Rick Raw: Recession–Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose

By Rick Grant rickgrant01@comcst.net www.rickatnight.com

Today, as Wall Street falters under volatile market pressures, economists are divided as to whether we are actually in a recession or not. But to the average person who has been downsized because their high tech jobs were outsourced to India, or similar scenarios, recession is just another word for nothing left to lose. In other words, to the middle-class Joe, who struggles to find a job and make ends meet, there is no doubt we are in a recession. It’s my recession. It’s your recession. Dammit, it’s The Recession fellow Americans.

The downward spiral happened when America’s corporations started to outsource customer service jobs to other countries, upping their bottom line. Then, bolstered by lack of outrage from America’s working force, they began outsourcing high paying jobs, such as engineering positions, to other countries, eliminating millions of U.S. jobs.

Soon there were more foreigners working for U.S. companies overseas than Americans working for U.S. companies. Of course, the Bush administration encouraged this treachery, stripping Americans of the right to have job security because our government allows companies to move their operations overseas for cheaper labor. Bush’s League of Extraordinary Losers said," It’s a global economy, go forth and find cheap labor, ya’ll, and we’ll be line-dancing in Lubbock with the oil industry in our pocket."

Now, practically nothing is made in America, and our retail markets are flooded with shoddy Chinese merchandise. And, we let it happen. Yes, we have no balls to demand accountability from our representatives in Washington. Wake up and hear the recession. It’s the clicking sound of the National Debt Clock, whirling so fast, it’s a blur.

In the hearts and minds of the unemployed America work force, when our big corporations are not hiring Americans, and Indian engineers are living la dolce vita on 10 grand a year, recession strikes deep into the America’s zeitgeist. However, outsourcing jobs is only part of the problem.
Recession raises its ugly head when every day $4 billion is added to the national debt.

The truth is: The Iraq war is feeding the outer parameters of a full blown recession. We simply can’t afford to continue this debacle. Until we eliminate the Iraq War’s stranglehold on our economy and reduce the national debt, we’re running on massive negative cash flow, inviting economic disaster. Yet, Bush is happy to continue spending billions to "stabilize" Iraq and leave a big mess for the next president to clean up.

If the layperson delves into the various dissertations on recession indicators, written by economists, one is met with complex economic mumbo-jumbo. Yet, the middle-class person knows damn well what’s happening to his lifestyle–it’s going downhill, as prices go up, wages stay the same or go down, and personal credit card debt rises just so the working stiff can maintain a reasonably comfortable status quo.

Indeed, the word "recession" rings hollow to the average person. As a semi-retired person, I gauge my budget limitations as my personal financial health indicator. Lately, I’ve noticed that it gets harder to make it through each month with any money left over. Suddenly, it hit me–I’m in my own personal recession, living hand to mouth. Call it recession, depression, or just that dunderhead President Bush screwing up our economy.

Now it’s personal. One knows there is a recession when it hits home like a financial plague, and suddenly, that National Debt Clock takes on heady significance. Think of it –$4 billion is added to the deficit every day. See it whirl and weep. "Down, down we go, into the abysss without a safety rope."

Rick Raw:Obscene CEO Salaries–Money for Nothing and the Perks for Free

By Rick Grant rickgrant01@comcast.net www.rickatnight.com

In a world of continuing outrages against the middle-class with unfair taxes, Washington lawmakers giving themselves raises, and a rigged system to limit working-persons’ income, here’s a statistic that caused my blood to boil: The ratio of CEO-to-worker pay hit a peak of 525-to-1 in 2001. It has stayed in that relative ratio ever since.

Yeah, these soulless greed-mongers running the corporations are literally draining their respective company’s financial resources with no incentive to help the company prosper. The cumulative pay of the top 10 highest paid CEOs in the past 15 years was a whopping $11.7 billion. A case in point, Forbes.com says that Citigroup’s Sandy Weill has made $1.1 billion since 1990. And you thought Mick Jagger was filthy rich. He’s just a poor rock ‘n’roll musician by comparison.

In 2007, despite efforts by the SEC to rein-in bloated Chief Executive Officers' salaries, CEOs of major corporations found surreptitious ways to skirt the rules and receive obscene amounts of money in stock options and pay as compensation for mediocre performance. Then, when the board of directors finally ousted them, they got the equivalent of a bonus for a not doing a good job called "the golden parachute"–costing the company millions of dollars down the drain.

How can any one person be worth these stagging amounts of money. The truth is, they’re not. CEO’s are hired because of their Wall Street influences and their image to brand the company with their particular style of "leadership." It’s more about the prospect’s ability to maneuver in the new global economy and raise the value of the company stock, serving the interests of the shareholders.

