Monday, May 31, 2010

Happy Memorial Day: From the Desk of Quincy


 FROM THE DESK OF QUINCY


Barack Obama: Wasn't he supposed to turn the water into wine, not Texas tea?”
-Quincy


Happy Memorial Day, Everybody!

I hope you are all having a nice day remembering the soldiers who defended the United States of America. Serving one's country is an honor and a privilege, especially if you make it out of there alive.

I tried to enlist in the armed services but got disqualified because I am, you know, a PIG. I'm an actual PIG and our distinct minority faces all kinds of discrimination way, way beyond Gays in the military with DADT (Don't Ask Don't Tell). What many people don't know is that being a PIG means automatic disqualification from all kinds of public outings and opportunities you normally take for granted, like go-kart racing and especially employment. Try applying for MaƮtre d' at the Boom Boom Room and you're not only (rather rudely) shown the door, but banned from ever dining there.

Last month, I found myself at a Fellini-esque crossroads, trying to decide what to do with my life. Should I take an Introduction to Photoshop class at the local community college or clandestinely and bravely serve my country? After being approached by a camouflage pants wearing military recruiter (well, that's what he said he was) in the SafeWay parking lot, I was encouraged to enlist after looking at the exciting pamphlet about all the places I could go – kind of like Dr. Seuss, only with attitude. Anyway, this was not to be. Besides, after my previous tour of duty on a stealthy, highly classified mission, you might say I was already overqualified.


On account of this, my plans to spend this Memorial four day weekend at Mr. And Mrs. Crisp's Ft. Myers beach front condo were scotched after the historic, man made disaster down in the Gulf of Mexico. The smell is beastly, and the mood of the locals is worse. The gusher is STILL gushing, and nobody knows how to really fix the mess.

That's why I was tapped by the State Department to go down to Houston this week to root out the culprits behind this non-stop, vicious and voracious volcano of black gold, Texas tea. Not only are wild PIGS highly experienced in rooting out farm profits, but we're also creatures willing to get down into the dirty muck of rooting out inconspicuous feral animals and blowhards guilty of poaching everything sustainable for the rest of those in the sty.

It won't be easy, since everybody involved is either a big fat liar and/or incompetent, but somebody has to help investigative journalist Mr. Greg Palast skewer a few rolling carcasses on a spit. As he wrote in his article Smart PIG: BP's OTHER Spill BP has a history of “cheaping out”:


By not properly inspecting the pipeline for over a decade, BP failed to prevent that March 2006 spill which polluted Prudhoe Bay. And cheaping out on remote controls for their oil well blow-out preventers appears to have cost the lives of 11 men on the Deepwater Horizon.
But then, failure to implement proper safety procedures has saved BP, not millions but billions of dollars, suggests that the company's pig is indeed, very, very smart.”



You can say THAT again, Mr. Greg Palast! This guy really, really knows what he's talking about.


I'm heading out now to join friends for an afternoon barbecue. Later on, in remembrance of Dennis Hopper, we plan to pop open a few Red Tail Ales and watch one of the best movies ever made, Easy Rider.

Have a happy Memorial Day!

-QUINCY

Friday, May 28, 2010

Steve Jobs, Foxconn Suicides and Bringing Jobs Home


(Click on image to enlarge)
Is Steve Jobs Robbing Americans of Jobs, While Simultaneously Robbing the Chinese of Their Youth?


Don Sears at eWeek reports that after 11 attempted suicides in 2010 of Chinese factory workers at its Foxconn subsidiary facility in Southern China, planned pay raises for worker salaries are expected to jump by 20 percent. “Exactly when these raises of workers who build products for Apple, HP, Dell, Sony and others will take place has not been announced.”  Sears explains:

The Foxconn factory is located in the Shenzen province of Southern China and employs about 420,000 workers in this facility. Earlier this week, a worker ended his life by jumping off the factory building, and another worker who tried to slit his wrists survived.”

The new Foxconn "pay-to-delay suicide pact" between the Asian outsourcing electronics manufacturer and their young workers raises the question:

Hey Stevie, why not just keep the jobs here for U.S. teens who need JOBS instead, you know? Why stay on the same old auctioning human life off to the lowest bidder planet when the U.S. needs a boost? (h/t Mish.)


