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alstry (35.76)

DON'T say Alstry didn't Warn YOU!!!!!

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June 23, 2009 – Comments (10)

The city of Sacramento has cut off talks with the fire union - and as many as 68 firefighters will lose their jobs next week as a result.

http://www.sacbee.com/topstories/story/1971509.html

ONE CITY......68 Firefighters!!!!!!

To help balance its budget, California has reduced the state tax credit for dependents.

The change will increase a family's California taxes for 2009 by about $210 per dependent compared with 2008.

A family with one dependent that normally gets a state-tax refund will get back $210 less when they file their 2009 return next year. A family that normally owes money will have to pay $210 more. Multiply that by two or more dependents, and it really adds up.

This may come as a shock to parents who have been too busy shuttling between soccer games and viola lessons to keep up with the state's budget fiasco. The Franchise Tax Board is trying to get the word out, so families can prepare.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/06/23/BUN418BJU3.DTL

Did you hear that little Cappers......PREPARE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am not sure what it will take to convince some of you there is no money.......and if Benny B keeps printing....not only will there be no money.....but whatever money you thought you had will be worthless.

10 Comments – Post Your Own

#1) On June 23, 2009 at 10:35 PM, alstry (35.76) wrote:

This could be good for thousands of jobs!!!!!!!!

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#2) On June 23, 2009 at 10:52 PM, oshiri (< 20) wrote:

Semapi Alstry . . . 

The Guv-a-nator could easily get more money for our state. It's called off shore drilling.  Cal-ee-forn-yah could reap billions in royalties and I wouldn't be paying over $3.00 a gallon (soon to be $4) for gasoline like I am now.

Might vested interests be holding him back, or just economically stupid environmental girly-men?

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#3) On June 23, 2009 at 10:58 PM, alstry (35.76) wrote:

oshi,

There are many solutions for CA....like running it like a profitable business for starters.

A little birdy tells me you might be heading to China......could be exciting.......but stay objective.....I came across this tonight:

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Despite China's reputation as a nation of savers, the central bank said this week that Chinese consumers are increasingly falling behind on their credit-card payments, suggesting a move toward Western-style spending.

China's credit-card debt at least six months overdue rose 133% in the first quarter, though the total overdue debt was still at the relatively modest level of 4.97 billion yuan ($727.7 million), the People's Bank of China was reported as saying in a state-run media report.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/chinese-increasingly-overdue-on-credit-cards

Good luck.

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#4) On June 23, 2009 at 11:06 PM, alstry (35.76) wrote:

YOUR TAX DOLLARS HARD AT WORK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

(MarketWatch) -- Troubled banking giant Citigroup Inc.  intends to raise its employees' base salaries by as much as 50% this year to offset smaller annual bonuses, the New York Times reported Tuesday, citing people with direct knowledge of the plan. The change would mean that most Citigroup employees will make as much money as they did in 2008, the report said. The firm also plans to award millions of new stock options to employees to retain workers and neutralize any drop in stock value, it said.

F....ME!!!!!......WHAT ABOUT THOSE 68 FIREFIGHTERS???

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#5) On June 23, 2009 at 11:10 PM, GenericMike (< 20) wrote:

I don't think anyone would claim alstry didn't warn them. He does it quite often.

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#6) On June 23, 2009 at 11:34 PM, oshiri (< 20) wrote:

Alstrydomous --

Your little bird is correct (for you know all!). I've already started to off load some of my worthless greenbacks for "The People's" money. To me it's six of one, half dozen of another -- the Chinese are moving toward capitalism, while the American are moving toward socialism.  Eventually those lines meet and go further in opposite directions.

I've taken the opportunity in your fabulous missive here to question the logic of The Economist for supporting/encouraging Obama's economic policies. While their editorializing stinks, their hard-wired data, end of magazine charts are undeniable. It even makes one want to take a flyer on Dollars vs. Yuan speculation when you look at their "Big Mac index" http://www.economist.com/markets/indicators/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13055650

And it doesn't hurt that I already have a condo available for my escape.

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#7) On June 23, 2009 at 11:53 PM, checklist34 (99.79) wrote:

ahh, you perhaps miss one true "green shoot" that might come out of a prolonged and severe economic downturn in the US.

And that would be more and more people in more and more industries telling unions to go take a hike.

And that would result in more and more domestic businesses - important ones like manufacturing - actually being able to compete and make money.

and that, in the long run, would be good.  :)

Unions in no small part are responsible for the decline in american manufacturing.  Toyota can hire workers that care for $15-20 an hour, GM gets workers that hate GM, hate their jobs, have contempt for everything under the sun and the worst attitude I can even imagine being possible for 3 or 4x as much.  As a result every Cadillac has to have a few thousand dollars less stuff in it than any lexus, etc.  

Two of my very best friends (and I have few friends I'd really call "good" friends) have found career employment in unions.  A third person I know very well but simply cannot make myself call a good friend is also in a union. 

One railroad, one teamsters, one UAW.  

