Originally Posted by Deb C

Prosperity gospel has, in part, been responsible for the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality. This is a far cry from the sermon on the mount.

The major exponents of the Prosperity Gospel, Joel Osteen, Joyce Meyer, Kenneth Copeland, Benny Hinn, Creflo Dollar and Eddie L. Long, all of whom – except for Osteen – have been investigated by the United States Senate Committee on Finance for improper use of donations, justify their unconventional beliefs through the creative interpretation of a few biblical passages:

John 10:10: "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly"
Philippians 4:19: "My God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus"

Jesus Christ never offered a get-rich-quick scheme. He offered a means of alleviating extreme economic distress. He offered a call for the rich to divest themselves of luxuries that arose from the exploitation of the poor. Get-rich-quick schemes are the stock in trade of swindlers. Swindlers do not create wealth; they simply grab it and waste it. It's not the Mercedes Benz vehicles that create wealth.

Or the more New Age version

In recent times the movement has shed its old moniker and adopted the more fashionable name of “Positive Thinking” or “Laws of Attraction”; yet it has continued to produce best selling books such as “The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne, “Who Moved My Cheese?” by Spencer Johnson and “Harmonic Wealth” by James Arthur Ray (currently standing trial for having caused the death of 2 people at his sweat lodge retreats).

The creation of wealth as a rule requires rational thought -- as in dedication of lives to such activities as accounting, engineering, and marketing. Also in the liberal arts so that we can have teachers who can teach because they know what kids need to learn to be fully human, including the ability to recognize fools as such and to be humane leaders even in profit-driven entities. Words to the wise -- invest in human capital and promote human dignity..


Then there's the *austerity* gospel

Anybody living in America in the past 15 years and under 40 years of age has probably proffered, or heard statements such as: “Believe and you can achieve”, “You are the maker of your reality”, “You have to stay positive”, “If you don't like your life, invent a new one!” and, of course, “Money happens”.

Some of those aphorisms are so outlandish it is hard to imagine how they could ever have become pearls of wisdom for so many, yet a closer look at the current state of the nation may yield the answer.

Make that "under 55". Desperate people will fall for anything -- even "We must cut your pay to create prosperity!" As a rule the pay cuts do not go into new investments in plant and equipment that create jobs but instead into luxury indulgence. Such is the GOP these days.

Again, con artists are extremely competent at grabbing and wasting wealth -- and almost never create it. As the GOP becomes more entwined with admirers of the plantation economy it will get increasingly reactionary.

Political establishment

Moreover, a significant portion of the political establishment believes America to be the apex of human civilization, which makes them impervious to recognizing any of its structural weaknesses, and prone to blaming the downtrodden themselves for their own misfortune.

Furthermore, the clever media engineering of awe inspiring rags-to-riches stories - even when the evidence would point to the contrary - creates a sense of inadequacy and embarrassment in the general population which, unable to stand the pressure, seeks refuge in magical promises of future bliss through the manipulation of supernatural powers.

So as long as the population stays unaware that the system is rigged, they will believe in the hocus pocus spin. This isn't to say that believing in yourself and going the extra mile is always futile, but for the most part, hard work doesn't always produce riches for some. But what also needs to be taken into consideration, is that luck, inheritance and helping hands along the way, contribute to some finding prosperity.

When all else fails, offer an outmoded and irrelevant rationale for a reactionary agenda. If a reversion to social norms and political practices of the Gilded Age could bring about the same sort of economic growth by themselves, then returning to them would have a justification. Of course something else was going on -- mechanization of farming, discovery of resources to exploit, technological innovation in basic objects, and the transformation of cottage industry as the norm to Big Business. It's hard to see how we can invent anything with the influence of the electric light, the automobile, or the telephone... and vertical integration of monopolies and cartels is already the norm.

Henry Clay Frick was an unnecessary evil.

