A corporate merger was the reason for this mass layoff story. The Memphis Business Journal has the details:
Citing the need to eliminate overcapacity and integrate its now-combined container business, International Paper Co. is shutting down four plants across the country in the next two months.
The plants are located in Fort Smith, Ark., Santa Paula, Calif., Chicago and Solon, Ohio. The company will eliminate a total of 215 jobs, according to an International Paper statement. The plants are a combination of facilities owned by Austin, Texas-based Temple-Inland Inc. and International Paper.
The closings come months after Memphis-based International Paper (NYSE: IP) completed its $4.4 billion acquisition of Temple-Inland, which brought an additional 10,000 employees, 59 box plants, 14 building products plants and seven containerboard mills into IP’s group of 23,000 employees, 12 paper mills and more than 140 box plants on six continents.
Sounds to me like someone is trying to monopolize the paper industry.
Bonus: We don't need corporate America to do any more joining together
One meme that appears a lot in the peak oil community is the idea that when society finally starts to break down, the supermarket shelves will become bare, causing mass panic. But what if all the supermarkets go out of business first? There have been a lot of supermarket closing stories lately, including this one from keyt.com:
Santa Barbara - Scolari's Supermarkets announced Thursday it's closing all of its stores on the Central Coast after 60 years of doing business.
The four stores shutting down include the one on Milpas Street in Santa Barbara and three others in Pismo Beach, San Luis Obispo and Paso Robles.
Officials with the Reno-based market says it was a gut-wrenching decision. They say the company was hit hard by the economic downturn.
Not just a supermarket chain, but one that has been in business since the early 1950s. Tell me again about that great economic recovery we are supposedly experiencing.
Bonus: "I think I should've moved west...like my brother..Southern California could've been good to me"
More defense war contractor cutbacks. Here is the Los Angeles Daily News with the details:
El Segundo-based Aerospace Corp. has laid off about 300 people, or 8 percent of its workforce, with most of the affected employees notified Thursday.
About two-thirds of the 306 workers who received pink slips are technical staff. The remainder are support staff such as secretaries, spokeswoman Sabrina Steele said.
Aerospace has about 4,000 employees, with 3,000 in California, mostly at the El Segundo headquarters. It is unclear how many affected workers were in El Segundo. The company has 17 locations nationwide.
In a statement, Mike Drennan, Aerospace senior vice president of operations and support group, said: "A workforce reduction is difficult for all involved, particularly those directly affected.
We did not make this decision lightly, but we are operating in a cost-constrained environment. As always, we remain focused on helping our customers succeed in their missions and providing them innovative solutions." The Aerospace Corp. is a quasi-governmental company that advises the Air Force on critical rocket and satellite programs.
I found this mass layoff story to be particularly galling. Here is Bay Area Biz Talk with the details:
Exar Corp. eliminated 120 positions Wednesday, bringing the money losing Fremont semiconductor company's total job cuts for the first quarter under new President and CEO Louis DiNardo to 169.
Exar said that the combined cuts amounted to 40 percent of worldwide headcount and would save $21.7 million in annual costs. About 270 employees remain worldwide at Exar, which does contract work for other companies and sells chips and software used in industrial, networking and data storage systems.
If I was still employed by Exar, I'd be polishing up my resume, that;s for sure. but here's the kicker:
DiNardo, who last was a partner at Crosslink Capital but previously was president and COO of Intersil Corp., was appointed CEO in December with a generous salary and stock package following years of significant losses at Exar, which at the time had accumulated a deficit of $236,797,000.
The company has lost another $4.73 million since then on revenue of $29.7 million, which was down from $36 million the previous quarter.
Holy crap! This company's debt amounts to almost a million dollars per remaining employee. And yet they went out and paid top dollar to a new CEO so he could lose even more money. Wish they'd paid me instead as I'm pretty sure I could have done that. Fucking brilliant.
Bonus: Sounds to me like this is what Exar is doing if it thinks it is going to be able to get out from under that mountain of debt:
It's getting rough out there in suburbia. Here is the Orange County Register with the details:
Wells Fargo Bank is closing its customer service call center in Santa Ana and cutting 315 jobs, a bank official said today. The layoffs are effective April 21.
