Free Republic

The real news in this story probably isn’t the subject of the Ex-Im Bank (which has some Republicans sneaking around with Democrats in an effort to reopen it) or even General Electric. This is a case study in how the media reports on relatively wonky subjects in an effort to bend public opinion in a progressive direction. In a very lengthy article at the New York Times we learn about the sad closing of yet another GE plant, this one located in Waukesha, Wisconsin. They manufacture huge industrial engines there which can sell for more than a million dollars.The...

GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump claimed credit Sunday for Ford Motor Company's plans to move a production plant from Mexico to Ohio. Trump has been calling out Ford during his campaign, saying the automaker plans to move jobs from Michigan to Mexico, but Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who also is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, says the move from Mexico to Ohio had nothing to Trump's demands. "The truth is that Ford began moving jobs back to Ohio four years ago under the leadership of Governor John Kasich," the governor's campaign said in a statement to the press on Sunday...

Gravity Payments, that Seattle credit-card-payments processing company that said all its employees would earn at least $70,000 in three years, is defying the doomsayers. Revenue is growing at twice the rate it was before Chief Executive Dan Price made his announcement this spring, according to a report on Inc.com. Profits have doubled. Customer retention is up, despite some who left because they disagreed with the decision or feared service would suffer. (Price said he’d make up the extra cost by cutting his own $1.1 million pay.) Barely any employees have left — although some outsiders, including some commenting on a...

Friday, October 23, 2015 Akin: Illinois ranks high for creating lawsuits, not jobs By Travis Akin - The University of Illinois football team is struggling once again this year, mired at the bottom of the Big Ten and near the bottom of numerous national rankings. Similarly, the State of Illinois is stuck near the bottom of another set of rankings, only these rankings reflect not just lost games but lost jobs and thus are important to every person living in Illinois. These important but depressing rankings come from a new national study that confirms Illinois’ status as a lawsuit haven,...

Qatar Airways chief executive Akbar al-Baker said Thursday that his company is helping to create jobs in the US despite an ongoing war of words between Gulf and American carriers. Baker, speaking in Doha, also said he trusted American regulators to put passengers’ interests first as part of their investigation into the funding of the Gulf carriers. U.S. carriers have launched a complaint that Qatar Airways, Etihad and Emirates break the so-called “Open-Skies” agreement through receiving government subsidies.

There are currently 6.5 million more students in the U.S. with bachelor's degrees than there are jobs available that require such degrees, including jobs expected to be created by 2022, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), but the Obama administration is still expanding programs to encourage even more foreign students to stay in the U.S. and work after graduation. There were 35,632,000 Americans age 25-64 with bachelor's degrees in 2014. If you include people age 20-24 and 65 years and older, the number grows to 45,176,000, according to the BLS statistics, reported The Washington Free Beacon....

Halliburton chopped another 4,000 jobs worldwide during the third quarter as oil companies continue to idle rigs and throttle activity, and will consider further reductions if business doesn’t improve, the Houston-based oil field services company said Monday. The reductions brings the total number of job losses across the company to 18,000, or 21 percent of Halliburton’s global workforce. “These are always tough decisions affecting great people, but they are simply decisions we have to make,” President Jeff Miller said. Included in that reduction, Halliburton slashed an entire level of management connected to a service line, but provided no additional details...

ERWIN — Once Northeast Tennessee’s largest railroad hub, Erwin is losing a significant part of its economic history as CSX Railroad plans to reduce its operations here, affecting some 300 jobs, as a result of less reliance on coal in the nation. Many of the changes were effective today, as facilities were closed. In a statement issued this morning, Jacksonville, Florida-based CSX Corp. said its plans include closing a locomotive service center, project shop and car shop, and eliminating switching operations at the Erwin yard. Approximately 300 CSX contract and management employees who work at the facilities and in support...

One month ago, when the JOLTS data showed the highest number of job openings in history, rising by a near record 430,000 to 5.8 million vacant positions, most speculated that this data - considered to be Janet Yellen's favorite indicator of slack in the labor market now that the unemployment rate has become utterly unreliable due to the 94 million Americans out of the labor force - had sealed the fate of a September rate hike. It did not, as instead the Fed decided to shift to its 4th mandate (the 3rd being the stock market), namely the "global...

Thanks in part to advances like email, Facebook, and Twitter, mail carriers will be all but obsolete in the not-so-distant future. By 2022, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a 28% decline in postal-service jobs, totaling around 139,100 fewer positions. Mail carriers aren't the only ones whose jobs are disappearing. Technology and market shifts have affected a wide range of fields. Based on the BLS's occupational outlook data, here are 15 American jobs that are on their way out. 1. Printing worker According to the BLS, printing workers inspect random samples during print runs to identify problems and make...

