Category: Politics, Religion & Money

Non-Union Jobs

I don’t own an iPod or a MacIntosh computer, but I admire Steve Jobs. He’s made mistakes, of course.

One mistake was hiring John Sculley; a man of limited ability, and zero vision, who successfully maneuvered to have Jobs removed from Apple a short two years after being recruited from Pepsi.

Apple barely survived the incompetence of Sculley. Jobs returned to run the company in 1996, and take on the seemingly impossible challenge of competing against Microsoft. Jobs’ stunning comeback is one of the all-time great business success stories.

The Jobs stock option scandal doesn’t interest me. What does are comments he made recently at an education forum, concerning public school teachers. He doesn’t like unions. He wishes school principals could fire teachers.

“I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way. This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy.”

Michael Dell, who was present, explained succinctly why unions came into existence.

“The employer was treating his employees unfairly and that was not good.”

Thank you, Michael Dell.

Colbert at New York Comic Con

Head’s up, fans of Stephen Colbert and comic books. You are one and the same. Colbert will be at the New York Comic Con this weekend! My buddy Dennis will be there too, although mostly to see Stan Lee. I’ll be right here. Starting work on the taxes. 🙁

Stephen Colbert is the Emmy Award-winning host of Comedy Central’s Colbert Report. He will be at NYCC on behalf of Oni Press in support of his new 5-issue comic book miniseries, Stephen Colbert’s Tek Jansen, which will arrive in stores on March ’07. The series is written by John Layman and Tom Peyer with Jim Massey and illustrated by Scott Chantler with others. It is a full color, 32-page comic book that will retail for $3.99. Colbert will be autographing on Friday, February 23 at 4:30pm.

Big Dig vs. Big Hole

Here in the Boston area, the so-called Big Dig has had more than its share of mismanagement, incompetence and outright fraud. The total price for the project, which is mostly done, is about $14 billion; an amount that has been rightly called an outrage and a scandal. How much of that is due to fraud and waste?

In Iraq the overhead for graft and corruption alone is estimated at $10 billion. Money that’s been skimmed right off the top by contractors, including Dick Cheney’s cronies at Halliburton. We need more outrage.

Audit finds $10 billion in fuzzy spending

Inspectors reviewed one-sixth of $350 billion U.S. has spent on Iraq

Dan Duray, Hearst Newspapers
Friday, February 16, 2007

(02-16) 04:00 PST Washington — More than $10 billion of the money paid to military contractors for Iraq reconstruction and troop support was either excessive or unsupported by documents, including $2.7 billion for contracts held by Halliburton or one of its subsidiaries, Congress was told Thursday.

The three top auditors overseeing work in Iraq told a House committee their review of $57 billion in Iraq contracts found that Defense and State department officials condoned or allowed repeated work delays, bloated expenses and payments for shoddy work or work never done.
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