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• Job Cut Reports
  • Comment 9/24/10: IBM is all about Southeast Asia now. It doesn't matter how critical you are to the business. As long as you live in the United States, you are a sworn enemy and will have to train replacements who probably eat dogs. If this keeps up, we in the US will be the ones who will have to eat dogs just to survive. -anon in RTP-NC-
  • Comment 9/24/10: November RA's. Everyone on here acts like they are surprised to see November RA's happening. I am not surprised at all. I have been reading this board for at least 5 years and have seen that there are RA's every November. It frustrates me beyond belief that people don't remember this pattern and either join The Alliance or find another job. -Anonymous-
  • Comment 9/25/10: Please don't rail on those reporting truth here. We can't post FLM names and some here seem to expect that level of information. I am part of the most recent RA and reported it here the day I was informed. I was also told it was not for performance or redundancy. If you don't have new business......then who needs employee's however good they are? it was also said it ain't over not by a long shot so next Q expect either a miracle or more RA. Also take the time to read the quarterly reports for if you do, you will know who is next - that's how I was certain ours wasn't over by what was included in the 2nd Q report. -freeatlast-
  • Comment 9/25/10: If I was the IRS. I would asked to see all the names of the people handling their account. I know for a fact that some of the employees and most of the backups have not completed a background check or completed training. Especially for the system administrator to the security support teams... -Waiting for my RA in CO-
  • Comment 9/25/10: > During previous R/As they were not told until a few days before the R/A although they had an inkling perhaps. The second lines did know and were not allowed to tell the first lines.< This is absolutely true. In one of the R/As in 2009 period, FLMs were initially involved in the selection for about 24-48 hours. After that, it was all moved up a level to the 2nd lines and the FLMs had ZERO involvement/input and were not told who was selected until the day before. -Anonymous-
  • Comment 9/26/10: FYI - Lots of IBM Canada employees are leaving IBM for more stable / better positions at our vendors / partners / competition, these folks are from all over IBM (GTS / STG / IGS) etc. I personally know of 9 people who left in the last 6 months and heard of another 12 via co-workers, these folks are all top performers, the tides are changing in Canada. SSRs are already started to look outside IBM since IBM cut pretty much all overtime for SSRs, no more incentive for this group to stick around seeing that the only way to supplement their minimum wage was overtime... If this continues IBM Canada will start loosing major customers, these customers are being affected when Highly Skilled face to face IBMers quit and Low skilled contractors are being hired to backfilled these position. IBM will reap what it sows.... -ZION-
  • Comment 9/26/10: To Concerned: No, I have not found another job yet. Rumors are that we will be told we are being RAed in 4Q 2010 which begins on 10/1/2010. I am in Shared Services and my position is a Business Analyst working on one of the Commercial Accounts... -LadyDi-
  • Comment 9/27/10: Oh, I think everyone will enjoy this rabid rumor floating around. Apparently, plans exist to "transition" every hourly employee to an external contracting company. Then tell the contracting company which of the hourly employees MIGHT be eligible to be assigned at an IBM facility. Target date: 1/1/2012 so perhaps this puts the proper focus on the recently eliminated "premium pay." Anyone else hearing this? -guess who?-
  • Comment 9/27/10: I have to agree with Zion about IBM Canada...managed by such short sighted people...they can't even see their noses. Everyone I know is on the lookout for other employment..the OT cut was the last straw for most... -another drone-
  • Comment 9/28/10: It doesn't surprise me that IBM has found a new way to renew the workforce with younger, cheaper labor from NYC. Some of my mid-Eastern friends have told me that everyone but, Indians are laid off in some areas so they become a target. There's nothing like making people fight each other to break a union. I think a union needs some political clout to insure some ability to have teeth. Right now the work force is not represented. Many people feel their success depends on reacting to IBM's tactics. Instead we should demand a public entity to protect the US work force. We have a little support in government, we need a lot more. If IBM wants to corrupt the public school system, we need to articulate why that is bad for students, the schools and society. I think its the fact the work is so un-inventive, future-less and dumbed-down is a major cause for concern. Making sure the education these kids receive enables them to intern at multiple companies, and different jobs would prevent IBM from employing the public schools to feed its temporary workforce machine. If the current workforce had a voice, I'm sure the public would see the flaws and question the greater good. -DungeonReaper-

News and Opinion Concerning Health Savings Accounts, Medical Costs and Health Care Reform

News and Opinion Concerning the "War on the Middle Class"

"But dependency on government has never been bad for the rich. The pretense of the laissez-faire people is that only the poor are dependent on government, while the rich take care of themselves. This argument manages to ignore all of modern history, which shows a consistent record of laissez-faire for the poor, but enormous government intervention for the rich." From Economic Justice: The American Class System, from the book Declarations of Independence by Howard Zinn.

