After casting her ballot for Barack Obama, Amanda Jones said simply, "I feel good about voting for him." Ms. Jones, of Cedar Creek, Texas (a town just south of Austin), is African-American, and what gives her vote some historic punch is that she's 109 years old. Her father was a slave. Her mother was born right after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. She's been through it all--Jim Crow segregation, women's suffrage, the Great Depression, the poll tax, FDR, the civil-rights movement, desegregation, 13 years of George W (five as guv, eight as prez), and now: Barack Obama. This last change fills her with joy, she says.
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Parting is such sweet sorrow
It seems that the CEOs of downsizing companies are getting jittery about how stock market analysts will take the firings that are once again all the rage in corporate America. The fear is that Wall Street will see mass layoffs as a sign of a sick company, thus knocking down the company's stock price, which in turn would whack the CEO's paycheck.
Can't have that! So, corporate lawyers and PR flacks are spending countless hours crafting press releases that go through linguistic convolutions to avoid saying the obvious: "Global Bloodsucker Inc. today fired skillions of its employees in order to prop up its profits and cover for management blunders."
Instead, the corporate spin doctors put yellow smiley faces on the bad news. For example, Procter & Gamble didn't recently fire 9,600 folks—it announced an "Overall Plan to Restore Competitiveness and Growth." Never mind that 9,600 souls will not be part of that "growth." Likewise, when KeyCorp offed 3,000 workers, its press release was headlined: "KeyCorp Preparing for New Opportu-nities, Announces Efficiency Initiatives." Those 3,000 fired human beings presumably can find their "New Opportunities" elsewhere. Or not.
First prize for Orwellian obfuscation, however, goes to the Internet giant Cisco Systems, which recently whacked 3,000 jobs. Rather than refer to them as firings, Cisco gaily chirped that these people were part of the company's "involuntary normal attrition."