NY Times To Lay Off/Eliminate 7.5% Of Newsroom Staff - How Come Opinion Page Columnists Are Immune From Cuts?

From the NY Times:

The New York Times plans to eliminate about 100 newsroom jobs, as well as a smaller number of positions from its editorial and business operations, offering buyouts and resorting to layoffs if enough people do not leave voluntarily, the newspaper announced on Wednesday. 

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the newspaper’s publisher, and Mark Thompson, its chief executive, said that in addition to the job cuts, NYT Opinion, a new mobile app dedicated to opinion content, was shutting down because it was not attracting enough subscribers.

The reductions, they said, were intended to safeguard the newspaper’s long-term profitability.

“The job losses are necessary to control our costs and to allow us to continue to invest in the digital future of The New York Times, but we know that they will be painful both for the individuals affected and for their colleagues,” the note said.

...

 

The Times has made cuts to its newsroom staff several times over the last six years. The paper eliminated 100 newsroom jobs in 2008, another 100 in 2009, and 30 more senior newsroom jobs at the beginning of last year.

It's interesting to me that every time layoffs are announced, the high paid columnists on the opinion pages are never part of the cuts.

How much are Brooks, Friedman, Dowd, and Kristoff making between them?

I bet you could save a couple of newsroom jobs by sending just one of them packing.

But it's never the high-priced neo-liberal whores on the opinion pages who get shown the door when cuts get announced.

How come that is?

Not saying I want to see the columnists lose their jobs (unlike some of those same columnists, who love the idea of firing teachers), but if it's between newsroom staff who are actually working for a living and these columnists who parrot neo-liberal talking points for a living, I'd rather see the columnists go.

Oh, and just to show you how warm and fuzzy capitalism is, the Times stock was up nearly 10% after the cutbacks were announced:

The announcements were welcomed by investors, with the company’s stock closing at $12.30, up $1.08, or 9.6 percent, after closing Tuesday at a 52-week low.

Lay people off, stock goes up.

The American Dream in a nutshell.

Obama Approval Hits Lowest Point

David Broder, David Brooks and the rest of the Washington Village Elite think he had a great week reneging on a campaign promise to end the Bush tax cuts for rich people, but the rest of America doesn't seem to think so:

President Barack Obama's approval ratings have sunk to the lowest level of his presidency, so low that he'd lose the White House to Republican Mitt Romney if the election were held today, according to a new McClatchy-Marist poll.

The biggest reason for Obama's fall: a sharp drop in approval among Democrats and liberals, apparently unhappy with his moves toward the center since he led the party to landslide losses in November's midterm elections. At the same time, he's gained nothing among independents.

"He's having the worst of both worlds right now," said Lee Miringoff, the director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion at Marist College in New York, which conducted the national survey.

"As he moves to the center, he's not picking up support among independents and he's having some fall-off among his base. If his strategy is to gain independents and keep the Democrats in tow, it isn't working so far."

The poll was taken from Dec. 2 through Wednesday, as the president proposed a two-year freeze on federal civilian workers' pay and cut a deal with congressional Republicans to extend expiring tax cuts — even those for the wealthy, which he'd opposed.

Overall, just 42 percent of registered voters approve of how he's doing his job, while 50 percent disapprove.

Obama's standing among Democrats dropped from a month ago, with his approval rating falling to 74 percent from 83 percent, and his disapproval rating almost doubling, from 11 percent to 21 percent.

Among liberals, his approval rating dropped from 78 percent to 69 percent and his disapproval rating jumped from 14 percent to 22 percent.

His position among independents remained virtually the same, with 39 percent approving and 52 percent disapproving. A month ago, it was 38-54.

The president's continued failure to rally independents could ruin his bid for re-election. A hypothetical 2012 matchup showed him getting the support of 44 percent of registered voters and Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, getting 46 percent.

This president does NOT have the same political skills or reputation Clinton had.

Obama can try and emulate the Clinton triangulation strategy of keeping liberals and traditional Dems in the fold while appealing to centrists and independents by moving more to the center.

But I doubt he can pull it off.

A) Many centrists and independents think he is "liberal" and he doesn't help himself when he makes these centrist sell-out moves like the Bush tax cut agreements while denigrating both the agreement and the people he made the agreement with.

B) Many liberals now see him as as corporate sell-out.

I know I have long been off the "Change We Can Believe In" Express, but many Dems and liberals who have long been apologizing for the previous Obama sell-outs - like TALF or Geithner/Summers or the failure to push for a public option in the HCR bill or the promoting a 40% excise tax to fund HCR over a millionaire's tax or the disastrous HAMP mortgage relief program - are really pissed off by this Bush tax cut extension agreement.

