11.01.13
Busking with the WhiteManistan Blues Band
It’s all that’s left. Look close at the Amazon Mechanical Turk screens.
Here’s the tip jar by the virtual guitar case.
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10.04.13
Letter from Pennsyltucky
The cause of failed state government in the United States is WhiteManistan.
From a letter published in the Allentown Morning Call:
President Obama could have prevented this shutdown by demonstrating leadership qualities (which he sorely lacks) and by sitting down with the Republican leaders in Congress to try to work out a compromise. Instead, he and the Democratic leaders in the House and Senate (namely, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid), resorted to name-calling directed at the Republicans (“anarchists,” “extortionists,” etc.) rather than trying to work out a compromise …
In hindsight, the American people lost out on the opportunity to have prevented all this controversy had they elected Mitt Romney president. He would have been a uniter instead of a divider, a problem-solver instead of a problem-creator.
If only Mitt Romney, not written but still uttered — the white man — had won, the guy who implemented an equivalent of Obamacare in Massachusetts. (And in Pennsylvania, he lost, too.)
The tribe of WhiteManistan cannot abide two elections in which the majority chose that black man, Barack Obama. It bedevils them, they despise him, make no bones of it and consider everyone who voted for him a traitor and/or a parasite. And so it has steadily used weakness in the design of the US government to undermine government and stage a coup, a rebellion, which — if successful, effectively destroys his presidency.
That’s more than half of what paralyzing the government and threatening to blow the foundations is about. The undisguised malice toward the black man in the White House cannot be separated from the shut down and threats over the debt ceiling. Only terrible people overlook the animus and pretend its over philosophical differences on the role of government in providing health insurance.
And so they have made a unique civil war, one in which the armies don’t fire on each other, the bodies don’t pile up, the separation and secession isn’t geographic north and south, but still in entire states and the difference between a many-colored America and a mono-colored one where others still know their place.
Make no mistake, they were always aching for a Fort Sumter, it has been slowly coming for years. Now it’s here.
There’s no remedy for it until they are completely driven from the field. There’s no shared future American experience that includes the contributions of WhiteManistan, only the toleration of its long goodbye. They know it, too.
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09.30.13
Faces In the Crowd
Shut down the government! Because Paul Revere, Hector Heathcote and the rest of those old founding guys knew that a life of fifes, drums, tri-corner hats, wooden teeth and typhus, anything, was better than health care for more people.
“What do you mean Hector Heathcote wasn’t a real patriot?!”
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09.21.13
Lords and peasants
Here’s a good explanation (at Salon) of the divestment of manufacturing for cheap prices, a government decision supported by all the presidents we’ve had since Richard Nixon. The end of making stuff brought down the middle class.
The story makes the point, now made by many: You can’t have a country like the United States if you generate nothing but low-paying service jobs for the support of the lords. It’s simply a modern feudal system. The great things the country was known for in science and progress post-WWII won’t be sustainable.
The Silicon Valley will never save the world by a bubble of extreme wealth, iKit, big data and web applications surrounded by a land of have-nots.
Anyway, to curb inflation in the 80’s, Paul Volcker tightened up monetary policy, setting the lending rate so high people couldn’t afford loans for cars and houses. It slowed the economy and utterly destroyed the steel industry, something I saw firsthand, living in Bethlehem. I even wrote a hard rock tune about it.
So sing happy songs on the radio and watch as the world crumbles down … And it’s hard for me to stifle a yawn as the American dream hits the ground.
The narrative of social and national decline extends through much American literature during the last 40 years. If you read Friday Night Lights, Buzz Bissinger’s book on high school football in Odessa, Texas, a good deal of the background story is on the ruin of the middle class economy in the region, brought on by just this thing.
In the end the Salon writer returns to Flint, Michigan.
Made famous in 1989 by Michael Moore’s Roger & Me, the first movie to show exactly what was being done to the country through what became an acclaimed documentary on the ruin of Flint as an auto-manufacturing center.
Flint never recovered, nobody did.
No American city has suffered more during the Age of Deregulation than Flint. In 1978, Flint had 80,000 automaking jobs, and the highest per capita income in the nation. Today, it has 6,000 automaking jobs, and the highest murder rate in the English-speaking world. Instead of Corvettes and speedboats, the yards are filled with mean dogs.
Roger and Me: Beach Boys tune from Andrew Reznicek on Vimeo.
Hat tip to Delaware Liberal, where I spied it.
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09.19.13
Failed State
We have met the enemy and it’s our so-called best. Corporate America and the most wealthy have destroyed everything, with no end in sight.
Smartphones and iJunk have not saved the day. You can use them to notify your family you’re going to the food pantry.
