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Layoffs, Layoffs, Everywhere You Look There Are Layoffs
Corporations are laying people off which will increase their profits and decrease the general growth of the economy. At the end of the last article I posted by Russ Winter, several seem to argue that corporations should not be paying taxes, and that might help them increase profits and spend their money more productively. Keep in mind that American companies that are moving operations overseas and getting out of paying taxes, do business in the U.S. and get considerable benefits from this country.
Here's a portion of a list provided by JW n FL (thanks):
3) General Electric made $26 billion in profits in the United States over the past five years and, thanks to clever use of loopholes, paid no taxes...
4) Chevron received a $19 million refund from the IRS last year after it made $10 billion in profits in 2009. (Source: See 2009 Chevron annual report here. Note 15 on page FS-46 of this report shows a U.S. federal income tax liability of $128 million, but that it was able to defer $147 million for a U.S. federal income tax liability of negative $19 million.)
7) Goldman Sachs in 2008 only paid 1.1 percent of its income in taxes even though it earned a profit of $2.3 billion and received an almost $800 billion from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Department...
8) Citigroup last year made more than $4 billion in profits but paid no federal income taxes. It received a $2.5 trillion bailout from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury...
9) ConocoPhillips, the fifth largest oil company in the United States, made $16 billion in profits from 2006 through 2009, but received $451 million in tax breaks through the oil and gas manufacturing deduction...
Layoffs, Layoffs Everywhere You Look There Are Layoffs
Courtesy of Michael Snyder of Economic Collapse
The competition for jobs in the United States is absolutely brutal right now, and it is about to get worse. A new wave of layoffs is sweeping across America. During tough economic times, Wall Street favors companies that are able to cut costs, and the fastest way to "cut costs" is to eliminate employees.
After a period of relative stability, the employment picture in the U.S. is starting to get bleaker again. New applications for unemployment benefits have now been above 400,000 for 15 straight weeks. Finding a good job is kind of like winning the lottery in this economy. Our federal government and the state governments have made it incredibly complicated and extremely expensive to have employees on the payroll. It is getting harder and harder to get a large enough return to justify the time and expense that hiring employees requires. So many firms now find themselves trying to do more with the employees that they already have. Other companies are turning to temp agencies as a way to reduce costs and increase workplace flexibility. A lot of the big corporations are sending as much work as they can overseas where the wages are far lower and where the regulatory environment is much simpler. All of this is really bad news for American workers that just want good jobs that will enable them to provide for their families.
When we first started seeing huge numbers of layoffs a few years ago, I encouraged people to look into government jobs because I thought that they would be a lot more stable in this economic environment.
But today that is no longer true. In fact, state and local governments all over the United States are responding to massive budget problems by slashing payrolls in an unprecedented fashion.
Sadly, the reality is that the number of "secure jobs" is rapidly declining in America. If you have a "job" ("just over broke") right now, you might not have it for long. That is one reason why everyone should be trying to become more independent of the system.
Once upon a time the U.S. economy produced a seemingly endless supply of good jobs. This helped us develop the largest and most vibrant middle class in modern world history.
But now employees are regarded as "costly liabilities", and businesses and governments alike are trying to reduce those "liabilities" as much as they can.
This summer the pace of layoffs seems to be accelerating all over the nation. Just check out what has been happening over the past few weeks....
-Lockheed Martin has made "voluntary layoff offers" to 6,500 employees.
-Detroit is losing even more jobs. American Axle & Manufacturing Holdings has told the remaining 300 workers at its manufacturing facility in Detroit that their jobs will be ending in early 2012.
-Layoff notices have been sent to 519 employees of Milwaukee Public Schools, and more than 400 open positions are going to go unfilled.
-The Gap has announced that up to 200 stores will be closed over the next two years.
-Cisco has announced plans to lay off 9 percent of their total workforce.
-Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel says that 625 city employees will be losing their jobs as a result of cutbacks.
-Pharmaceutical giant Merck recently dumped 51 workers from an office in Raleigh, North Carolina.