Lisa Belkin at Yahoo politics looks back at Donald Trump’s business career and discovers he has a history of hiring and promoting women.

The yawning gap between job cuts (surging most since 2009) and initial jobless claims (hovering near 42 year lows) continues to grow as initial jobless claims collapse 7k this week to 255k - the lowest since 1973. Bear in mind, Goldman's explanation that jobless claims are useless in this part of the business cycle..."this does not signal a booming labor market." Charts: BloombergBut as Goldman Sachs confirms... "this does not represent a booming labor market"Although payroll employment growth has slowed in recent months, initial claims for unemployment insurance benefits remain very low. The four-week moving average of initial claims has...

A new report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the personal income of Michigan residents grew 3.7 percent between the second quarter of 2014 and the second quarter of 2015. Even more impressive, from 2012 through the second quarter of 2015 personal income here has increased by 9.2 percent here (from $382 billion to $417 billion). Nationwide, income growth during this same span was 8.3 percent. Michigan became a right-to-work state in December of 2012. The law became effective in March 2013. ForTheRecord says: When Michigan’s right-to-work law was enacted at the end of 2012, unions attacked...

Thanks to Michael Ashcroft’s biography of David Cameron, we know more than we want to about the goings on in the Piers Gaveston Society at Oxford in the 80s. At the other end of the political spectrum there would, of course, have been activist student clubs. Students have always made their own experiences. These days, though, things are different. While students once went to university to get a higher education, now they go to be given an “experience” by that university. The student experience is made for the student. Universities, jittery about how they will score in the national student...

What are some real world examples of gender equality benefiting the economy? There are four main ways in which gender equality contributes to growth. The first is simply the increase in the number of people who are economically engaged, whether as workers or business owners. A significant proportion of the economic growth experienced in the US and in Europe during the 20th century was caused by the entry of women into the labor force. The second is the improved efficiency in resource use. Today, there are more women in higher education than men, both in Europe and the US. If...

Job cuts have already surpassed  last year's total, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas with the highest annual total since 2009, when nearly 1.3 million layoffs were announced at the tail-end of the recession... so how does the government explain the fact that initial jobless claims have once again re-tumbled back to close to 42-year lows... Initial claims dropped 13k this week to 263k - just shy of the lowest levels sicne 1973... As Job cuts soar... One of these is lying...   The third quarter ended with a surge in job cuts, as U.S.-based employers announced plans to shed 58,877 in...

President Barack Obama’s deputies are quietly hacking a gap through immigration regulations to allow them to import hundreds of thousands of university-trained foreign workers for jobs sought by American college grads. “They’re bending immigration law until it almost breaks,” says Ian Smith, a lawyer at the Immigration Reform Law Institute. The Obama-hack, he added, should be fixed by Congress or a judge The regulatory hack is part of Obama’s broad immigration-boosting alliance with Fortune 500 Companies and the GOP’s establishment. In 2013 and 2014, most — but not all — of his prior amnesty and immigration plans were blocked by...

The federal government uses very carefully manipulated numbers to cover up the crushing economic depression that is going on in this nation. For the month of September, the federal government told us that 142,000 jobs were added to the economy. If that was actually true, that would barely be enough to keep up with population growth. Sadly, the truth is that the real numbers were actually far worse than that. The unadjusted numbers show that the U.S. economy actually lost 248,000 jobs in September and the government added more than a million Americans to the “not in the labor force”...

If we're going to dig our way out of what lies ahead, we need people who can work hard and start/operate new businesses.Simply put, job growth is not keeping pace with population growth--specifically, the growth of the labor force which is generally defined as the population between the ages of 18 and 64.So what happens to the economy as millions of people never acquire the habits of hard work or lose them due to chronic joblessness?Yesterday I presented data on not in the labor force, which is defined as "persons aged 16 years and older in the civilian noninstitutional population...

The TPP Trade Deal is looming closer to becoming a finalized reality. Current negotiations center around Auto Manufacturing, and Japanese negotiators have constructed an outline that would devastate what remains of the U.S. Auto industry. Unfortunately the K-Street lobbyists, funded by Wall Street through the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have already greased the legislative skids to all but guarantee the elimination of thousands of jobs. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue gave Senators $18 million in bribe money to insure passage. The TPP deal encompasses approximately 40% of total global manufacturing. Trillions of dollars are at stake.