Excerpts from the news on the today’s Census report on the state of America:
“The number of Americans in poverty remained largely unchanged at a record 46.5 million. By race, a growing proportion of poor children are Hispanic, a record 37 percent of the total. Whites make up 30 percent, blacks 26 percent. The new census data show that lower-income households are a steadily increasing share of the population, while middle- to higher-income groups shrank or were flat. Roughly 13.6 percent of U.S. households, received food stamps, the highest level on record. Just over half of these households, or 52 percent, were -below poverty.”
Corporate profits soared, noted the New York Times, “but [according to Census data] the median earnings of men working full time have not increased in real terms since the early 1970s.”
“Economists believe that the [Census] report understates the degree of income inequality in the United States, by not including, among other things, earnings from capital gains made on rising stock prices.”
Could we hope for the Republican Party to make things worse in two weeks?
Isn’t it time to send everyone to the glue factory?
Comparisons: 46.5 million Americans live in poverty. Population of France — 65.7 million, Britain — 62.2 million.
Art predicts life:
We lock up the poor for all the rich
And we do it right without no hitch
Welcome to the United States of Greed
It’s the only country you’ll ever need …
Now we think freedom’s lame
Because what you need is a life of pain.
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09.18.13
Grand Old Terrorists
A decade ago, in the introduction to my collection The Great Unraveling, I argued that the modern Republican party was a “revolutionary power??? in the sense once defined by, of all people, Henry Kissinger — a power that no longer accepted any of the norms of politics as usual, that was willing not just to take radical positions but to act in ways that undermined the whole system of governance people thought they understood …
So, now we face the imminent threat of a government shutdown and/or a U.S. government default because Republicans refuse to accept the notion that duly enacted legislation should be allowed to go into effect, and repealed only through constitutional means. Oh, and the cause for which most of the GOP is willing to threaten chaos is the noble endeavor of ensuring that tens of millions of Americans continue to lack essential health care. —Krugman
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09.13.13
Art predicted life
Should’ve been a folk hit. But we’re not really into even letting a few eke out a few pebbles on social music, are we?
Friday music loud electric folk rock for modern raging inequality:
“Blessed are the job creators, ’cause they can always hire way more waiters.”
Which, as it turns out, is exactly what has happened.
Krugman, from today in the NYT, ‘Rich Man’s Recovery:’
“Basically, while the great majority of Americans are still living in a depressed economy, the rich have recovered just about all their losses and are powering ahead.”
Just published Piketty/Saez (UC Berkeley) data on inequality and the recovery of the super-wealthy after the Great Recession.
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08.16.13
The sharing economy: Everyone’s a maven at something
Everybody knows something. That’s the hook an on-line bidding bazaar for consulting services, called Maven, part of the alleged great knowledge-sharing economy, uses to sell what it does.
Maven connects people interested in speaking to thousands of experts knowledgeable in a specialized areas of science and business. As a user of Maven in the role of consultant, you set your rate hourly. The lowest you can go is $25/hour, which immediately sets it apart from crowd-sourced micro-task work at places like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. (More, on which, later.)
A couple years ago I joined up for Maven and listed my areas of expertise — which are pretty obvious if you read this blog. National security issues, specializing in weapons of mass destruction, cybersecurity, and — as a side — protein chemistry/biochemistry.
Maven lists your profile and bio, anonymized or not, depending on your desire. Presumably it is searched when someone is looking for experts which hit your keywords.
Maven will also boost your profile — for a fee.
In the time I’ve been on Maven, my profile has been viewed — at best — three or four times. Put bluntly, it never comes up in search.
This didn’t bother me. I’m used to being overlooked in the winner-take-all scheme of things. I decided to ignore the account.
However, when someone from corporate America does actually view your profile and decides to ask for advice, Maven sends you a notification.
But what if the invitation to consult is from a total idiot?
Corporate America is rife with them, businessmen — maybe successful — who can still be pretty dumb at lots of things, individuals who wish to ask nonsensical questions.
My first request was from some American business that wanted to know about the potential for bleaching melanin.
There is none.
Melanin is a natural pigment of complex biochemistry. It’s present in almost all animals. One of evolution’s great achievements, there’s no way to make it go away.
Or, in another way of speaking, you can’t turn black and brown people into white people with rubbing creams or other chemicals. In fact, when melanin is inhibited by genetic disease, the result is very disfiguring.
I have no desire to take money from stupid people, or even to talk to them about things which they could easily determine, by themselves, to be impossible.
So I deleted the invitation to consult.
This is not how things are done. You have to formally decline and give a reason on Maven.