-Perkins has revealed that they will be closing 58 restaurants.
-This week, Goldman Sachs announced that they will be eliminating 1,000 jobs.
-Cracker Barrel is rapidly reducing staff at its headquarters.
-Telecommunications and web marketing firm Crexendo has announced that it will be laying off about 30 percent of its workforce.
-Borders has announced that they will be shutting down their remaining 399 stores and that 10,700 employees will lose their jobs.
-Now that the space shuttle program has ended, thousands of NASA employees will be losing their jobs.
There are hundreds of more examples of recent layoffs and job losses. One website that tracks these layoffs daily is Daily Job Cuts. It is pretty sad when there are entire websites that are devoted to chronicling how fast our economy is bleeding jobs.
What is worse is that it looks like the pace of layoffs is going to keep increasing.
One report that was recently released found that the number of job cuts being planned by U.S. employers increased by 11.6% in June.
That is not good news.
Things don't look good for employees of state and local governments either.
State and local governments have eliminated approximately 142,000 jobs so far this year.
That is bad, but this is just the beginning.
UBS Investment Research is projecting that state and local governments in the U.S. will combine to slash a whopping 450,000 jobs by the end of next year. Ouch.
Barack Obama and Ben Bernanke keep trying to tell us that the economy is improving, but that simply is not the case. Yes, some of the largest corporations have announced big earnings, but that is not translating into lots of jobs for American workers.
Today, most large corporations only want to have as many U.S. workers as absolutely necessary. In a world where labor has been globalized, it just doesn't make sense for corporations to shell out massive amounts of money to American workers when they can legally get away with paying slave labor wages to workers on the other side of the globe.
So if it seems like it is far harder to get a good job in America today than it used to be, the truth is that you are not imagining things.
Our entire system discourages job creation inside the United States. Every single year, even more ridiculous job-killing regulations are being passed on the federal and state levels. It has become extremely expensive and ridiculously complicated to hire people.
So how are American families surviving? Those that still do have jobs are finding that wages are not going up but the cost of living rapidly is. Many American families are making up the difference by using their credit cards more.
In June, credit card purchases in the U.S. increased by 10.7 percent compared to the same month a year ago.
It looks like a whole lot of people have not learned their lessons about how bad credit card debt is.
Millions of other American families have fallen out of the middle class completely. Today, one out of every six Americans is enrolled in at least one government anti-poverty program. The level of economic suffering in this country continues to soar.
In fact, the number of Americans that are now sleeping in their cars or living in tent cities remains at staggering levels.
What we are witnessing in this country is not just a "recession" or an "economic downturn". What we are witnessing are fundamental economic changes.
Until there are fundamental policy changes in the United States, there will continue to be huge waves of layoffs and millions of jobs will continue to be shipped out of the country.
In the old days, one could go to college, get a good job with one company for 30 years and retire with a big, fat pension.
Now, that way of doing things is completely and totally dead. Today, there is virtually no loyalty out there. It doesn't matter how long you have been working at a particular job. When it becomes financially expedient to get rid of you, that is exactly what is going to happen.
It is a cold, cruel world out there right now. Don't assume that you will always have a good job. The world is rapidly changing.
Don't get caught in the trap of believing that the way that things were is the way that things are always going to be in the future.
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Thanks for bring that up. I don't see much media about tent cities and car sleepers much. I guess those people from 3 years ago are still there and much more. SNAP is helping them not die. The next wave of Unemployment should scare the shit out of everyone. Be well my friends !
back in 1991 or around that time i heard a statistic, that at the time it was the first time in history of our country that more people worked for "The Man" than work for themselves. i hope in a way more people try to work for themselves and give up on finding a job, that pays very little and takes up all your time.
Working for yourself, usually means working for a customer or client. And US customers, as a breed, are the most spoiled, coddled, scheming brats on the planet...courtesy of American retail's "customer is always right", and "knock 'em dead service" marketing plans. This animal is no fun to work with.
Here's a thought...
