followed another article, Exiting Detroit, about the endless and evidently irreversible decline and fall of the city of Detroit. It sure looks as though there are fewer and fewer reasons to visit, do business in, or live in, Michigan, and more and more reasons to avoid the entire state.

Similarly, if Apple shows so little regard for their customers’ privacy, I would suggest buying from a competitor until such time as Apple changes its ways. Vote with your wallet and vote with your feet!

Michigan: Police Search Cell Phones During Traffic Stops

(h/t: Da_Beerfreak)

ACLU seeks information on Michigan program that allows cops to download information from smart phones belonging to stopped motorists.

The Michigan State Police have a high-tech mobile forensics device that can be used to extract information from cell phones belonging to motorists stopped for minor traffic violations. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Michigan last Wednesday demanded that state officials stop stonewalling freedom of information requests for information on the program.

ACLU learned that the police had acquired the cell phone scanning devices and in August 2008 filed an official request for records on the program, including logs of how the devices were used. The state police responded by saying they would provide the information only in return for a payment of $544,680. The ACLU found the charge outrageous.
[...]
A US Department of Justice test of the CelleBrite UFED used by Michigan police found the device could grab all of the photos and video off of an iPhone within one-and-a-half minutes. The device works with 3000 different phone models and can even defeat password protections.

“Complete extraction of existing, hidden, and deleted phone data, including call history, text messages, contacts, images, and geotags,” a CelleBrite brochure explains regarding the device’s capabilities. “The Physical Analyzer allows visualization of both existing and deleted locations on Google Earth. In addition, location information from GPS devices and image geotags can be mapped on Google Maps.”

The ACLU is concerned that these powerful capabilities are being quietly used to bypass Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.

“With certain exceptions that do not apply here, a search cannot occur without a warrant in which a judicial officer determines that there is probable cause to believe that the search will yield evidence of criminal activity,” Fancher wrote. “A device that allows immediate, surreptitious intrusion into private data creates enormous risks that troopers will ignore these requirements to the detriment of the constitutional rights of persons whose cell phones are searched.”
[...]
Read it all.

But that’s not all, folks!

(Updated 9:33 AM EST April 22, 2011)

Jury to decide if Pastor Terry Jones can protest outside the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn. Last I checked, the First Amendment is not subject to jury disapproval.

Why It’s Bad Business to Hire the Long-Term Unemployed

The Obama administration has overseen the utterly preventable destruction of human capital that is arguably unprecedented in human history — and it’s their fault.

March 15, 2011 – by Tom Blumer

Those greedy employers are up to their nefarious tricks again. They’re even being overt about it.

If you’re unemployed, many of them won’t hire you. They won’t even talk to you. They don’t want you to waste your time, or theirs, filling out a job application, or submitting your resume. How absolutely awful of them.

Wrong. The “unemployed need not apply” phenomenon is an all too predictable and awful result of over two years of horribly misguided economic policy.

First, let’s acknowledge that employers are mostly acting rationally.

Especially in this economy, perhaps until recently — and that’s a big maybe — the main focus of many, if not most businesses, has been to figure out how to stay in business. In an environment where a serious hiring mistake may mean the difference between keeping the doors open or closing them, employers looking for help cannot afford to take unwarranted risks. Before they go into the hiring market, they ask themselves if the old reliables in their current crew can handle the increased workload caused by staff departures. They may also consider whether some or all of the tasks involved can be outsourced, automated, or even eliminated.

If they reluctantly conclude that they must hire someone new, company managers will go through their own internal networks of relatives, friends, and acquaintances to see if they can find someone — employed or unemployed, but largely prescreened — who is up to doing the work. They may also look at the possibility of proactively recruiting people who have impressed them in their business interactions while currently working at customers, suppliers, or competitors.

When the avenues just described come up empty, employers will let the general job market know that they are looking. It is there where the bias in favor of people who are currently employed comes out, and for several valid reasons.

If a person is already working somewhere else, they’re demonstrating that on a daily basis, not in the recent or sometimes distant past, their work habits and output are more than likely satisfactory to someone else. There’s at least a decent chance that this person has kept his or her skills sharp, and has kept up with technological and market developments in the industry. The effort involved in training such a person in their new job will often be fairly minimal. There will also be a lower likelihood that the person will flunk a background check, credit check, or their drug test.