Happy Friday, Loserettes!

-2Truthy

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Obama and Geithner Entry Level Man-Crushinomics: The Gay Swami Times



(Click on Image to Enlarge)

Obama and Geithner Entry Level Man-Crushinomics Exclusive: The Gay Swami Times


MAN-CRUSHINOMICS 101: Keep Your Hands on Your Puts and Keep Your Man-Crush Closer


Welcome back to The Gay Swami Times for our first-ever tutorial special MAN-CRUSHINOMICS 101: Keep Your Hands on Your Puts and Keep Your Man-Crush Closer issue where we investigate the sublime and sometimes plunging depths of the highest rollers in the land who have their manly fingers all over the place. Our exhilarating Man-Crushinomics journey takes us to the pulse of Washington and Wall Street's long-term capital portfolio lusting, pay-to-play casino derivatives beasts dripping in lifetimes of infinite pleasure trysts.  A mysterious inner-sanctum where technocratic man-crush e-dicts and rigged casino economics rule!  Click here for previous issues.

In this breathtaking special issue, our BROMANCE detector alert has been raised to an all-time high as new reports surface in the White House that Barack Obama and “embattled” Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner...they have a thing, goin' on...Cue up “Me and Mrs. Jones” and then sing “Me and His Cahones”!!!

Although no juicy specifics about the purported Barry on Timmy man-crush were uncovered, uber Brahman (note: to the ladies only) David “Axe” Axelrod revealed that Geithner's “looming large” persistent presence might have something to do with Timmy's mystical abilities at imposing pleasing, nocturnal “stabilization” and “stress tests” (sorry, no details yet available) that are reported to work very, very well:

Indeed, the president's support for his Treasury secretary has been unwavering. (Axelrod would laugh at rumors that Geithner was about to get the boot: "Don't these people realize they have a man-crush on each other?") And Obama's loyalty has been repaid with results. Geithner's stabilization plan is now widely regarded as having worked -- mainly thanks to the once-derided "stress tests" that he imposed on the banks, which showed the world that their circumstances weren't as dire as many feared and let them raise the requisite capital to get back on their feet.”

Yes, the magic of entry level MAN-CRUSHINOMICS is like pulling a rabbit out of a hat, and anything else from exotic, secret and taboo places! What results are these that are said to work? Although you can't see, taste or smell any of them (much less understand what the hell they are) SOMEBODY can...Ask TimBama.

In another exciting expose, we thank Cenk Uygur for his wonderfully manly exclusive video (above) further detailing Barry and Timmy's “peas in a pod” like attraction!


Ommmmmm...


-THE GAY SWAMI

Monday, May 24, 2010

2Truthy's Lunchbreak with Avi Buffalo: Turn Up the Volume


(Special Thanks to Avi Buffalo)


Avi Buffalo? What's that? Is this some Jewish dude on a Montana ranch? Click on the above video “What's In It For” and enjoy a great throwback to what I first heard in London's electric bubble gum 60's days:


“Avi Buffalo was once just the kid named Avi (short for Avigdor Zahner-Isenberg). He’s now singing and playing guitar, but was then a vaguely aspirational skateboarder living in Long Beach, who figured between hip trauma and a never-quite-conquered fear of dropping into a half-pipe that he might need to come up with something else to do with the rest of his life. (Maybe journalist? If there were gonna be any left?) His parents never got around to getting him the Game Boy he wanted, so he turned to a handily local guitar. Years of 12-hour days attacking that (plus lessons-to-mentoring with seriously iconoclastic local blues guys) revealed a pretty preternatural talent for making a very special kind of bent but lovely pop song. “You know why it’s good? Because it sounds OLD, but it’s NEW!” said Blues Mentor, sparing the world more labored analysis. And that is the connect-the-dots story of how Avi Buffalo became a band—boy meets guitar. It’s a good old story.”


-2Truthy

Saturday, May 22, 2010

Cancer Causing Strontium-90 Found in Soil at Vermont Nuclear Plant


Mommy Mommy! What's that nukey smell in the sap?”


Strontium-90 Detected at Vermont Nuke Plant

A Catastrophe a Day in the Rat Race to the Bottom?

