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IBM Hides the Bodies, Eyes US Government Billions
theodp writes "As his company was striving to hide the bodies of its laid-off North American workers, IBM CEO Sam Palmisano stood beside President Barack Obama and waxed patriotic: 'We need to reignite growth in our country,' Palmisano said. 'We need to undertake projects that actually will create jobs.' While Sam positions IBM to get a slice of the $825 billion stimulus pie, Big Blue is quietly cutting thousands of jobs and refusing to release the numbers or locations, arguing that SEC disclosure rules don't apply since the US job cuts are immaterial in its big global picture. The layoffs included hundreds in East Fishkill, coming early in the year after NY taxpayers paid IBM $45 million not to cut additional jobs in East Fishkill in 2008. Some are questioning whether IBM incentives are worth the cost."
Last time they left bodies in their wake, the Allies found most of them...
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Even in the linked article, they're only questioning how much to pay IBM -- not whether to pay them. It amazes me that local officials do this so often, when there's no real proof these sorts of incentives are a net gain. Localities pay hundreds of millions of dollar for sports team's stadiums and get no direct profit sharing, cities offer multi-million dollar packages - or in Seattle's case, even build an egregious trolley line - for businesses and don't even pretend to have a measure of the monetary benefit to the community for the given initial outlay. I always wonder how much these pointless incentives come from honest incompetence versus corruption of the government officials.
M1 Carbines for the US, and Holleriths for the Nazis? What a brilliant business strategy! European explosive manufacturers made tons of money supplying both Iran and Iraq during their war in the 1980's. But I guess you're not supposed to do this if your country is on one side of the conflict.
I suppose that IBM would claim that the Nazis had taken over the subsidiary, and that IBM in the US had no control over it. I believe that Ford and GM (Opel) had the same problem with their subsidiaries, and faced the same allegations after the war.
If the case in the book is so strong, why hasn't anyone sued IBM over it?
"Hey, Daryl McBride! Here's your chance to try to sue IBM again!"
Or maybe some militant animal rights groups can sue them over this: http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/vintage/vintage_4506VV2154.html
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Who is the most inefficient? Government workers! People who have no accountability, can steal money from taxpayers at a whim, and possess no real incentive to ever to a good job or improve themselves. So now that companies have gotten large enough to fail, the dumbest of all are taking them over. This will lead to greater failure because it is sucking in money from better people. Russia tried this approach, and the people starved... Americans are fat, but how long will we last when our bread lines run dry? Governemnt control of business has always failed, and will always fail. Obama is 100% wrong to "bail out" any company. Bush was no better since he did the same thing. We all knew W was a dummy the first time he opened his mouth, but Obama seemed a bit brighter.
Let the companies go under. Others are waiting to pick up the pieces and start fresh. If you are about to be laid off, sorry, but you are free to start your own business. If you had a brain you'd be working on it now instead of bitching. You don't need big college degrees to make a business. Get good at something and charge for your service.
I can't find an online reference for this, but supposedly Warren Buffet once started out an earnings call with, "We would have done much better this year if I had never come in to work."
First IBM manages to post a 'strong quarter' (though in depth analysis by some indicates serious problems underscoring the superficially nice summary).
Then, the CEO sends an email to the whole company saying while other companies are cutting back, IBM is going to be different because they think it is important to invest long term in its people because IBM can afford to.
The next day, they execute the first wave of layoffs.
As layoffs continue, they try to say things about 'accelerating workforce rebalancing through resource actions' to pretend it is somehow different from everyone else. Notably, they have architected the whole thing it so that they feel disclosing the details to the SEC is not required.
I guess it may be different, maybe IBM is trying to finally achieve a goal under the smokescreen of recession-induced lay-offs. They are ditching people in the US with high years of service as they reduce numbers to allow for future overseas growth *despite* relying chiefly upon the US market for revenue still.
I still work at IBM (for the moment), but this recent activity has really frustrated me. The BS is so transparent and yet they shovel it on us anyway. If IBM were at least forthcoming about it, I might retain some shred of respect, but they are being so slimy about it.
My conflict is lack of viable choice in my area and in the industry. Doing in-house IT for various companies has lacked the technical challenge I want, as well as a salary ceiling that goes with that level of expectation. Small business/startups are even less certain than IBM employment. Other healthy hardware providers don't tend to volunteer to help with complex application of the gear. I guess HP would be the other candidate, but they aren't any better and aren't where I live.
Credit can appear and disappear relatively quickly without causing rampant inflation. That doesn't mean the total money supply can simply increase forever without doing so. Be very careful overgeneralising from the last decade. I think there's a specific reason we've gotten away with it for so long, which is China. They willingly hoarded ever more of our dollars and tied their currency to ours. Part of the reason is because they hold so many US dollars, if they tried to circulate them they'd become almost worthless. If they ever call in our debts by spending those dollars, we are in big trouble.
Your comment about taking away each other's customers by laying off big chunks of workers is true and if I had mod points, I'd mod your comment up.
These layoffs are scaring everyone else and making them stop buying anything. The ones laid off certainly aren't spending except on absolute essentials until their money/retirement/savings run out, etc.
It's the economic death spiral and is becoming its own self-fulfilling prophecy.
It is getting scary out there. I hope it doesn't happen to me, but you never know...
That's what the parent is saying. China keeps their take from sales of cheap stuff mostly in US banks... the same ones that turn around and put the money back into loans for high interest credit cards and ARM home loans.
In a sense it was their money that fueled the housing boom... People borrowed to buy more stuff. Which increased Chinese profits and they make the money available to borrow so interest stays low. It works well until the bankers screw it up by fixing the books.. because they are "competing" to turn sub-prime 5% loans into 20% plus returns to investors.. take a guess how long that lasted?
Why was it so important to give Wall Street $700B, even after it fucked up so badly?
Oh that's right, because they're refusing to loan out money even to reputable companies like GM and Chrysler.
I'll tell you what - you give me a few suitcases of that soon to be worthless money, I'll give you some worthless goods in exchange (perhaps some brightly colored beads?), and we'll call it even.
Replace the beads with rare earth magnets and spools of copper wire for my turbines and motors, throw in a cow, some chickens and some tempered glass to expand my aquaponic setup and you've got a deal.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Hate to break it to you, but the commodities bubble has already gone bust. Dollars and Yen are the only things going up in value these days.
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