John Sotoodeh, executive vice president for the Los Angeles Metro/Orange County region, said the closure is part of an overall effort to consolidate facilities following the final integration of Wachovia Bank, which Wells Fargo acquired in late 2008.
Wells Fargo has three other call centers in California and 24 nationwide.
Sotoodeh said Wells Fargo will make an effort to transfer as many of the Santa Ana workers as possible to other jobs in the company, including its auto finance call center in Irvine.
The Wells Fargo announcement was the second piece of bad news for Orange County bank workers today.
MetLife confirmed earlier that it is laying off 118 workers in Irvine after it decided to get out of the regular mortgage business.
Wells Fargo has been restructuring its operations for several years in response to changes in the banking market.
Last year, the bank cut 145 mortgage jobs in Irvine in January. Those workers handled third-party mortgages from brokers and were hired by the bank on an interim basis for short-term assignments.
In March, the bank laid off 59 Orange County people in its wholesale lending operations in Irvine, shifting some of what was described as support work to India. Those changes came after the bank announced in July 2010 that it was closing all six of its Orange County Wells Fargo Financial offices as part of a plan to exit the subprime mortgage business.
Wow...sounds like Wells Fargo is really doing a number on Orange County.
Bonus: Bill was never a big fan of Southern California
The Los Angeles County Superior Court system is expected to lay off about 350 employees in June and "restructure" more than 50 courtrooms because of deep cuts in funding by the state, according to a memo obtained Tuesday by The Times.
The latest reductions come after the court has already reduced staff by 500 -- or about 10% -- due to layoffs and attrition over the last two years.
More troubling was this quote:
"These changes will affect every judicial officer and staff member -- as well as the millions of attorneys and litigants who depend upon our courts to deliver justice," Presiding Judge Lee Smalley Edmon and Executive Officer John A. Clarke wrote in the four-page memo. "Nonetheless, there is no escaping the fact that this next round of cuts will be the most significant event to happen in our court .... Never before has a budget crisis dealt so crippling a blow to our court."
A lot of people in the peak oil and "reality based" communities often ask when exactly collapse is going to come to America. Take this as yet another sign that collapse is already here--it's just happening in slow motion.
Bonus: "Next time you come into my courtroom, you will look lawyerly"
More and more data continues to come in which indicates that the media narrative about the economy being on the upswing, fueled in large measure by the January month jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Lying statistics and the booming of the horrendously manipulated stock market, is a flat out falsehood. Just in the past week there have been reports that American gasoline consumption is cratering along with the Baltic Dry Index (which measures global shipping rates), indicating a massive slowdown in the economy. And now comes word that taxes revenues in the nation's largest state also went into free fall in January. Here is Bloomberg with the details:
California collected $528 million less in taxes in January than Governor Jerry Brown estimated in his latest budget, Controller John Chiang said.
The majority of the shortfall was in income taxes, down $525 million, or 6.3 percent less than projected in the spending plan Brown released Jan. 5, Chiang said. Corporate taxes were down $127.9 million, while sales taxes were up $42.8 million.
California’s cash may be exhausted by March, Chiang reported Jan. 31. The nation’s most populous state will need $3.3 billion by mid-April without additional borrowing and payment delays, because it has spent more and received less than anticipated for the current fiscal year.
“January revenues were disappointing on almost every front,” Chiang said today in a statement. “Thankfully, the decisive actions taken recently by the state to stabilize its cash flow will ensure that California can pay its bills through the end of the fiscal year.”
Love that bit of FlackSpeak there at the end by Controller John Chiang. "Stabilizing cash flow" actually means "massive budget cuts," but obfuscation has now become official policy just about everywhere.
If the economy really is recovering as the pundits would have you believe, why did California's income tax collections plummet by over half-a-billion dollars in just one month? That sounds like either, a) people are losing their jobs in large numbers again, b) wages and salaries are declining rapidly, or c) all of the above. Combined with the gasoline usage data and the BDI numbers, it also sounds like the economy is on the brink of a major crash.