Leaking News

MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) — "Vermont Yankee officials say that while cleaning up after a leak of radioactive tritium at the nuclear power plant, they found another, more potent radioactive isotope in soil near where the leak occurred. Strontium-90 is a byproduct of nuclear fission that has been linked to cancer and leukemia.

Vermont Yankee spokesman Larry Smith said Friday that the substance hasn't been found in any groundwater and plant officials believe they've removed all the soil containing it. He said they believe it poses no threat to public safety or health. Vermont Health Commissioner Dr. Wendy Davis didn't immediately return a call seeking comment late Friday."


New Orleans-based Entergy Corp. owns the plant. In the wake of BP Oil's worst disaster to sully our shores, coincidentally you'd almost think somebody in the government of Louisiana is sleeping at the switch.

Did you know that unlike the oil industry, U.S. taxpayers subsidize insurance for the nuclear power industry? The free government-granted insurance Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act given to for-profit nuclear plant operators has been cited by Ralph Nader as an example of colossal corporate welfare. But who is looking out for the welfare of our citizens and communities?

Wikipedia includes criticism of The Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act below from a number of environmental and other organizations/think tanks including Union of Concerned Scientists, Greenpeace International, Public Citizen and the Cato Institute. According to watchdog group Public Citizen, no other government agency provides the same level of taxpayer indemnification to private corporate non-citizens:

Public Citizen has been particularly critical of Price-Anderson; it claims that the Act understates the risks inherent in atomic power, does not require reactors to carry adequate insurance, and would therefore result in taxpayers footing most of the bill for a catastrophic accident.[3] An analysis by economists Heyes and Heyes (1998) places the value of the government insurance subsidy at $2.3 million per reactor-year, or $237 million annually.[4] In 2008 the Congressional Budget Office estimated the value of the subsidy at only $600,000 per reactor per year. [3] Due to the structure of the liability immunities as the number of nuclear plants in operation is reduced the public liability in case of an accident goes up.[5]


Talk about the ultimate public-private man crush. While the Price-Anderson Act indemnifies the Department of Energy and private contractors from nuclear incidents “even in cases of gross negligence and willful misconduct (although criminal penalties would still apply)”, the DOE shrugs off critics of taxpayer funded insurance:

The Energy Department counters those critics by saying that the distinction is irrelevant, since the damage to the public would be the same. [4]


The damage - It would be the same! Got that? Taxpayers picking up the tab for private industry catastrophic disasters should be IRRELEVANT. Unlike British Petroleum whose oil spill disaster may quite likely have been caused by cutting corners, (but didn't get that sweet deal), why should the nuclear industry insure itself against potential disasters? Thank heaven for the best and brightest, public-private master caste, the neo-frat boy corporate state – to innovate a permanent neo-feudal caste of serfs to hedge their unsustainable, negligent bets. Will U.S. citizens take another slow as molasses response to demanding accountability from our elected government officials?

Party on, plebes!

-2Truthy

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Monday, May 17, 2010

BP Plugging Oil Leak: The Unsustainability of Cheap Labor and Cheap Oil



(Very Special Thanks to Monty Python)

H-1B Gluttons Gushing Out of Control (on the U.S. Taxpayer Dime)

More Adventures for the H-1B Program


glut
 (glt)
v. glut·ted, glut·ting, gluts
v.tr.
1. To fill beyond capacity, especially with food; satiate.
2. To flood (a market) with an excess of goods so that supply exceeds demand.
v.intr.
To eat or indulge in something excessively.
n.
An oversupply.

glut [glŹŒt]
n
1. an excessive amount, as in the production of a crop, often leading to a fall in price
2. the act of glutting or state of being glutted
vb gluts, glutting, glutted (tr)
1. to feed or supply beyond capacity
2. (Business / Commerce) to supply (a market) with a commodity in excess of the demand for it
3. to cram full or choke up to glut a passage



Imagine that you put one end of a hose in your mouth and kept threading it through until it came out of your butt. That's more or less what the alimentary canal is. You put food in one end of the tube and it's processed during its journey to the other end of the tube, where the waste material comes out. Now, let's abuse the process and imagine it gets CRAMMED with more food than it can accommodate leading to the eventual gushing and puking and exploding of its excess. Still with me?

