Slashdot Mirror
Lockheed To Furlough 3,000 On Monday, Layoffs Also Kicking In
Dawn Kawamoto writes "Lockheed employees are the latest casualty in the government shutdown, with the defense contractor announcing Friday it plans to furlough 3,000 workers on Monday. But what they didn't mention is they are laying off workers too, says a Lockheed source on the hush-hush. Lockheed, of course, isn't the only defense contractor taking it on the chin. Other contractors include United Technologies, which has furloughed 2,000, and BAE Systems which cut 1,000."
They want to make you think that if you don't give them what they want then you'll suffer for it. Legal extortion from the ring masters.
Defense spending needs to be reduced, but this bullshit isn't the way to do it. If anything these shenanigans are going to end up costing the American taxpayer more.
Your (dipshit) Congress in action.
Lockheed gets to lay off a bunch of employees while blaming the government even though the government shutdown doesn't actually affect them. That's brilliant PR. Now the employees will be angry at the government for shutting down instead of Lockheed executives laying off thousands of people in order to pad their own back pockets.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
You are correct but you're still an idiot. Now that you are unemployed and have no healthcare and potentially have pre-existing conditions, you better hope and pray for a change in attitude from the remainder of the House majority. A few days of slow business didn't get you layed off - it was going to happen anyways, this just happened to be a convenient time to do so.
So where does that leave you? COBRA for a few months if you're lucky under existing law and then you get to be a single person (or family) negotiating with a multinational insurance corporation. Have you done that before? If not I'll tell you a trick, lube up real good before you go begging, cause you're going to need it.
OTOH come Jan 1st, you'll get to join up with millions of others just like you and with your combined negotiating power you will be able to get a much much better deal, better in fact than any Corporate plan. Better because you will be paying less than what you plus the Corp would pay (yes they pay for some percentage of the policy, the individual typically pays less than 50%, depending on the size of the group).
Don't be an idiot. Realize that economies of scale are real and that group plans are better than individual plans, regardless of who manages the group enrollment policy.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
That was an awful lot of words built up on one fundamental, crippling flaw.
The House has the right to initiate budgets, as you say. But those budgets must be agreed to by the Senate and (barring a 2/3rd majority) the President.
If your stance is that the Senate and President must accept whatever the House gives them, then why do we even have a Senate or Executive?
The US political system is deliberately designed to create gridlock. The philosophy is that the less government can do, the better. Obviously nothing is idiot proof. Yelling about how one side is evil and the other good, while the other side takes the same tone is just part of the plan. Eventually though someone involved is supposed to be mature enough to ensure the essential stuff happens.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I am sure there are some excellent rebuttals that will be coming your way... many on a technical/procedural level that I will not attempt. I will however, give you an example that shows the absurdity of this line of thinking.
When/if Democrats/Libertarians get in power of the House, you have basically stated that they are allowed to "defund" any part of the government they wish. Don't like drone strikes, just defund it. Don't like the whole damn military, just defund it. Don't like national parks, just defund it. Don't like border patrol, just defund it. Don't like the FBI/CIA/NASA/etc., just defund it. Don't like a single program within any of those agencies, just defund it.
You have basically created an end-around to the entire democratic process and made the House the most powerful group of people in the country. Screw the Senate, the Executive branch, the Judicial branch and the People... it's all up to the House to decide what is law; after all if they don't like, just defund it.
Where is the check of power on the House?
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
The Senate and the veto power of the President are the checks on the House's ability to defund programs. They can refuse to pass or can veto budgets that the House passes. That's exactly what's happening. That's exactly what's supposed to happen. The Constitution is not a blueprint for efficiency; it's a set of rules for political warfare designed to keep the politicians at each others' throats so that they're less able to choke the people instead. The government works as intended when the House, Senate, President, and Supreme Court are all trying to undermine each other and build their own power, because the people who designed the government didn't trust human nature to provide in perpetuity the kind of leaders who would observe moderation and remain within the bounds set upon them. The Founders knew that power attracts the ambitious, and that the only way to check ambition was to pit the ambitious against one another.