After another e-mail admonishment, I did so. I discovered Maven also rates your “expertness.” I was 2.5 on a scale of 1 to 5, without ever having consulted. This seems to mean someone can give you a bad review even if you decline to speak with them.
The next consulting request — one of the features of the service is that the businesses asking for the consult are rendered anonymous until a deal is clinched — was made by someone looking to discuss the issue of cyber-attacks and cyberterrorism on the US electrical power-generating infrastructure.
Seemed straightforward, something I could talk about and return good value.
I accepted the invitation.
The next thing the corporate customer wanted, still anonymous, was for me to take an on-line test.
Corporate America is also filled with people who have little respect for anything, or others with whom they wish to deal. Total contempt for people everywhere is now embedded in the American way of doing things.
I declined to take the test and indicated, through the Maven interface, that I would be turning down the offer to consult. No money would change hands.
Again, Maven requires you fill out a reason for turning down a consult. This was easy. The requesting party was not an honest broker. It wanted me to do something for it, take a test to prove myself in a manner which did not specifically have anything to do with the questions it wished to discuss.
My Maven rating, of course, was not improved by honesty.
A few weeks later Maven sent me an e-mail informing it needed “protein chemists” and that there would be a referral fee available if I could find one, or more, to consult on Maven. I informed the service that I was highly trained in protein chemistry. There was no answer.
A couple months went by, my weekly Maven bulletin informing me that my profile had been viewed “zero” times and not come up in search.
The next invitation to consult came from the same business originally interested in discussing American electrical power generation, cybersecurity, risk and evolution of effort on the matter. In fact, it was precisely the exact invitation I had rejected a couple months earlier, just cut and pasted into a new request.
I rejected it for the second time. Again, Maven required a reason. Reason given: Entity — after initial rejection — waited a couple months and refiled with an identical query, one that involved taking an on-line test. I won’t take such tests. Contempt, as I’ve said, is now found at all levels of American business life and it is something that anonymous crowd-sourcing software developed in the Silicon Valley conveys well.
Maven then inquired, could I refer someone to help the client. Absolutely not.
Why would I? Why would anyone? Some corporate entity, anonymous, dealing in bad faith. Just the kind of people you’ll go out of your way to help.
There are no news items on Maven Research, the on-line consulting marketplace, in the current Google News tab. Wonder why?
Related:
“Is LinkedIn Cheating Employers and Job Seekers Alike?” — at PBS.
The short answer: Why yes, yes it is. You can read why. The critique, from a headhunter, is long and detailed. LinkedIn is, unsurprisingly, just another corporate tech start-up for the business world, one that has degenerated into a scam which pits everyone stupid enough to be in its resume marketplace against everyone.
Again, this is a piece, at the heart of which is a contempt for dealing with people honestly and humanely.
Of interest, a more general observation on corporate human resources operations:
As I’ve written often in the past, I believe the automation of recruiting, job seeking and hiring has exacerbated America’s employment crisis. Online forms and tools like the “apply with LinkedIn button” make it too easy for the wrong applicants to apply for jobs, and harder for employers to find the right ones. But when a job applicant’s position on the stack of resumes can be bought, the search for the best-qualified candidates is even further compromised, and so is our economy.
America’s jobs crisis needs to be looked at as a failure of employers and job boards to ensure an accurate and fair employment process. Blaming unskilled and improperly educated job seekers is a fool’s errand, as Wharton researcher Peter Cappelli demonstrates in his book, “Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs: The Skills Gap and What Companies Can Do About It.” The talent is out there; it’s just getting lost in a system that employers have permitted to supplant more sound, accurate recruiting methods and their own good judgment.
Everyone from employers to job seekers to the U.S. Department of Labor should be scrutinizing the mechanics that control recruiting, job seeking and hiring — and how these systems contribute to the employment crisis.
08.05.13
The six figure explainer
One of the necessary jobs in the Culture of Lickspittle is the swank public explainer. Sometimes they have interesting things to say. And often they just have position in which to write things everyone else has already lived through or now knows implicitly.
Today, the New York Times posted a bit in its blog on inequality in the US by Robert D. Putnam of Harvard. Putnam went back to his hometown of Port Clinton, Ohio, using it as a personalized framing example for the destruction of the blue collar working class and disappearance of American industry in the last forty years.
What he describes in Port Clinton happened everywhere, nowhere more noticeably than in Bethlehem and Allentown in the Lehigh Valley. The destruction of the steel industry slowly wiped out the vitality of the area. Nothing could replace the middle class jobs that allowed people without college degrees to earn a good living, enough to send their kids on to school, to become home-owners and to, generally, make the place a nice one in which to live.
