You can bathe in the mass delusion of Independence Day having actual meaning in 2011 as we head into the 4th. And if you want to read tearful crap about the American flag as a security blanket for a “wounded nation” post 9-11, go here.
Or if you’d rather not indulge in these displays of mock patriotism and piety for the purpose of hiding from unpleasant reality you can briefly enjoy the Hooray for the Salvation Army Band slideshow. Which doesn’t pretend to be anything but humorous in a mildly disgraceful way.
It’s my version, posted as an MP3 on the blog a while ago, from the old Bill Cosby album of the same name, published by Warner Brothers in 1967.
Support an old independent voice in security affairs, fine music, and other interesting things in the fourth or fifth day of my first fundraiser, ever!
Today’s bit of tripe from the business wire continues the received wisdom that mass unemployment is caused by a skills gap. Americans are stupid slobs, the story implies, completely unskilled for the work crying out to be done in the corporate shops of our formerly go-go nation.
John Russo’s chemical lab in North Kingstown has been growing in recent years, even despite a deflated economy, and he expects to add another 15 to 20 positions to his 49 employees over the next year.
But the president of Ultra Scientific Analytical Solutions has found himself in a vexing spot, struggling to fill openings that require specialized training …
“It’s very difficult to find the right person, and there’s all walks of life trying to find jobs. I honestly think there’s a large swath of unemployable,” said Russo, whose firm manufactures and supplies analytical standards. “They don’t have any skills at all.”
The man seems to actually believe this. The story eventually points out, near the end, what kind of job he’s actually trying to fill.
This is well after all the stock lamentation about not enough people being sent to re-training camps community colleges and a number of piddly private sector efforts, like one by the Aspen Institute, to counter the lack of enthusiasm for the idea.
As a grad student I taught laboratory courses which entailed training students in hplc. And I trained lab technicians how to do it when I was a postdoctoral researcher. One did not go to school to learn how to specifically run hplc. I went to get multiple degrees in chemistry.
It’s called building a foundation in a basic hard science. Handling equipment was a necessary part of it but not the essential or central part.
On paper, in standard news, hplc may sound like really high skill work. It’s not. People can be trained to do it and the outlay in labor and time isn’t particularly dear. And even if you are dealing with a person straight from some chem lab instruction at a vocational technical school or a community college, you will have to invest some time in training them on what you have.
My take on the matter, then, is that quite often the man in charge of hiring, or allegedly looking for skilled labor, is either too damn cheap or lazy or both to actually do what used to be considered the normal course of things.
That is, the not looking at people as machines fresh from a box, pre-programmed to operate as widgets for whatever you want done.
What you don’t see in these stories is who the people actually are that the human resources department is throwing out as unfit. Perhaps not all of them were but screening disposed of them, anyway. Or perhaps there were a couple of individuals who may have turned down a job offer or walked away because the company was just too irritating a place or diminishing in its returns. One is just delivered the implication that all job applicants are rubbish — which I strongly doubt is always the case in such matters.
The inefficiency then, as I see it, is not perhaps just in the labor force but also on the corporate side. Where it manifests as a profoundly selfish short-sightedness and disbelief and disinterest in entertaining the idea that people are very trainable. And that maybe it’s part of your civic responsibility to help in these matters.
Near the end of the Associated Press piece, all is revealed. The nature of the job is stated and the fact the Mr. Russo actually did eventually fill it.
“It took Ultra Scientific’s Russo more than half a year to fill one of those jobs,” reads the AP piece. “Until recently, he couldn’t find anyone to operate a specialized piece of equipment that performs high-pressure liquid chromatography, a technique that separates compounds in a solution.
“But his firm’s gain represents an economic loss to the state: The Ph.D. Russo is hiring is coming from [a company the closed its manufacturing facility in Rhode Island].”
In terms of just needing someone to run hplc, a Ph.D. is a bit of an over buy in terms of skills. So the man hired is probably making less than he formerly did.
While illustrates another aspect of hiring for “skills” jobs the AP piece does not mention.
Technicians for running hplc did not get paid particularly well back when I was working in labs although you can probably now find Ph.D’s, who earn a decent living doing only this at giant biotech and pharmaceutical firms. (If the work has not been outsourced to similar labs in Asia.) And these jobs are not good avenues to career advancement. But they are necessary busy work employment opportunities.
According to breaking news GOP Rep. from Michigan, Thaddeus McCotter, will enter the presidential race on Saturday.