As yours truly reported in The Unsustainability of Cheap Labor and Cheap Oil  and in The Politics of Ocean Trash and Educated Middle Class Trash, corporate America's incivility toward its local community and their greed are literally destroying our ecosystem. The socioeconomically unsustainable H-1B visa program is just like the BP Oil disaster gushing cheap foreign labor into an already over-saturated local labor pool of unemployed and underemployed American white collar citizens. Like BP Oil's uncontrolled attempts to conceal the gusher now creeping to Florida's coastline, when will America's corpulent, corporate gluttons abandon their insatiable appetite for cramming Burnt Fries down corporate America's choked labor alimentary canal? Why are U.S. corporations still importing dubiously skilled, “best and brightest” workers when there are not enough jobs for educated young and experienced Americans schooled at our finest universities?

With the unprecedented rise of U.S. unemployment and white collar jobs being outsourced/insourced to Indian nationals, outsourcing and the H-1B visa program originally intended to fill skilled job openings when no American professionals can be found should have gone the way of the dinosaur. Oh – but that might force a few sociopathic corporate managers and CEOs to reform the current corporate culture of greed and neo-feudal overlording and begin rebuilding local civility and economic sustainability into our own communities. Can't have that! Charity, after all, begins in the man-crush bedroom boardroom.

In his excellent new CIS report entitled More Adventures for the H-1B Program, David North cites a study that quotes Michael Teitelbaum, vice president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (which funds basic scientific, economic and civic research) who has confirmed the great labor shortage lie. Teitelbaum said:

Over the past few years that there are “substantially more scientists and engineers graduating from U.S. universities than can find attractive jobs.”

The socioeconomically unsustainable, wholesale sell-out of local U.S. jobs  and plummeting wages doesn't stop with STEM jobs and now includes journalism, marketing, healthcare, and the legal professions. With a glut of educated unemployed and underemployed U.S. citizens, why hasn't our government scrapped the legalized visa practice designed for corporations to displace American workers? Although there are laws on the books in place to investigate visa abuses, North has found that the U.S. Labor Department has now decided to do something about them by “mounting a series of 25,000 investigations of the H-1B operation.”

So why the sudden uptick in this massive number of investigations to monitor H-1B abuses?

North notes esteemed UC Davis computer science Professor Norm Matloff's summary of the H-1B program's intent who “has reminded us from time to time, that the program is designed quite specifically to allow employers to hire high-tech talent at below-market rates.” As Matloff puts it:

The law ITSELF is the problem, not lax enforcement. If the law were to allow drivers to go 80 mph in a residential neighborhood, you wouldn't blame the police for lax enforcement, would you? The law itself would be the problem, not the police.”

Indeed, the (gluttonous) H-1B law itself is the problem. Rather than budget millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to investigate H-1B visa fraud, why not just scrap the whole socioeconomically unsustainable practice of importing a glut of workers? The H-1B visa program, has,  like the BP Oil disaster, over-saturated our fragile and scarce supply of jobs like giant plumes of oil mixed with water in the depths of the finite gulf. 

A closer look into North's investigation reveals “a bit of information on the funding of these H-1B investigations” which he uncovered this past week into a Congressional Research Service report which “managed to escape Capitol Hill secrecy.” North explains:

The most interesting point to me, perhaps well known to others, was that most of the congressional funds set aside for the investigation of fraud in the H-1B program have been diverted by the Executive Branch to other programs. There are $500 and $150 fees, per petition, that are supposed to be going into the "Fraud Prevention and Detection Fee Accounts" and DoL's nominal share of those moneys has been $31 million a year in recent years.
"However," the report continues, "DOL reportedly used only $6.7 million in FY 2007, $5.5 million in FY2008 and an estimated $5.5 million in FY2009 for H-1B, H-2B [farmworker] and L visa [international exchange of managers] fraud investigation activities." (See pp. 21-22 of the Wasem document.) There was no discussion of what happened to the non-DoL share of these funds, which apparently was about $62 million a year.
The Obama Administration is estimated to be using $12.5 million of these funds for fraud detection in FY2010.”

