Fulltime Employee | Working Stiffed

The Deep State Coup of Trump Will Kill Economic Recovery

There is a deep state coup in the works right now that stands to destroy the Trump-driven economic recovery we are currently experiencing, as well as our constitutional republic. This is a most frightening development for the millions of Americans who are finally starting to get back on their feet after suffering economic destitution during Obama’s divisive, un-American eight-year reign. Lies and misery will be that clown’s legacy.

I make this observation from personal experience, not force-fed, regurgitated talking points from MSM or alternative media outlets. During Obama’s last five years in office, I came close to losing everything I had worked hard to attain throughout my 35-year career, including my home.

I enjoyed a moderately successfully career in middle management until the company I worked for was acquired by a competitor in 2011. That’s when my nightmare began. I was one of many casualties of the merger & acquisition (M&A) craze that has infested our economy in the 21st century, antitrust laws be damned. Monopoly is not only a board game, it’s the new normal for Corporate America.

I wasn’t immediately concerned when I was displaced, because I was very good at my job and had excellent references. I wasn’t prepared for the radical changes that had taken place under Obama’s then two-year tenure as president.

I soon discovered that the gig economy was being peddled as the new norm and full-time jobs had disappeared. Obamacare made employers resistant to hiring full-timers and I found myself competing against a flood of H1-B Visa employees or cheap offshore labor. I was stuck in a transient employment hell world. Since I live alone and support myself, this was a disastrous situation.

As the years ticked by, I found myself lurching from one short-term “gig” to the next, sometimes going months between assignments. While I waiting for Obama’s “hope” and “change” to kick in, I nibbled away at my modest nest egg until it was almost depleted. And when I needed to withdraw money from my 401(k) to pay my bills and eat, I was penalized, despite being just a few years short of the being eligible to withdraw these funds without penalty.

Obama never waived these penalties or offered any assistance to the middle class workers who were sliding into impoverishment; in fact, he worked overtime to hasten our demise by pushing for the job-killing, globalist screw job known as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). He had fundamentally transformed America, all right, but not in the way he led most of us to believe he would when he bullshitted us into voting for him (twice, in my case).

Because of Obamacare, I went without insurance for two years. I couldn’t afford it and, to add insult to injury, I was subjected to penalties, which, duh!, I couldn’t afford, either. Medicaid wasn’t an option, because I managed to keep a couple of thousand in the bank.

For the first time in my life, I was uninsured and I was over 50. The blows kept coming and, like millions of other middle class U.S. citizens, I was sliding into the abyss. When I hear people say now that they wish Obama was still president, I’m sorry, but I want to hit them in the face with a shovel.

The day that Trump was elected, I had not had a single job prospect in five months and my home (which I love so much) had been on the market for a month. As hard as it was to have real estate agents show my beloved home, I prayed I could sell it before I ran out of money. I knew that if Hillary Clinton won, it would be game over for me.

I’m not surprised there’s an opioid epidemic; millions of Americans like me were made punch drunk with despair during Obama’s presidency. I never succumbed to the need to numb my pain or disengage from my hideous reality, but I can certainly understand why some people chose that dark road.

I was on my knees praying to God for an answer; a way out. Days later, Trump won the election and my life was transformed almost overnight.

Four days after Trump’s election, I got an offer for a full-time job. The pay wasn’t great, but it allowed me to pay my bills and take my home off the market. It was a real job with benefits. My phone started ringing and my email was filling up with job prospects (they still are). It was unreal! Four months later, I got another job making twice as much money. There is no question that Trump made all of this happen.

It didn’t surprise me to hear this week that during the first six months of Trump’s presidency, a million jobs were created and that investors in the stock market have made $4 trillion! And now that Trump has deep-sixed the Obamacare penalty and is tightening up immigration and work visa policies, wage growth is starting to become a reality after decades of stagnation!

The deep state doesn’t want to let Trump “Make America Great Again.” They are censoring or downplaying reports of the Trump recovery and they are openly calling for a coup.

Former CIA Director John Brennan, along with former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, went on Wolf Blitzer’s show a couple of weeks ago and called for a bipartisan Congressional coalition to remove Trump from office if he fired special prosecutor Mueller (the Clinton operative who was appointed to investigate Trump-Russian collusion, despite no evidence that any crime was committed).

A few days later, former Vice President Al Gore went on James Corden’s show and said that a “challenging event” is imminent regarding Trump. Really? What? An assassination, maybe? Why these treasonous piles of excrement haven’t been arrested, thrown in a dungeon and charged with sedition and/or treason is beyond me. Clearly, these traitors, minions of the deep state, are planning a coup.

Let me tell you something: the millions of Americans who are just starting to crawl out of Obama’s economic destitution pit are not going to take this lying down.

The elites and snowflakes who flipped out when Crooked Hillary lost, insist on calling us homophobic, misogynists and/or racists. They refuse to acknowledge that we voted for Trump, because we were being suffocated into nonexistence as a result of Obama’s policies…the same policies that Hillary Clinton was committed to maintaining and expanding.

These accusations were particularly hurtful to me as a lesbian who fought for LGBT rights in the 80s and 90s. I lost a lot of friends, as a matter of fact: people who have known me for decades unfriended me on Facebook and no longer speak to me. I thought these people knew and cared about me, but the mass mental illness that has resulted from the constant stream of hate and lies MSM and Hollywood are vomiting every minute has distorted their sense of reality.

Millions of friendships, marriages and family relationships all of over the country have been destroyed by this massive, collective manipulation. What the globalist, deep state propagandists are doing is positively diabolical.

