Elizabeth Warren: America Without a Middle Class. Can you imagine an America without a strong middle class? If you can, would it still be America as we know it? Today, one in five Americans is unemployed, underemployed or just plain out of work. One in nine families can't make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans is on food stamps. More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month.
Families have survived the ups and downs of economic booms and busts for a long time, but the fall-behind during the busts has gotten worse while the surge-ahead during the booms has stalled out. The crisis facing the middle class started more than a generation ago. But core expenses kept going up. To cope, millions of families put a second parent into the workforce. Through it all, families never asked for a handout from anyone, especially Washington.
The contrast with the big banks could not be sharper. Families are ready for change. China Holds Firm on Major Issues in Obama’s Visit. The Management Myth - The Atlantic (June 2006) During the seven years that I worked as a management consultant, I spent a lot of time trying to look older than I was. I became pretty good at furrowing my brow and putting on somber expressions. Those who saw through my disguise assumed I made up for my youth with a fabulous education in management. They were wrong about that. I don’t have an M.B.A. I have a doctoral degree in philosophy—nineteenth-century German philosophy, to be precise. Before I took a job telling managers of large corporations things that they arguably should have known already, my work experience was limited to part-time gigs tutoring surly undergraduates in the ways of Hegel and Nietzsche and to a handful of summer jobs, mostly in the less appetizing ends of the fast-food industry.
The strange thing about my utter lack of education in management was that it didn’t seem to matter. After I left the consulting business, in a reversal of the usual order of things, I decided to check out the management literature. Microsoft's Long, Slow Decline. Thursday, 30 July 2009 There were two interesting Windows-related news stories last week. First, Joe Wilcox’s story on a report from NPD claiming that 91 percent of $1,000-and-higher retail computer sales now go to Apple. Second, Microsoft’s quarterly financial results, in which revenue fell $1 billion short of projections and declined 17 percent year-over-year. To be clear, Microsoft remains a very profitable company.
However, they have never before reported year-over-year declines like this, nor fallen so short of projected earnings. What is particularly alarming about Microsoft’s numbers is that revenue from its Windows PC division suffered an even greater year-over-year revenue decline than the company as a whole: 29 percent. But Microsoft’s operating system business is not new, and it has never been particularly cyclical. Windows is at the core of everything Microsoft does that makes money. One argument is that the fault lies with the global economy, not Microsoft itself. Some Joke. America's 25 Fastest-Growing Tech Companies - Forbes.com. ESAN - Universidad ESAN.