Author: Rex Nipper

Today the Associated Press reported that all but 4% of U.S. Fortune 500 companies reported gains in 2010. This report also showed that hiring was up for all companies this year, and yet still the economy lagged in the face of these happy results. Maybe that’s because, as the article stated, that the majority of those jobs were created outside the United States. That’s right folks, U.S. companies started hiring this year. However, they didn’t hire in their own country.

Our economy is struggling while the majority of corporate America hired more than 1.4 million people outside the U.S. Caterpillar, one of the nation’s few manufacturers still standing, hired more than 50% of their 15,000 jobs outside the U.S. I have no doubt that this was the exception. Many companies that hired didn’t hire ANY U.S. labor.

I guess I can understand why a company like UPS hired overseas. That makes sense to me. Their jobs were for shipping and receiving personnel. With the increase in overseas shipping, that makes sense. It’s not like some guy in Indiana can drive his little green truck to Minsk. However, it seems that what gets shipped more than anything are the jobs that can be done right here at home.

I have ranted on this before. I truly believe that if the Obama Administration would grow a pair, and force companies to pay taxes on offshore labor, more jobs would be done here, than outside the U.S. I know they have tried to pass that type of legislation, but since we don’t have anyone to stand behind it, who can fit into a standard athletic supporter, the legislation just sits in some committee until everyone forgets about it.

This year there was legislation to provide medical support for 9/11 first responders. Apparently, many of these volunteers don’t have health coverage, and the ones that did have it were dropped from their insurance companies when they got sick. Some of these people were actually City, State, and Federal employees at the time. These people put their lives on the line on 9/11. This seemed like a no-brainer vote. Who wouldn’t vote for that? However, Republicans wanted to add an Amendment to the Bill to prevent illegal aliens from getting access to any 9/11 money (even if they helped dig out bodies), and the Democrats blocked the Amendment. Democrats then tabled the Bill until after the mid-term elections because they didn’t want Republicans creating political ads which said “Did you know that (Insert ball-less Democrat Name Here) voted for healthcare for illegal aliens?” Then, when Democrats were ready to vote on the Bill after the elections Republicans blocked it until Obama agreed to tax cuts for people making more…not less…MORE, than $250,000.00 per year. It wasn’t until Jon Stewart dedicated a week’s episodes of his Comedy Central show (the last inviting actual first responders on to talk about the issue), were the lawmakers shamed into passing the Bill. Really? It took a comedian to get you to do the right thing? WOW!

I guess the only way we will get anyone to do the right thing here, is to have Stewart and Cobert hold another rally. I think we should call it the Rally to Restore a Pair. It should be held in Washington, and everyone should bring a pair of brass balls. I fear that city needs a few.

It’s Christmas again. It’s the time of year I spend skiing with the rest of the pagans at a resort in the western United States. I never have been much for the regular trappings of the holiday since I reached adulthood. I don’t have children, so I have never seen the need to carry on that part of the tradition. However, living in the mountains does have the advantage of bringing back my inner child, or at least my inner teenager. Really…I’m going to have to go with teenager. Children don’t get together to do what we do after a day of skiing. I’ll leave some of the “what” I do up to your own imagination.

I will spend some of this time sitting by a fire with friends, and companions, reflecting on the year’s events, and eventually bidding good evening, and in some cases, carrying some companions back to their rooms after too much eggnog. Really…I have never met anyone that actually drinks that stuff. In this case, let’s just call the wine eggnog.

Needless to say, the last few years have been very stressful, so taking this time out is just what the doctor ordered. I know many of you feel the same way about your own stressful lives, and are happy to take what time you have to spend with friends and family.

So take this ranting as my bidding to you to have a wonderful holiday season, whether that be Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, or your briss. OK…maybe not briss. Let’s face it…the only people happy about that are the spectators. However, I would be more than happy to send some wine to dull the pain.