So what does California plan to DO about this depressing state of affairs? Oh, the usual same old tired bullshit:
Treasurer Bill Lockyer plans to obtain as much as $1 billion from Wall Street to ease the shortfall. Lawmakers passed a bill to let the state borrow $865 million from internal accounts to avert a cash shortage.
That's their strategy: borrow, borrow and borrow some more until you can't borrow so much as another nickel. And that, my friends, will be the end game, not just for California, but for America as a whole.
Bonus: Well, if nothing else this story gave me the excuse to play some Social Distortion
One unconventional place to keep an eye out for signs marking the continued deterioration of the economy is in the world of sports. Attending sports events represents the ultimate frivolous household expense that can be cut back or eliminated by families looking to economize. Here is the latest example of distress in the sports world, as reported by the Pasadena Star-News:
Irwindale Speedway, considered by many to host the finest short track racing in the nation, appears to be history. On Saturday, workers appeared to be closing down the facility, which has had the biggest NASCAR short track races on the West Coast for more than a decade.
Workers were dismantling the pit grandstand, which is adjacent to the first turn. They also were taking apart storage areas. A large billboard bordering the San Gabriel Valley River Freeway was not lit up for the first time in its history, barring power outages, and the track's web site was taken off the Internet.
"They went out of business," said a prominent Irwindale racer who did not want to be identified.
Vice president and general manager Bob DeFazio and some staff members were in the locked administration building Saturday morning, with a moving truck backed up to the office's side entrance and a moving box stacked outside. DeFazio, through track operations director Bob Klein, refused to comment. Klein only would say an announcement would be made Monday.
The article goes on to describe what did the racetrack in:
Opened in 1999 amid much fanfare, it featured a state-of-the-art track surface which cost several million dollars. Track CEO Williams, a former owner of Golden States Foods which supplies food to McDonald's and a friend and car builder for Roger Penske-driven IndyCars, said at the time he wanted to rival the draw of the Dodgers.
NASCAR Hall of Famer Darrell Waltrip, in a visit to the track, called the facility the finest short track in America.
It gained national attention when Stewart won the 2000 Turkey Night Grand Prix and then even more praise when NASCAR bestowed its tour racing Grand National series all-star event, the Toyota All-Star Showdown, to the track.
But it all came unraveling last season. Car counts were down significantly and nearly every division had the fewest racers since the track opened. More important, attendance was down. There were roughly 900 people in the stands for a Saturday, May 14 race.
Attendance over the past two seasons gradually has dwindled since the heydays of the early 2000s. The track does not release attendance numbers, but they averaged about 2,700 people at 28 races last year.
The track averaged more than 5,000 attendees in a 6,500-seat stadium for four consecutive seasons, starting in 2001.
This is just the beginning, of course. When the day finally comes that Major League Baseball, National Football League and National Basketball Association teams start to fall by the wayside, you'll know that a full blown economic collapse is drawing near.
Bonus: Instead of speed, we now have the sound of loneliness
Green energy is the wave of the future that is going to save our economy by being a huge driver for employment. Or so says the bullshit propaganda. But despite oil prices hovering in the low triple digits, the solar industry is having huge problems, as reported by Forbes:
Japanese solar company Sanyo plans to lay off about 140 employees in California, or about 40 percent of its manufacturing workforce in the United States, as it shifts its strategy in order to compete with large rivals, particularly those from China.
Sanyo is closing the 30-megawatt factory in Carson that makes silicon ingot and wafers – the materials for making solar cells – after setting up shop there in 2003. Production will stop at the end of March to coincide with the end of the company’s fiscal year, said Aaron Fowles, a Sanyo spokesman, on Friday. The company plans to liquidate the assets and close the factory for good in October.
But wait...there's more:
The planned factory shutdown by Sanyo follows a series of layoffs and solar factory closures in the United States and elsewhere over the past year. Manufacturers have struggled to survive when there is a glut of solar panels and the wholesale prices for them have fallen by 40-50 percent. The glut is partly caused by the lowering of government subsidies in big solar markets such as Germany and Italy in 2011.