Somewhere along the line, the CEO’s reason for being on the job gets perverted by their greed addled motivation to take the company to the cleaners before they’re fired, then move on to the next suckers. These guys make Al Capone look like a Boy Scout.

Enron may have been an extreme example of CEO’s skulduggery, with the top executives indicted and jailed. But, Enron’s honcho, Ken Lay had the good sense to die before he served any time. However, CEOs still have carte blanch on their companies’ finances, manipulating stock with their golden parachute to bail them out at the end.

More significantly, despite new SEC disclosure rules, CEOs use illicit tactics to hide their true earnings from the shareholders. According to a Forbes.com article, three of the components of CEO compensation are salary, bonus, and long-term incentive plan payout, which are easy to find in the company proxy. But carefully hidden in the reams of data are the "final average compensation" which includes restricted stock awards. In other words, call it creative accounting which gives the outgoing CEO set-for-life wealth. Mitt Romney made his billions the old fashioned way–playing the CEO game, which financed his run for president.

Of course, these big-time crooks we call CEOs are masters of sinister machinations and deceit. Yet, companies, like pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, added executive pensions to their CEO’s perks at a time when the current corporate trend is to reduce or eliminate workers’ benefits like pensions and healthcare. Why? The fat-cat CEO is making all the money.

The bottom line: Big pay for the CEO is no guarantee of big payout for the shareholder. In fact, most CEOs could give a crap less what happens to the company. They’re foxes in the hen houses. They may or may not enhance the company stock, but by the nature of their compensation package, they are, by design, bleeding the company profits. Indeed, CEO salaries should be tied directly to performance. Yet, big company boards consider CEOs the rock stars of the corporate culture and throw money at them, guaranteeing them unreasonable compensation packages. In effect, they are saying, "Work for us, we’ll make you a billionaire."

Perhaps the so called Chief Executive Officer position should be eliminated in favor of democratic board voting power with two-thirds majority decision making. Let’s get rid of these creeps once and for all.

Rick Raw: Walking the Social Security Treadmill–It’s No Gravy Train

By Rick Grant rickgrant01@comcast.net www.rickatnight.com

First, let’s clear the air. I loathe the term "Baby Boomer" (BB) with all its cliche connotations. At 67, I was born in 1941, making me "pre-BB," since the consensus is the BB factor affects birth dates from 1946–after WWII to 1965–Vietnam era. I am neither a baby of that time frame nor did I join the BB brigade. Yes, I’m riding the Social Security (SS) train as it chugs along, sending automatic deposits into my bank account every month. Along with my wife’s SS amount and what I make as a journalist, we are barely making it every month. By any stretch of the imagination, this is no gravy train! And, it was a rude awakening that when I earned over a certain amount plus my SS, and the IRS wanted its share. That’s taxation double jeopardy, since SS was already a tax. "Look, you IRS goons, I paid that tax, now you want more," I yelled.

Too many smartass twentysomethings, who say seniors are draining SS dry, living high on the hog, I say, remember, we paid into that fund for many years. It’s our money. Yet, young people resent the fact that they have to pay SS taxes to the tune of 12.4 percent of their paycheck. They argue that by the time they reach 62, the SS fund will be broke. Of course, this beastly SS system, like all bloated government bureaucracies, needs to be eliminated and new ideas to make old age at least tolerable put into place. Ah, but SS is the bastard step child of politics. For political candidates to even mention tampering with SS is tantamount to committing political suicide.

However, now that the BB population (80 million) are reaching retirement age, it opens up a $2.1 trillion market that vastly transcends the highly touted 18-34 demographic, which is a myth. Many of the retiring seniors have provided for their elder years by saving vast sums of money (smarty-pants) which, in addition to SS, will provide a comfortable lifestyle for them. More importantly, they will buy things like smaller houses, RVs, vacation cabins in the woods, and partake in leisure activities like golf and sex (yes sex) now that the kids are gone (hallelujah) and Viagra is readily available.

Today, seniors citizens are living longer and enjoying it. The image of seniors staring at the wall in a nursing home is cliche. Sadly, though, dementia and Alzheimers hit an alarming percentage of older Americans. It’s insidious and tragic, but we must be compassionate and treat these people with dignity. Medical breakthroughs are happening every day and a cure for Alzheimers is a real possibility. I’ve already had cancer and beat it, but Alzheimers really scares me. I test my memory every day, and if I can remember my checking account number, and at least some of my passwords and user names, (jeez, there are so many) I figure I’m okay.