Conclusion

Belief in the Prosperity Gospel - which is in essence a form of magical thinking - in conjunction with a paucity of opportunities, produces a class of “hopeful millionaires in permanent waiting” with the systematic tendency to careless spending, oversized debt, low education, high propensity for unreasonable risk taking, and diminished class mobility. All bolstered by the firm belief that it is just a matter of time before God will replenish their bank account.

The pastors and televeganlists who use their pulpits to preach this irresponsible message, corrupts Christian teachings, contribute to the enduring material deprivation of the working class and retard much needed social reforms.


“Ten Christians will say that God told them to buy a house.” says Fernando Garay, a pastor in Charlottesville, Virginia “In nine of the cases, it will go bad. The 10th one is the real Christian.” And the other nine? “For them, there’s always another house.”

Lets just hope God remembers them on Holy Saturday.

http://www.examiner.com/article/jerr...reat-recession

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

One problem is that we have a poor fix on what it means to be a "winner." Also, people have a poor grasp of probabilities and a poor understanding of how many people can be wealthy.

Which ignores the ultimate attribute of winning -- being happy with the result. Success is not enough, which explains that such people as Richard Wagner, Vincent van Gogh, and F. Scott Fitzgerald were unhappy people despite their artistic successes. Many of the accoutrements of wealth get tiresome.

Liking what one does for a living seems to solve most imaginable problems in life. Someone who hates his job is going to use his pay to buy salves for his misery.

Note well that lotteries and casinos are doing well. Unless people go there for the thrill of the game or the subconscious desire to lose any rational calculus says "Stay clear!" (OK, I got an excellent buffet at a reasonable price at a casino in Nevada -- and I found it easy to pass the huge array of slot machines).

What do we want our economy to do? Do we want it to maximize the chance of becoming truly wealthy, so that the largest possible number of people achieve that distinction? Or do we want it to maximize the chance of rising out of the ranks of the working poor into the middle class? The reality is we can't do both of these at once, because they're contradictory and mutually exclusive.

The choice that our politicians have taken is all too often to make those already rich even richer at the expense of everyone else just as the lobbyists tell them to do as the paymasters of those lobbyists pay them to do.

The reason why is that people rise out of poverty and reach middle-class status, almost always, by finding a good job or successfully creating a small business: by working, in other words. But people become truly wealthy by investing well and seeing a good return on those investments.

Things are so bad that if one offered the economic dream of middle-income America circa 1950 most would accept it in a pinch so long as they could keep current technology. (We would need much of the new technology just to keep from wasting resources and wrecking the environment. Don't feel guilty about the flat-screen TV that uses far less material than one of those consoles of the 1950s that devoured picture tubes or the computer that might reduce your driving even if the car that you use doesn't guzzle gas like a 1950s model). But that said, the 1950s economy was much more equitable except in the Jim Crow South for which almost nobody has any nostalgia. So the culture was stultifying -- blame a 1T for that.

Both high-wage jobs and successful small businesses cut into the returns on investments. High-wage jobs are a cost of business and reduce the profitability of the big corporations, and successful small businesses compete with the big corporations and reduce their market share. It's in the interests of the investor class to hold wages down and to maximize barriers to small business success. They use their influence over the government to do just that. As a result, opportunities to rise into the middle class have dropped over the past thirty years, while opportunities to become rich have expanded and there are more millionaires and billionaires than ever before. Even so, the rich still represent a tiny fraction of the population and always will. It's impossible for everyone to be rich, or even most people, or even as large a slice as one percent. ("The 1%" is a good political slogan but an exaggeration. The rich constitute a little over 1/2 of 1%.)

But a well-paid working class is good for spreading income around, and small businesses create wealth in their own right. Both are prosperity. Maybe we will see some spectacularly-successful capitalists who bet a million to make a billion and succeeded. What we can't afford in addition to the tycoons is another class that can exploit -- the executive nomenklatura that gets paid very well for treating workers very badly and ruining small-scale competition.