The disastrous American system wrecked all of it.
During the mid-Eighties the south side of Bethlehem slowly turned into a slum as did the center of Allentown.
Bethlehem recovered slightly by becoming a bedroom community for people commuting into the New Jersey/NYC metroplex.
Allentown never made it back. The good jobs were never replaced. About a decade ago an attempt was made to bring casinos to the site of the old Bethlehem Steel. I wrote about it on the old blog here.
Bethlehem was able to get Sands to open an operation there and then development foundered on the rocks of the Great Recession.
What jobs were created were no good:
Jobs in heavy manufacturing in the US used to pay $20/hour. And in Bethlehem, generations of workers could buy a house and send their kids to college, just by working at the steel mill straight from high school.
Jobs working at a casino pay much less in 2009. In the US, this is expected. It is important that you be screwed.
[A friend] informs a cage cashier’s slot at the Sands casino in Bethlehem pays 9-10 dollars/hour for work at night and on weekend. It’s a good rate if you’re enthusiastic about the economic benefits of 24/7 work in a banana republic.
As it turned out, there’s not really enough cash on hand in the middle class anymore to make a casino in Bethlehem particularly profitable. Bethlehem, obviously, is not Las Vegas. It’s not even Atlantic City.
In reading Putnam’s piece for the Times, just as in the Lehigh Valley, so it was in Port Clinton.
My hometown — Port Clinton, Ohio, population 6,050 — was in the 1950s a passable embodiment of the American dream, a place that offered decent opportunity for the children of bankers and factory workers alike.
But a half-century later, wealthy kids park BMW convertibles in the Port Clinton High School lot next to decrepit “junkers??? in which homeless classmates live. The American dream has morphed into a split-screen American nightmare. And the story of this small town, and the divergent destinies of its children, turns out to be sadly representative of America …
But the story of Port Clinton over the last half-century — like the history of America over these decades — is not simply about the collapse of the working class but also about the birth of a new upper class. In the last two decades, just as the traditional economy of Port Clinton was collapsing, wealthy professionals from major cities in the Midwest have flocked to Port Clinton, building elaborate mansions in gated communities along Lake Erie and filling lagoons with their yachts. By 2011, the child poverty rate along the shore in upscale Catawba was only 1 percent, a fraction of the 51 percent rate only a few hundred yards inland.
It’s not a bad piece. However, Putnam brings the story as a member of the privileged class of “wealthy professionals.” He knows as well as anyone else that the success some of his generation now enjoy came from the very process of enabling the cannibalization of everyone else. Some are not going to get above it, either. The national cauldron of all against all will assuredly take a number.
Maybe Robert Putnam never personally had any hand in where we are today. But he was part of the generation and middle class that put in place the system which has dismantled so many.
“Half a century later, my classmates, now mostly retired, have experienced astonishing upward mobility,” Putnam writes.
Do we need someone, the kindly scholar from Harvard to be the official explainer? You’ve experienced it, you can’t escape it.
One no longer lives in the United States, one survives the United States, and the highest inequality in the advanced nations.
I wrote a song back in ’86 that described it, “Ironwork Blues,” from my second album. There was no Internet, no sharing economy, and you could charge a small amount for it. And you could see the calamity unfolding.
So sing happy songs on the radio and watch as the world crumbles down … And it’s hard for me to stifle a yawn as the American dream hits the ground.
08.02.13
Blew the top off the outrage guage awhile back
Another end of the week, another report on corporate American offshore tax evasion/money laundering. $1.2 trillion hidden, 80-90 percent of the 100 largest firms doing it — Apple, Google, Band of America, GE — only a few days after the President offers them a “bargain” reduction of the corporate tax rate in return for something called “middle class jobs.”
Don’t people know that investigative reports about US corporate tax evasion over and over with the same result every time are the definition of insanity?
No links. Why? The Congressional Research Service published a report a year ago on US corporate “profit-shifting” through shell companies in small countries which have set up their economies exclusively for money-laundering.
And this song is now two years old.
And, from across the pond in the Daily Telegraph:
In the wake of the outcry over the tax-dodging schemes of Starbucks, Google and Amazon, the House of Lords Committee on Economic Affairs will today call for penalties for aggressive tax avoiders and more expertise at HM Revenue & Customs, so that it can stand up to powerful multinationals.
The committee, which is chaired by former education secretary Lord MacGregor and includes ex-Chancellor Lord Lawson, highlights how big international companies can “manipulate the system… to reduce or avoid corporation tax by shifting profits to low-tax jurisdictions???.
The upshot is that UK corporation tax has become “largely voluntary??? for multinationals …
Bomb Ireland, then.
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