Posts Tagged ‘damagnificent seven’

Boomers are in trouble

Posted: February 9, 2021 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

Amid the carnage of economic shutdowns during the pandemic, baby boomers have suffered more than any other age group, according to MarketWatch.com.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly 900,000 Americans between the ages of 60 and 69 lost their jobs between December 2019 and December 2020, a 5 percent decline in the number of employed people in that age group. Some 21.2 million Americans in their 60s are no longer in the labor force, the BLS reported.

MarketWatch interviewed several people in their 60s, with long records of professional success who were “trying to find purpose or, at least, some income to help pay the bills. None of them ran a hedge fund or cashed out in an IPO. None attended Ivy League colleges but went to state universities or technical schools and lived solid middle-class lives as loyal, productive employees, raising families on high five- to low six-figure incomes.”

All had been laid off with no explanation. Those interviewed had sent out dozens of resumes but got few job interviews and even fewer offers. All firmly believed they faced systemic age discrimination.

Curtis Berndt, 65, told MarketWatch that he thinks that people eliminated him because of his age, “You go in, they look at you, and they say ‘too old,’ and you’re done.”

Berndt began as a draftsman and then moved into product design. For more than 40 years, all in Indiana, he did advanced quality control and streamlined manufacturing processes to reduce defects and improve efficiency.

“Everything was good, and then all of a sudden — and I mean, really, all of a sudden–there was a huge financial issue, and they decided they were going to have to get rid of people,” he said. “I had just turned 65, and three days later, they didn’t need me anymore. It’s impossible to prove, but they assured me that my age had nothing to do with it.”

Berndt has applied for about 50 full-time job openings and gotten a handful of interviews.

“They say everything’s good until the face-to-face interview, and then it’s dead. From other people I’ve talked to in my age group, that’s pretty much the pattern,” he said.

When Karen Mater was a young geologist working on oil wells in southern Indiana, a male rig worker said to her one day, “I don’t think women belong in oil fields. What do you think?”

“I said, ‘Well, I’m the wrong person to answer, because here I am,’” she told MarketWatch.

But the strain on her young family of being away for two or three weeks at a time caused her to change careers. Using the computer knowledge she’d acquired as a geologist, she took a job at nearby Central Michigan University, where she had earned her master’s degree.

Twenty-three years later, in August, the university let her and others go.

“They decided they had to really slim down, and for whatever reason, they picked my job to eliminate,” she said.

Since then, she’s applied to at least 45 jobs, but with no luck.

While Berndt and Mater said they should be all right financially, more than half of those 55 and older are expected to end their lives in poverty, MarketWatch reported, mainly as a result of the shutdown of the U.S. economy during the past year.

My generation is in trouble. I hope someone in the Biden White House is paying attention!

Biden bought the election with questionable campaign money

Posted: January 26, 2021 by chrisharper in elections
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By Christopher Harper

Even if Joe Biden didn’t steal the election, he certainly bought it through a record-breaking amount from anonymous donors whom Democrats have decried for years until 2020.

A Bloomberg investigation, which not so ironically came after the election rather than before it, noted that “the public will never have a full accounting of who helped him win the White House.”

Biden’s winning campaign received $145 million in so-called “dark money donations,” or roughly 10 percent of his record-breaking campaign chest of $1.5 billion. 

Biden’s haul of dark money dwarfed the $28.4 million spent on behalf of Donald Trump tops the previous record of $113 million in anonymous donations backing Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2012.

In the past, many Democrats wanted to ban dark money since it allowed supporters to quietly back a candidate without scrutiny and obtain undue influence over victorious candidates. But in their effort to defeat Trump in 2020, they embraced dark money.

For example, Bloomberg reported that Priorities USA Action Fund, the super political action committee that Biden designated as his preferred vehicle for outside spending, used $26 million in funds originally donated to its nonprofit arm, called Priorities USA, to back Biden. The donors of that money do not have to be disclosed.

Guy Cecil, the chairman of Priorities USA, was unapologetic in comments to Bloomberg. “We weren’t going to unilaterally disarm against Trump and the right-wing forces that enabled him,” he said.

