PreferredSeat.com Blog

Today in Sacramento almost 1,000 employees of  Ocwen Financial Corp. based in West Palm Beach, Fla. were laid off. The company is not closing,  they are simply outsourcing the jobs to Uruguay and India.

And in a short time their customers will hear the all too familiar sound of someone thousands of miles away in another country working customer service for another American company. It shouldn’t be this way. And this is the very reason we have a jobs problem in the US.

It doesn’t take a sharp eye to see the sheer number of jobs that have been outsourced to China, India, Pakistan and dozens of other countries in the last 15 years or so. Call centers, manufacturing, you name it and American companies have been shipping those jobs overseas for years. And we’ve allowed it.

I would love to see President Obama take care of the jobs problem. But I don’t think he can. Just like nothing can get done in California. The system is broken and there aren’t enough good people in office to stand up to big money. Even if he manages to create new jobs, which the companies will get tax breaks for, they will just outsource them down the road when they want more profits for Wall Street.

So it may come down to us. Before we make any more purchases maybe we should take a look at where that product is manufactured. It doesn’t take long on Google to find the information and if we all start buying American products a majority of the time we spend our hard earned money then the manufacturers will have to listen.

I’m not waiting on the government to take care of the problem. We have the power to bring the jobs back. It will take time, but a change is necessary and it’s up to us.

Jim Cramer was on Good Morning America this morning. And the  last time I saw Cramer on the morning show he said pretty much the same thing as today. He was reacting to a recent poll about the state of the economy and he suggested that things were not as bad as the common man believed they were. 

As a new poll suggested, most people believe times are going to get worse. Maybe Cramer is talking to the wrong people, or getting paid for pushing a positive message in the middle of the Great Recession.

To back up his claim Cramer says that he talks to CEO’s of companies and they tell him things are going great. So rather than being in tune with the average man and getting a real pulse of how bad things are, Cramer talks to the people who have laid off workers across the country, to save the money it takes to say “things are great”.

But it’s the laid off workers that are feeling the pain. And the furloughed state employees. And those that have to work twice as hard for those very same companies because their coworkers were let go so the company can tell Cramer “things are great”.

And maybe those same CEO’s are telling our President Obama that “things are great” also. Well they are not great. And small businesses are not being asked how things are by the right people or dumb asses like Cramer would not be saying that “things are great”.

Normally I may not get into this topic for an entertainment blog. But having owned a small business for 23 years I have seen it all. But when someone in his position makes a point that is so far off track from the real world, then someone needs to speak out.

It’s sad too that the answer is obvious to anyone out of a job. Bring back the jogs from overseas. There’s your damn answer for how to employing more people.

Irving Azoff of Live Nation Ticketmaster appeared on CNNMoney.com video for Fortune and showed how far out of touch he was with the fans that he wants to sell tickets to. He talks about concert ticket prices still being too low and basically blames low prices and the fans for all the problems his company is going through selling tickets this summer.

As Azoff talks about the reason ticket sales are down in the US he says something about the economy and then goes on to say about ticket buyers, “If they could figure out a way to steal tickets, they would. Just like they steal movies and music, but so far they haven’t figured out a way to do that”.

It reminds me of the same things BP’s Tony Haword said in the press that got the American public against him and BP. How can you sit there and call your customers theives, as you explain that they are bitching because of he economy and not the high ticket prices.

Azoff goes no to explain that he considers the Live Nation Ticketmaster company as an ecommerce opportunity more than a concert ticket promoter or ticket seller. That explains his line of  thinking. Live Nation and Ticketmaster are not there for the fans, the customers, they are there to make money for shareholders.

It’s that type of thinking and greed that got this country in the situation we have been in the last few years, screw the customer for the profits of the shareholder. Can we now hope to see Irving Azoff sent to Russia and work his magic there instead of here?