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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."
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.
This is not going to reduce spending one bit. When the Congress gets done with 'shutdown' theater, everything that was put on hold will be restarted. The delays will cost more and some of the people who were intimately knowledgeable of the projects will move on, to be replaced by people who do not know as much of what is going on. None of these projects will stop, which is the only way that they would cost any less, they will continue and the interruption will make them cost more. And the Congress will continue appropriating while citing the interruption as a "need" for more money.
Time Bomber the Book coming soon.
That's a bit of an oversimplification. There are three major camps now in the red team: the neoconservatives who favor imperialism and value military spending for the sake of American power, the vested-interest establishment that wants to feed its defense contractors for little reason except to reap kickbacks and support local porkbarrel spending, and the libertarian wing (with some of the Tea Party) that earnestly and without cynicism believes in reducing military expenditure for constitutional reasons and a sense of historical obligation to the ideals of the Founding Fathers. The blue team finds it hardest to work with the lattermost faction, which uncompromisingly also wants to cut social spending; the establishment cores of each team, blue and red, work together to increase spending on arms and useless foreign conflicts. The leftmost blue team factions (i.e. Kucinich) might like to reduce military expenditures, but no one listens to them. There's really no mainstream political will on either side of the aisle to reduce the military to sane levels, because that will cost campaign dollars and district jobs. Everyone has to Support Our Troops to get reelected, after all. Eisenhower was right: the Military-Industrial Complex has changed the way we think about the economic and political status of the Union.
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 Republican controlled House of Representatives passed a spending bill funding the entire federal government - except Obamacare.
Whatever you think of Obamacare, it was passed into law by a majority of both houses and the president's signature, just like the Constitution requires. Now the house R's, instead of trying to repeal the law, are instituting a tyranny of the minority. Don't do what we want, and we'll screw up everything. Much as it sucks to have the federal government largely shut down, the D's are right not to give into this extortion. Let this kind of crap get started, and we'll have a situation where an overall minority that controls one house, or the presidency, gets a chance every year to effectively veto any law they don't like.
Republicans lost the overall vote in the House, but have many entrenched politicians thanks to excessive gerrymandering. They only can't do that for the senate because they can't manipulate state boundaries!
And yes, Democrats gerrymander too, but clearly Republicans have done it more, since they can drastically lose the popular vote for the house and still hold the majority of the seats.
So yes, MINORITY.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
"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