As hurtful as these losses have been, I know they won’t compare to the devastation we will experience if we let these treasonous, un-elected members of the globalist deep state “eliminate” our president. It will mean the end of our country and dark days for all Americans.

American workers are not feeling the love. A lack of job security, combined with increasing responsibilities (and fewer resources) has resulted in exhaustion, low morale, lack of motivation and (drum roll please)…lower productivity.

The U.S. Department of Labor said last Tuesday, that productivity fell 0.5 percent in the second quarter of 2016, while labor costs rose by 2 percent. U.S. worker productivity has been weak for the past five years and stands at 1.2 percent, less than half of what it was before the 2007 recession, when it was at 2.6 percent.

Many economists say Americans are working more to create less, because workers have outgrown existing technology. As a result, we can expect “restraining” of wage growth and more layoffs. And so the epidemic of myopic economics continues.

Don’t these geniuses realize that reducing financial incentives and increasing employee workloads as the result of layoffs will only drive productivity down further? These “experts” may know the price of everything, but they know the value of nothing.

U.S. workers today are routinely being pushed to their mental and physical breaking points. Workplaces are toxic work environments staffed by people either in the midst of a psychotic break or on the brink of one. The stench of fear and uncertainty lingers in every cubicle, assembly line, water cooler, coffeemaker and non-subsidized vending machine.

It doesn’t help that employers like Disney, Toys ‘R Us, Xerox, Pfizer, and Microsoft are turning to “insourcing” of H1-B visa workers in order to lower their payroll costs, despite posting record earnings…and then they force their poor displaced American employees to train their “guest” worker replacements or forfeit their severance.

Corporate Hunger Games?

As an unwilling participant of the gig economy, I’ve been flitting in and out of different corporate offices for the past four years. The mass psychosis and/or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) I see is alarming, but not surprising.

When you experience three or four (or more) reorgs a year and know that on any given day you could walk into work and be handed a severance package, even if you’ve been a rock star employee (damn those surprise mergers!), it’s bound to damage your psyche to some extent at some point. And at the end of the day, you become aware that there is no “i” in team, but there is one in “survive.”

This past year, I’ve had two assignments where the person responsible for training me held back information I needed to know in order to do my job. Both women were overworked and clearly needed my help, so I can only conclude that they felt that if I knew as much as they did, they wouldn’t survive the next reorg.

They obviously felt it was safer to be overworked to the point of mental and physical exhaustion than to have the well-trained help they desperately needed. How sick is that? Still, they survived round after round of layoffs and salary dumps, so I suppose it’s not an unrealistic fear to expect to be replaced by a contractor who probably made less than they did.

Needless to say, this epidemic of fear and loathing in workplace after workplace makes it hard to stick to a new employer, even when you do a good job under most challenging circumstances. It’s like an endless loop of different movies made with the same script. Sometimes, I feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day.

No rest for the corporate weary

This environment of perpetual job insecurity has scared workers into being on the job 24/7. According to a study by Project Time, more than half of U.S. workers left unused vacation time in 2015. In fact, over the past 15 years, American workers have been taking less and less vacation time.

These poor souls likely feel that if they take time off, their bosses might replace them with an intern or hourly contractor…or worse, that someone of importance may decide that their department functions just fine without anyone in their role.

These are the same people who make work calls after dinner and send emails at 11 p.m. on Saturdays in an endless quest for validation and job security. It’s madness! But this is exactly the frame of mind that bipolar CEOs value in their employees.

Rising labor costs? No shit!

Hiring people costs money, and when your business model involves having a revolving door of “talent,” even if you’re replacing 20 full-time employees with 10 gig contractors or H1-B visa guest workers, you’ll end up throwing a lot of good money after bad. Recruiters, equipment and training costs add up.

And then there is the learning curve. It takes a while (sometimes years) before most employees achieve optimal knowledge of their company and/or industry. Many employers learn the hard way that inexperience can be pretty costly, especially in industries that are heavily regulated.

And how many times have employers carelessly displaced long-time employees, only to find they also unwittingly displaced a lot of company knowledge that their low-cost millennial or H1-B visa colleagues didn’t have? Too many; but they repeat the process, anyway. Einstein said the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over and expect a different result. So, there you go.

And while we’re on the subject of insanity: If a company wants to treat employees like disposable widgets, then they should stop asking employees to participate in charitable drives in the company’s name. This is inconsiderate at best, and perverse (or even sociopathic) at worst.

Also, I’m not sure why this isn’t obvious, but it’s never a good idea to have leadership team members spew empty rhetoric about “teamwork” and “commitment” at employee or town hall meetings in the same breath that they announce layoffs. What is up with that? I can’t think of a better way to incite workplace violence or corporate espionage. Seriously.

When I worked at Philip Morris in the 90s, we were hit by lawsuits left and right while dodging regulatory challenges by the FDA. If our then CEO had followed today’s popular strategy of slashing headcount and hiring cheap labor, the company probably would have folded before the end of the millennium.

Instead, they doubled down on staffing up, paying above average salaries and they had the best benefits. They understood that if they were going to survive, they needed a knowledgeable and dedicated workforce. Not only did the company survive, but it thrived…the stock split multiple times during the 90s and they’re still around today.

If employees feel valued, enjoy support, and know that if they do a good job, they’ll not only stay employed but they can expect to be promoted and rewarded financially, well…there’s no end to the growth a company can experience. Until “leaders” rediscover the core fundamentals of entrepreneurial success, true growth and peak productivity will likely remain elusive.

Category: fulltime employee

The Deep State Coup of Trump Will Kill Economic Recovery

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