With the unemployed, especially the long-term unemployed, the situation completely flips. Work habits and attitudes, even if once great, become suspect. Skills may have eroded. On the job training efforts are more likely to be substantial, take longer to stick, and are more likely to fail. The chances that the new person will steal because of financial hardship, has gotten into legal trouble while unemployed, or has fallen into substance abuse are all greater.

Employers who are avoiding the unemployed are merely saying, “We only have so much time and energy to put into a job search, and we can’t afford to make a business mistake. So we’re going to avoid considering the unemployed to reduce the chances of making such a mistake.”

Read the rest, if you can stand it.

Thus we have a “jobless recovery” – if it can be called a recovery at all.

I am indeed one of the many who are “too old to retire, and too young to retire.” I am a lifelong IT professional. For many months, I have been working as a cashier, part-time, at minimum wage. I cannot earn enough to live on, and I continue to look for something better. Despite the canned spiel given during the hiring process, the cashier position is a dead-end job; there is no realistic prospect of promotions or pay raises. Even so, it is literally the ONLY job offer that I have received in over three years of diligent searching, and I accepted it instantly.

My story, and that of so many others, is here: Who are the 99ers?

What our government has done to us, by deliberately destroying one sector of the economy after another, is truly evil.

As Francis W. Porretto pointed out,

Excellently well put, and terribly depressing for anyone currently on the short end of the economic stick.

Another way of phrasing this would be: Just as a rising tide lifts all boats, a sinking tide lowers all boats…and the lowest of those boats will get beached as a result.

It is much worse than that. Not only are the lowest of those boats doomed, but also a goodly number of the other boats that have run up on heretofore unseen rocks and shoals.

It will hit many of us who did everything that we were supposed to do: living frugally, investing prudently, upgrading our skills, avoiding dissolute living habits, you name it. The only thing that we did wrong was to grow older at a desperately inopportune time.

May God have mercy on our souls.

Update:

I refuse to blame the long-term unemployed for their plight by assuming that they refused to take poorly-paying jobs before their unemployment ran out. (See Who are the 99ers?).

For the record, I DID accept the ONLY job offer I have received since February 2008, and I accepted it BEFORE the unemployment benefits ran out. Because it is only part-time and it only pays minimum wage, I actually was legally eligible to collect part of my unemployment benefit until the 99 weeks ran out. They simply told me to report exactly what I earned each week, which I did.

Oh, and by the way, I recently applied for another job for which I would have been eminently qualified. But they turned me down on account of the fact that I have not been working in the IT field since February, 2008.

No, there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING wrong with my work ethic. I show up when scheduled (and also show up when called in on short notice). I follow instructions, I am honest, I am diligent about providing good customer service, I cooperate well with others – what’s not to like? But apparently everybody thinks I have forgotten the skills I spent 30 years in acquiring. They are mistaken, but I have no means of proving that.

If enough people speak up, the Islamists will not be able to silence all of us. Kudos to Herr Friedrich!

Guardian: German interior minister reopens bitter row over Muslim integration

(h/t: pulpark)

Hans-Peter Friedrich criticised after claiming Islam ‘does not belong’ in Germany

Helen Pidd in Berlin guardian.co.uk, Friday 4 March 2011 13.26 GMT

Hans-Peter Friedrich, Germany’s new interior minister, was accused by the opposition SPD of a ‘misjudgment’. Photograph: Soeren Stache/EPA

Germany’s new interior minister has said Islam does not “belong” in the country, reopening a bitter debate over the integration of Germany’s 4 million Muslims.

Hans-Peter Friedrich, who took office on Wednesday, was being asked by reporters about a gun attack at Frankfurt airport in which two US servicemen were killed and another two injured. Investigators suspect the attack, carried out by a 21-year-old Muslim immigrant from Kosovo, was an act of Islamist terrorism. A federal judge in Karlsruhe on Thursday ordered the suspect be remanded to jail on two counts of murder and three of attempted murder, pending further investigation.

In his first press conference as minister, Friedrich said on Friday that Muslims should be allowed live in modern Germany, but he added: “To say that Islam belongs in Germany is not a fact supported by history.”

