industry

Chris Knight's avatar

Jobs are evaporating.  Manufacturing is disappearing from our shores.  Millions upon millions of undocumented immigrants are flooding across our borders.

And now, at long last, the population of Americans on government food assistance outnumbers that of private sector employees.

This is not sustainable.

From the story at CNS News…

The number of Americans receiving subsidized food assistance from the
federal government has risen to 101 million, representing roughly a
third of the U.S. population.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates
that a total of 101,000,000 people currently participate in at least
one of the 15 food programs offered by the agency, at a cost of $114
billion in fiscal year 2012.

That means the number of Americans receiving food assistance has
surpassed the number of full-time private sector workers in the U.S.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), there were 97,180,000 full-time private sector workers in 2012.

...
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Chris Knight's avatar

Ever since this blog began five years ago, I have very often broken bad on George W. Bush. Because he has consistently proven himself to have been the worst President of the modern era (and quite possibly the worst ever). There have been a few times when I have not hesitated to praise his actions, but those have been few and far between. It will be decades before the damage that he has done to America can be fully repaired, if at all.

But don’t think that The Knight Shift is going to be a safe harbor for pro-Obama sentiment either…

This blog and the admittedly off-kilter guy behind it do not cotton to any ideology. If anyone enters my dojo with the sad notion that I should admire or fear them because they are a self-styled “conservative” or “liberal”, then they are wrong… and I won’t hesitate to land ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

It was reported earlier this week that officials here in Rockingham County, North Carolina have begun looking at the county landfill off N.C. 704 as a rich source of high-quality methane. The plan is to harvest the gas and use it for artistic uses – such as blacksmithing – and even for commercial purposes… such as “creating electricity”. All of this is supposed to help boost the local economy.

Maybe we should turn control of Rockingham County over to this guy. He seems experienced…

“Who run Bartertown?”

“MASTER BLASTER RUNS BARTERTOWN!”

Come to think of it, the way things are going lately it might not be a bad time to pop those Mad Max movies in the DVD player. Might be a good brush-up for how lousy things are getting.

I still can’t believe they’re doing this with the landfill though. I mean, with all the cows in Rockingham County, ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Every politician, corporate executive, and management-type in America who believes that globalism is “a good thing” and that there’s nothing wrong with outsourcing our jobs to China, had better take a damned good hard long look at this photograph…

This is what passes as a high-grade pharmaceutical plant in the village of Xinwangzhuang, in the Juangsu Province of China. The guy is harvesting the mucous membranes from the intestines of dead pigs.

The tissue is then processed to make heparin: a drug widely-used in surgery and kidney dialysis here in the United States and elsewhere.

There have now been 19 deaths and numerous allergic reactions reported because of the drug.

I defy anyone to look at that photo, and still tell me that China is a responsible trading partner or that it’s “sound policy” to entrust it with so much industry that we could be doing far better at ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

It’s bad enough that they have a package sent out two weeks after it was ordered…

…but to waste my valuable time with a “customer service representative” who is talking to me from another country and can not speak discernible English at all, when there are plenty of people in America who could both use a job and would not be an insult to the intelligence of Amazon’s customers as their “outsourced help”, is the final straw....

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Circuit City is laying off 3,400 store associates and replacing them with lower-waged workers. The reason for the layoffs is that the current employees are earning “well above the market-based salary range for their role”.

This is either a pretty bad move by Circuit City, or it signals something wrong with their finances. Or both. If a company has a competent workforce in place already, what’s the point in replacing them with new employees who will need significant training time before they can adequately take over from the previous associates?

And why should the current employees have to suffer for Circuit City’s mistake anyway, if they’re just now realizing that they’ve been paying “well above the market-based salary range” for all this time? Is that really a mistake? Employees who have shown commitment deserve to be compensated for their loyalty. It’s the associates – and not the execs who hardly ...

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