Campaign finance laws are supposed to limit the influence big money has over politicians. But the system has gaping loopholes, which groups backing Biden exploited.

In fact, the Biden campaign called for banning some types of nonprofits from spending money to influence elections and requiring that any organization spending more than $10,000 to influence elections to register with the Federal Election Commission and disclose any donors.

Overall, Democrats received $326 million in dark money, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. That was more than twice the $148 million that supported Republican groups. 

Bloomberg found that Future Forward PAC, a super-PAC that spent $104 million backing Biden, got $46.9 million Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, $3 million from Twilio Chief Executive Officer Jeff Lawson, and $2.6 million from Eric Schmidt of Alphabet, the parent company of Google. But the most significant source of funds was from a sister nonprofit, Future Forward USA Action, which contributed $61 million. The names of those who put up the $61 million don’t have to be disclosed.

I guess you aren’t exactly stealing an election if you buy it with questionable donations, but it’s awfully close.

The end of Boss Madigan, the man who destroyed Illinois

Posted: January 17, 2021 by John Ruberry in News/opinion, politics
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Madigan graphic courtesy of the Illinois Policy Institute

By John Ruberry

Had this event not occurred on the same day President Donald J. Trump was impeached a second time, the failure of Michael Madigan to win a 19th term as speaker of the Illinois House would have made national news. The luck of the Irish was somehow with him on his worst day in his 52 years in politics.

There is much to criticize with Madigan. While the one sentence summary of the Chicago Democrat’s career might be “Longest statehouse speaker tenure in American history,” it instead needs to be, “The man who destroyed Illinois.”

Here’s a graph created by the Illinois Policy Institute–which has been on the forefront of exposing Madigan to the masses for a decade–that shows the decline of Illinois’ credit rating. And the rating began its descent early in Madigan’s tenure as speaker. To be fair, it was Gov. Jim Thompson, a Republican, who in 1989 signed into law the annual compounded three-percent cost-of-living public pension raise for retired state employees, but that bill emerged from Madigan’s House. Nearly all state workers are members of public-sector unions, those unions have been an important cog for the Madigan Machine. Other GOP governors share some of the blame for the Illinois pension bomb. But for all but two years since 1983, Madigan was speaker and he had his hands on every budget since then. 

Illlinois’ credit rating now hovers slightly over junk status.

The Prairie State has lost population for seven straight years. People have wised up. After the 2020 reapportionment Illinois will once again lose a congressional district. Perhaps two.

Madigan’s political mentor was the first Mayor Daley, Richard J, the legendary boss of Chicago. Madigan was America’s last machine boss. As mayor Daley was also chairman of Cook County Democratic Party, since 1998 Madigan has been chairman of state party, a post that he, at least for now, retains. Like Daley, Madigan would reward his political supporters and their relatives with jobs, usually public-sector jobs. But recent scandals involving private-sector entities, including the Chicago area’s electrical utility, Commonwealth Edison, betrayed the burden of the pension bomb that is eating away at Illinois government. Allegedly ComEd was handing out jobs, as lowly as meter readers, to Madigan loyalists. The ComEd scandal has produced several indictments, including the company’s former CEO and some Madigan loyalists. A separate scandal centered around red-light cameras has bagged other Madigan cronies. These political brushfires, on top of allegations of sexual harrassment against a member of Madigan’s inner circle, finally made the Madigan name toxic. 

The result in 2020 was better-than expected results for the anemic Illinois Republican Party. Best of all, the so-called Fair Tax Amendment, would have replaced Illinois’ flat income tax with a graduated one, was resoundingly defeated. A majority of Illinoisans finally ascertained, as I quipped at the time, that if Illinois was given an unlimited budget, politicians here would still exceed it. 

Another sin against democracy committed by Madigan is gerrymandered legislative districts, unintended artwork that would make Jackson Pollock or Pablo Picasso proud. “The state’s legislative map looks like a Rorschach test on steroids,” Robert Reed wrote in 2019 for Chicago Magazine, “with districts of all squiggly sizes and shapes.” With a few exceptions, such as university towns, Republicans dominate downstate Illinois in gubernatorial and presidential races, but there are still plenty of central and Illinois Democratic members of the General Assembly. That is the power of Madigan’s gerrymandering. It also discourages challengers to the status quo; according to the Center Square, last year 44 percent of Illinois legislative races were uncontested. Why run? Because in most districts in Illinois the politicians choose their voters, not the other way around.