The railroad guy talks endlessly about how the railroad screws the workers, how rich the railroad is, how much money they make, quoting figures 5-10x higher than reality (BTW, railraods are publicly traded, we can look this up), griping about how crappy management is, whining endlessly.  All while bein gpaid far above average wages in the US for a job requiring no education, where he has far, far, far less risk related to being laid off or fired than anybody else.  He is paid much more and faces much less risk, yet his attitude towards his employer is severely negative.

The UAW guy can't even have a beer without launching into a speech about how rich the car makers are, how much the execs make, how screwed the workers are.  (see a theme building here?).  If you bring up the fact that the car makers are going broke and his wages are about 4x more than the workers at the japanese plants in the US he has some bizzaro world speech about how they're making money and he doesn't care what he says, and he's getting screwed and he doesn't care what anybody says.

The Teamsters guy, same story.  whines about how hard he works, about how the suits get all the money.

I've talked personally to 6 people who have described cases of starting work at a union factory and being lectured, hated, yelled at, or threatened to work LESS hard lest they make everybody else look bad.  One was a Case IH plant, two were UAW, etc.  

Unions are the freaking antichrist, absolutely destructive to the wealth and success of America at large, and I honestly...

and I love cars.  I love cars.  And I love GM cars (corvettes and caddy's and hummers and the new pickups).  I've test driven 100's of cars in the last 4 years and I simply think that some of GMs vehicles are just the most itneresting enjoyable things on the road.  Its not that I don't like other cars or that I have some heinous bigotry towards imports...  

But I don't konw if I can continue to patronize GM after the UAW is handed, for pure political payback, so much.  After contract law and any and all sense of reason is violated to pay the union - who's anti-work-ethic and greed helped destroy GM every single bit as much as mis-management - gets paid for their heinous deeds.

Unions are, quite literally, the greediest most self-serving things in our society.  The hwole goal is to get paid more for doing less, the whole goal is destruction of productivity and industry.  There just isn't any way to argue around that.

The "poor put-upon working man just needs a union to help get his" argument hardly holds water in light of how radical the pay scale for union vs non union workers is, and how severely bad the attitude of union -vs- non usion workers is.  

Nobody ever mentions it, but a union is literally an entity with no function other than greed, no purpose other than getting more for its members, often at the expense of others and society at large.

my old business attended trade shows where, for example, we would be trying to stand up a display and ask someone standing there to lend a hand and get a reply like "i'm in the electric union, i won't help with that you have to find someone in the XXX union"  sheesh!

And, last, I'll share a story about unions that struck pretty close to home.  Just after my long-time business partner and I sold our businesses last fall (in part to buy into this market crash, long story) I was out with a guy who worked for us (EVERY employee we ever had was paid more than they'd ever made before, BTW) to play darts.

He was buddies with a bunch of Teamsters union folks.  We played darts, we had some fun.  at 11 I overheard the table of Teamsters telling the waitress to put their beer on my tab.  I asked "WTF is going on here?", the waitress explained they had been putting beers on my tab all night.  I said "@#^%$^ that, I didn't buy anybody a beer but J".  They didn't apolgozie for TRYING TO STEAL FROM SOMEONE, they didn't express any level of remorse or regret, they started screaming at me that I SHOULD pay for the drinks, I have money after all, why should they pay for beres when I have money.  

Thats how bad the attitude is with unions.  The "everybody owes me, I owe nothing back" attitude is to the point where they think that stealing from others is ok.  As long as those others have money.  

In the course of starting (and frequently failing) many businesses over the last 12 years I have heard probably a dozen stories about UAW plants.  People on the clock playing cards, refusing to work, sleeping on the job, and more.  

A really severe mess, of Alstryistic proportions, would over the long term strengthen the US.  One part of that is it would quite possibly bring the reign of terror that unions have held over industry in the US to an end.  

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#8) On June 23, 2009 at 11:57 PM, alstry (35.76) wrote:

check,

You are definitely dealing with part of the problem that will be resolved when this turns eventually. 

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#9) On June 24, 2009 at 12:04 AM, oshiri (< 20) wrote:

Sounds like Alsty's 9/09?

Wall St Boss: Prepare For Another Downturn
Sky News --10:12pm UK, Tuesday June 23, 2009

The chief executive of Wall Street brokers Cantor Fitzgerald tells Sky News we're in a W-shaped recession which could last for the next decade.

In an interview with Sky's business presenter Anna Jones, Shawn Matthews said: "The underpinnings of the economy are still pretty poor.

"I think we're going to be through a series of up and down 'Ws' for the next five or 10 years so this is a long-term problem not a short-term issue."

A W-shaped recession describes a double-dipped downturn, or bear market, where the economy hits bottom, rallies, and then sinks back once more before finally going into recovery.

Mr Matthews explained recent rallies in the US and European markets, which have been driven by an increase in the supply of money, will be dragged down once again by the amount of debt dominating the economic system.

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#10) On June 24, 2009 at 12:44 AM, checklist34 (99.79) wrote:

that turn, alstry, however painful in the short to intermediate term, would help usin the long run.

breaking the back of teh union tyranny would be a phenomenal thing...

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