Earlier this month, California-based Amonix said it was letting go 200 of the roughly 300 workers at its North Las Vegas factory, which it opened last year with a promise to bring lots of local jobs. Amonix said it needed to cut staff so that it could modify the production equipment and start making a new line of solar energy systems later this year. Some workers there told the Las Vegas Sun that they didn’t know their employment would be so temporary.
Also earlier this month, Boston-based Satcon Technology, which makes power conversion equipment for solar electric systems, said it was laying off 35 percent of its workforce and shutting down a factory in Canada. Two German manufacturers who set up factories in the United States, SolarWorld and Solon, have shuttered some of the production here.
Several manufacturers who didn’t have enough money or unable to reduce their costs quick enough to stay in business have filed for bankruptcies, including Solyndra, SpectraWatt and Evergreen Solar.
So what's the problem?
Some manufacturers blame their Chinese rivals for the pileup of unused solar panels and the big drop in prices. SolarWorld, which runs a solar panel factory in Oregon, joined six other manufacturers in filing a trade complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Commerce last October. The companies contend that Chinese manufactures are selling their products at prices far below the cost of producing them, and they are able to do that because they receive heavy and unfair subsidies from the Chinese government.
The fact that Chinese workers are willing to do the job for a fraction of what Americans are paid is no doubt a factor, as is the fact that China essentially has no environmental regulations. Look, we can argue all day about whether large scale solar power really has the potential to replace fossil fuels (as I've said before, I'm not a subscriber to that theory). Nevertheless, even if it could be part of the answer, I think it is clear from this story that as long as we have unrestricted globalization, what solar power will certainly not be able to do is create a substantial number of new good paying jobs in this country as politicos like President Hopey-Changey would like us to believe.
Addendum: After composing this post, I found another story about an impending solar company bankruptcy, this time in Delaware. Here is Canadian Business with the details:
A Delaware-based solar power company has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
New Castle-based Suntricity Power listed estimated assets of between half a million and a million dollars, and estimated liabilities of between $100,000 and $500,000 in its filing Tuesday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington.
Suntricity, founded in 2007, designs, sells and installs solar energy systems for residential and commercial customers.
image: The Machesney Park Mall, Rockford, Illinois...yesterday and today
The new Forbes list of America's Most Miserable Cities is out. Here is Yahoo Real Estate with the details:
Miami is a playground for the rich and famous. Celebrities flock to parties at South Beach clubs and then return to their $10 million mansions in Miami Beach and Key Biscayne. It’s a leading city in culture, finance and international trade. But away from the glitz and glamor, many ordinary Miamians are struggling.
A crippling housing crisis has cost multitudes of residents their homes and jobs. The metro area has one of the highest violent crime rates in the country and workers face lengthy daily commutes. Add it all up and Miami takes the top spot in our ranking of America’s Most Miserable Cities.
The most famous way to gauge misery is the Misery Index developed by economist Arthur Okun in the 1960s, which combines unemployment and inflation. Our take on misery is based on the things that people complain about on a regular basis.
We looked at 10 factors for the 200 largest metro areas and divisions in the U.S. Some are serious, like violent crime, unemployment rates, foreclosures, taxes (income and property), home prices and political corruption. Other factors we included are less weighty, like commute times, weather and how the area’s pro sports teams did. While sports, commuting and weather can be considered trivial by many, they can be the determining factor in the level of misery for a significant number of people. One tweak to this year’s list: we swapped out sales tax rates for property tax rates. Miami would have finished No. 1 under the old methodology as well.
Miami has local company in misery on our list: the West Palm Beach metropolitan division ranks fourth and Fort Lauderdale is seventh. Both areas have been hit hard by the housing crises.
Michigan’s troubled duo of Detroit and Flint clock in at No. 2 and No. 3 among the most miserable cities. The cities have been reeling for decades due to the decline of the U.S. auto industry and in recent years have been demolishing houses to change their city landscapes. Detroit has closed schools and laid off police, while Michigan appointed an emergency manager last year to take over Flint’s budget and operations. Detroit and Flint rank No. 1 and No. 3 when it comes to violent crime, and unemployment over the past three years in both communities has also been among the worst in the U.S.