DD blog touched upon the quizzical McCotter here. Principally, McCotter is — right now — best known for short guitar-strumming video made with the far right publication, Human Events. Entitled Rock Solid with Thad McCotter, they feature the man playing riffs from the Stones before briefly discussing topics of world interest — like the travails of Silvio Berlusconi.
McCotter still carries a strong whiff of extremist GOP weirdo who just happens to have to be more friendly to labor because he relies somewhat on the union vote in his district.
For instance, he has made a hobby of being in a number of the very bad political documentaries produced by GOP loyalists Ray Griggs and Stephen Bannon. (Bannon is responsible for the Sarah Palin film hagiography, “The Undefeated,” a movie apparently so awful it rates no reviews on Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes despite being regularly in the news.)
McCotter’s list of movies where he has a talking head role is here at IMDb.
The notices on these gobblers speak for themselves.
“This is pure fascist propaganda brought to you by the same people that have been pushing religion and any other mid evil [sic] practices they can come up with,” reads one citizen reviewer of “I Want Your Money.”
“Yay! A 42% Tax cut for the rich!” writes another of the video, on its way to a solid 4.4 on a scale of ten.
McCotter has also written a book entitled Seize Freedom — also his Presidential slogan — which few seem to have read. That is probably about to change.
Two of the biggest obstacles McCotter faces are overcoming Bachmann-mania or the phenomenon of holding one’s nose and supporting Mitt Romney because he’s the least among the extremists. However, McCotter does have his own set of unique quirks.
McCotter is often stilted and, well, weird. It’s difficult to tell if he’s just trying to bring humor to the world or if the Wayne County pol is actually like that all the time.
Q: Mitch Daniels called for a truce on social issues this election cycle. What do you think of that?
McCotter: A truce with whom? This constitutes an unprincipled unilateral surrender to the left that initiated and continues to wage its “culture war??? against Americans’ traditional and cherished way of life.
In today’s New York Times, Roger Cohen has a piece that compares Europe and the US. It begins by focusing on the old meme of ‘can-do’ American exceptionalism and history, trying to point out how Europe was exhausted after the bloodlettings of the World Wars while we were poised to leap ahead.
This is tired news but a popular thing to reminisce about now because of national decline. It’s the equivalent of any standard pep talk given by any high school coach — “boys, we can do anything we set our minds to, it’s not the size of the dogs in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dogs, etc (!)” — before taking the field and receiving a good beating, anyway.
Bits Cohen uses as illustrative moments are the battles of Verdun and the Somme, two things which have no comparisons in US history.
One of the things you awaken to is that it’s now almost a century since Europe ripped itself to shreds at Verdun. Geoffrey Wheatcroft recently calculated in The New York Review of Books that British losses on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, given respective populations, were the equivalent of “280,000 GI’s killed between dawn and dusk.???
The Great War had its midcentury European sequel. And so power passed to America. It was of a United States ascendant that Berlin wrote, a confident nation assuming responsibility for the world.
Cohen later gets around to writing that Europe has obviously recovered and even has some stuff to teach us.
However, he might have added, for the sake of a cautionary tale, the American experience that introduced the nation into its decade of decline.
9/11.
This country lost a mere fraction of the people the French lost at one battle and the Brits saw killed at the Somme.
But we completely lost our heads, essentially declaring permanent war on about half the world. The military and national security infrastructure ballooned and we threw away millions of middle class jobs so giant multi-national corporations and the wealthiest could thrive even more during this period.
At one point Cohen wonders about what can be done, suggesting wanly that Bill Clinton recently had a good essay on the matter in Newsweek.
I’m trying to figure out why job seekers don’t have the skills companies need; why the community colleges and vocational programs, which have done such a great job for America, are not providing more people with the skills to fill these vacancies. Do people just not enroll in the right programs or do they drop out because of the economy? I hope we can find out.
Again, it’s an annoyingly stupid idea that’s taken hold in people who really don’t have any more ideas than the rest of us. It’s the obsession with community college as a magic wand or Philosopher’s Stone, the suggestion that if we could just get everyone into retraining camps them, everything would be fixed and a great leap forward would occur.
It’s a self-reinforcing delusion caught, like a disease, from just reading all the cant delivered by your social peers and cronies in the business and opinion pages of the nation’s newspapers.