Fox guarding Hen House? While a “moratorium on such visas might be prudent” and even an understatement, North reveals that the budget for this massive number of H-1B investigations may have an economic imperative/profitability motive. He concludes that getting the Congress to fund fraud investigations in non-immigrant programs won't do much good if the Executive Branch (hey, Obama?) diverts most of the monies to other activities. The open question is, where/to whom are they being diverted to?

But the gluttonous parallels between the socioeconomically unsustainable and destructive H-1B visa program /outsourcing disaster and the BP Oil disaster are striking. Below, insert “H1-B” for the BP Oil gushing disaster and, well, you get the picture about the whole unsustainable practice of human labor arbitrage and exploitation that has to be stopped.

In the decisive words of Janet Napolitano, it's time to also extend her oil clean up  vision for America to permanently plug this gushing well of cheap imported labor siphoning U.S. jobs and to restore local labor civility to U.S. citizens:

The right thing to do is permanently plug this well, and that’s what we will do,” Mr. Suttles said.“We want to slowly optimize it to try to capture as much of the oil and gas as we can without taking in a large amount of seawater,” he said. Ms. Napolitano and Mr. Salazar cautioned that the tube was not “a solution.”“We will not rest until BP permanently seals the wellhead, the spill is cleaned up, and the communities and natural resources of the Gulf Coast are restored and made whole," Ms. Napolitano and Mr. Salazar said in a joint statement on Sunday."


Party on, plebes!


-2Truthy

Friday, May 14, 2010

I Need a Freakin' Job Billboard Creator Jeff Baker on CNN


Special thanks to Jeff Baker at INAFJ.ORG

(Click here for CNN Jeff Baker interview)

(CNN) -- "I need a freakin job" yours truly recently reported. From CNN:

That's the message on a billboard that went up in Buffalo, New York, just in time for President Obama's town hall meeting there Thursday.
On CNN's American Morning, the creator of the billboard, Jeff Baker, said he was inspired to help pay for the eye-catching gimmick because he wanted to "refocus the national dialogue" back to "basic job creation."
When the economy went south, Baker and his brother lost their 10-year-old textile business, which employed 25 people. Their family's woes are reflected throughout the city of Buffalo, which suffers from one of the country's highest poverty rates, with nearly 30 percent of its population living at or below the poverty line. Buffalo's unemployment rate is at 8.6 percent, while the national average is 9.7 percent.
"Like many other businesses in the country, we got caught in the banking collapse and were basically forced out of business," Baker said of his family business. "So for the first time in my life, I found myself as an unemployed dad and husband and person."
A Congressional Oversight Committee report out Thursday said the biggest Wall Street banks slashed their small-business loan portfolios by 9 percent between 2008 and 2009, more than double the rate at which they cut their overall lending.
And more...
  

IT'S NOT THE ECONOMY, STUPID. IT'S YOUR JOB!
-2Truthy

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Tiger Quits TPC, May Have Bulging Dick



(Elin and Tiger Woods Out Clubbing)


  Tiger Withdraws from Celebrity Championship

Fears He May Have Bulging Dick Disk


Breaking News 

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. (AP) – In yet another sudden blow to Tiger Woods who was supposed to be on the ninth hole at the Celebrity Championship, the celebrity pro golfer “withdrew suddenly with neck pain” in fear it might be a bulging dick disk.

The revealing comment raised several eyebrows from at least three reporters, as a “frustrated” Woods slumped down in front of his locker and gave the following unofficial statement:

I’ve been playing around with a bad neck for about a month,” the troubled star said. “But after my emergency trip to the hospital on Nov. 27 to fix my busted up lip and very sore neck after being hit by a bitching wedge when I drove my Escalade over a fire hydrant and into a tree, I'm taking every precaution to avoid any further stiffness and monitor my swing.”


-2Truthy

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Happy Cinco de Mayo

(Photo Credits Los Angeles Citizine)


 Viva el Cinco de Mayo! "The 5th of May is not Mexican Independence Day, but it should be!  And Cinco de Mayo is not an American holiday, but it should be.  Mexico declared its independence from mother Spain on midnight, the 15th of September, 1810.  And it took 11 years before the first Spanish soldiers were told and forced to leave Mexico.

Mexicans, you see, never forget who their friends are, and neither do Americans.  That's why Cinco de Mayo is such a party -- A party that celebrates freedom and liberty.  There are two ideals which Mexicans and Americans have fought shoulder to shoulder to protect, ever since the 5th of May, 1862.  VIVA! el CINCO DE MAYO!!"
 