If we want to restore the middle class in this country, we will have to sacrifice the pipe dream of getting rich. Otherwise, we'll continue to vote against our real interests, like a gambler who doesn't understand that the odds will always favor the casino.

Voting Republican is a very bad gamble even if one must prevaricate about how one voted to one's boss.

I worked for this company about 35 years ago. The #3 ranking is for third -- worst.

3. Dillard’s
> Rating: 2.3
> Number of reviews: 560
> CEO approval rating: 23% (Bill Dillard II)
> Employees: 27,740

Dillard’s Department Stores is run and controlled by the Dillard family. Dillard’s has about 300 stores in 29 states. It operates in a highly competitive environment, which includes Kohl’s, Macy’s and J.C. Penney. In the last quarter, Dillard’s sales did not grow at all. Dillard’s is not only competing with larger retailers but also with Amazon.com, which has already driven several companies out of existence. In the meantime, Mike, William, and Alex Dillard receive large salaries — a total of $54 million over the course of the last three years.

Many Dillard’s employees griped about their hours and pay. They also complained about sales-per-hour targets. These targets, employees said, were unreasonable and led to intense competition among co-workers. “Lower level employees are faceless numbers to many members of upper management and are treated like pawns in a chess game,” one commenter wrote.

Read more: America’s Worst Companies To Work For - 24/7 Wall St. http://247wallst.com/special-report/...#ixzz2ZjXL58Sy

It was like that 35 years ago. Some things just do not change.

Originally Posted by Deb C

Detroit Bankruptcy:

​"Sen. Sanders said the city that once led the world in automobile manufacturing declined as a result of U.S. trade policies that sent American factory jobs overseas. “What you're seeing in Detroit is the result of horrendous trade policies that have gone on for decades which resulted in the shutdowns of tens of thousands of factories in America,” Sanders said Saturday on The Ed Show on MSNBC."

Detroit is the result of many bad things by many people, well intentioned and not. In fact, the underfunding of retirement packages led to the policy of offering great retirement as a public worker benefit at no immediate cost to anyone. Detroit is far from the only public entity to do this. We have been in a particularly squanderous 3T for too long, and it shows. I don't buy the foreign trade issue on this, though. The Big Three jsut did a horrible job of making cars, and the Japanese and Germans took full advantage.

Originally Posted by Brian Beecher

This story gets very explicitly into what I was talking about. Would love comments from the folks here about this one.

http://www.alternet.org/civil-libert...e-afraid-speak

No one wants to step off the precipice into the void. Once we're firmly in the void, the attitudes will probably change. Of course, demagoguery is still a problem, even in bad times .. maybe even moreso.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

Detroit is the result of many bad things by many people, well intentioned and not. In fact, the underfunding of retirement packages led to the policy of offering great retirement as a public worker benefit at no immediate cost to anyone. Detroit is far from the only public entity to do this. We have been in a particularly squanderous 3T for too long, and it shows. I don't buy the foreign trade issue on this, though. The Big Three jsut did a horrible job of making cars, and the Japanese and Germans took full advantage.

One example you might consider in regards to outsourcing of the automobile industry, is that the parts that at one time were made in the USA, are now mainly made in other countries. The reality, from what I understand from the mechanics in our area, is that many parts in the *American* made car, are from Japan.

There are various reasons for the demise of Detroit. I posted an article over in the Detroit bankruptcy thread about how unfettered capitalism and racism were also part of the mix. It's by Political scientist, Johns Hopkins Professor and Detroit native Lester Spence.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

Detroit is the result of many bad things by many people, well intentioned and not. In fact, the underfunding of retirement packages led to the policy of offering great retirement as a public worker benefit at no immediate cost to anyone. Detroit is far from the only public entity to do this. We have been in a particularly squanderous 3T for too long, and it shows. I don't buy the foreign trade issue on this, though. The Big Three jsut did a horrible job of making cars, and the Japanese and Germans took full advantage.