Last year’s most miserable city, Stockton, ranks No. 11 this year. Stockton got a boost as housing prices have stabilized to some degree after a 45% drop between 2006 and 2008. They also benefited from our replacement of sales tax rates with property taxes in the methodology (Stockton would have finished No. 6 under the old methodology). Stockton still has plenty of problems, though. It ranks among the country’s six worst when it comes to unemployment, foreclosures and violent crime.
The Top 10 List is below, with details for each one at the link:
10. Warren, Michigan
9. Rockford, Illinois
8. Toledo, Ohio
7. Fort Lauderdale, Florida
6. Chicago, Illinois
5. Sacramento, California
4. West Palm Beach, Florida
3. Flint, Michigan
2. Detroit, Michigan
1. Miami, Florida
Interesting that two cities in which I used to reside, Chicago (6) and Rockford (9) made the list. Perhaps that is why I am such a sunny personality. I chronicled Rockford's descent into hell last May 23rd in my post, "Worst City in America" -- How Rampant Globalization Transformed Rockford, Illinois." I'm sure it must be cold comfort to the citizens of Rockford that eight other cities have passed them up in their misery.
Bonus: "They say misery loves company. We could start a company...and make misery"
I've noticed that the food industry has been taking a lot of hits lately. Here the Modesto Bee with the latest:
Dawn Food Products will close its three Modesto manufacturing plants in March, which will cost 265 workers their jobs.
Dawn officials say the closures are part of their corporate plan for "enhancing manufacturing operations and increasing efficiency."
The Michigan-based Dawn and its predecessor, Bunge Foods, have been making frozen cakes, cake mixes and other dry-mix bakery products in Modesto since 1996. Dawn leases 125,000 square feet in three buildings in the Beard Industrial District.
Again, the business reporter fails top ask the corporate flacks the question of how closing factories "enhances manufacturing operations" or "increases efficiency." An idled plant is a subtraction to the bottom line and there is no efficiency to be had. But these particular flacks didn't stop there:
"Dawn will work with our Modesto team members in the coming weeks to provide useful information, tools and resources that will help people move forward," said Michelle Fehr, Dawn's senior vice president of operations for U.S. bakery products. "We remain extremely grateful for the hard work and commitment of all our people during this challenging transition."
Since the business reporter won't do their job, allow me: Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit and more bullshit.
At least the story does attempt to draw somewhat of a bigger picture:
Losing those manufacturing jobs is another blow to Stanislaus County's already weak economy.
Stanislaus' unemployment rate tops 16 percent, and another big food processor, the Patterson Vegetable Co., announced that it planned to go out of business next month. The Patterson closure will eliminate 489 jobs.
Sounds like yet another community that's been pretty hard hit as the slow downward grind of the economy continues.
Boy, my recently created "California" tag has been getting quite a workout lately--and that, of course, is bad news for The Golden State. The latest economic hit was reported on Friday by a local television station in San Francisco:
There are a lot of anxious city worker in Oakland. They just got word that hundreds of pink slips are going out next week. The layoffs are the result of a sudden loss of money from Sacramento.
When these 1,500 plus layoff notices start going out next week, we're told it will be the largest number ever sent out by this city at one time. When the actual layoffs occur, it will be more like several hundred, but there's no doubt this process will be painful for all involved.
"It's devastating for this organization," said Oakland city administrator Deanna Santa.
Santa confirmed for ABC7 more than half her city's employees will receive layoff notices, starting next week, that's more than 1,500 pink slips in all.
"We have a workforce that will be reduced in a very short period of time without the normal engagement process that this city has put in place in the past," said Santana.
Still, Santana said it has to be done after the California Supreme Court's decision supporting the disbanding of redevelopment agencies. In Oakland, that's a loss of $25-$30 million per year. Redevelopment dollars fund 159 full-time positions.
There was one additional little interesting tidbit in this story:
One other note, redevelopment dollars pay for much more than the agency itself -- 17 Oakland police officers are paid for out of that money. The officers can't be laid off because of a prior agreement they have with the city.