-2Truthy

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Times Square Bomber Was an H-1B Visa Holder

Homeland InSecurity: Who is Protecting America's Middle Class?


Breaking News

NEW YORK --  The Washington Post is reporting that the suspect in the Times Square bombing attempt, Mr. Shahzad, initially lived in the United States under H1-B and F-1 visas designed to facilitate his education and give him employment.

In December 1998, he was granted an F-1 student visa. Immigration officials noted then that there was "no derogatory information" on Mr. Shahzad in any database, a law enforcement official said.

He first attended Southeastern University in Washington, D.C., a small school that lost its accreditation last year. In 2000, Mr. Shahzad transferred to the University of Bridgeport. In April 2002, he was granted an H1-B visa for skilled workers; he stayed in the U.S. for three years on that visa, gaining his M.B.A. It is not clear what company sponsored the visa, which is used to attract workers with a "specialty occupation," such as information technology.

Who - WHO in our government will FINALLY stop this and stand up for and protect American citizens?

Party on, plebes!

-2Truthy

Times Square Bombing Attempt has South Park Creators Fearing for Their Lives: A Mel Toast Exclusive

A Mel Toast South Park Exclusive

After Bombing Attempt, South Park Creators Fear for Their Cars Lives


NEW YORK (Reuters) – “They are hiding in an undisclosed location; the poor things have been sobbing like little girls for days!” said a worried Ann Rasco, publicist for the South Park creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone during an exclusive interview this afternoon at a hotel in lower Manhattan.

No longer the haughty mavens of biting social satire, Trey and Stone, were more like quivering like little kittens when I spoke with them earlier today. They fear for their very lives—and for the close call to their pair of gold, Lamborghini Gallardos, which were parked just outside the Viacom corporate offices in Times Square where the failed bombing attempt took place last week.

Viacom is the parent company of Comedy Central, the network that carries South Park and has broadcast the episodes that have apparently offended Muslims worldwide.

“We didn’t mean any harm,” pleaded Parker. “Crap! Why are these guys after us? We have done more to bring down a free society in America and Western civilization in general with our vapid, vulgar, nihilistic South Park episodes than anyone!” Parker continued.

Co-creator Stone added, “Yeah! We hate all this freedom stuff just about as much as any fascistic, totalitarian adherent to that medieval abomination called Islam does!” Adding, “Man, we’re on your side! Chill out!”

Neither Viacom nor Comedy Central officials had any comment on the fate of their wunderkind, Parker and Stone. But Jon Stewart, another stalwart of Comedy Central and host of The Daily Show, offered his insights by noting, “Hey, I like you Muslim people. Really. I think you’re pretty funny. Burnoose! What a great word. But please, just let me keep hammering away at all those nasty, rich, white, right wing corporate Christians for you. Don’t hurt me. Please.”

When asked why a Jew would support Muslims who seek to kill his people as well as Christians, Stewart added, “Hey, Jews are used to this kind of sh*t. And besides, business is business. These guys provide me with great material. But really, their production values on those beheading videos do need work. I wish they’d call me. I can work a deal.”

Cordially,

Mel Toast

University Professors Now Outsourcing Grading to India


(Tech Support: Foamy the Squirrel)

Taking U.S. Jobs is like Stealing Candy from a Baby

Cheap and Degrading News

Virginia -- It's time to change the non-biodegradable nappy on this stinking bum of Indian outsourcing.

LWOH previously reported on the unsustainability of teacher assistant graders and jobs to India.The Star reports today that a George Washington University professor is outsourcing paper grading and commenting to India because he is “unhappy with the tedium of grading papers.” In what has been described as a race to the bottom, the professor nonetheless defends the anti-U.S. academic worker practice of outsourcing grading papers ( a job that U.S. college student and teaching assistants depend upon) to India here:


Our intent is not to cheapen or degrade the learning and teaching equation,” the professor told the Star. “We think there is a better model. We never outsource the responsibility, we’re just outsourcing the activity."