That they did. They committed themselves as long as possible to overweight, gas-guzzling cars designed adequately for long road-trips but uneconomical for commuting. For commuting the Japanese flooded test markets in California with Datsun, Honda, and Toyota cars. GM came out with the Chevrolet Vega, whose aluminum-block engine designed to save weight invariably overheated and cracked in a couple of years, and the cramped Chevrolet Chevette. Ford came up with the infamous Pinto with a horrid engineering failure (the bolt on the rear axle was perfectly placed so that in a collision it the bolt would pierce the gas tank). American Motors built the Pacer, a vehicle that put everyone in it in a glass dome that created its own greenhouse effect. I test-drove one of those while looking for a car in those days and rejected it because I figured that it would be a kiln even in chilly weather. Chrysler got involved in the import of Japanese-built Mitsubishi cars, accelerating the demise of the American component of the auto industry. In contrast Honda built the marvelous Accord, a vehicle that often remained comfortable and reliable for about twenty years. But such happened in a 2T.

GM, Ford, Chrysler, and American Motors blamed the customer for failing to keep buying cars that had not improved in performance and economy since the 1960s. Bad business.

Auto-parts trade deficit. NAFTA?

The decline of the U.S. motor-vehicle sector and auto-parts industry, 2000–2011

The market for U.S.-made vehicles has been hollowed out by globalization, rapidly growing import competition, and by the post-2007 collapse in the U.S. economy, which had severe impacts on demand for autos and other consumer durables. Total domestic car and truck sales of U.S. automakers fell from 11.5 million units in 2000 to 4.6 million units in 2009, at the depths of the industry crisis—a decline of 60 percent (Ward’s Automotive Group 2012).

While total U.S. automaker sales in 2011 reached nearly six million units, they were 48.1 percent below levels achieved in 2000, a product of both declining overall demand and significant long-term loss of market share by the U.S.-based producers.

Employment in the U.S. auto-parts industry

The bulk of employment in the U.S. auto-parts industry is driven by demand for original equipment manufacturer (OEM) parts to supply auto assembly plants in the United States. Since the auto-parts industry follows the trends of the overall motor-vehicle sector (Office of Transportation and Machinery 2011, 9), direct employment in the U.S. auto-parts industry has fallen significantly in recent years, declining by 419,600 jobs (45.8 percent) from November 2000 to November 2011 (Figure A).

Growing direct threats to employment in the U.S. auto-parts industry

Trade deficits in both assembled autos and auto parts are a major contributor to job losses in both the motor-vehicle sector and the auto-parts industry. The U.S. motor-vehicle sector has sustained a large global trade deficit (now $106.7 billion) over the last decade,5 and auto parts’ share of that total deficit has risen steadily, from 8.4 percent in 2000 to a historic high of 29.2 percent in 2010, as shown in Figure B (measured on the left axis).)

Conclusion

As a result, all 1.6 million jobs in the U.S. auto-parts and supplier industries are at risk due to rapidly growing imports of auto parts.

Furthermore, there is a sharp contrast between the impacts of China’s practices on the auto-parts industry in the United States, and how they affect the auto-parts industries in countries that manage their trade, such as Germany, Japan, and South Korea. These countries emphasize balanced growth designed to maximize employment, output, and innovation at home—and they are not falling prey to the same job losses in the auto-parts industry as the United States, which lost 419,600 auto-parts jobs between November 2000 and November 2011. In short, these other countries face the same unfair trade practices emanating from China but appear to be doing a much better job of dealing with them. Some countries, such as Japan and South Korea, have responded with unfair trade policies that should be confronted by the United States. Germany, on the other hand, has successfully used industrial and labor market policies to better manage its trade with China and the world, which suggests that the United States has significant room for improvement in the development of more-effective policies to support the manufacturing sector. The most important first steps are to fight unfair currency manipulation (Scott 2011b) and illegal subsidies and other unfair trade barriers erected by China and other countries.