The Democrats (except for the fringe left) aren't going to try to defund the NSA or drones (Obama arguably makes too much use of both to give up either willingly), but one could imagine the libertarians (the fringe more-or-less right) doing so if they ever went mainstream, and that would be in accord with the system of checks and balances. The Senate and the President could try to stop them, and eventually the administration shuts down unless a compromise is reached. This weakens all parties involved and shows the people that their leaders are more interested in ambition than service, and that large swaths of the government are truly nonessential. The people, outraged at their leaders' incompetence and the waste of money that goes into nonessential functions, should then rabidly demand more efficient service for less tax money; that's the cue to kick out the incumbents. Once upon a time that happened, but the people have lost their ambition.
But the budget isn't the time to fight things. The way to get a law changed isn't to say "Let's stop paying for the law!" but rather to change the law. The ACA can be repealed, just as it was introduced. That is the right way. However there isn't the votes for that.
What's worse is that there IS the votes to pass the budget in a straight up and down vote but the leadership won't let it happen. That's why people are, rightly, calling "taking hostage". The unmodified budget could and should pass a vote, but they won't let it go to vote because they are mad. A minority trying to force things on a majority.
I also can 100% support the president in saying "No we won't make concessions," because it is in the same vein as "Never negotiate with terrorists." If they can get away with whatever they want just by threatening a shutdown, then that'll happen every single time.They continue to force more and more radical agendas saying "Do this or we shut things down!" No, no negotiation when you play hostage with the budget. Do it right or fuck off.
No, the supreme court found the Individual Mandate constitutional. They also found the Medicaid expansion constitutional, what they found unconstitutional was the part that penalized states who didn't implement it. That was the part stripped. Which is why some states chose not to implement it, even though the federal government was paying for it.
Funny thing about the supreme court- they may have no authority to cancel part of a law, but they also have no authority to say a law is constitutional or not. They took that authority onto themselves, as part of Marbury v Madison. If they hadn't done so, there would be no power capable of determining that and Congress would be able to pass and the president enforce any law, Constitutional or not (for a great example, see the Alien and Sedition acts of the early 1800s). The right to cancel part of a law is pretty much necessary to do that job- if a bill has a tiny portion that's illegal, it's much closer to what Congress wanted to cancel part of it than all of it. If Congress then wants to tweak or get rid of the law in response they have that power. Two flaws in the Constitution that we've patched without official amendment.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I live in the middle of Austin, yet I'm represented by someone who lives in suburban Houston. My only option is to vote for or against the guy who is guaranteed to win thanks to gerrymandering.
How exactly can I fire him?
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Aside from guitar / bass amplifiers and hi end stereo equipment who uses vacuum tubes ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavity_magnetron
You're welcome.
"Since we cannot read minds, we cannot say who -- if anybody -- 'wants to shut down the government.' But we do know who had the option to keep the government running and chose not to. The money voted by the House of Representatives covered everything that the government does, except for ObamaCare."
No need to read minds, just read a newspaper like the conservative Washington Examiner from July when they were pushing for it as a GOP tactic, headline:
"Republicans are willing to shut down government to stop fraudulent Obamacare subsidies".
http://washingtonexaminer.com/morning-examiner-republicans-are-willing-to-shut-down-government-to-stop-fraudulent-obamacare-subsidies/article/2533356
Acting like there's some question of who's to blame is ridiculous. In addition, we know that there are votes in the House to pass a full-funding bill right now but the GOP leadership won't allow the vote to occur. (See "discharge petition" in the House below):
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/05/us-usa-fiscal-idUSBRE98N11220131005
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Ah yes, the both sides do it argument. How quaint. There is only one party here that is using questionable tactics. The democrats are correct to refuse to play this game. Do you really want to set a precedent where whoever is in charge of the house can defund anything they want by holding the economy and government hostage? They holding the value of the dollar hostage. It might be that outsiders might decide they want a more stable currency than the U.S. dollar. Then we will be up shit creek. Obama has been bending backwards trying to appease these clowns. They only are trying it again because they thought it worked last time. Now they are backed in a corner because they thought the democrats would cave.
for what it's worth, a large part of what our defense industry does is pry money out of the hands of the super wealthy and spread it around the economy.
The decision to pry money from the super wealthy, and the decision of what to spend that money on are two disjoint decisions. For instance, we could still tax the rich, and then instead of spending a billion dollars on a single B-2 bomber, we could spend $11,000 each to improve every single one of the 88,000 elementary schools in America. Which of those two expenditures would be more likely to improve the long term strength and security of our country?