He was immediately criticised by another government minister. “Of course Islam belongs in Germany,” said the justice minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, of the FDP party, which rules in a coalition with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU). “I assume that the new minister will follow the lead of his predecessor [Thomas de Maizière] and will take his responsibility for integration policy seriously, and campaign for cohesion rather than exclusion,” she added.

Another FDP politician, Hartfrid Wolff, said on Friday in Berlin: “Islam has been a real part of Germany for several generations … It is just as unhelpful to deny this fact as to naively romanticise multiculturalism.”

Dieter Wiefelspütz, of the opposition SPD party, said Friedrich was talking “nonsense”. The interior minister had started his new job by making a “misjudgment”, he added.

Friedrich was promoted to his post after Merkel was forced to reshuffle her cabinet because of the high-profile resignation of her defence minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, who was disgraced in a plagiarism scandal.
[...]
Read it all.

Just wondering…

If there is still a labor shortage in Germany, why is Germany not recruiting and importing unemployed or underemployed American tech workers, particularly well-educated older workers with good track records and considerable breadth of experience? US workers would make excellent replacements for workers from Muslim countries who are disrupting German society and presenting an unacceptable security risk. Unemployment in the US is still hovering around ten percent. Is there too much regulation and red tape in Germany, not to mention excessive taxation, to make this happen? If so, isn’t it time for Germany to consider deregulation, lower taxes, a rollback of socialism, and eventually, disentanglement from the EU?

Counterjihad Tweets!

If you have a Twitter account, be sure to follow:

Creeping Sharia
Pulp Ark
IsraelRight
MuslimAlert
MuslimWatch
…and, of course:
1389
The Blogmocracy

This video is a real shocker:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Unemployment Benefits: The 99ers

Vast numbers of Americans who were laid off back in 2008 still cannot find jobs. There simply are nowhere near enough jobs to go around.

Despite what was said in the news about extending unemployment benefits for another “thirteen months,” this was a lie. There was no extension of benefits for those who have exhausted their 99 weeks of unemployment benefits and who still cannot find work, or are working at part-time jobs that don’t pay enough to live on.

You don’t have to be a wastrel to end up in that predicament. Many of these people are older, educated professionals who did all the right things: finished college and professional school, worked diligently, kept their skills up to date, saved for their retirement. Now they are cashing in their IRAs and their 401Ks just to survive, selling their homes at huge losses, moving in with strangers, going to soup kitchens, picking through garbage for items to recycle.

Per the video, “No one is expecting Congress to vote another extension of unemployment checks, given our historic budget deficits.”

House adjourns with no mention of tier 5 unemployment extension for 99ers

December 23rd, 2010 8:58 am ET.

The House of Representatives yesterday evening passed a motion to adjourn the 111th Congress with no mention of H.R. 6556, the bill that would have provided unemployment benefits for the 99ers. The bill was sponsored by Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA).

In an eloquent eulogy for tier 5, Michael Colliss laid into Lee, writing on the website All247News, “This latest disappointment to the 99ers was little more then an effort by a relatively unknown Congresswoman to get publicity. The 99ers have suffered – and are continuing to suffer – enough. This was a totally unnecessary, and in the opinion of this writer, basically cruel and insensitive effort by a person who did not care who she hurt to gain headlines. Considering the sad, unnecessary turmoil created by Congressman Barbara Lee of California, many unemployment advocates as well as 99ers are probably asking themselves, ‘With ‘friends’ like these who needs enemies?’”

Michael Colliss worked for 21 years as a staff member in Congress. He is now retired and works as a volunteer advocate for the 99ers.

The 112th Congress begins on Wednesday, January 5th, 2011. It is unlikely to pass legislation providing unemployment benefits for the 99ers. When asked about the future of the 99ers earlier this week, White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs said that the President intends to focus on job creation.

Read the rest.

I know only too well what the President means when he “intends to focus on job creation.” This means pork-barrel jobs for the TSA gropers, for the new food-inspection Nazis, for unneeded school administrators, and for all of the bureaucrats who are putting a stranglehold on private enterprise. There will be jobs for the SEIU and for other unions that have contributed to the election of Barack Hussein Obama.