Graph and more: http://www.epi.org/publication/bp336...arts-industry/

I don't know if these are new jobs or just relocation of existing jobs.

http://www.al.com/business/index.ssf...cle_plant.html
Polaris off-road vehicle plant in Huntsville
… “The Minnesota company is working with a Nashville-based …contractor… to build the more than 700,000-square-foot, $48 million facility west of Greenbrier Road. The project, which will employ at least 1,700 workers, is expected to start early production by January.
Polaris Director of International Operations … said the facility is one component of an overall $150 million investment project, which includes the building, capital equipment costs, tooling and other expenses.”…

Originally Posted by radind

I don't know if these are new jobs or just relocation of existing jobs.

There are snippets of information floating around that suggest that perhaps at least some manufacturing is coming back to the U.S. Some months ago I read (sorry, but I don't have a link) about a General Electric plant someplace in Kentucky or Tennessee or Missouri - there someplace in the mid-mid-west that was being refitted to make large appliances - washers, dryers, etc.

What G.E. was finding that when a new model is developed, it is clearly cheaper to have it manufactured in China or wherever. BUT, once the model has been around for a bit, and G.E. wants to introduce improvements or modifications, the back-and-forth between the domestic engineers and the foreign factories becomes impossibly complex. Overall, they are thinking it may be cheaper in the long run to simply make it here. And, as we know, the folks at G.E. are not fools.

My son just went to work for a Japanese company who is starting a brand-new factory in Phoenix making airbags for cars. The last supplier of airbags has made them such that they blow shrapnel into the chests of the passengers. These defects brought the replacement manufacturer back to this country. Interesting, eh?

Originally Posted by Deb C

Prosperity gospel has, in part, been responsible for the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality. This is a far cry from the sermon on the mount.

Or the more New Age version

Then there's the *austerity* gospel




Political establishment

So as long as the population stays unaware that the system is rigged, they will believe in the hocus pocus spin. This isn't to say that believing in yourself and going the extra mile is always futile, but for the most part, hard work doesn't always produce riches for some. But what also needs to be taken into consideration, is that luck, inheritance and helping hands along the way, contribute to some finding prosperity.

Conclusion


http://www.examiner.com/article/jerr...reat-recession

The prosperity gospel is pure nonsense and sadly too many foolishly continue to follow them. There is nothing Biblical about this that I can see.

Originally Posted by pbrower2a

I



Read more: America’s Worst Companies To Work For - 24/7 Wall St. http://247wallst.com/special-report/...#ixzz2ZjXL58Sy

It was like that 35 years ago. Some things just do not change.

and ...

Originally Posted by website

7. Sears Holdings (Sears/ KMart)
> Rating: 2.5
> Number of reviews: 583
> CEO approval rating: 19% (Eddie Lampert)
> Employees: 274,000
Sears Holdings, which owns both Sears and Kmart, has been effectively run by hedge fund manager Eddie Lampert since it was created by a merger in 2005. Over the intervening period, Lampert has gone through several CEOs and made a name for himself as the greatest bumbler in the U.S. retail industry. Impatient after years of failure, he took the CEO job himself.
Lampert has made a great deal of his decision to use technology as a way to track customer needs as well as his closing of stores and brands. Sears Holdings ranked next to last in customer service in ACSI’s retail category, ahead of only Walmart. Kmart has been the weaker of the company’s two divisions based on same-store sales, although each is in a state of hopeless decline.
Employees at Sears and Kmart felt just as poorly about the company’s performance as Wall Street. They noted that the chains have lost their identity and suffer from morale issues. Other common concerns, especially at Sears stores, were the limited availability of work hours and constant pressure to convince customers to open new credit cards. Employees also complained about wages. One employee noted that while the company was updating its technology, raises were extremely rare.
Many employees believed the company would be better off investing more resources in the company’s locations. A recent report by Businessweek highlighted that Sears and Kmart fell well short of their peers in investing in their stores.

