-By Dan Scott
Recently a number of overly rosy pronouncements have been coming out of the Whitehouse in an attempt to talk up the economy and consumer confidence. In the corporate world, putting a brave face on a bad situation is called Happy Talk. The CEO comes out with the pep talk to boost flagging employee morale to keep up productivity and key employees from jumping ship. The positive spin can be come from true concern for the drag on team spirit that would make the difference between success and failure through vision and teamwork. The overly positive spin is done cynically in the knowledge the company leadership has made some bad decisions which are about to have very negative consequences and is done to prevent employees from taking any action to protect themselves. Many things can sink a company, poor attitude, low morale, bad decisions, natural disasters and fraud among the many, but how you characterize the situation speaks volumes as to your intent. In the corporate world, the dividing line between Happy Talk and vision is denial, ignorance and deception.
The Tim Geithner Stress Test for the Banks is an example of such Happy Talk. The results were positively optimistic and a number of banks were told to increase their reserves just in case there was an unexpected drop in the economy. What Geithner and the MSM didn’t say was there are other independent companies who regularly evaluate the health of banks beyond the FDIC conducting periodic evaluations of the banking industry. One such company is called Institutional Risk Analytics (IRA). IRA rates banks via an index based on the year 1995 being a rating of 1. The relative strength of the institution drops as the index number increases.
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Happy Talk”
According to a new study released by the Mercatus Center of George Mason University, some of our most liberal states rank at the bottom in a measure of personal freedom. “
Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) appears to be warning his membership that there is no lock on allegiance for Arlen Specter even though he has recently jumped the GOP ship for the Democrat Party.
Looks like Washington Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt sort of put his foot in his mouth — or his pen as the case may be — in an April 27 editorial where he as much as called America’s older workers “lumbering” and less talented than “younger, nimbler” employees. In a nation that has one of its largest blocks of citizens in the “older” category, those over 40, it seems like Hiatt just insulted the largest number of Americans. Not the best way to sell newspapers, eh?
The International Monetary Fund’s, World Economic Outlook, report may be squealing about how the Globalist economy contracting by a measly 1.3% makes it the worst recession since World War II but they haven’t seen anything yet. Governments can do all the economic stimulus packages they want but you can not force people to buy when they don’t want to. All those chickens from outsourcing of jobs to cheaper workers in emerging nations and insourcing of H1-b and L-1 workers, not to mention illegals, to flood the labor pool with cheaper labor is coming home to roost. Big corporations in collusion with big governments thought that they could fascistically enrich themselves through the socialistic manipulation of Market Forces but they forgot that the Market is ruled by the Law of Supply and Demand. Demand has dropped off because the very people, who were driving the economic engine of success, have become impoverished. They were stripped of their jobs and work because corporations did not want to pay prevailing First World wages or benefits to First World workers.
Most lefties claim that “no” means “no,” but not where it concerns unions that have lost the organizing argument over and over again. We can see that refusal to listen to the workers in the case of Unions vs. Wal-Mart. Repeatedly Wal-Mart workers have generally refused to unionize, yet instead of taking that as an answer, the unions continue to push. And they are at it again.
Although I didn’t vote for him, and, if you are reading this, there’s a good chance that you didn’t vote for him either, Barack Hussein Obama is our President for better or for worse, for good or for ill or until after four years do us part. Until then, it’s Suffer Time; break it down!
On April 4 
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