If even more layoffs are expected, and the overall number of desperate/depressed people increases, does this mean we might be soon seeing the start of a frightening new trend in which more people "go postal" and take their frustrations out on strangers in public areas?
If so, imagine how the State would quickly make laws even tighter and crack down on everyone...for the public's safety, of course. Think it's far-fetched? Only thirty years ago, private firearm ownership (to use one example) was completely legal in the U.K. and Australia. After a mass shooting in 1986 and another one in the mid-90s, the U.K. made private gun ownership illegal in almost all circumstances. Australia has recently does this as well (and the Aussies were founded on independence just like Americans were). Calimexifornica is just waiting for such a reason to finally wipe private ownership off the map.
I'd bet a hundred devalued FRNs that the Gov't is actively preparing for the future uptick in incidents, and would have no problem whatsoever implementing or expanding "TSA"-style checkpoints at more and more public locations. Federal government building entrances? Done. Airports? Done. Bus and train stations? Getting it done. Ferries? Interstates? State border crossings?
I suggest this because I recently underwent my only IRS tax audit ever (which was fortunately over nothing because it was initiated by a newbie agent and I was her very first solo case). I received a letter demanding that I travel from my home into L.A., where I forced to pay for parking. Then as I entered the IRS building, I was immediately stopped by an armed gorilla with a nightstick and (1) told to place my tax folders onto a conveyor belt for x-ray examination (really?...papers?), and (2) told to stand still so he could "wand" me. I verbalized my frustration at being forced by decree to travel there and then go through the checkpoint as if I were a suspect, and he simply replied that the public is angry nowadays, and they can't take chances.
You know what I'm really surprised we haven't seen yet?...a suicidally depressed person leading the cops on a typical high-speed chase on the freeways here in SoCal. When the person stops, and the cops surround the car (with the news choppers airing it all live like they always do), then the car explodes and takes out everyone within 100 feet. It would be horrible, but I'd bet we'll see something like that at some point.
One of the few benefits of the wars is they give many of these folks a place to "legally" vent their fustration. Should they decide to tone it down, bring home the troops and demobilise... things could get uglier quickly
DHS propaganda. Don't you have something better to do with your time?
More likely, it will trigger a new wave of colonization.
An author, on another site (that I can’t recall) likened our dubious economy to the old game “Kerplunk”.
That game was a cylinder that had a bunch of sticks through it, with a pile of marbles stacked on top. Removing the sticks was no problem initially, but as the game progressed it became harder and harder to safely remove a stick without causing a massive drop of marbles.
We’re at the point in our “Kerplunkanomy” that each piece of news, financial reversal and political action not only causes more marbles to drop, but we have very few sticks left, if any, to hold back the final collapse. There are quite a few known events coming up that will violently jar our “Kerplunkanomy”.
China will be opening a silver exchange. This will break the collusion and manipulation between London and the New York Cartel on silver pricing. It will also have an effect on gold. The prices should surge as a result and make the use of paper currency seem ridiculous to even the currently unaware.
We still have ALL the “Toxic Assets” sitting in ALL the banks that were “TBTF”. Those didn’t go away; they’ve just been sanitized a bit so the toxicity didn’t reek as badly.
We KNOW that our disgustingly corrupt politicians will once again insure that their lords, masters and owners will be bailed out on the back of the american peasant. (Remember "Dead Peasant" insurance? No? Do a websearch.)
We have another round of Subprime Interest Resets coming starting NOW. Bringing a new round of “foreclosures”. Plus we have the added bonus of resets with Commercial Real Estate…the malls, shops, restaurants, etc.
2012 will be moving to five years since the beginning of this mega-depression. That means there will be a pile of five year commercial leases being reexamined.
Five years also means that commercial financing taken on in the better days of 2006/2007 will be paid off. That means that those wonderful institutions that used to loan us our money, (before they found out it was quicker, easier and cleaner to simply steal it) will no longer have capital streams coming in. Nor will they be showing revenue from the normal interest income they earned.
We still have the costs associated with the commodity speculation earlier this year piling into the production systems.