• AlterNet: Left Versus Right Is Meaningless -- It's Us Versus the Corporations, It is now an Individual vs. Corporate debate – and the Humans are losing. By Barry Ritholtz. Excerpts: Every generation or so, a major secular shift takes place that shakes up the existing paradigm. It happens in industry, finance, literature, sports, manufacturing, technology, entertainment, travel, communication, etc. I would like to discuss the paradigm shift that is occurring in politics.

  For a long time, American politics has been defined by a Left/Right dynamic. It was Liberals versus Conservatives on a variety of issues. Pro-Life versus Pro-Choice, Tax Cuts vs. More Spending, Pro-War vs Peaceniks, Environmental Protections vs. Economic Growth, Pro-Union vs. Union-Free, Gay Marriage vs. Family Values, School Choice vs. Public Schools, Regulation vs. Free Markets.

  The new dynamic, however, has moved past the old Left Right paradigm. We now live in an era defined by increasing Corporate influence and authority over the individual. These two “interest groups” – I can barely suppress snorting derisively over that phrase – have been on a headlong collision course for decades, which came to a head with the financial collapse and bailouts. Where there is massive concentrations of wealth and influence, there will be abuse of power. The Individual has been supplanted in the political process nearly entirely by corporate money, legislative influence, campaign contributions, even free speech rights. This may not be a brilliant insight, but it is surely an overlooked one. It is now an Individual vs. Corporate debate – and the Humans are losing. ...

  For those of you who are stuck in the old Left/Right debate, you are missing the bigger picture. Consider this about the Bailouts: It was a right-winger who bailed out all of the big banks, Fannie Mae, and AIG in the first place; then his left winger successor continued to pour more money into the fire pit. What difference did the Left/Right dynamic make? Almost none whatsoever.

• The Progressive: Republicans Cry “Class Warfare” When They’re Winning the War. By Matthew Rothschild. Excerpts: Whenever Republicans are at risk of not getting their way for their millionaire constituents, they cry “class warfare.” So it was that House Minority Whip Eric Cantor just whipped out the old accusation again in the Wall Street Journal, blaming the Democrats and “the progressive left” for “provocative class warfare rhetoric.” What Cantor doesn’t like is the rhetoric. But he’s content with the class warfare, because his class keeps winning, battle after battle, war after war.

  Look how much ground the richest of the rich have gained from the Bush tax cuts, which the Republicans are so intent on keeping for this cohort. The top 0.1 percent of Americans gained more than $2,326,607 a piece, whereas people making between thirty and forty thousand gained only $7,040, according to a great chart in Sunday’s New York Times Week in Review. ...

  “After remaining relatively constant for much of the post-war era, the share of total income accrued by the wealthiest 10 percent of households jumped from 34.6 percent in 1980 to 48.2 percent in 2008.1 Much of the spike was driven by the share of total income accrued by the richest 1 percent of households. Between 1980 and 2008, their share rose from 10.0 percent to 21.0 percent, making the United States as one of the most unequal countries in the world.”

  Over the last decade, most Americans have been losing ground, with real wages stagnating and household incomes falling. “Real median income for working-age households is now $4,925 below its peak in the year 2000,” according to the Economic Policy Institute

• New York Times op-ed: The New American Normal. By Roger Cohen. Excerpts: On a weeklong visit, I found a mood of deep unease in an America that seems to have descended into tribalism — not ethnic, but political, economic and social. Uncertainty is pervasive. The government’s rescue of Wall Street combined with the acute difficulties of a middle class struggling to get by on stagnant or falling incomes has sharpened resentments. This is not a momentary phenomenon. Nobody seems to think unemployment is going to fall significantly from 9.6 percent — a level more often associated with France — in the near future. Get used to the new normal.

  I spoke to a retired Wall Street executive who got out a few years back and set up a small business where he had to make payroll (sobering), but was freed from the debilitating short-termism of financial institutions that, over his career, had become dominated by traders “who look at economic opportunity rather than economic conditions.”

  He said the final straw came in 2002. Top executives at the bank where he worked gathered to discuss their bonuses. The issue before them was whether to maintain those bonuses in a time of economic contraction, which would require firing 5 percent of the workforce, or take a 25 percent bonus cut, which would allow those jobs to be kept. “The guy running the meeting asked for a show of hands on who would accept a reduced bonus,” he said. “There were 30 of us in the room. Three raised their hands. I was one of them.”

  The job losses went through, this executive left, and the bank today is still trying to claw out from its uncontrolled excess. ...