People don’t lack skills in the US. When Fender and Gibson fired most of their domestic workforce involved in making electric guitars and shipped those jobs to China it wasn’t because the Chinese had set up community colleges which taught people how to make rock and roll instruments and Americans had grown stupid and unskilled.
If you look at pictures from the old Fender plants in a semi-official history of the company, The Soul of Tone, there were plenty of people in evidence making things. And they were obviously not all initially trained in community college. And they didn’t pick it all up in high-school industrial arts classes. Jobs were offered and they were trained, for example — to assemble guitar amplifiers, at the plants. Period.
It’s not that hard to train people. But “lack of training” is an excuse for the real reason corporate America isn’t hiring. It just isn’t interested in American labor. Bad for the bottom line when you can do it elsewhere.
The world didn’t stop wanting electric guitars because they are old and were invented back in the Fifties. And this country’s middle class can’t survive by complete conversion to making a few pricey big ticket items for the corrupt militaries of the world. Or whatever passes for made things that the world’s wealthiest can buy in the next few years. Becoming the equivalent of chocolate truffle and symbols of ostentatious living makers to the world isn’t going to cut it.
It’s absurd that “climate change??? has become an unpronounceable phrase under Obama and that green technology initiatives have been stymied by sterile ideological dispute. Intelligent use of resources makes strategic sense for America whatever your hang-up on global warming. It’s equally absurd that private U.S. corporations, having made $1.68 trillion in profits in the last quarter of 2010 and sitting on piles of cash, are doing fine while job numbers languish and more Americans struggle.
None of this makes moral or any other sense. America needs an energy policy and an industrial policy. It has to lead in green technology and — purist capitalist reflexes notwithstanding — it must find ways to get corporate America involved in a national revival.
Unfortunately he knows, and so does everyone else, that’s just not going to happen.
I get one or two interview requests a week on cybersecurity lately.
The conversations always hinge on matters of absolutely no interest to the American middle class. Most popular now: “What would a cyberwar look like?”
I usually don’t answer such questions with predictions or go-alongs.
This is because the term “cyberwar” has been so abused and overused it’s effectively meaningless.
Its only utility is to rivet a reader’s attention. And while it still merits discussion there’s no capacity for conducting any kind of thoughtful debate on it in the national media. Or the halls of Congress or anywhere that’s not behind walls of secrecy.
Anyway, cybersecurity and cyberdefense, like much national security, is now almost totally split away from the interests of average people.
The American economy, which has turned on the middle class, is the foremost consideration in life. Not whether or not the CIA’s website is taken down or defense contractors and banks are invaded by hackers.
Last week, a new story arose, inspired by fear of LulzSec, which has since allegedly disbanded out of boredom.
Banks, it was said, wanted to be protected in cyberspace. Not out of any sudden realization that cybersecurity adds value and is a good thing to practice but because said banksters were worried about the cyber-paupers getting into their stuff and the scandal and momentary public embarrassment that entails.
And in this they show what can be seen when people lose all faith in corporations and government institutions. There’s no sympathy for the defense contractor or giant financial multinationals that are hacked.
If you find anything at all, it’s something closer to “they had it coming.”
Lynn and others also say the Pentagon must more aggressively protect the networks of defense contractors that possess valuable information about military systems and weapons’ designs. In a new pilot program, the Defense Department has begun sharing classified threat intelligence with a handful of companies to help them identify and block malicious cyber activity on their networks.
Over time, Lynn said, the program could be a model for the Homeland Security Department as it works with companies that run critical infrastructure such as power plants, the electric grid and financial systems.
[The bold-faced objective is of absolutely zero value to average Americans. No one will see any benefit, ever, on whether or not the Lockheed Martins of the US are protected from hacker breeches by the Pentagon. Lockheed Martin’s financial and proprietary business interests are the only things served
Another paradox here is that Lockheed Martin has very aggressively marketed its cyber-defense arm to the US government and military. Commercials are not hard to find in which the company portrays mock cyber-attacks being warded off by their brave and canny cyber-defenders..]
At a recent Capitol Hill hearing, incoming Pentagon chief Leon Panetta, the outgoing CIA director, said the U.S. must be aggressive in offensive and defensive countermeasures.
“I’ve often said that there’s a strong likelihood that the next Pearl Harbor that we confront could very well be a cyberattack that cripples our power systems, our grid, our security systems, our financial systems, our governmental systems,” he said.
Panetta is the hero of the hunt for Osama bin Laden. But that does not mean he is a whiz-bang in all matters.
