We as spiritual beings or souls come to earth in order to experience the human condition. This includes the good and the bad scenarios of this world. Our world is a duality planet and no amount of love or grace will eliminate evil or nastiness. We will return again and again until we have pierced the illusions of this density. The purpose of human life is to awaken to universal truth. This also means that we must awaken to the lies and deceit mankind is subjected to. To pierce the third density illusion is a must in order to remove ourselves from the wheel of human existences. Love is the Answer by means of Knowledge and Awareness!

The Republican layoff conspiracy 
By Kevin J. Shay  --  Online Journal Contributing Writer 
 
February 21, 2002—Lost in the excitement last year over Enron and the 
purported War on Terrorism was this fact: 2001 was the worst year for 
workers since the early Reagan years.

The ranks of the unemployed grew by 2.6 million last year, the most since 
1982, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Most of those new former 
laborers collecting unemployment were laid off—estimates on the number of 
layoffs in 2001 ranged from 1.8 million to 2.5 million.

I was one of those 2 million or so layoff victims. I had worked as a 
reporter and editor for Dallas-area newspapers owned by Texas-based Belo 
Corp. for the previous nine-and-a-half years. My last position was as a 
business reporter for The Dallas Morning News. Remaining unconvinced that my 
company was doing as poorly as management said, I have conducted some 
research into the finances of Belo and other companies that made some major 
layoffs in 2001.

My findings may not surprise you: Half of 30 companies picked at random that 
made layoffs of at least 1,000 workers last year made money. And only one of 
those 15 that lost funds in 2001 showed a loss the previous year. Most of 
the firms made good money. For example, New York-based financial firm 
Citigroup Inc. announced it would slash 7,800 jobs last November, then went 
on to record a whopping $14.1 billion in profit in 2001. That came on top of 
making $13.5 billion in 2000 and $9.9 billion in 1999. 

Why did Citigroup need to cut almost 8,000 employees when it made so much 
and paid its chief executive, Sanford Weill, an obscene $225 million in 
2000? Weill has a history of leaving a trail of layoffs that help boost his 
pay. Between 1987 and 1997, when he was CEO of Travelers Insurance, which 
merged with Citibank to form Citigroup, Weill cut jobs by one-third and 
became one of the highest paid chief executives in the country.

Another company that made off well last year while cutting people was the 
New York Times Co., which said it would send 1,260 workers to the 
unemployment lines last June. The Times Co. made $444.7 million in 2001, 
after hauling in $397.5 million in 2000 and $310.2 million in 1999. Other 
companies I researched—including IBM, Verizon, WorldCom, Dell, 
Hewlett-Packard, American Express, Bristol-Myers, Sara Lee, VF Corp., 
Wachovia Corp., and Proctor & Gamble—took in similar nice profits before and 
after the layoffs.

So what's going on here? You can't blame all these layoffs on September 
11—about 63 percent of job cuts tracked last year by the Labor Department 
came before that date. And you obviously can't blame declining profits in 
many cases. Is there some kind of campaign by executives, who were 
complaining about not having enough qualified employees throughout much of 
the 1990s, to make good employees stay longer and reduce wages and benefits 
through increased layoffs? In effect, are corporate bigwigs taking it on 
themselves to turn the employees' job market of much of the last decade back 
into an employers' market? Or is it just plain old greed, in which 
shareholders who care more about increased profits than the overall welfare 
of the company and its employees, not to mention the costs of job cuts to 
society, are demanding these layoffs? Where's Oliver Stone when you need him?

As you might guess, this layoff conspiracy leads directly to the White 
House. Remember what Bush and Cheney did in December 2000 as soon as they 
had stolen—er, been appointed to—the presidency? Cheney, a former corporate 
bigwig himself, went on major television programs and talked about how bad 
the economy was, blaming it on Clinton, when most real economists agreed it 
was not that bad—yet. Bush, a failed corporate smallwig who could only make 
money through a questionable stock transaction with Harken Energy and as 
part owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team by convincing taxpayers to 
fund most of a new stadium, talked the economy down in his own way in front 
of crowds of supporters and in one-on-one meetings with reporters. 

Bush's handlers wouldn't let him go on TV and actually answer a question 
more complex than "How's your golf game?" Their aim was to blame the 
impending recession on the Clinton administration, and to pay back their 
huge campaign contributors, many of whom were these same corporate 
executives who complained before about not having enough qualified 
employees, by aiding the return of an employers' market.

For example, Ivan Seidenberg, president of Verizon Communications, the $67 
billion telecommunications giant formed by the union of Bell Atlantic and 
GTE, gave $1,000 to Bush's campaign, the legal limit for an individual. His 
company contributed $818,000 to Republican Party committees and $3 million 
to the 2000 Republican National Convention. Verizon was one of the first 
firms to lay off workers last year, cutting 10,000 jobs. The company ended 
up making $590 million in 2001, after hauling in an astronomical $11.8 
billion in 2000. That year, Seidenberg amassed $15.7 million in salary alone.

Other company executives gave even more to the GOP. Cisco Systems President 
John Chambers donated $280,000 by himself to Republican committees in 2000, 
the same year he made $157 million. Cisco laid off 8,500 people last year 
after making $2.7 million in 2000. The firm did lose $1 billion in 2001, but 
it made up about 40 percent of that loss in the first three months of its 
2002 fiscal year.