The mayor, city administrator, city council members, half of all of their salaries are paid for out of that redevelopment money. It's not clear at this point whether or how those salaries might be affected by all this.
I wonder if one of the 17 police officers whose salary came from redevelopment money was the one who shot that unfortunate Occupy protester in the head with a tear gas grenade? Because it seem that firing his ass would at least do a little to alleviate the problem. Oh, and how about shitcanning Oakland's scumbag mayor for siccing her thugs on the Occupiers in the first place. See? I'm GOOD at this budget cutting stuff.
Bonus: I'd like to dedicate this song to the Oakland PD
Back on August 11th of last year, I wrote a post called "Riding the School Bus is Apparently About to Become a Thing of the Past," which included a story about a school district in Arizona that was discontinuing bus service for its students. Now the same problem is being faced by schools across California as the state is ending busing subsidies for local school districts. Here is California Watch with the details:
There are no sidewalks, bike lanes or public transportation in Forks of Salmon, a tiny, forest-shrouded community deep in the mountains of Siskiyou County. For seven of the 10 students at Forks of Salmon Elementary School, getting to class means taking a 45-minute school bus ride on 18 miles of a narrow, two-lane road that twists and turns with the Salmon River.
Until this month, most of the $32,000 the school spends each year to bus students was covered by the state. But now, Forks of Salmon and other rural school districts are grappling with how to keep their buses running. Last week, Gov. Jerry Brown proposed eliminating school transportation funding [PDF] next year, just weeks after announcing trigger cuts that wiped out $248 million for buses this year.
California does not require school districts to provide home-to-school transportation, except for certain special education students and those who are severely disabled or orthopedically impaired; less than 16 percent of students statewide ride school buses. But ridership is significantly higher in many rural areas, where sparsely populated, sprawling communities necessitate bus service, officials say.
"If we don't have transportation, we don't have school," said Tina Bennett, Forks of Salmon's superintendent, who also serves as its principal, first-through-third-grade teacher and bus driver.
The nearest gas station to Forks of Salmon charges $4.95 a gallon, and the roads, prone to rockslides and slick with ice in the winter, often are dangerous to drive. Not all families can afford or feel comfortable driving under those conditions, Bennett said.
Well, it sounds to me like those families are going to need to reconsider their options. But that isn't how some folks see it:
"It just doesn't seem equitable," said Stephanie Siddens, superintendent and principal of Bonny Doon Elementary School in Santa Cruz County, which used to receive about 72 percent of its transportation funds from the state. "Just because we provide transportation and we need it, we get cut more."
Sorry to be the one to break this to you, Ms. Siddens, but the state of California is broke and cuts have to be made SOMEWHERE. That's a fact, and there is no use crying about it.
In fact, I'll go you one further. If you are residing in a rural community you are going to have to accept the fact that it is time to start becoming self-sufficient and not count on expensive government services to be there for you anymore. In this instance, that probably means home schooling your children if you can no longer afford to drive them to school yourself. If you aren't prepared to do that, perhaps you should reconsider living in a locale where services are likely to break down sooner rather than later. On top of losing your school buses, you're probably going to be losing your rural post offices fairly soon as well.
Are you ready for that? Because if not, I'd consider moving. If there is ANYBODY who needs recognize that the time is quickly coming when they are going to need to be able to survive in the peak oil era with reduced or no government services supporting them, it is those who live the farthest from where those services are being provided.
In yet another sign that consumers have less money to spend, there was a steep drop in tickets sales for movies this past year, as reported by the Atlantic Wire:
The numbers are in, and they show what studio execs likely feared and movie-goers likely suspected all along: Not a lot of people went to the movies this year. Box-office tracker Hollywood.com says that "an estimated 1.275 billion tickets sold" in 2011, a 4.8 percent decrease from 2010 making for "the smallest movie audience since 1995," reports the AP. A hodgepodge of reasons for the sour showing were cited in the AP and ABC News reports. Among them: Too many sequels, too many kids movies, too many distracting gadgets, the bad economy, high ticket prices, and, something being called an "'Avatar' hangover" from 2010.