Maybe Obama is skilled enough to bring pissed off Dems and liberals back into the fold while attracting some independents to support him in 2012.

But I have yet to see the kind of political skills he would need to bring that off from him or anybody in his administration.

So maybe he'll get votes from the 42% who still approve of him, and maybe he'll get votes from David Broder and David Brooks and the rest of the Village Eliters.

But winning 42% overall in an election isn't gong to get him any prizes, not unless a third party candidate runs and takes a large enough number of votes from a Republican candidate to make that enough to win.

David Brooks Says Rich People Work Harder Than The Rest of Us

You can read Bobo's Rich People Suck-Off here.

Matt Taibbi calls Bobo on his bullshit here.

I had to read this thing twice before it registered that Brooks was actually saying that he was rooting for the rich against the poor. If he keeps this up, he’s going to make his way into the Guinness Book for having extended his tongue at least a foot and a half farther up the ass of the Times’s Upper East Side readership than any previous pundit in journalistic history. But then you come to this last line of his, in which he claims that “for the first time in history, rich people work longer hours than middle class or poor people,” and you find yourself almost speechless.

I would give just about anything to sit David Brooks down in front of some single mother somewhere who’s pulling two shitty minimum-wage jobs just to be able to afford a pair of $19 Mossimo sneakers at Target for her kid, and have him tell her, with a straight face, that her main problem is that she doesn’t work as hard as Jamie Dimon.

Only a person who has never actually held a real job could say something like this. There is, of course, a huge difference between working 80 hours a week in a profession that you love and which promises you vast financial rewards, and working 80 hours a week digging ditches for a septic-tank company, or listening to impatient assholes scream at you at some airport ticket counter all day long, or even teaching disinterested, uncontrollable kids in some crappy school district with metal detectors on every door.

Most of the work in this world completely sucks balls and the only reward most people get for their work is just barely enough money to survive, if that. The 95% of people out there who spend all day long shoveling the dogshit of life for subsistence wages are basically keeping things running just well enough so that David Brooks, me and the rest of that lucky 5% of mostly college-educated yuppies can live embarrassingly rewarding and interesting lives in which society throws gobs of money at us for pushing ideas around on paper (frequently, not even good ideas) and taking mutual-admiration-society business lunches in London and Paris and Las Vegas with our overpaid peers.

You can see where a pundit who works so hard to propagate the mythification of rich people and how "hard" they work would also push an education deform agenda that forces working class kids to spend 60 hours/6 days a week and 48 weeks a year in school.

Heck, it's just the kind of long hours and hard work rich people already do.

We're just socializing these kids to work as long and hard as their overlords in the hopes that some day they will be part of that class.

Uh, huh.

Never mind the advantages of access, privilege, connections, nepotism and cronyism rich people enjoy that allow people like Chuck Prince or Stan O'Neal or Bob Nardelli or Carley Fiorina or other CEO's who drive their companies into the ground the opportunity to parachute out with huge severance packages and then work in industry again (even though all the "data" and "evidence" needed is available to show just how stupid and incompetent these people are.)

Hell, Fiorina is running for Senate even after nearly driving HP into the ground and being forced to resign from her position as CEO.

If there were any justice in the world, she would be slogging some minimum wage job somewhere instead of running for Senate.

Nardelli tried his best to destroy Home Depot when he was CEO, received a golden parachute when he left of $250 million and then went on to drive Chrysler to bankruptcy.

How much you want to bet he gets some board positions even with his track record of failure wherever he goes?

Tell us, Bobo, is that from all the hard work and long hours Fiorina and Nardelli put in or is it just because people of privilege continue to get advantages the rest of us don't?

For the above column he wrote with Gail Collins (another idiot who write the most inane drivel you've ever seen) Bobo Brooks wins the Fred Dicker of The Day award for the month.

What a Dicker.

UPDATE: I should add that even "successful" CEO's like Jamie Dimon of Chase and Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman are "successful" because they had access to people in the corridors of power, were "successful" at lobbying those people for an AIG bailout and made sure that AIG's counterparties were paid 100 cents to the $1 for the derivatives crap deals they had between them.

Bobo of course would say Dimon and Blankfein work harder than everybody else.

President Obama would say the same (actually he has.)

I would say they just steal better than everybody else - they're so good at their cons that they have their marks saying "Thank you, would you like some more?" after Dimon and Blankfein rob them blind.