Then there is Cheney's former firm, Dallas-based Halliburton Co., which is 
vying to become the next Enron and will more than likely announce some major 
layoffs soon. Halliburton's stock dropped to $16 a share on Feb. 19 after 
reaching $49.25 nine months before. The freefall was blamed largely on 
multimillion-dollar asbestos court verdicts. Pittsburgh-based 
Harbison-Walker Refractories Co., a former subsidiary of Dresser Industries, 
which Halliburton bought in 1998, has already filed for bankruptcy. Will 
Halliburton be next? And is this part of the reason why Cheney is pushing so 
hard for legislation that will benefit his former employer, such as drilling 
for oil on protected federal lands like in Alaska? 

When Cheney left in 2000 as CEO of Halliburton, a position he held since 
1995, he sold his stock for more than $40 a share. He personally pocketed 
more than $33 million in 2000 from Halliburton. You don't think Cheney 
remembers that deal? Cheney presided over several rounds of job cuts, 
including of about 11,000 workers in 1999, a year that Halliburton showed a 
$438 million profit. Since those layoffs, Halliburton's profits have risen, 
to $501 million in 2000 and $809 million in 2001. An interesting sidebit to 
this story is that Houston-based Kellogg Brown & Root, another Halliburton 
offshoot, recently agreed to pay the U.S. 
government $2 million to settle allegations it defrauded the military by 
submitting false claims for delivery orders between 1994 and 1998. 

So here you have Cheney trying to at least indirectly help his former 
company, which is possibly preparing to lay off more workers, through 
friendly legislation as one of its subsidiaries reportedly defrauds all of 
us. [And yes, Cheney still lived in the Dallas area until after the November 
2000 election in apparent violation of the 12th Amendment to the U.S. 
Constitution. He didn't sell his Dallas-area mansion to a major Republican 
donor until Nov. 30, 2000, according to deed records. Through a local 
television station's camera, I saw Cheney stroll out of his Dallas-area home 
late at night after Nov. 7, 2000. Contrary to Republican spin, Cheney never 
was a resident of Wyoming in 2000.]

Company executives and their apologists will tell you they "need" to lay off 
workers—even when the firm is making boatloads of money—to remain 
competitive in today's market. Don't buy that bull. In the increasingly 
merger-friendly environment, competition for many large megacorporations is 
not much of an issue. The main issue for many shareholders is to acquire as 
much capital and return on investment as possible. For these 
multimillionaires and billionaires, money is only a way to keep score, not a 
basic necessity that can mean the difference between eating and not eating. 

And they only feel good when that score is going up, even if it is at the 
expense of a person making $20,000 or $30,000 a year. Most really liked 
Bush's tax cut plan last year, which netted the super wealthy millions of 
additional dollars. The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans already own about 
40 percent of the wealth, and that is only expected to grow under the 
current so-called "Christian" administration [idle thought: would Christ 
really support this administration that cares primarily about the wealthy 
and those who want to be wealthy in monetary terms?].

So what do we do about this situation? We stage a nonviolent revolt. We 
organize politically. We educate people on companies that practice 
alternatives to layoffs like reducing hours—Phil Hyde of Timesizing.com 
highlights numerous good examples. We educate people on studies that show 
layoffs actually hurt companies' profits due to lower morale, a loss of 
momentum, and other factors.

We support unions, even though they are not perfect themselves but are 
better than nothing. We demonstrate. We go on strike. We file employment 
discrimination claims with government agencies when we are laid off—I have a 
claim pending against Belo myself. In short, we do whatever we can to make 
the bigwigs feel our pain and perhaps think twice about laying us off just 
to make a few more bucks in the future.

In my daydreams, I see myself taking a page from Michael Moore, the populist 
film maker of Roger and Me who dogged former General Motors Chairman Roger 
Smith after GM closed plants and laid off thousands of workers in Moore's 
native town of Flint, Mich., in the 1980s, despite GM continuing to make 
billions in profits. I see myself bursting into Belo shareholders' meetings 
and firing questions about the layoffs at stunned executives. My wife, 
Michelle, even recently had an actual nocturnal dream about her and me and 
others doing just that at some Belo meeting and causing a big stink—things 
are really getting weird when your spouse has dreams about your former 
workplace. In her wild dream, Bush happened to be there and offered to help 
place a story I wrote in a national newspaper or magazine. I turned down 
Bush's help on principle, figuratively telling him to shove it before I 
walked off. It was only a dream, but the scenario sounds good to me.

Some say we shouldn't concern ourselves with this layoff conspiracy because 
executives like Smith and Weill and Seidenberg and Chambers— as well as 
their political conspirators like Bush and Cheney—will get their just 
desserts in their afterlives. Some believe the corporate and political 
masters will be sent to Hell—wherever the hell that is— to live in eternal 
damnation, if they aren't there already. Others say they will have to 
reincarnate to the Earth as low-level workers and see what it's like to live 
paycheck to paycheck for themselves.

I don't know about those theories. But I do believe that one day in the near 
future, such executives and politicians will be forced to search the vacuous 
depths of their souls, and answer to themselves and to a Higher Authority. 
And then, perhaps there will be hell to pay. Maybe through their redemption, 
the rest of us will benefit. Maybe not. All I know is we have to keep 
fighting, right here, right now.
 
Kevin J. Shay is the author of the electronic booklet, No More Layoffs: How 
to Work For a Workplace That Works For All of Us. He also started a new 
Internet site, LayoffWatch, that tracks layoffs and the profits of these 
companies at 
http://www.angelfire.com/biz/shaybiz/layoff.html. Shay can be contacted 
through email at mkshay40@yahoo.com.