This is how Obama’s “job creation” has worked out thus far:

Hot Air: Chart of the … year

(h/t: Iron Fist)

posted at 11:36 am on December 7, 2010 by Ed Morrissey

Quite a few people have had the same reaction to this chart from Business Insider and Calculated Risk as John Derbyshire at The Corner, which is to offer a res ipsa loquitur rather than clutter it with commentary. But there is more to be said about the ramifications of this chart:

But calling it the Chart of the Day seems too limiting. I’d call this the Chart of the Year, for a couple of reasons. It demonstrates the folly of the Obama administration’s insistence that we have been experiencing a recovery and any sort of significant growth in job creation. After hitting the nadir of job losses relative to our peak inter-recession employment, we have essentially flatlined for far longer than any other post-recession period. Nothing in the data shows a hint that we will soon break out of that pattern either, and Ben Bernanke says we’ll probably go four to five more years on this same trajectory.

Read the rest.

But that’s not all, folks. The Obama Administration has been creating jobs, all right – but not for Americans! The jobs are in other countries, in various industries that are profiting from US subsidies, sometimes through the costly stimulus program that was touted as a means of stemming American unemployment.

Our Tax Dollars ‘Saved or Created’ Jobs – OVERSEAS!

Our economy is a mess – millions of Americans are out of work and those who do have jobs are finding it increasingly difficult to afford the ever rising costs of living. With this in mind, it might make sense for the Obama administration to direct some of our tax dollars towards job creation, but what doesn’t make sense is the fact that millions of our dollars are being used by the Obama administration to create jobs in foreign countries!

Democrats are working very hard pushing the ‘green’ meme and fighting tirelessly to divert money to China for wind turbines – which if made here instead could help put Americans back to work.’
[...]
Not to be outdone by his former rival & current underling, good ole Barry spent $22 MILLION dollars to train high tech workers in Sri Lanka! Jobs that, again, I’m sure many AMERICANS would have loved an opportunity to be trained for and to get. There was a lot of coverage of this in the right-blogosphere, and virtually none in the MSM (try not to look so surprised), here’s what Ed Morrissey had to say about it at Hot Air:

Obama WH spends $22 million to train workers …
August 4, 2010 by Ed Morrissey
As I noted earlier, Democrats plan to punish businesses that locate higher-paying manufacturing jobs overseas with higher taxes. What will they do with a White House that will spend $22 million to train programmers in Java — and English — in Asia? The program from USAID will train 3,000 programmers to compete for business in the high-tech sector…

Much more here.

H-1b: Importing foreigners to displace American tech workers

As if all that were not enough, the H-1b visa program remains in effect. This program imports foreign workers to work at high-tech jobs where there is supposedly a shortage of American workers. The program was a fraud from the get-go, and it still is. Never has there been a shortage of American workers in the IT and engineering fields. Instead, the H-1b workers are being imported as contractors, at lower wages than what American workers would be paid, despite the laws that supposedly prevent that. Because most of the H-1b workers lack understanding of the American business environment, not to mention English-language communication skills, the quality of their work falls far short of that of the experienced American workers whom they have displaced. But too many CEOs and CIOs who want to cut corners to improve their short-term results make use of these H-1b workers in droves.

I am one of the 99ers.

At the age of 57, I am one of those who are considered “too old to rehire, and too young to retire.”

If Barack Hussein Obama has his way, there will never be a job at a living wage for the likes of me.

Having been laid off from an IT job early in 2008, I am one of those who have no more unemployment benefits. I am currently working as a part-time retail clerk, at minimum wage. To put it bluntly, I am a diligent and reliable worker with a clean record and a cooperative attitude, and I am exceedingly frugal, but it is flat-out impossible to survive on what I earn. I have requested more hours, but business has been much too slow.

Unless my situation drastically improves after the beginning of 2011, I am seriously considering emigration.