Illinoisans would have been better served if there was not a Madigan monoculture in power for years in Springfield.

Groups such as the Better Government Association of Illinois and the League of Women Voters have long called for a Fair Map Amendement, taking away the power of decennial legislative remapping away from the General Assembly and putting a non-partisan panel in charge of the task instead. Twice in the prior decade hundreds of thousands of signatures were collected to put such an amendment on the ballot for voters to decide the issue, twice a lawyer with ties to Madigan successfully sued to keep it off. Last year, for the first time ever, a state Supreme Court justice, Democrat Thomas Kilbride, who represented a downstate district, failed to win retention. His vote against the Fair Map Amendment was one of the issues that galvanized opposition from voters.

Illinois’ Democratic governor, J.B. Pritzker, finally the state’s most powerful politician now that Madigan is no longer speaker, has vowed only to sign only a fair map into law. 

Don’t hold your breath on that one.

Madigan’s successor is Chris Welch, a suburban Chicagoan who was once a member of the Madigan Machine. He’ll be the Land of Lincoln’s first black speaker. But there is already a cloud over him. In 2002 he allegedly slammed the head of his girfriend repeatedly on to a kitchen countertop. Eight years later another woman claimed that she lost her job at a high school because Welch, then a school board president, broke up with her. 

Still there is reason to have at least a glimmer for hope in Illinois. But barring a change in federal law that would allow states to declare bankruptcy, Illinois will remain in its financial sewer for many years. A different amendment to the Illinois constitution, one that will allow pension reform and remove the pension guarantee clause, is desperetely needed. 

John Ruberry regularly blogs in Illinois at Marathon Pundit.

The blame game

Posted: January 12, 2021 by chrisharper in Uncomfortable Truths
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By Christopher Harper

After hundreds—perhaps thousands—of demonstrations over the years in Washington, D.C., how could law enforcement officials have been so poorly prepared for the attack on the U.S. Capitol?

For the most part, that question has gone unanswered as the media and Democrats blame President Trump.

The chaos showed that government agencies had no coordinated plan to defend against an attack on the Capitol.

The U.S. Capitol Police chief, Steven Sund, said he asked his supervisors for the National Guard to be put on alert long before the rioters exploded into the House and Senate. That request was denied.

“If we would have had the National Guard, we could have held them at bay longer, until more officers from our partner agencies could arrive,” said Sund, who, along with other law enforcement officials involved in the mess, has resigned.

Sund said that House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving rebuffed the idea, arguing he was uncomfortable with the “optics” that such a move would bring. Senate Sergeant at Arms Michael Stenger told Sund that he should informally reach out to his contacts at the Guard and ask them to be on alert, Sund added.

Both Irving and Stenger have since resigned from their posts in the fallout of the riots.

Despite numerous postings on social media calling for violent action, various federal agencies apparently failed to take the rhetoric seriously.

Dozens of posts listed assault rifles and other weapons that people claimed they were bringing to Washington. People discussed what types of ammunition would be best to carry and whether medical personnel would be available to treat the injured.

“It was such an embarrassingly bad failure and immediately became an infamous moment in American history,” said R.P. Eddy, a former American counterterrorism official.

Despite all of the red flags, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser sent a letter to top federal and local law enforcement officials that warned against massive police deployments. Bowser had complained loudly about the large presence of riot police during last June’s protests by Black Lives Matter.

All of the requests for support came far too late, resulting in National Guard troops arriving hours after the assault started.

“We rely on Capitol Police and federal law enforcement to provide an assessment of the situation,” Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman said. “And based on that assessment that they had, they believed they had sufficient personnel and did not make a request.”

Ultimately, the rioters are responsible for the mess they created.

Now the politicians are shoveling the blame toward Donald Trump when the House and Senate leaders didn’t like the optics of a sufficient number of cops to handle the rioters.

As a result, the optics got a lot worse.

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