The “electronic Pearl Harbor” trope in reference to cyber-attack is now about fifteen years old.
In the first page list is something I wrote back in 1997 entitled “Electronic Pearl Harbor — Not Likely.”
A great deal has changed since them. But my title, as one of the few predictions I have ventured, remains solid.
Routinely, as one sees if one scans up the search page, are many many trivial writers declaring how “electronic Pearl Harbor” may have already happened. (Or what it would look like.)
The original Pearl Harbor, it’s worth noting, was impossible to overlook.
A cursory reading of these beware-of-electronic-Pearl-Harbor notices since the late Nineties reveals their sameness. All of them are ultimately based on the simplistic idea that unknown enemies on the other side of the world can overturn substantial portions of the US by flicking a few software switches.
This is essentially the result of two things: now way-old American national security infrastructure near psychotic paranoia over magical technological surprise that never occurs and now way-old methodology on massaging the national treasury for funding.
The other bits in the current arguments about cybersecurity and cyberwar are the warnings that the financial system could be hit.
The world economy was put in a tailspin by Wall Street financial systems in 2008. It has yet to recover.
The argument that the US financial system ought to be protected from electronic Pearl Harbor would, if all Americans actually knew of it, strike them as ridiculous.
It’s easily observable that people are much more interested in protection from the racket that’s the American financial system. Cyberwar and hack attacks on it, when compared to the damage inflicted by Wall Street misbehavior, are absurdly small things.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The photograph on Home Depot’s website shows a line of smiling soldiers unloading a truck stacked with power tools and other company wares.
The company says this shows “federal dollars go farther at The Home Depot.” San Francisco Attorney Paul Scott says the photo also shows the company providing Chinese-made products in violation of the Buy American Act, and the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating.
A federal judge in April refused Home Depot Inc.’s bid to toss a whistle blower lawsuit Scott and other attorneys filed against the Atlanta-based company. Now the country’s largest home improvement retailer is the latest company accused of running afoul of the Buy American Act, a 1933 law aimed at protecting U.S. jobs. The law requires that all materials used in construction of public projects originate in the United States or “designated countries.”
As a practical matter, this probably encompasses cruel and unusual punishment. That’s because it’s virtually impossible to find any goods not made in China (or other Asian country) in middle American big box stores.
In political discussion on the old blog I often used “heevahava” in 2008 to describe white voters in mid Pennsylvania between Philly and Pittsburgh, right where I grew up.
And that description now always ties to the question, “Why do poor whites always vote for the people who harm their livelihoods the most?”
Vulgarly, heevahavas, are ignorant, or very misled, on the issues which will have direct influence upon them. But they are easily inflamed and mobilized by emotional cultural issues and a rage against “elites.”
This problem has become more pronounced in the US in 2012, successfully fed by very visible national decline, unstable irrational political leadership, economic collapse and the natural scapegoating that has resulted when the desperate are trying to keep heads above water.
And technology, particularly the media and the Internet, has not been a leveler. Specifically, because neither yet effectively communicate truth. The antidote is personal and direct education on the economic issues which dictate quality of life. Destruction of labor equals destruction of the middle class wage earner.
Anyway, tipped by blogger IZSmirkzz , I direct you today to a piece in the Locust Fork News Journal, one profiling and having discussion with a social scientist who devoted his life to figuring it all out. And furnishing solutions to the dilemma.
Dr. [Wayne Flynt, professor emeritus, Auburn] says the political problem working people face is what he calls “hard support??? for Republican and conservative politics …
“They don’t want to pay taxes. They don’t care about public schools,??? he said. “They particularly don’t want to pay for black kids in public schools. They are not going to subsidize schools in Birmingham, Huntsville, Montgomery and Mobile, in the inner-city. And they are certainly not going to support schools in the Black Belt, where virtually all the kids are black.???
So people like former Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, a.k.a. the “Ten Commandments Judge,??? who is now talking about running for president even though he can’t even win a Republican primary for governor in Alabama, argue that the “real issue??? is abortion, and the solution is posting the Ten Commandments in public places such as courts and schools.
“Well, obviously, posting the Ten Commandments is not going to make that happen,??? Dr. Flynt said.
“We’ve just seen by what happened in Wisconsin what the real agenda is: To make the United States like Alabama was in the middle of the 19th century.???
