fw - Job Market could be bleak for years

msnbc article on fugazi US job market.

Obama blacklists Progressive Economists

David Sirota editorial & Christopher Hayes editorial detail how Obama has shunned Progressive hires for the economic-related cabinet jobs. It would be great is Obama had named Dean Baker, who is not only Progressive, innovative, but most importantly has the benefit of being correct on calling the Nasdaq bubble in 1999 & housing bubble in 2004.

These Obama economists Larry Summers & Timothy Geithner were incompetent in the 1990s & deregulated financial derives. This action made the housing bubble & 2008 Financial ELE worse. Summers & Geithner also Wall Street Welfare Whores.

On economics, it seems that Obama is a Corporate Welfare Whore Lite, ala Bill Clinton.

I sincerely hope that Obama will prove Sirota, Hayes, & myself wrong.

Chris Hedges "It's Not Going to be OK"

Chris Hedges big-picture editorial about the US economy & state of democracy.

Obama salary limit for bailed out companies

Obama has announced a $500K salary limit for the employees of bailed out companies, including the CEO. Personally, given the Fed Gov's deficit spending, I'd put the limit at $200K, but hey I still support Obama for this effort.

I put on Morning Joe on MSNBC this morning while eating breakfast. This host/douche Joe Scarborough said that this plan is "Marxist" and "we can't get qualified CEOs".

What extreme idiocy from Scardoucheough.

Erin Burnett & Steve Forbes were crying the same river on Meet The Press on Sun Feb-1

The Fed Gov funding the banks is what is "Marxist". If the banks need the bailout money, they need to accept the terms of the US public aka the taxpayers.

The fact that the current bank CXOs are "talented" is in question anyways. If they were so "talented", how did they bankrupt their banks & wreck the broader US economy in the process?

Even if they are talented, where would these CXOs otherwise go for jobs? All the banks are downsizing.

Also, their are probably 1000s of bank executives who could do at worst "as good a job" as the current CEOs, from any of these 3 categories:
1 midlevel managers at the bailed out banks who have a track record of good performance AND were prudent in their risk/reward decision making, not causing Billions in losses for their department

2 CEOs of profitable regional commercial banks or successful not-for-profit credit unions, which unlike their more glamorous investment banking CEO competitors, did not ruin their organizations in the 2008 Financial ELE.

3 CEOs of profitable banks in BRIC-type countries. In India alone, there's probably at least 100 English-speaking & competent bank CEOs that would take the job for $100K, much less $500K. The Feds could allocate a few H1-B visas for them to relocate to the US.

Funny how Wall Street was cheerleading for US nonfinancial corporations' offshore outsourcing for PhD engineers, radiologists, accountants, etc. Because apparently all work skill sets are comodities whose price needs to fall in a "Race To The Bottom", & we should not worry about the effect of this massive US job loss on the US economy. But yet somehow their expertise is some unique Jordan/Federer/Einstein skill set than only NYC investment bankers have? FOH!

Corporate Welfare Whores like Joe Scarborough practice the REAL CLASS WARFARE. Everyone else needs to show extreme competence & ruthlessly compete with globally cheap labor. But the how dare we plebeians suggest the US' 0.1% superrich class of Wall Street execs, douche cable pundits (like Scarborough), etc, have to ACTUALLY COMPETE in an actual global free market! No, we 99.9% plebeians should "bow our heads" (c) Cenk Uyger, & let the 0.1% enjoy Corporate Welfare aka Conservative Nanny State protection, while basic government services for the common folks are getting cut.

An extreme FOH to Joe Scarborough, Erin Burnett & the rest of these unAmerican US Corporate Welfare Whores. They can all EAD.

IBM relocating US employees to BRIC

IBM is relocating US employees to cheap-labor countries such as India, of course getting the much lower salary. Presumably the fugazi choice for many US employees is IBMer in India on a $15K engineer salary, or possibly $15K as Walmart clerk in Rochester, NY.

IBM can EAD.

Judd Gregg same bad behavior as Blago

C&L makes great point that NH Sen now Sec of Commerce Judd Gregg did similar action as disgraced IL Gov Rod Blagojevich aka Blago.

Economics & Revisionist History

A TYT listener blogger, sisco66, has a good take on the RGDs aka Republican Great Depression(s).

need mp3 encoding advice/winLAME

What do you use to rip audio CDs to MP3? Any suggestions or advice?

I had heard that the "LAME encoder" was a better technology to "encode MP3s" than whatever Apple iTunes uses. This open source/free software winlame allows one to use that LAME format.

I downloaded this app & tried it. It seems to work good. I picked
Encoding Quality = High
Quality = 4 (0 = best/big file, 9 = worst/small file)
Variable Bit Rate Mode = Standard

The resulting files sound good to me, but I'm not an audiophile. The albums (1 jazz, 1 electronica, 1 world genre). They were all about 50 minutes & the albums created were about 50 MB in size, with mp3 files of about 150 kbps VBR.

Fiscal Therapy

David Cay Johnston article Fiscal Thearpy, editorial on how to fix the US fugazi economy.