Oh, the tedium! The professor would appear to believe for some reason that India is entitled to take jobs away from Americans and that funneling every last (except his own?) job including student academic jobs to India is fine rather than American citizens doing the work to sustain their livelihoods and rebuild our local economies. To the contrary of the professor's above assertion, ridding U.S. students of jobs does cheapen and degrade not only learning but the entire socioeconomic fabric of our local communities. Quoth the professor:

As long as outsourcing meant for the last 30 years only the flight of blue-collar jobs, that was okay. The moment it extends to knowledge work, immediately people get defensive. The idea that EduMetry can’t mark an English Composition 101 paper is ludicrous.”

Why would he possibly think it's fine and dandy like stealing candy to just keep flushing U.S. jobs to India? And shame on every American citizen for being “defensive” to want our jobs and jobs for our kids. How “ludicrous” is that?

Like stealing candy from a baby, the professor appears to embrace the unsustainable practice of taking jobs from U.S. citizens and giving them instead to India as mere child's play by comparing outsourcing U.S. student jobs to sticking your infant in a daycare center! Yes! He actually joked  that U.S. university students who need those jobs to help pay for their educations and further their own academic experiences (most of their parents' jobs are outsourced to India)  also “should be fair game”:

I like to half-jokingly point out that a mother is outsourcing childcare to a daycare provider. If you can entrust the care of your infant to a third person, any form of outsourcing should be fair game.”

Fair game? Haha. Get the joke? Taking jobs from American citizens when they need to work is indeed child's play!

Stealing jobs from Americans, in fact, is as easy as hopscotch, jump-rope and skipping. Our Congress critters and soiled cheap lying labor lobby sociopaths are ridding educated Americans of their jobs, and, if this entitled professor knows one thing about anything, he apparently knows that that. So why not extend the whole Indian cyber-kinder class all the way up to outsourcing this esteemed professor's hallowed job and relieve him of his binky along with the “tedium” in employing those dreadful U.S. students to grade his papers so he can have an extended, big fat nap while our country goes to hell? Whether or not this professor and his ilk would possibly have a vested interest in discriminating against U.S. students who need those jobs or whether outsourcing them means more profits for their universities or more nap time for the professors, this latest five-finger discount on U.S. students' jobs coming from Academia ought to be the final wake up call for America.

Give this man a Happy Meal and send him back to the unending, humility and shameless-free third world romper room twelve time zones away where nirvana and race-to-the bottom collide.

Party on, plebes!
-2Truthy

Monday, May 3, 2010

Lynn Redgrave has Died



 Actress Lynn Redgrave, is shown guest starring in a 2009 scene from the TV series ''Ugly Betty'' in this undated handout released May 3, 2010.
(Credit: Reuters/Patrick Harbron/ABC/Handout)


Connecticut -- Actress Lynn Redgrave has died of breast cancer at the age of 67. 

She was nominated for Oscars in 1966 for "Georgy Girl" and in 1998 for "Gods and Monsters". In London I first saw her in her starring role in Georgy Girl as the "gawky  soft-hearted, badly-dressed young woman who clowns and wise-cracks to cover her emotional inadequacies, and to hide her envy of the casual love affairs engaged in by her London roommate, Merdith (Charlotte Rampling)." Alan Bates was great, too. So was James Mason. And the Seekers.

R.I.P., Lynn Redgrave.

-2Truthy

Sunday, May 2, 2010

British Petroleum (BP) Whistleblower Leaks 'Profits Before Safety' Engineering Practices


BP's Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Disaster 


Did BP Cut Corners By Hiring H-1B's?

Click here for UPDATE: The Meaning of Gluttony...

Has British Petroleum (BP) Cut Corners By Hiring H-1B's? Yes. Here is a current list of many job openings at BP for H-1B's, complete with salary listings. (Note that this list does not include any reference to the large numbers of Indian body shops in the U.S. that they may be contracting imported workers from as well.)

In this shocking Truthout report, Jason Leopold uncovers a former BP contractor turned whistleblower who was hired to supervise the company's databases who had raised concerns in 2008 over BP's failure to maintain crucial safety and engineering documents related to one of the firms other deepwater production projects in the Gulf of Mexico (don't miss the comments.) The contractor had feared the engineering document “shortfalls” related to Atlantis "could lead to catastrophic operator error" and that BP's own internal communications even showed that company officials “were aware of the issue.” Although Leopold's article does not indicate if any of the positions related to BP's disastrous rig explosion were given to H-1B visa holders (or if the whistleblower him or herself is an H-1B visa holder), it does expose the company's profits over people and safety issues that are increasingly linked to disastrous, locally unsustainable economic hiring practices where American corporations are trained to cut corners on how NOT to hire American workers.