  The share of national income held by the top 1 percent of American families has doubled in recent decades to 20 percent. That’s a huge shift. I spoke to Doug Severance, a Vietnam vet who’s a hotel employee in Aspen, Colorado. “When I moved here in 1984 we were all family,” he said. “Now either you arrive in a Lear Jet or you’re a servant.”

• Jim Hightower: A Speaker Lobbyists Would Love. Full excerpt: John Boehner is known for his ties and his tan. You've probably never heard of this Ohio Republican, who's been the minority leader for four years, but he has big plans to be the next Speaker of the U.S. House. Who is he? For clues, look no further than those ties and that tan.

  The tan is odd, both because it has an eerie orange hue to it, and because it never goes away. Even in the dead of winter, this GOP leader from sun-starved Ohio has such a perpetual glow that he's been nicknamed "Suntan Johnnie." How does he get the glow? By routinely flying on corporate jets to play golf with corporate lobbyists on various corporate tabs at such sun-drenched resorts as the Ritz-Carlton in Naples, Florida.

  Which brings us to his ties – by which I don't mean the flashy silk neckwear he favors. Rather, I mean Boehner's flagrant ties to a clique of powerful influence peddlers. These ties go way back – in 1996, he was caught passing checks from tobacco lobbyists to fellow Republicans on the House floor!

  His inner circle of special interests is so cozy that it's even been given its own nickname: BoehnerLand. Outsiders need not apply, for BoehnerLand is an exclusive place inhabited by about 20 lobbyists for such outfits as Citigroup, R.J. Reynolds, Coors, Goldman Sachs, Google, and UPS. They put millions of campaign dollars into his pockets, fly him around, wine & dine him at the finest restaurants, and sustain his political ambitions.

  In turn, Boehner is their boy. One member of Suntan Johnnie's corrupt club candidly told the New York Times that he regularly gets Boehner's help for his clients, ranging from fighting limits on debit card fees to protecting tax breaks for hedge fund operators. They want Boehner to become Speaker for one reason: he's fluent in corporate-speak.

• Delmont PDA: Top 5 Social Security Myths Debunked. Excerpts: Myth #1: Social Security is going broke. ... Myth #2: We have to raise the retirement age because people are living longer. ... Myth #3: Benefit cuts are the only way to fix Social Security. ... Myth #4: The Social Security Trust Fund has been raided and is full of IOUs. ... Myth #5: Social Security adds to the deficit. Read more...
• AlterNet: Corporate Mortgage Scams Threaten to Crash an Already Shaky Housing Market. A foreclosure pandemic riddled by corruption may stall America's recovery. By Scott Thill. Excerpt: The Great Recession may have ended in June 2009, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, but U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner isn't buying it. Neither are recently revealed foreclosure and eviction scams at GMAC Mortgage, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and other too-big-to-fail financial firms swimming in both American taxpayer cash and the Federal Reserve Bank's divine intervention. ...

  Last week, predictable news emerged that Jeffrey Stephan, a GMAC Mortgage team leader for affidavit execution, signed off on nearly 10,000 foreclosures each month without even bothering to read them, although he is legally tasked with doing so. That's a rate of one a minute, if he works an eight-hour day, according to the Washington Post. Afraid it would look like it was blithely executing foreclosures on a callous conveyor belt -- which is precisely the case -- GMAC quickly put the brakes on any further evictions in 23 states until it could find a way to massage the problem.

• AlterNet: 20 Signs that the Economic Collapse Is Already Upon Us. This year, millions of Americans are discovering that the music has stopped playing and they are left without a seat at the table. By Michael Snyder. Excerpts: For most Americans, the economic collapse is something that is happening to someone else. Most of us have become so isolated from each other and so self-involved that unless something is directly affecting us or a close family member than we really don't feel it. But even though most of us enjoy a much closer relationship with our television sets than we do with our neighbors at this point, it is quickly becoming undeniable that a fundamental shift is taking place in society. Perhaps you noticed it when two or three foreclosure signs went up on your street. Or perhaps it got your attention when that nice fellow down the street lost his job, and he and his family seemingly just disappeared from the neighborhood one day. The Census Bureau made front page headlines all over the nation this week when they announced that one out of every seven Americans was living in poverty in 2009. Every single day more Americans are getting sucked out of the middle class and into soul-crushing poverty. ...

  The Democrats blame Bush for all the poverty and advocate expanding programs for the poor. Not that there is anything wrong with a safety net. But the "safety net" was never meant to hold 50 million people on Medicaid and 40 million people on food stamps. The number of Americans on food stamps has more than doubled since 2007. So do we just double it again as things get even worse? The truth is that welfare programs are only short-term solutions. Unfortunately, the Democrats do not understand this. What Americans really need are good jobs.