Also see:

• Help the NObama Sticky Note Campaign Go Viral!
• 99er unemployment benefits legislation, H.R. 6556, passage unlikely
• For the Unemployed Over 50, Fears of Never Working Again
• Shadow Government Statistics: Alternate Unemployment Charts
• 1,000 camp out 3 nights for job application
• Obama Boom leads to a loss of 131,000 jobs in July
• Here Are 13 Signs That We’re Actually In A Depression Right Now
• 20 Signs That The Economic Collapse Has Already Begun For One Out Of Every Seven Americans
• Obama’s Stimulus Money Spent Overseas, Jobs in China (h/t: Rancher)
• Stimulus money going to El Salvador shows Democrats care about our money, not about us
• Special Report: Is America the Sick Man of the Globe? (h/t: Rodan)

Update:

I refuse to blame the long-term unemployed for their plight by assuming that they refused to take poorly-paying jobs before their unemployment ran out.

For the record, I DID accept the ONLY job offer I have received since February 2008, and I accepted it BEFORE the unemployment benefits ran out. Because it is only part-time and it only pays minimum wage, I actually was legally eligible to collect part of my unemployment benefit until the 99 weeks ran out. They simply told me to report exactly what I earned each week, which I did.

Oh, and by the way, I recently applied for another job for which I would have been eminently qualified. But they turned me down on account of the fact that I have not been working in the IT field since February, 2008. (See Why Employers Avoid Hiring the Long-Term Unemployed).

No, there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING wrong with my work ethic. I show up when scheduled (and also show up when called in on short notice). I follow instructions, I am honest, I am diligent about providing good customer service. I have some sales skills. I cooperate well with others – what’s not to like? But apparently everybody thinks I have forgotten the skills I spent 30 years in acquiring. They are mistaken, but I have no means of proving that.

Ironically, the particular job I was applying for is one that would have required outstanding communication skills – WHICH I HAVE – and which I have further honed in my current retail clerk job!

Despite the fact that an H-1b visa worker would be exceedingly unlikely to measure up in that regard, I think it is extremely likely that an H-1b worker was given that job, simply because an H-1b worker would be much likelier to be able to claim recent experience in this particular area of the IT field. It would be far easier for a foreign worker to fabricate such recent IT experience in his home country, simply because it is very difficult for a US employer to verify references in a foreign country.

Dan’s Data Reviews Juvenile Felis catus

(excerpt)

Compatibility with existing hardware

No significant points of incompatibility have been found between the new kitten and my existing equipment. A box with some old cables in it has been slept in. My monitor and mouse pad have been sat on. My keyboard has been walked on, but not seriously enough to justify intervention.

NOTE: Kittens do not have any computer-compatible ports. Don’t try to plug anything into them. I’m serious.

Also: If you’re waiting for me to make some kind of “mouse” joke here, you can just keep on waiting…

Read it all.

Here’s Tom, another cat belonging to Dan:

PawSense intercepts “cat typing”

Note: I have not tried this product myself, because our cat is of mature years and seldom gets on the keyboard. If you have used this product and have any opinion on it either way, you are invited to comment here.

From the site:

When cats walk or climb on your keyboard, they can enter random commands and data, damage your files, and even crash your computer. This can happen whether you are near the computer or have suddenly been called away from it.

PawSense is a software utility that helps protect your computer from cats. It quickly detects and blocks cat typing, and also helps train your cat to stay off the computer keyboard.

• Every time your computer boots up, PawSense will automatically start up in the background to watch over your computer system.
• Even while you use your other software, PawSense constantly monitors keyboard activity. PawSense analyzes keypress timings and combinations to distinguish cat typing from human typing. PawSense normally recognizes a cat on the keyboard within one or two pawsteps.
• If a cat gets on the keyboard, PawSense makes a sound that annoys cats. This teaches your cat that getting on the keyboard is bad even if humans aren’t watching.
• Once a cat has been recognized, PawSense blocks the cat’s keyboard input. This keeps the cat from entering lots of commands to your programs or operating system…

To get back into your computer, you can either select the appropriate button with your mouse and click it, or type human in the text box to prove that you are one.

Here are a few cat smileys: =^..^=

Catbert is the evil director of human resources in the Dilbert comic strip by Scott Adams.

I work in retail sales, and I sure hope that this doesn’t happen to me!

(h/t: yenta-fada)

The evil pointy-haired boss finally gets his comeuppance:

Click thumbnails to see full-sized images.