Who is behind the orchestrated sell out of American jobs to cheap, dubiously “skilled” labor responsible for corporate America's rising numbers of compromised products and services spilling into heightened security and deadly safety breeches? Despite the growing millions of educated American engineers now unemployed/underemployed, BP has an appetite for cheap imported, “best and brightest” foreign workers to do the work that the corporate sponsored, American job killing tech lobby propaganda pit TechNet claims Americans actually support! And if you buy that whopper, I've got a collapsed bridge in India to sell you.

Among many positions advertised for non-Americans, BP is looking for an H-1B to Market Sector Analyst - Offshore Rigs to contribute “to BP's bottom line and is in the midst of implementing a new Strategy...” and  an SPU Data and Information Manger, Gulf of Mexico. Need a job but you're not from India? Get over yourselves! In the Neo-frat boy corporate state of America, No Americans Need Apply. (So much for local labor and oil sustainability from leading corporate persons like BP.)

The former BP contractor who worked for the oil behemoth and noted the engineering document safety gaps claimed in internal emails and other documents obtained by Truthout reveal he first raised these concerns back in 2008:

The whistleblower, whose name has been withheld at the person's request because the whistleblower still works in the oil industry and fears retaliation, first raised concerns about safety issues related to BP Atlantis, the world's largest and deepest semi-submersible oil and natural gas platform, located about 200 miles south of New Orleans, in November 2008. Atlantis, which began production in October 2007, has the capacity to produce about 8.4 million gallons of oil and 180 million cubic feet of natural gas per day.
It was then that the whistleblower, who was hired to supervise the company's databases, discovered that Atlantis had been operating without a majority of the engineer-approved documents it needed to run safely, leaving it vulnerable to a catastrophic disaster that would far surpass the massive oil spill that began last week following a deadly explosion on a BP-operated drilling rig.”


It was later determined that the documents described as “as built” drawings need not be complete or accurate and, furthermore, are irrelevant to a hazard analysis BP was required to complete.”


An engineer with Apex Safety Consultants last year into BP's engineering documentation practices related to the subsea Atlantis components records revealed they lacked final approval:


Last May, Mike Sawyer, an engineer with Apex Safety Consultants who evaluated BP's database and looked into the whistleblower's allegations, concluded that of the 2,108 P&IDs BP maintained that dealt specifically with the subsea components of its Atlantis production project, 85 percent did not receive engineer approval. Even worse, 95 percent of Atlantis' subsea welding records did not receive final approval, calling into question the integrity of thousands of crucial welds on subsea components that, if they were to rupture, could result in an oil spill 30 times worse than the one that occurred after the explosion on Deepwater Horizon last week.
He said the safety shutdown logic drawings on Atlantis, a complex computerized system that, during emergencies, is supposed to send a signal to automatically shut down the flow of oil, were listed as "requiring update."


But if corporate state persons like BP hire cheap imported and outsourced labor to cut corners and continue to bar educated American engineers from jobs, who does care about local jobs and oil sustainability when the cost cutting corporate overlords are at the switch? One commenter noted:


This horrific disaster in the Gulf of Mexico should be the last nail in the coffin for offshore drilling! Yes, we will probably have to continue to use conventional energy until we catch up with clean energy. But, we don't have to imperil the oceans to do it.


It's time for Americans to demand corporations and their sleazy political enablers STOP putting corporate profits before local people's jobs and our safety. As is true for other countries, it's time for America to clean up our local environment and our local hiring practices by stopping the flood of cheap imported labor and to hold who is responsible for the lack of sound, quality engineering practices at BP accountable.


BP's latest horrific Gulf of Mexico disaster should be the last nail in the coffin to the horrific American job outsourcing and insourcing cheap foreign visa labor hiring practices used to kick Americans in our towns across the country to the curb.


Party on, plebes!

-2Truthy