Trying to post without my handy little editor is like trying to run in wet sand. HTML is a nightmare to a dyslexic mind. All the wonderful little landmarks are twisted in on themselves and there is no oral or aural component to the language – which really slows down those of us for whom text is way down on the list of preferable communication styles. But - The Circuit City firings:

The electronics retailer, facing larger competitors and falling sales, said Wednesday that it would lay off about 3,400 store workers — immediately — and replace them with lower-paid new hires as soon as possible. Full

Atrios posted on this a couple of days ago but I wanted to explore a different avenue. As we continue on with our ramp up to the 2008 presidential election the headlines are overflowing with the market value of the candidates. Hillary Clinton raised 26 million US dollars. “Shattering a record”. I won’t go on a tirade about how you can’t be a faithful representative of the people with that much money floating around you. I won’t talk about the impossibility of representative government with such intensive media manipulation. I won’t mention the fact that there seems to be a remarkable correlation between election success and amount of money spent on advertising.

No, what I would like to inject in to the consciousness of the community is a healthy bit of paranoia. The layoffs at circuit city are due, in large part, to the downward pressure on wages created by too many goods chasing too few dollars. Yep, inflation. Inflation and increasingly efficient production cycles are reducing the need for human labor. There are countries in the world where they don’t have automatic doors – they have doormen – because they need the jobs.

In the era of unrestricted warfare, finaical weapons can be more devastating than conventional weapons. China continues to flood the US with cheap consumer goods, driving out manufacturing and lowering wages across the board while siphoning off us capital.

China will stop stockpiling its massive foreign exchange reserves, China’s central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan said in an interview published Tuesday. “Many people say that foreign exchange reserves in China are [already] large enough,” Zhou told the Emerging Markets magazine, whose latest issue was released at a meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank in Guatemala. “We do not intend to go further and accumulate reserves,” Zhou said, adding the government will “cut a small piece of reserves” for a new agency to be set up for the management of its massive foreign reserves, which have swollen because of the trade surplus. Full