Conspicuously absent from the list was the fact that most of the movies released in 2011 sucked balls.
Donated farm equipment that works is the only thing that will save an FFA chapter’s 11-acre alfalfa farm.
The chapter’s 380 members are ready to roll up their sleeves and do everything to keep the farm alive. But they don’t have the right tools, according to a Morgan Hill Times article today.
And unless they find someone to donate mowers, balers and tractors so they can get to work, the farm, located behind Sobrato High School, will be history.
FFA members manage the operation of a greenhouse and livestock barns and can continue taking care of those operations. But their lack of equipment has led to their alfalfa acreage to lie underdeveloped.
So students are asking their community to give any functioning farm equipment to FFA. They’re looking for tractors, power-takeoff implements and three-point implements to move dirt, till, mow, plant, level and harvest their crop. The school’s metal shop classes will also accept equipment that needs minor repairs so they can work on fixes and get the machines to work for FFA.
Sobrato’s agriculture mechanics and veterinary science teacher Joe Martin is the one to contact if you have equipment to give or can help his FFA chapter in any way. E-mail him at joseph.martin@mhu.k12.ca.us.
Simply for this reason-- Texas WILL survive by exports. We are the largest export state in the USA. For this reason, California and several other states will soon be in Washington DC begging for a bailout, and Texas will be booming right along. This is because Texas don't spend it if they don't have it. So, we will all tighten our belts a bit, and keep pumping the oil and shipping beef. Texas did not get in top place in the USA by printing funny money and getting loans from Charlie Wong. We live on what comes in via sales tax, and that will work again. Also, we don't let people go on welfare until they have worked in Texas, and then they don't get unemployment forever when they lose a job. You work, or you starve, or you go back to Taxechusetts. Also, living under a bridge is not dishonorable in Texas if that is how you want to live. Just don't expect to be entitled by your choices. Finally, Texas has one natural resource that is lacking in almost all other states. In fact some states try to outlaw it and criminalize it. That natural resource is attitude. If you don't have one when you get here, you better get one in a hurry, or you will be left behind. Ecclesiastes 9:10 (KJV) Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest. We have plenty of land left to bury losers-- get to work. Now, Bunkie, I bet you are troubled by this blog, right? Well, I will tell you what to do-- Just look up at the top of the page, left corner. See that arrow pointing to the left? Click it, and you will never have to read stuff like this again :-)
This week seems to have been one of those periods in which people came to their senses. Especially Wednesday. Common sense seems to be catching on. If you look at history it usually does, and that is one of the reasons I am an optimist.
While the U.S. political scene appears to have come back on track with Senator Clinton's recognition that her chances of becoming the Democratic nominee are slim (Slate's Hillary Deathwatch has argued as such since March) and the United States is indeed "ready" for an African-American president, common sense has also popped up in other parts of the world, giving me hope.
In Tokyo, Japan's Supreme Court came to its senses in favor of justice, perhaps realizing that nationality is not an issue of "ethnicity," a concept that no one seems to be able to define:
TOKYO (AP) — Japan's Supreme Court ruled Wednesday against a law that denied citizenship to children born out of wedlock to Japanese fathers and foreign mothers, a court official said. Japan's top court ruled in favor of 10 Japanese-Filipino children suing for citizenship in Japan. The children were split into two separate cases, one filed in 2003 and one filed in 2005. The suits were filed by Filipino mothers who had proved the fathers of their children were Japanese, the report said.
Between NYC and Japan, good sense prevailed in California on Wednesday too. Another court did the right thing, giving proper rights to people, allowing gays to marry:
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Gay and lesbians couples around California are planning their nuptials following a refusal by the state's highest court to stay its decision egalizing gay marriage.
The California Supreme Court's announcement Wednesday cleared the final hurdle for same-sex couples in the nation's most populous state to wed beginning June 17, when state officials have said counties must start issuing new gender-neutral marriage licenses. Judy Appel, executive director of Our Family Coalition, a San Francisco-based group that advocates for same-sex couples with children, said she was thrilled by the court's refusal to stay the ruling.
The long view of history shows that people eventually do the right thing. Let's hope it lasts.
