October 28, 2009: Yahoo shows its most popular searches which, of course, provides a clue about what is of interest to the millions of people visiting the site and peforming Internet searches. Of particular interest is that entertainment comes in ahead of politics and that, of course, should be no surprise. People are fed up with lying, backbiting, one-for-all-and-all-for-me politicians.

Gas prices ranked high on the list. I don’t know about your neighborhood but in mine it’s almost laughable to see how the prices are changing several times a day, it seems. Being an information collector, I fired up Quicken and searched for my gas expenditures.

• January 17 – $1.739
• February 20 – $1.639
• March 5 – $1.689
• April 11 – $1.899
• May 15 $2.089
• June 1 – $2.399
• July 6 – $2.409
• August 8 – $2.399
• September 14 – $2.219
• October 15 – $2.299

Forget all the fluctuations. Let’s look at where we were in January ($1.739) and where we were on October 15 ($2.299). Ol’ Jethro ciphered that out to $0.56 cents more for each gallon. Based on the January figure of $1.739, that’s an increase of over 32%. (continued below)

Jobs, Jobs, Where are the Jobs?

Is it any wonder that unemployment benefits rank high on Internet searches? If you’re fortunate enough to still have a job, you have an interest in what the future might hold for you. Trust me on this: it ain’t much. Last year, an acquaintance of mine was nearing her 25th anniversary with her company when she was laid off. Her unemployment benefit was less than half of her salary. It took about 50% of her unemployment benefit to pay for COBRA insurance continuation. The bottom line is that she was trying to live on less than 25% of her previous salary. Could you do that?

And then there are millions of unemployed workers trying to see when their benefits will run out.

The pundits are telling us that jobs are a trailing indicator and that we’re still 12 to 18 months away from seeing job growth. Well, what about the millions of Americans that are waiting for those jobs. Can they hold out 12 to 18 months? Could you?

Windstream Corporation (NYSE: WIN) is certainly not alone in its efforts to thwart the badly economic recovery in America. It’s pretty much business as usual in the corporate world – just as it seems to be business as usual in the financial industry and politics as usual in Washington.

In late September the shareholders of D & E Communications of Ephrata, Pennsylvania voted to approve a merger with Windstream. Each shareholder would be able to exchange D & E shares for .65 Windstream shares plus $5.00.

Windstream Corporation of Little Rock, Arkansas, came into existence in July 2006 when Little Rock’s Alltel Corporation (since purchased by Verizon) spun off its wireline phone division and merged it with Valor Communications Group, Inc. of Irving Texas. In 2007 Windstream acquired CT Communications Inc. of Concord, North Carolina. What followed were layoffs in Kansas, Nebraska, Arkansas and North Carolina.

Then there was the September announcement that Windstream would reduce its workforce by 5% by the end of 2009. Oh, yeah – about D & E. Of the 490 employees in Pennsylvania, 290 are out the door, or will be soon. Two of Windstreams Internet Data Centers are being moved from Little Rock to Pennsylvania and, while the company has said no one in Little Rock will lose their jobs, they probably should be working their job contact list.

Windstream has, of course, performed other cost-cutting measures like moving call center operations to India.

What’s Wrong in America?

Corporations no longer care about being community citizens. Oh, sure, they pressure their employees to make payroll deductible contributions to this charity or that charity. And they call that corporate citizenship. They may even put on t-shirts and join some walk or run for some worthy cause. But, all the time, they are buying and selling other companies and moving jobs overseas.

Why do they do this? You know the answer already. They want to impress the stock analysts. So here’s my thought: you cannot be a good corporate citizen when you put people out of work to please someone on Wall Street. But I forgot. It was favorable thoughts from Wall Street that led to banks allowing Windstream to re-wire its loans so it could buy more companies and lay off more workers.

So, what can we do to correct this situation? HellifIknow!