Either way, may the holiday bring you joy and gladness to the next year. I love you all, and I look forward to writing more in the near future. However, right now they’re reporting 5ft of snow in my area, and I’m taking full advantage of it!

Happy Whatever!

Rex

I make no secret of the fact that I’m a fan of the current President. In fact, given the previous eight years, I can’t understand why anyone would want to reverse course and go back to the good ole days of death in despair. Still….recent events have caused me great pain in that I watched helplessly as Obama went to India, in an effort to gain jobs for Americans. What was more troubling is that he went there with an entourage of the imbeciles who sent all our jobs there in the first place. I have to agree with Jon Stewart. I hope he doesn’t send the crappy customer service jobs back…even if it means we could finally understand what they’re saying on the phone.

Yes…I know that his intent was to get 50,000 jobs for the U.S. However, I think it will be more likely that we gain 50,000 and lose another 2 or 3 million. I would have thought someone would have told him that this was a ridiculous idea. Also, military contract jobs are only available to a limited number of people. If you have EVER missed a payment on anything, chances are you will never work for the military. Evidently they equate economic hardship with espionage. “You got laid off from your job you say? Well…we can’t hire people like you. It’s obviously your fault your company shipped your job to the country that’s now making our airplanes.”

Here’s my idea…drop the H1B program. Do what other countries do when foreign workers want to enter their country; don’t let them. Tell our U.S. employers that if they hire foreign contractors over U.S. labor that they no longer reap any tax benefit. Tell them that if they hire illegal labor, the hiring manager goes to jail. Hell…if a convenience store clerk can go to jail for selling a 17 year old a pack of smokes, I’m thinking sending a hiring manager to prison for starving out an American family is the least we can do.

I have long stated that it’s not the Mexican border that is a threat to the American Worker, but the influx of cheap legal labor from India, Pakistan, Vietnam, and elsewhere. I could care less if some guy picking oranges in Florida is from Mexico or Mars. What impacts our economy is someone from another country who works for ten cents on the dollar, and then sends all the money they earn OUT of the country. That doesn’t help us much.

So Mr. President, if you want to help us out, grow a pair. Tell Congress, and big business, that we will no longer tolerate sending jobs overseas. Tell them both that if they continue to partake, support, and promote the export of labor that you will do your level best to expose their actions to the American public. Do the country a favor. Stop going overseas to visit our jobs. Tell them they have to come home.

Ever since I was a freshman in college, I have been presented with the argument that language is dying. No more are our children, students, Public, whomever, capable of understanding the intricacies of the English language. They no longer understand the ten dollar words spoken by learned individuals whose sole purpose is to communicate their knowledge to those of us less fortunate than they. To this I say to them, with all sincerity…big deal.

I’m by no means saying that we should eliminate the acquisition of knowledge. What I argue is that we need to expedite our language to increase the efficiency, and speed at which we acquire knowledge. For that to happen it will be required for us to transform the language in a way that will enable our brains to acquire more information in that shorter period of time.

I was recently privy to a conversation where a couple was discussing how terrible it was that their students could not spell. They seemed to be using the abbreviations used when texting on a phone. U, instead of you. R instead of are. You get the idea. It infuriated them that these kids wouldn’t use the whole word when writing papers. They were so used to the shortened, abbreviated version, that the longer one was no longer in their lexicon. Languages evolve. If you don’t believe me, then you might want to pick up a copy of Chaucer in the original middle-English: “Thanne telleth here speche and al the blysse.” I have long believed that using 12 words when 2 will do is a waste of time. I could care less that someone texts to me, “How r u, rather than How are you.”

Like many things, language is an evolution of knowledge. If we, as a species, are to evolve, then our language has to evolve as well. If that wasn’t the case we’d still be speaking like Chaucer. As the computer age grows larger, and as knowledge expands, it is only logical that language will have to evolve to accommodate the need to read more information in a shorter period of time. If that means we need to alter spellings to increase efficiency, I’m all for it. However, if you think that we should spend endless hours learning the spellings of words long dying, or dead, then more power to ya. I’m sure there’s an Amish family that will be more than happy to take you in.