People in Wisconsin were even talking about the so-called “Southern policy??? toward economic development. “Of course above all else it is anti-union,??? he said. Basically it means: “Keep unions out (and) stop regulation of business.”
“I think you are going to see a lot of elections turn around in 2012 in places like Wisconsin and Ohio, where finally, apathetic voters discover that all those battles that were so painfully won by your mother and father, your grandmother and grandfather, are going to be taken away if you just apathetically sit there on your rear-end …
So, he said: “What labor’s going to have to do is find a way to communicate with their members who are interested in the economic issues and the future of their jobs, and their kids’ jobs, and using that media in order to educate themselves, educate their members, tell their members, ‘Hey! Have you watched this? Cause you really need to watch this. Because this is where you’re going to learn an awful lot of stuff … about regulations, about jobs and about the future.”
From a review of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present in the NY Review of Books:
In possibly the best chapter of the book, Madrick recounts the irony of how Reagan, the great moralizer, made unchecked greed and runaway individualism not only acceptable, but lauded, in the American psyche.
Replace “Great Depression??? with “the financial crisis and its aftermath,??? and it could be John Boehner today, rather than Friedman in 1962, speaking these words. Like Reagan, Friedman proclaimed a creed of greedism (our term)—that unchecked self-interest furthers the common good.
Madrick’s character-centered narrative makes it seem as if the triumph of greed was the result of a series of contingent events: the inflation of the 1970s, the exploitation of that inflation by Reagan and Friedman, the wheeling and dealing of the likes of Sandy Weill, and the diffidence of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Yet surely there must have been deeper forces at work.
We have argued elsewhere (and are not unique in doing so) that white backlash—especially Southern white backlash—against the civil rights movement transformed American politics, creating the opportunity for a major push to undermine the New Deal. Also, it’s hard to make sense of the growing ability of bankers to get the rules rewritten in their favor without talking about the role of money in politics, and how that role has metastasized over the past thirty years. There’s another book to be written here—perhaps less personality-centered and hence less entertaining than Madrick’s, but one that gets at the forces that made the reign of financial villains possible.
But today’s Republicans remain firmly attached to greedism … It has now become orthodoxy on the right—despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary—that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, not Angelo Mozilo and Countrywide Credit, are to blame for the subprime mess. While proclaiming themselves defenders of the little guy, Republicans are currently hard at work undermining the Obama administration’s consumer protections that would largely prevent a replay of rapacious subprime lending.
Still only a 1-in-4 chance the GOP will smash the economy by refusing to raise the debit ceiling, at InTrade.
Reader J points to a speech at Bank of America Sucks.
[The] Administration defines hostilities – an interpretation concocted over the objections of two top Pentagon lawyers – as a condition that exists only when U.S. troops are in a position to be fired upon …
With the libertarian-leaning GOP freshmen and progressive doves up in arms over the “war,” Boehner has little choice but to address the issue. But he wasn’t about to allow his conference to pass an extreme measure defunding all U.S. action in Libya, which would freak out the European allies who are leading the mission.
The only change would be a ban on attacks by drones or manned aircraft.
Sales of smart bombs and cruise missiles to Little Tommy Atkins and the rest of the toadies and pantywaists to remain bullish. Raytheon and Lockheed Martin CEO’s continue to report good quarterly results.
No real concern over terrible trade imbalance with China due to deindustrialization of almost everything but arms manufacturing.
The Senate Armed Services Committee urged China to let investigators travel unfettered to the Chinese mainland to probe reports that Chinese-made counterfeit parts are making their way into U.S. weapons and other electronics …
A range of U.S. companies interviewed by the committee, from military contractors to consumer electronics makers, have pointed “almost totally and exclusively” to China, and more specifically to Shenzhen, in Guangdong province, as a source of counterfeit electronic parts, Levin said.
Ultimately, he said, what was at stake is the U.S. ability “to have reliable weapons for bombing paupers and selling to panytwaists worldwide” “to defend itself with weapons systems that we can rely on.”
Upon running the illegal immigrant farm labor out of Georgia, the locals find their crops rotting in the sun, being unable to fill the jobs for lack people willing to do the hard stoop labor for the current compensation.
It didn’t take any time at all for some Georgia politicians to come up with the idea of pressuring ex-cons out on probation into the work. Since probation requires they be employed.
The only slight fly in the ointment is the ex-cons can still walk off the job.
It’s reported as attempting to steal labor and that’s accurate. The comparisons to slavery aren’t hard to find.