• Major Holders
• Sears Announces Dozens of Store Closures Amid Financial Woes
• Northeast Phila. KMart among 78 stores being closed by Sears
• 78 Sears, Kmart stores to close; see the list
• The Decline of Sears Told Through Eyes of Instagram
• Here’s a List of All the Sears and Kmart Stores That Are Closing
• Sears shuttering more stores

Prev Close 18.01	High 19.12
Open 19.01	Low 17.94
Volume 680.9k	52 Wk High 44.72
Mkt Cap 1.93B	52 Wk Low 14.05
Avg Vol 669.8k	P/E
1Y Target Est 9.00	EPS -10.59
Beta 1.51	Div & Yield N/A

Speaking of which, why can't somebody just shoot SHLD and put it out of its misery? An estimated earnings/share of -10.59 makes me wonder why on earth anyone would pay anything to own this loser.

Interesting. My Grandpa owned stock in SS Kresge (KMart), and did very well with it, and passed some on to me. I got out of it decades ago.

Referring back to the original thread, what JPT was advancing is an aspect of secular cycle theory. The book Turchin mentions in the link is due next month. A year or so ago, he had a partial draft of the book posted online, which I read. It is no longer available. He presented a more comprehensive version of JPT's concept in that manuscript and also in a series of blog posts:

Part 1 is a rehash of the linked article that asks the question. The answer is in the next four posts:

Part 2: https://evolution-institute.org/blog...et/?source=sef
Part 3: https://evolution-institute.org/blog...es/?source=sef
Part 4: https://evolution-institute.org/blog...er/?source=sef
Part 5: https://evolution-institute.org/blog...ped-growing-v/

Turchin's idea comes from his work on agrarian societies. In an agrarian economy, GDP and demand for labor is fixed by the amount of cultivated land, while supply of labor and economic demand is proportional to population. Rising population means a rising labor supply relative to fixed demand leading to lower real wages and rising economic inequality.

Hence increases in the labor force cause falling real wages, inequality, which leads to increased elite numbers (as some take advantage of the inequality to gain wealth) which eventually leads to increased elite competition, internal strife and ultimately state collapse and population loss, after which the cycle starts anew.

Turchin's and JPT's analyses are valid for agrarian economies, because demand for labor was ultimately limited by the amount and quality of available farmland, which is fixed by geography. Rising labor supply would necessarily force wages down. Hence population cycles do correspond with cycles in real wages and inequality. Also with prices.

Unlike agrarian societies, industrial ones do not exhibit population cycles. In an industrial economy GDP and demand for labor are not fixed by land, but rather by economic demand (correlated with population). Wages are set by the interplay between supply and demand for labor, both of which are correlated with population, making wage trends no longer predictably related to population, price or anything else. Inequality measured by GDPpc/wage is then also unpredictable, as is elite number. That is, in an industrial economy the secular economic relations characteristic of agrarian societies are no longer valid.

Nevertheless, inequality cycles still happen in industrial economies (the fact of the "Great Compression" followed by the rising inequality over the past 4 decades shows this). We do NOT see cycles in population or prices that coincide with these inequality cycles as we did during agrarian times for the reason outlined above.

I mentioned that labor force participation has fallen dramatically from 2000 which according to supply and demand should have resulted in rising real wages. It did not. In contrast, in the mid-14th century, falling labor supply (due to the Black Death) coupled with fixed demand (the land was still there, needing labor to work it) led to sharp rises in wage levels.

In 1924 immigration was greatly reduced. According to this concept real wages should have risen at a faster rate after 1924. No immediate impact of this policy on wages was apparent: real wages grew at a 1.2% rate over 1924-29—no faster than the 1.3% rate over 1896-1924.

