“Lay Off the Layoffs,” the magazine advised corporate America in
its Feb. 15, 2010 cover story. “Our overreliance on downsizing is
killing workers, the economy — and even the bottom line.”
Let’s revisit the moment — for what it says about the
soon-to-be-defunct magazine… and the ill-informed thinking that
passes for wisdom in Hollywood, academia, and, not least of all,
the Obama administration.
Thirteen months into the Obama presidency, it was painfully
clear that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, signed on
Feb. 17, 2009, wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do — which was
to keep unemployment below 8 percent. Instead, the nation’s
unemployment rate had soared to 10 percent — or 15.8 percent, if
you added “discouraged workers” who had given up looking for jobs
and others doing part-time work because they couldn’t find
full-time employment.
What do you do when the facts don’t fit your narrative?
You change the facts to fit the narrative. You
lie if you have to. You stall and obfuscate and wait for
people to lose interest as the story grows old and muddled.
That is the Obama way of covering up mistakes and responding to
criticism. We have seen it repeatedly.
It is what the Obama administration did following the murder of
the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three co-workers on the eleventh
anniversary of the date known as 9/11.
With the Nov. 6 election just eight weeks away, the
administration decided to stick with the already-established (and
self-flattering) narrative for the Middle East and world affairs.
This was: “Osama is no more,” Al Qaeda is crippled, and “the tide
of war is receding.”
Despite immediate and compelling evidence to the contrary,
President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and UN
Ambassador Susan Rice refused to admit that the deaths in Benghazi
had been the result of a premeditated terrorist attack involving an
Al Qaeda affiliate. For two full weeks, they insisted that it was a
“spontaneous” demonstration that got out of hand. In short, they
threw sand in the face of the American people — in the apparent
hope that this would help Obama win a second term.
With that bogus line of thought came the oft repeated and
shameful apology, which I will paraphrase as follows:
We hope that our friends in the Islamic world will forgive us
for the fact that there was someone amongst us — some wretched and
hateful creature out of the 300 million-plus people living in
sometimes unseemly freedom inside the United States of America —
who put together a 14-minute video that found its way to YouTube…
where it offended the tender sensibilities of many devout Muslims
— including (and this-is-okay) those who rioted on Sept. 11, 2012,
and (this-is-not-so-okay) some others of an extremist bent who
murdered our ambassador and three co-workers in Libya.
With the emerging jobs fiasco following the failed stimulus
package, the administration acted in a similar way — painting
happy faces over damning evidence as long as it possibly could.
First of all, it stuck with the narrative that the “Stimulus” was
working — and working miracles. This time, it invented a new and
entirely meaningless metric — jobs created or saved. This
number grew and grew — even as total employment recorded by the
Bureau of Labor Statistics was stuck or falling. Eventually, even
the administration’s own economists grew tired of this obviously
phony metric which took credit for “saving” jobs from disappearing
at a theoretically assumed faster rate. So Obama’s advisers dropped
the metric — to keep from being laughed at for their
stupidity.
But back to Newsweek, which, as Jeffrey Lord noted in a
recent column (“Twinkicide:
Death by Liberalism”), was sold for a single a dollar.
Not knowing that I would be paying five times the final sale
price for the entire magazine, I spotted the issue with
“Lay Off the Layoffs” cover as I was checking out a grocery store
check-out line in early 2010, and I plunked down $5 to buy a
copy.
For me it was money well spent. I just wanted to see how — with
its lefty bias — Newsweek would play around the idea that
rich and powerful executives had strangled economy — just for the
hell of it.
That was the story line in the then popular movie Up in the
Air, starring George Clooney — one of the president’s biggest
supporters in Hollywood — as the “downsizing expert” who racks up
more than 10 million frequent flier miles going from city to city
to terminate an endless parade of desperate employees. As it
happened, I had just seen the movie.
I felt sure that Newsweek’s treatment of “Lay Off the
Layoffs” idea would offer more of the same screwy logic in seeing a
bottomless gold mine of opportunity for unscrupulous businessmen to
make money by shuttering plants and laying people off.
Of course, there are firms (and Bain Capital was one of them)
that specialize in restructuring distressed companies and returning
them to profitability. What they do used to go by the respectable
name of “re-engineering.” But that was in another age, before large
government bailouts of distressed companies gained general
acceptance.
The Newsweek article did not disappoint. That is to
say, it was even worse than I thought. And it was the perfect
companion piece to Clooney’s Up in the Air. So I wrote a
story
for the Weekly Standard aimed at correcting some of the
nonsense spread by Clooney and Newsweek.
The Newsweek article opened by singling out Southwest
Airlines for special praise in hiring new workers and
expanding its operations in the midst of the first big
slowdown in commercial aviation history — the great slump that
occurred after al Qaeda succeeded in simultaneously hijacking and
crashing four U.S. jetliners on 9/11/2001 — two into the Twin
Towers, a third into Pentagon, and fourth that crashed into an open
field after passengers revolted and tried to regain control of the
airplane and from the armed and already prepared-to-die
hijackers.
As someone who has written about the airline industry for
several decades (both as a reporter for leading publications and,
at other times, as a speechwriter for CEOs in the airline and
aircraft industries), it wasn’t hard for me to highlight the
absurdity of Newsweek’s premise — which would have the
reader believe that if all of the nation’s airlines had
followed Southwest’s example, the industry would have rebounded
quickly from the disaster that happened on 9/11.
But nothing could be further from the truth. Among the large
airlines, Southwest, by reason of being the one big
low-cost carrier, was the only the one that was strategically
positioned to expand and pick up market share from the others
during a period of falling demand for the industry as
whole. As a group, U.S. airlines were losing more than ten
cents on every dollar of sales during the post 9/11 slump. With the
exception of Southwest and a couple of low-cost, low-fare upstarts
— JetBlue and AirTran — they had no choice but to retrench. If
anything, the big carriers were slow to downsize in the aftermath
of this great national tragedy (employment at U.S. airlines
declined only half as fast as revenues in two years after
9/11).
Now here is one last irony which I omitted from my piece in the
Weekly Standard as a result of being limited to 1,000
words: Newsweek out-sourced its own story on outsourcing
(or downsizing and then farming out the work, which comes to the
same thing). Even as it was laying off staff members, it relied
upon on an outside source (Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor of
organizational behavior at Stanford University’s Graduate School of
Business) to write its cover story.
I ended my story with the words: “The big threat to today’s
economy is not corporate downsizing, but government upsizing.”
With Obama’s reelection, we are sure to get more of both in the
year ahead — more government upsizing and, with that, a
demoralized and diminished private sector, leading to more
corporate downsizing.
No doubt about it: Team Obama licked its chops at the thought of
applying the whole sad fantasy of unfairness and victimization
(from Up in the Air / Lay Off the Layoffs / and Occupy
Wall Street) to the 2012 election. In Mitt Romney — from Bain
Capital — they even had someone they could portray as an
honest-to-God “downsizing expert.” Mitt might have been George
Clooney’s boss-of-bosses in Up in the Air. What luck!
Unfairness was the winning hand in this election. It trumped the
free market and the argument that failed economic policies were a
more than sufficient cause for dismissal.
That makes Nov. 6 a dark day for America — and the world.
As for Newsweek, there is no need to mourn its passing.
It is going to its just reward in the boneyard of print
journalism.
