The Omnipotent Poobah Speaks!

Panty purveyor Hanes announced deep job cuts this week. There’s nothing surprising about that, many companies shutter plants and abandon communities and employees for sweatshops overseas. The empty streets in dozens of North Carolina and New England mill towns is testament to it. What is different this time is where Hanes is making the cuts.

Of the 5,300 redundancies (man, those Brits sure use classy words, don’t they?), only a handful will come from the US and Canada. The rest are from such “high cost” locations as the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. At the same time, Hanes will hire 3,000 workers at new plants in Central America and Asia. In other words, Hanes is abandoning sweatshops in Third World countries for sweatier shops elsewhere.

It’s enough to make you want to go commando.

You Suck and We’re Moving
Whenever companies break the news about layoffs, employees hear lots of management talk about staying competitive and saving jobs - a particularly odd explanation when employees are coping with the loss of many close friends and colleagues. Sometimes they even throw in an admonition about moving jobs to locations where product quality is higher, or in other words, telling the surviving employees, “You suck and we’re moving your jobs to someplace less sucky.”

Oddly, these “high quality” plants are inevitably in places with some of the lowest standards of living on the planet. Imagine the coincidence.

As companies stalk lower costs like a canned hunt on a Texas ranch, they conveniently forget their tactics will come back to bite them in the ass. In fact, the biting has already begun.

Made in Japan
Not so many years ago, “Made in Japan” was synonymous with “cheap crap”. As production migrated there from the US, Japanese wages grew into a rising tide of prosperity. As they did, Japanese managers made the same short-sighted decisions as their US counterparts. Expensive Japanese production begat cheaper Korean, Indonesian, and Singaporan production. As wages in those countries rise, their production is moving to places like India where wages are nearing the tipping point of sending their jobs to Chinese prison labor or African countries where stick-thin people will make boxers and tighty-whities for not much more than a ladle of soupy gruel and a hunk of stale bread. America’s homeless couldn’t compete in a market like that.

Companies that talk about higher quality are just as disingenuous. Business leaders care little about quality. That’s because quality no longer means building a better mousetrap. It means making products that only suck marginally less than your competitors. Quality talk is twaddle. Wage talk is king.

Somali Underwear
So in the end, workers around the world watch helplessly as their jobs bounce from one cheap crap factory to another and their livelihoods dry up and prevent them from affording even Somali-made underwear. While this may seem like a viable business strategy now, it’s a pretty stupid long-term strategy.

It’s a strategy where companies not only kill the goose that laid the golden egg, but then roast it, gorge on it, and boil the bones for that soupy gruel so popular in African diets.

Tech Tags: business globalization corporatization hanesbrands omnipotent+poobah

Pundits scoring Tuesday’s Ann Coulter/Liz Edwards dust-up have generally declared Liz the winner, despite Coulter’s obviously impassioned and no-nonsense language. In top-form, Coulter defended herself against Liz’s tired accusations that calling John Edwards a “faggot” and maintaining that he should be assassinated is anything more than normal rough and tumble politics. After all, the Edwards campaign used Coulter’s “faggot” remarks to bolster their campaign war chest with $300,000 worth of contributions after portraying Coulter’s comments completely out of context - a direct smear of Coulter’s reputation. It’s obviously hypocritical of Edwards to complain about personal attacks when she is the one employing those tactics and benefits from doing so to boot.

Coulter Well Respected
Coulter, widely respected in the conservative movement, has been known to ruffle feathers before. She previously pointed out that ultra-left wing liberals are traitors and cretins sucking the life out of our solidly conservative society. Her comments last year about widows of 9/11 victims using their victimhood to advance a partisan, liberal agenda was another example of how the moonbat media uses their power against her. Some have even suggested - rightfully - that Coulter’s recent legal troubles over innocently voting in the wrong district are nothing more than another traitorous attempt to silence her.

What the left wingers fail to realize is that conservative voices like Coulter’s, Sean Hannity’s, and Glen Beck’s are the last bastions of common sense over the liberals’ complete disregard for good old-fashioned American values. Every day I wake up thinking how glad I am to be an American who stays free through the efforts of strong broadcasters like Rush Limbaugh and my favorite, Bill O’Reilly. Traitors like Edwards and the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart are just two of the many examples of extreme liberalism the good folks like Coulter and O’Reilly defend against.

Praise the Lord
If not for these courageous defenders of our freedom, we’d be running away from Iraq with our national tail between our legs and slaughtering millions of babies courtesy of unrestricted abortions. Liberals just don’t seem to understand that abortions and the terrorists are linked. Abort all of our unborn children and soon the country will be entirely too weak to defend against the hoards of Islamofascists and illegal immigrants. When that happens, all those wigged out anti-Second Amendment types will be changing their tune and looking to become armed to the teeth like any true American. There is no higher calling than defending our country against Islamic renegades.

Praise the Lord.

…You know, now that I’ve looked at this from Ann’s position it sounds just as stupid as it does from Elizabeth’s position. She is a crapweasel, isn’t she?

Tech Tags: politics ann+coulter elizabeth+edwards omnipotent+poobah

The Bush administration has a novel approach to managing bad news like Iraq. When things get hot in the Baghdad kitchen we’re suddenly treated to a performance of the Keystone Cops.

Cirque Du Gonzo
Recently, Cirque du Gonzo pushed Iraq off the front page by performing his famous amnesiac clown act. He thrilled spectators with his pratfalls and unbelievable faux pas. “Well Senator, I didn’t fire those attorneys for political reasons. Except for the ones I did fire for political reasons, but that was only a mistake made by my second in command. Or, maybe the third in command, or whoever still hasn’t gotten immunity. I’m very unclear on those details sir. I simply can NOT be expected to know everything.”

When audiences began to get antsy with the Sadsack Gonzo, the administration pulled out the burleque stick and yanked the dunderhead off stage.

The Penquin Stikes
The latest pratfalls are courtesy of Dick Cheney. Nattily dressed as Burgess Meredith’s Penguin to Adam West’s Batman - wah, wah, wah - he fights like a cartoon henchman. Boff! Socko! Pow! “I’m not in the executive. Well, I am when I need executive privilege. But other than that, I’m the King baby!”

Yeah, tell that to the subpoenas headed your way.

I Quit!
Of course, there are new acts waiting in the wings. Former Environmental Poison Administrator, Christie Todd Whitman, now claims she quit over Cheney’s interference. Apparently, waging double useless wars, dismantling the military, and shredding the first amendment didn’t whet is voracious appetite for stomping mining, logging, and oil drilling rules. He follows the old Wyoming rule of thumb, “Earth first! We’ll mine the other planets later!”

If Christie doesn’t catch on, there are other options. Karl Rove is vulnerable on several fronts, there are at least three new Congressional scandals a day, and now it turns out the Brownie might actually have done a “heckuva job” - FEMA predicted the Big Easy disaster before it happened.

For an Imbecile…
With all the hubbub on stage, the Decider just keeps on decidin’ and the war stays in the background.

You know, for an imbecile, he makes a mighty fine magician.

Imagine that.

Tech Tags: politics bush cheney gonzales omnipotent+poobah