I was thinking the other day, that if someone in a company thinks they need to layoff a group of people then the person making the decision to do the layoff has to meet the person and the family of the person, they’re laying off face to face. This might be pretty difficult in some situations, I realize, but I bet you would have a lot fewer layoffs if the individual knew they would have to tell you and your family to your faces. If they had to face the family members of the lives they’re about to ruin, I would imagine things would be a bit different than they are right now.

It used to be, back in the old days, that companies became successful by being beholden to their customers, and their workers. Now it seems that they are beholden to their stockholders, and to hell with everyone else. The problem I have with that mindset is that when you forget the customer, and you forget the worker, then you’ve pretty much eliminated the reason to be in business in the first place. How in the world does a company expect to make money if they don’t make anything, or don’t provide a service?

I’m not saying our recent economic problems are anything new. We’ve had problems like this throughout history. However, what I think is recent, is the dot com attitude that if you create vaporware, then you can get rich without actually doing anything. There are some of you that won’t understand that comment, but what I’m getting at is that there were hundreds of companies in the 1990s that were making millions in investment dollars, and never made, or sold a product. I’m really wondering if some of the executives who came out of that era in the 90s aren’t still trying to run their businesses that way.

What appears to be the M.O. of most companies is to see how much they can skim off the top without having to actually do any more work. These companies don’t try to look for better ways of doing things. There’s no massive strategy. There’s no real plan. They just look at a set of numbers and say “If we can reduce our payroll by 30%, well then we have increased our profits by 30%.” But that’s never the case…and I mean never. If you look at a set of numbers on a spreadsheet, and you decide to make a decision in whole on those numbers, then you deserve to get what you don’t pay for. It never works out that when you let someone go that you instantly reap an economic benefit. Someone still has to do the work, or the work doesn’t get done. If the work doesn’t get done, then you can’t sell your product. If you can’t sell your product, then you don’t make money. It’s that simple.

Many companies have decided that to make money, they need to ship jobs offshore. This is even after other companies have tried this over the last decade, only to ship jobs back to the U.S. The most noticeable are customer service jobs. There was a time when you called customer support, and you didn’t understand a word the person said. Now they are moving these jobs back because they found that 1). It really didn’t save them what they thought. Sure the labor cost is lower, but the cost of doing business in two countries erased any benefit, and 2). They lost customers.

The other jobs that were being shipped overseas were manufacturing. It’s just recently that these jobs are starting to come back. Let’s face it…you can’t sell toys with led paint. Companies found that products didn’t meet any quality standards, and they had to spend three or four times as much money as they did before, for the same product. It turned out that the cheap Chinese and Indian labor didn’t really pan out all that well. They removed any profit because they had to ship things back and forth to get them fixed, or they had to hire someone here to fix them anyway.

It is true…you get what you pay for. I like to work on houses, so my favorite example is this. You can buy a of paint brush for $4.99, but if you pay $25.00 for a brush, you will spend less on the paint. Sure…you your brush for 20% less than I did, but you still didn’t get the job done with that brush. And, you wasted hours, and a lot of paint to figure out that the crappy brush you bought, just ruined the wall you were trying to paint. So now you have to go spend another $50.00 on a gallon of paint, and still buy the good brush to cover up what you did when you tried to save $15.00. So…how much did you save?

I think shipping jobs overseas is un-American. If there is anything that we can all agree upon, I think it just might be that. With all the rhetoric of people pointing fingers at others and calling them un-American, from politicians, to pundits, I think one thing we should all agree upon, is that if you run a business in this country, and you think that putting Americans out of work to add another nickel to your pocket is a good decision, then you are no better than the people who flew planes into the twin towers. It might not kill as quickly, but like cancer, it’s just as deadly, and I would guess, that it ruins more lives than any terrorist we will ever encounter.