• AlterNet: Modest Tax on Billionaires Could Erase Budget Shortfalls of Every Single US State. The ten richest Americans on the new Forbes list carry, all by themselves, more than the inflation-adjusted net worth of the entire initial Forbes 400 list back in 1982. By Sam Pizzigati. Excerpts: David Rockefeller, Sr., the only surviving grandchild of America’s first billionaire, has achieved still another distinction. At age 95, he currently rates as the oldest billionaire on the new Forbes magazine annual list of America’s 400 richest. David Rockefeller, on this year’s list, has plenty of billionaire company. Every single one of the 400 deep pockets on that list holds an individual fortune worth at least $1 billion. In 1982, the first year the annual Forbes 400 list appeared, only 13 Americans could claim billionaire status. ...

  How much of an impact on our troubled nation could these staggeringly massive accumulations of wealth have if modestly shared -- or taxed? One quick answer: A 15 percent “wealth tax” on all personal assets over $1 billion would this year raise $145.5 billion, more than enough to cover the entire $140 billion budget shortfall America’s 50 states are facing in the current fiscal year.

  The 400 billionaires on the new Forbes list, after paying that tax, would still average $2.4 billion in personal net worth, over 37,000 times the $65,400 net worth that NYU economist Edward Wolff earlier this year calculated for the typical American family.

• AlterNet: The Super-Rich Get Richer, and Everyone Else Is Going Down the Drain. Only twice before in American history has so much been held by so few, yet they're going to keep their fat tax cuts. By Robert Reich. Excerpts: The super-rich got even wealthier this year, and yet most of them are paying even fewer taxes to support the education, job training, and job creation of the rest of us. According to Forbes magazine’s annual survey, just released, the combined net worth of the 400 richest Americans climbed 8% this year, to $1.37 trillion. Wealth rose for 217 members of the list, while 85 saw a decline.

  For example, Charles and David Koch, the energy magnates who are pouring vast sums of money into Republican coffers and sponsoring tea partiers all over America, each gained $5.5 billion of wealth over the past year. Each is now worth $21.5 billion. ...

  From another survey we learn that the 25 top hedge-fund managers got an average of $1 billion each, but paid an average of 17 percent in taxes (because so much of their income is considered capital gains, taxed at 15 percent thanks to the Bush tax cuts). ...

  Only twice before in American history has so much been held by so few, and the gap between them and the great majority been a chasm — the late 1920s, and the era of the robber barons in the 1880s. And yet the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which conferred almost all their benefits on the rich, continue.

• New York Times: TARP Bailout to Cost Less Than Once Anticipated. By Jackie Calmes. Excerpts: Even as voters rage and candidates put up ads against government bailouts, the reviled mother of them all — the $700 billion lifeline to banks, insurance and auto companies — will expire after Sunday at a fraction of that cost, and could conceivably earn taxpayers a profit. A final accounting of the government’s full range of interventions in the economy, including the bailouts of the mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is years off and will most likely remain controversial and potentially costly. But the once-unthinkable possibility that the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program could end up costing far less, or even nothing, became more likely on Thursday with the news that the government had negotiated a plan with the American International Group to begin repaying taxpayers. The rescue of the troubled insurer included $70 billion from the bailout program that was enacted two years ago, at the height of the global financial crisis late in the Bush administration, initially to prop up big banks. ...

  Senator Robert F. Bennett of Utah was “Bailout Bob” to Republicans who refused to re-nominate him for a fourth term. “For those who were screaming at me — and screaming was the operative word — ‘You’ve just saddled our children and grandchildren with $700 billion,’ I said, ‘No, I haven’t,” Mr. Bennett said in an interview. “My career is over,” he added. “But I do hope that we can get the word out that TARP, number one, did save the world from a financial meltdown and, number two, did so in a manner that, I believe, won’t cost the taxpayer anything. And even if it did not all get paid back, it was still the thing to do.”

• Washington Post: Report gives stimulus package high marks. By Lori Montgomery. Excerpt: The massive economic stimulus package President Obama pushed through Congress last year is coming in on time and under budget - and with strikingly few claims of fraud or abuse - according to a White House report to be released Friday. Coming barely a month before November's midterm elections, which will determine whether Democrats retain control of Congress, the report challenges public perceptions of the stimulus aid as slow-moving and wasteful - an image that has fueled voter anger with the dominant party. Even some former skeptics who predicted that the money would lead to rampant abuse now acknowledge that the program could serve as a model for improving efficiency in government.