In reality, the horror of SS going belly up is a hypothetical threat, decades into the future. When the projected demise of SS happens in 2041, most BBs will be dead and a new system put into place. By then, other factors will be in play such as long term trends in immigration, expanded life expectancy, and who knows, maybe there will be a cure for old age. Then what the hell will we do? A system of selective termination would have to be in place to get rid of the long-living slackers who are 150 years old but look 40 and are living off the labors of the hapless twentysomethings. Tennis anyone? A career as a hitman may be a growth industry.

Like me, healthy seniors can keep on working indefinitely or until they drop dead. But taxing us is unconscionable and burdens us unnecessarily. Senior citizens on SS should not be taxed! Period! Barack Obama is the only candidate to offer that consideration as an election promise. Huckabee wants to eliminate the IRS, which is great, but I doubt he could actually get that accomplished. Dismantling such an ingrained bureaucracy, employing thousands of people, would cause an ungodly uproar on the Hill, and Huckabee would be stonewalled on the issue. But it’s a wonderful idea, and if he wasn’t a Baptist preacher (I hate preachers) and appealing to the religious right, I’d vote for him.

So, trust me, SS is no golden years’ boon. Admittedly, I screwed up and didn’t save enough money for my senior years. However, I do enjoy working as a journalist which enriches my life. And, fortunately for me, I have simple tastes and hobbies. Until I crossover to the other side, I’m living my dream–somewhat downsized, but nonetheless, a productive existence.

Rick Raw: While You Were Out for The Holidays, $555 Billion Went Down The Drain

By Rick Grant rickgrant01@comcast.net www.rickatnight.com

Happy New Year suckers! While you were out enjoying the holidays, no one noticed that before our spendthrift Congressmen and Senators left for their holiday bacchanals, they passed a whopping $555 billion omnibus appropriations bill. It combined war funding with budgets for 14 Cabinet agencies. This bill not only sent the National Debt Clock clicking up at warp speed, it’s loaded with earmarks, (pork) granting Congressmen and Senators mad money for their pet projects. These are frivolous pork-barrel plans, such as, better grass on the golf courses in the lawmakers’ hometowns, or more fish in their favorite fishing holes. Really, earmarks are that trivial. Hey, it’s our money. Where’s our outrage? We should be going to see our legislators in droves, demanding change.

Ironically, in a Democratically controlled Congress, Decocrats caved, failing to win votes to force removal of U.S. troops or set a non-binding target to remove most troops by the end of next year. In other words, in an election year, Democrats were afraid that their constituents would accuse them of not supporting our troops and hurt the Democratic nominee for president.
Yes, if our useless representatives are not soliciting sex in men’s rooms, their hiding behind their desks like the sorry cowards we always knew they were. This was a pathetic year-end budget compromise deal between the Congress and the Bush administration ending months of empty rhetoric. When push came to shove, the Democrats lost their testicles and went home to their trophy wives.

Representative John Shadegg, R-Ariz, said, "Congress refuses to rein in its wasteful spending or curb its corruption!" And that’s coming from a Republican! The bill contained at least $48 billion in domestic spending above Bush’s budget. More significantly, Bush won his $70 billion in troop funding, while Republicans hid out in the basement. Both parties gave Bush carte blanch on war spending and they got their earmarks. Quid pro quo!

Hell, print more money. Its open season on the deficit. What’s worse, we have a whole year before Bush is out of office–a year for him send the National Debt Clock into inconceivable amounts of negative cash flow–presently its holding at over $9 trillion, but if this reckless spending continues, it may exceed $10 trillion by the end of the year.

Just imagine if Bush was running your family business as head of the firm and he was spending the company’s money with complete disregard for the financial health of the company, acquiring huge debts. You’d be doing the Mexican tap dance on the board’s conference table, demanding his resignation. Well, Bush is running our country like a drunk cowboy and we can’t fire him until next year. And, by that time, he will have sent the National Debt into deep space, well out of reach for the foreseeable future. Has anyone contemplated how much money $9 trillion dollars really is? It’s mind boggling.

After the bill passed, Democrats tried to spin it as a justified compromise, saying that the bill "smoothed the rough edges of Bush’s February budget plan," which sought below-inflation increases and contained cutbacks. Bull! The Democrats failure to throttle Bush’s war and domestic spending was a complete breakdown of leadership. It makes me lose faith that either party can act responsibly in such a charged political atmosphere when everyone is trying to cover their own asses rather than do the right thing. Yeah, 2008 is off to an expensive start.