Now we will see more costs as the unprecedented flooding, storms, and draught have basically wiped out our mid-west farms.
We know, right now, that beef and pork will be significantly higher by the end of the year.
We know that cereals, not the Kellogg stuff, necessarily…oats, wheat, corn, etc are going to be tight.
We know that Russia had their own problems and banned any grain export. We may need to do that, but we KNOW that we will export food to some degree regardless.
In short our basic food costs are going to hike sharply higher.
We still have a simmering Middle East, with the major oil producers in various shades of revolt, acknowledged or suppressed by the regimes and media. Our national pet regime in the area, Saudi Arabia, has its own inner turmoil that could spill over and affect our fuel imports...that is until we deploy the Marines to suppress the rebellion. After all, our base in Bahrain is just a toll bridge away.
We already know that the effects of the Japanese earthquake back in March will show the full effect on financial reports starting NOW. The JIT (Just-In-Time) inventory/logistics was severed for a period and that will reflect in our few remaining mega-manufacturers.
We also know, based on personal observation and experience, that our “Kerplunkanomy” is much worse than our ruling elite deign to acknowledge.
That unemployment is higher, inflation for day to day items is higher, that there is an air of desperation emanating from more and more of our fellow serfs…and things are rapidly coming to a breaking point.
And we KNOW that whether the scum-sucking vermin weasels in Congress settle the current “debt crisis” or not, it will ultimately fall on our backs; along with a lash from a whip.
We also know that the vast majority of our local career politicians are as corrupt as the rest, and will go to any length to preserve the status quo within the local hierarchy.
These parasites, in conjunction with the scum-sucking vermin weasels in Congress, have already put a police-state society into place. We have the US Gestapo Corps at airports, buses, trains, subways. sporting events now, and we will soon see them in courthouses, city halls, and state houses.
We have the KGB spy cameras erected throughout society.
We have a militarized police force more focused on physical control through weaponry, intimidation, and physical force than on civil liberty or the core philosophy of "Protect and Serve".
We have an entire industry focused on surveillance, intelligence and control of american citizens.
We have all the conditions in place for the day that the government handouts cease, and the millions of recipients no longer receive their allotment, that brutal enforcement/suppression will be "justified".
So we have a few more sticks that are still to be pulled from our “Kerplunkanomy” in a relatively short time.
And when the marbles fall; its game over.
What's wrong with secure & stable work(that develops what you're wanting over time), versus the kinds of work that offer nothing much in return but more problems?
There isn't anything 'wrong' with it. What's wrong is your thinking. Or complete lack of it.
You don't understand the first thing about work. It's called work for a reason.
If companies had to figure out a job specifically designed for you and everyone else that works for them, a job that maximizes their development, provides lifetime security, and stability they would all lose money and then simply go out of business.
The only companies in the world that can do that are a handful and they have to be extaordinarily profitable. No company that has competition and lots of it, is going to be extraordinarily profitable. The examples are all around you.
The Googles, M/Softs, AAPLs and other technology companies that have huge net profit margins are nearly monopolies. Monopolies are the kinds of companies you should seek out for your dream job, though I doubt they will provide you with security. And even if they did, how many can they reasonably employ? AAPL makes its profits because they don't really manufacture anything. Googles makes no products whatsoever, nor does M/Soft.
The total employment in those three companies wouldn't even fill a large football stadium.
So good luck in your search. You're going to need it.
as corporate profits keep soaring into stratosphere
Money goes where it's treated best, with all the regulation and a 35% (official) tax rate no wonder jobs are going oversees and profits too, you can't regulate prosperity !!! commies
Then why is it that a worker has to take lesser returns on his own returns, but it's OK for a business to seek greater returns?
It just would seem inconsistent, and worthy of worldwide pursuit & repatriation.
well, maybe not so much ...
Look at all the Oil, pharma, bank sector and hitech major blue chips...who OWN WS. Then tell me "maybe not"... Even today..in this mega financial global mess this is ever so true...
we'll watch and learn ;-)