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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The lowdown gooberhead award
It's time for another Gooberhead Award, presented periodically to someone in the news whose mouth is running 100 miles an hour . . . but whose brain is not quite in gear.
This month's prize goes to management consultant Bruce Tulgan, who penned a happy piece in the New York Times explaining that downsizing is good for you!
Goodness knows, there is plenty of downsizing taking place for Tulgan to cheer about. From high-tech to low-tech, corporations are merrily tossing thousands of workers out the door. In January alone, Whirlpool spun 6,000 workers out of its system, Sara Lee cooked 7,000 employees, J.C. Penney closed 50 stores and shipped out untold thousands of workers, Lucent Technologies zapped 16,000, and DaimlerChrysler rolled out 26,000 workers.
Mr. Tulgan assures us, however, that we should not lose a wink of sleep over any of this, for job cuts are an excellent way to keep Wall Street booming. The new global economy, he's thrilled to tell us, has "demolished job security forever," and the labor market has "transformed itself" from being static to being fluid.
What a Goober. The labor market did not transform itself, rather it was transformed by greedhead CEOs and their Washington puppets. As for labor-market fluidity, all that means for workers is "Adios, chump."