An increase in the supply of labor, particularly low-wage labor (which would have a smaller impact on aggregate demand) should have some depressive effect on real wage levels in the relevant markets, but its effect will be greatly diluted from that seen in agrarian economies.

In fact if you look at the chart in the first post of this thread you will see that labor participation rates were trend-less over 1990 to 2007. In contrast, labor participation grew strongly in the 1980's. Yet real wages were pretty much flat throughout (see fig below). Note that GDP (demand for labor) per hour worked (productivity) rose throughout the entire time. So we had a time of rising demand and rising supply in the eighties, plus a time of rising demand and flat supply over 1990-2007. If these supply and demand relations mattered we should have seen much stronger real wage growth over the latter period than the former. I see a weak effect at best. Yet there was a preceding period from WW II to 1973 when real wages rose right along with rising labor demand (productivity).



So what happened? Qualitatively what happened was the stagflation period of the secular cycle, when wealth extraction by elites increases, resulting in a "golden age" for elites. For example the era of the "five good emperors" in Rome was such a period. A time of rising misery for ordinary people that led to a a golden era of peace and plenty for the elites (who are the participants in the pageant of history) and so is characterized by historians as a "Golden Age". Another such era was the glorious thirteenth century, the peak of the High Middle Ages, before the Crisis of the 14th century began.

The fundamental mechanism behind this in agrarian times was demographics. It is something else now.

Originally Posted by TnT

There are snippets of information floating around that suggest that perhaps at least some manufacturing is coming back to the U.S. Some months ago I read (sorry, but I don't have a link) about a General Electric plant someplace in Kentucky or Tennessee or Missouri - there someplace in the mid-mid-west that was being refitted to make large appliances - washers, dryers, etc.

What G.E. was finding that when a new model is developed, it is clearly cheaper to have it manufactured in China or wherever. BUT, once the model has been around for a bit, and G.E. wants to introduce improvements or modifications, the back-and-forth between the domestic engineers and the foreign factories becomes impossibly complex. Overall, they are thinking it may be cheaper in the long run to simply make it here. And, as we know, the folks at G.E. are not fools.

My son just went to work for a Japanese company who is starting a brand-new factory in Phoenix making airbags for cars. The last supplier of airbags has made them such that they blow shrapnel into the chests of the passengers. These defects brought the replacement manufacturer back to this country. Interesting, eh?

ECOs with China are a complete pain in the ass. Plus, even if you could get it right on the first try, there are always literally boatloads of existing product without the change, en route. By the time you cleaned out the pipeline of all the old stuff, the NEXT ECO has been written. Engineering they screams and shouts, why did it take 6 months ... 9 months ... a YEAR! ... for my change to get implemented. YMMV.

The other problem is the outright logistics cost. Even doing the slowest biggest boats, you are gonna pay!

Originally Posted by Ragnarök_62

and ...

• Major Holders
• Sears Announces Dozens of Store Closures Amid Financial Woes
• Northeast Phila. KMart among 78 stores being closed by Sears
• 78 Sears, Kmart stores to close; see the list
• The Decline of Sears Told Through Eyes of Instagram
• Here’s a List of All the Sears and Kmart Stores That Are Closing
• Sears shuttering more stores

Prev Close 18.01	High 19.12
Open 19.01	Low 17.94
Volume 680.9k	52 Wk High 44.72
Mkt Cap 1.93B	52 Wk Low 14.05
Avg Vol 669.8k	P/E
1Y Target Est 9.00	EPS -10.59
Beta 1.51	Div & Yield N/A

Speaking of which, why can't somebody just shoot SHLD and put it out of its misery? An estimated earnings/share of -10.59 makes me wonder why on earth anyone would pay anything to own this loser.

Places I've worked that had (much more) positive earnings, great fundamentals and a massive P/E still muddled along in the $2 - $3 range and meanwhile this PoS trades in the high teens!?! WTF!!!